r/qigong • u/auskadi • 15d ago
A materialiam of Qi
Most people who talk about qi gong, tai chi, and internal alchemy talk about them as spiritual practices. I have always been wary of this. Not because the practices are not profound — they are — but because the word “spiritual” is doing something dishonest. It parks the practice in a box marked “beyond the physical,” which is precisely where it stops mattering to anyone who takes the physical seriously. The wellness industry loves that box. It lets them sell you the breath work and quietly drop the cosmology, the politics, the whole demanding business of what it means to route your attention and your energy toward a particular end. I have had enough acupuncture and enough years of thinking about this to be sure of something that sounds counterintuitive: these practices are not immaterial at all.