Chi is the life or vital force in living things. It is the essence of non-living things. It can be felt, it can be seen, it can be heard, it can be, in all ways, perceived. One just has to redevelop the ability to perceive it, but in our "normal," desensitized state, we usually fail to perceive it at all. In fact, most of us deny its existence.

In the living, the chi follows the breath (which is why breathing fully and naturally, as introduced in the beginning sections, is important). As you inhale, the chi "gathers" as if in preparation. It "fills" and the life force is invigorated. When you exhale, the chi disperses and is distributed throughout. The body returns to a "neutral state."

NOTE: There is a way to hold chi in a gathered state while exhaling so to gather more, so to accumulate chi to a super-charged level for specific uses, but that is not important to us in this learning. For those curious, accumulating chi is used in healing self, healing others, or in martial applications of self-defense. (The word defense is being emphasized here because there is no actual application for self-offense, martial militancy being an imbalanced state.)

In this part of the book, among other things, we will learn to feel and to see chi, some expressions of which are sometimes called the aura or auric fields. We start with feeling chi.

FEELING CHI

Let's start with the old arms in the doorway trick.

Stand in a doorway with your hands down at your sides. Extending your arms until they touch the door frame without bending your elbows (or locking them straight either), steadily push on the door frame for about five minutes. Then maintaining the position of your arms (releasing the pressure just enough to step out of the door frame) step out into the open and feel what happens to your arms. (They want to raise up.)

Having felt that internal sensation, we now move to "forming a ball of chi" between our hands. Sit down and enter an active meditative state - balanced, relaxed, and centered, with the mind at ease and quiet. Bring your hands, palms facing each other, up in front of you at about the same level or position your would use to examine an object that had been handed to you (say, about heart level.) Let the space between your palms be a comfortable amount - say about eight inches (20+ centimeters). Now, start moving your hands as if rolling around an imaginary ball you visualize yourself holding in your hands. Breathe slowly, from and to center, while doing this, and concentrate your exhaled breath as if generally focused or directed toward and into this imaginary ball.

Using an awareness located at your temples, without disrupting any of your inner quietude or bodily and mental states, feel what exists between your palms. You will feel a bouncy or cushiony ball, perhaps just faintly, but it is there. An analogy between the feeling of this and something more familiar would be the feeling that two magnets give you when you try to bring both their positive or negative poles toward one another, especially if you move them in a circle around one another. The difference is that the magnets repel and try to slip away from each other, whereas this only feels like a cushy ball. What you are feeling is chi, or your own life force, concentrated by your mind between your hands, or, perhaps better said, your awareness concentrated so you can perceive the chi riding there between your hands as it naturally exists in, of and around your body in interaction with self, environment and life. This is the "chi ball" that tai chi teachers try to teach you to "hold" as they begin to help you on your way to "dancing in tao." And, yes, chi can be likened to electromagnetic radiation.

Next, maintaining your awareness, slowly stroke the air above one of your hands, around and about a single finger, or back and forth across the back or palm of your hand. Sometimes some surface of your arm proves a better subject. Or, of course, the head. Perhaps immediately or in time, with attentiveness, you should be able to discern an energy and movement. Both the stroking hand and the body part being stroked should return sensation. Just switch your awareness between the two to feel the individual sensations. And, please, attend what those sensations feel like. Nuances are everything. They define your own personal and individual manner of sensing and it is slightly to incredibly different for everyone. In learning to detect what are now just nuances, you will become more sensitive to the sensory stimulae delivered by the deep senses. Because, in truth, what you are feeling are the gross (obvious) sensations, the subtle yet being invisible and intangible to you as yet. The more nuances of which you become aware, the more the subtle will become apparent until, with practice and application, the most subtle will become tangibe. Remember, in the details reside the keys. The more details you apprehend, the more keys you will gain to understanding exactly when and what your deep senses are perceiving.

Having accomplished feeling chi on your own body, now it is time to try to feel it about the bodies of others. Do NOT attempt to do this with someone who is not completely comfortable with you and what you are doing. And certainly don't do it to someone on the sly. That's a good way to get punched in the nose. And remember, most people tend to "clap in their auras" and, therefore, their chi fields, around strangers, in strange environments, and when feeling uncomfortable. Another thing to remember, if you try to "show off" this new found sensory ability as a parlor trick or to impress your friends, acquaintances, or enemies, you will probably wind up embarrassing yourself as your own state of consciousness will not be holding to the necessary balance, harmony, center, and relaxed, meditative state by nature of the fact that you are "performing" for prestige, whether to try and prove the reality to some other person, or simply to gain recognition. (We have to chuckle here, because we know that many of you will probably try it anyway, but, until and unless there is legitimate reason to so demonstrate, such as in teaching others, such demonstrations usually if not always fail.)

Further exercises and experiments in feeling chi of course revolve around other subjects such as animals, plants, rocks (yes, rocks) and so on. Once you begin, the possibilities for exploration become self-evidencing and endless. And, yes, this is the same sense that the blind use to sense objects.