Insights & Practice
Unlock the Power of Your Mind, Body & Qi
What if the body you think you know is only the version you have learned to notice?
We may know our shoulders as a place that tightens, our back as something to protect, or our balance as something we no longer trust. These experiences are real. Yet, over time, a story about what the body can do can quietly become a story about what the body is.
That distinction matters. A limit may deserve respect, support or medical care. But a description formed in one chapter of life need not become a lifelong verdict.
In Tai Chi and Qigong, I am interested in the space between those two truths: honouring what is real while staying curious about what we have not yet noticed.
When the map becomes the territory
We all carry a map of ourselves. It is drawn from pain and ease, successes and setbacks, the things we were told, and the movements we learned to avoid. Much of that map helps us navigate wisely. But a map is selective by nature. It shows the routes we have taken, not every route that exists.
“My shoulders are stiff.” “I have poor balance.” “My body does not move that way.” These statements may describe an experience accurately. Yet they can also become filters. The familiar difficulty takes up the foreground, while quieter information about support, coordination or ease may never receive the same attention.
This is not a claim that thought causes every physical limitation. It plainly does not. It is an invitation to ask whether our expectations sometimes leave part of our experience out of view.
Imagine reading a sentence one letter at a time. Every letter is there, but the meaning lives in their relationship. Something similar can happen when we think of the shoulders, spine, pelvis, feet and breath as separate problems to manage. We may know every part and still miss the conversation between them.
What a simple Qigong shape can reveal
Holding the Ball is a familiar image in Qigong: the arms describe a rounded space, as if embracing something light. It is visually simple, which is partly why it is so revealing. There is no complicated sequence to hide behind.
To an observer, it may look like two arms held in front of the body. To the person experiencing it, the more interesting question is whether those arms feel isolated or supported by a wider relationship with the back, centre, breath and ground.
Nothing supernatural has to appear. The insight may be as modest as realising that a shoulder has been doing more work than necessary, or that the back was never absent from the action. Yet that modest discovery can be quietly radical: the body is no longer a collection of isolated faults. It is a network of relationships capable of being understood more deeply.
This is why Tai Chi and Qigong are not simply collections of positions. Their wisdom lies partly in how they invite us to experience continuity: one part affecting another, effort meeting ease, attention changing the quality of what is already happening.
The value is not in achieving a perfect posture. It is in seeing that a movement may be more than the visible action, and that the body may be more than the list of things we believe are wrong with it.
Mind and body are not rival leaders
“Unlock the power of your mind” can sound as though the mind should conquer the body. That is not what I mean.
In these practices, attention is not a force imposed from above. It can be a way of listening. The body offers information; the mind notices, interprets and sometimes revises its assumptions. Breath is neither a switch to control nor a magical solution. It is one of the rhythms through which this relationship becomes perceptible.
Traditional Tai Chi language speaks of opening and closing, rising and settling, yin and yang. These are not promises of permanent calm or effortless movement. They point to a changing balance: activity depends on rest, support makes release possible, and a sense of wholeness may arise without every part doing the same thing.
That picture is far richer than the instruction to “think positively” about the body. It allows doubt, fatigue and difficulty to be present. Curiosity does not demand that we deny them. It simply refuses to let them be the only voices in the room.
Where Qi belongs in the conversation
Qi is a rich term within Chinese traditions. In the context of Tai Chi and Qigong, it helps name the lived quality of vitality, relationship and flow that practitioners may explore. It cannot be reduced neatly to a single modern measurement, and I am not suggesting that an invisible substance has been detected between the hands.
For some people, the word opens a useful way of speaking about an integrated experience. For others, it may be less familiar. Neither response is a test of whether the practice is “working.” The important point is not to manufacture a sensation. It is to remain interested in the difference between a body imagined as disconnected pieces and a body experienced as a living whole.
What the science can and cannot say
Research on bodily awareness distinguishes, among other things, proprioception, which concerns information about position and movement, from interoception, the sensing and interpretation of signals from within the body. These contribute to how we experience ourselves, though they are not scientific translations of Qi or yin and yang.
Reviews of body representation describe the integration of different sensory signals. Research in people with particular health conditions also finds an association between fear of movement and physical activity, although this does not tell us that every belief about movement has the same effect, or which came first. Qigong research examines combinations of posture, movement, breath and attention, with evidence that differs in quality and relevance across health conditions.
This research gives us reason to take bodily experience seriously. It does not establish that Holding the Ball dissolves limiting beliefs, rewires the brain on demand or treats a medical condition. The traditional language and the scientific language can sit beside one another without pretending they make identical claims.
A larger view of possibility
Perhaps the deepest question is not “What can I make my body do?” but “What account of my body am I living inside?” One is a demand for performance. The other opens a possibility for understanding.
A truthful answer may include real constraints. It may include grief about something that has changed. It may also include relationships, abilities and qualities that have been overlooked because our attention was trained elsewhere.
Tai Chi and Qigong offer a patient way of meeting that question. Not a demand to overcome the body. Not a promise that every boundary will disappear. A way of recognising that the body we have come to know may not be all there is to know about it.
Imagine what changes when the body stops being a problem to win against and becomes a relationship to understand. There may still be limits, and some may remain. But the person meeting those limits can be more informed, more compassionate and less confined by an old verdict.
That is an extraordinary possibility to carry into ordinary life.
Unlock the power of your mind, not to dominate, but to notice.
Unlock the intelligence of your body, not by denying limits, but by listening.
Discover the living quality of Qi in the relationships between them.
Continue with Apex Complete Membership
If you would like to explore these ideas with guidance and carry them into an ongoing rhythm, the Apex Complete Membership offers different ways to keep practising.
For £35 per month, you can attend regular public sessions in Swansea at no extra cost, subject to booking and available places; join the members-only Monday and Wednesday online practices and Friday Stillness Gate; and return to approved recordings, notes and your member practice library between sessions. You do not need to attend everything. Choose the route that fits the week you are living.
Wishing you a week of curiosity, steadiness and equanimity.
Dr Jar
Apex Tai Chi
References & Further Reading
Khalsa SS, et al. (2018). Interoception and Mental Health: A Roadmap. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging. A foundational overview of how internal bodily signals are sensed and interpreted; it does not test Holding the Ball or beliefs about movement.
Parma C, et al. (2024). An Overview of the Bodily Awareness Representation and Interoception: Insights and Progress in the Field of Neurorehabilitation Research. An overview of the integration of proprioceptive and internal bodily information, rather than evidence for a particular Qigong outcome.
Goubran M, et al. (2025). Relationship Between Fear of Movement and Physical Activity in Patients With Cardiac, Rheumatologic, Neurologic, Pulmonary, or Pain Conditions: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Relevant to the article’s discussion of expectations and movement, but its findings are associations in specific health populations, not proof about all limiting beliefs or Qigong.
National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. Qigong: What You Need To Know. An evidence and safety overview that describes Qigong’s integration of movement, posture, attention and breath, and the limits of current research.
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