Tag: wellbeing

Qigong – body awareness of a different kind

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I first encountered Qigong when I was exploring anything and everything that I could find that I thought might help to restore my mental health from a point of crisis to some semblance of stability. That was over 25 years ago, and I had a long and arduous journey ahead of me. Along the way I took part occasionally in Qigong classes and workshops. It wasn’t until some years later, however, when I was struggling to push through the challenges of a demanding job – in itself part of my recovery process – that I considered a more regular commitment to the practise of Qigong.

Google searches came up with limited references to Qigong being offered locally. Luckily, one of these few was an evening class at a school just a few miles from where I was living, in Leeds.

An online Medical Dictionary notes:

Qigong (pronounced “chee-gung,” also spelled chi kung) is translated from the Chinese to mean “energy cultivation” or “working with the life energy.” Qigong is an ancient Chinese system of postures, exercises, breathing techniques, and meditations. Its techniques are designed to improve and enhance the body’s qi. According to traditional Chinese philosophy, qi is the fundamental life energy responsible for health and vitality.

The Dictionary goes on to state:

Qigong may be used as a daily routine to increase overall health and well-being, as well as for disease prevention and longevity. It can be used to increase energy and reduce stress. In China, qigong is used in conjunction with other medical therapies for many chronic conditions, including asthma, allergies, AIDS, cancer, headaches, hypertension, depression, mental illness, strokes, heart disease, and obesity.

Qigong is presently being used in Hong Kong to relieve depression and improve the overall psychological and social well-being of elderly people with chronic physical illnesses.

[Source: https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/qigong]

While I can’t claim that I commit to a daily practice – not yet anyway – I have been attending these evening classes – and some day workshops at weekends too – with the same teacher ever since. 

When the Covid lockdowns first started, Sue Dunham – the teacher – was quick off the mark with setting up Zoom classes.  Just as in the live classes, Sue’s commitment to her own practice and to sharing her knowledge and vast experience has shone through into these Zoom sessions.

Sue doesn’t just demonstrate what to do for us to follow. She talks through and builds up each movement step by step, repeating as necessary; infinitely thorough and always engaging.  Her approach is very meditative and mindful, working deep on different themes in each group of three classes.  During the height of the pandemic, focusing on the lungs could not have been more appropriate, and we’ve also recently worked on the spine and the digestive system. 

Though the movements are slow and steady, I find that I sleep really well after a class session, and wake in the morning with the sense that I’ve had a really good workout, even though it isn’t ‘exercise’ in the conventional sense.

According to Sue:

“Qigong is an extraordinary practice: it can bring you to question fundamental beliefs about mind and your life, bringing you to that in a supported, gentle way. I have found it to be accessible and yet challenging, it’s enigmatic but intriguing!”

One of my favourite Qigong movements is called ‘Healing Form’, and Qigong has certainly become an essential part of my own movement towards health and healing.

When I started to become aware of my body, as a teenager, it was on the basis of how it looked. The negative compulsive obsessions I developed were – I realise now – associated with complex psychological and emotional traumas that have taken me 50 years to unravel.

Fortunately for me, my body was and is healthy and, while I continued well into adulthood to control my life by controlling what I ate, my body served me well. Deep roots hold tight, though, and it was a long time – being ultimately faced with the choice of life or no life – before I was able to find the strength, coping mechanisms, and resolve, to push through and come out the other side.

Qigong has helped me to work at a deeper level with my body – my amazing body.

It hasn’t provided me with a miracle ‘cure’ but it has helped to shift my focus into health and wellbeing, which is where it should be.

I feel a lot ‘lighter’ these days, even though I’m 65 and probably weigh at least 4 stone more than I did when I was 15. At six-and-a-half stone and still feeling the need to lose weight, I was weighed down and locked in as a teenager.

Some of the grief, sadness and regret linger on, but less so day by day. I’m thankful for a lot of things and hope that I can continue to be so for many years to come. Qigong helps me to nurture my body, with all its intricate mechanisms for feeding and flow.

One of the wonderful things about this practice is that it takes me beyond what I ‘know’, what I can measure or evaluate, into that sense of wonder, about what I don’t know, with all the associated mysteries of those realms.

When I’m practising Qigong, under Sue’s infinitely patient and painstaking instruction, I feel as graceful as a dancer, and that – for me – is something of a miracle.

The Covid pandemic has shown us just how vulnerable any of us can be, at any age, but also how those vulnerability factors can increase as we get older. The more we can do ourselves to mitigate those factors, the more likely we are to be able to lead fulfilling, meaningful lives for longer.  That’s my plan, anyway, and I’m sticking to it!

If you want to know more about Qigong, you can visit Sue’s website and Facebook pages via the following links:  https://www.facebook.com/suedunhamqigong and this https://sites.google.com/view/qigongwithsue/home.

Additional references:

Image: Physical exercise, yin yang transparent background PNG clipart | HiClipart

Familiar Fields

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Familiar Fields

Turning the corner
the familiar fields and shelters
come into view

Open outlook, clear and calm
this is the place where past harms
are healed

Friends old and new
graze on at steady pace
it’s never too late for needs to be met
just a turn of fate

The familiar fields and shelters
will come into view again next year
the way ahead may not always be calm and clear
but we can always come back to this place
this sanctuary

And marvel at the donkeys
stroke the pony’s mane
it’s always different every year
and every year, just wonderfully
the same


It’s around a year ago today that my friend, Rosemary, passed away. She was 49.

I wrote the above poem after we had been to visit an animal sanctuary in Norfolk. Rosemary had introduced me to the animal sanctuary because she had adopted a Shetland pony who lives there, Sampson.

I suggested we go and visit which we did, and revisited a few times more, before it got to the point where it was too much for Rosemary. She found it too tiring, she said, which it was. It was too tiring because she smoked heavily and was an alcoholic.

Rosemary had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in her early 20s.  While she never opened up much about her past or about anything emotional at all really – I was told in no uncertain terms to ‘leave it’ if I prompted her in any way – she did tell me once that the psychiatrist who diagnosed her told her that she would never work again.

That may well have been the case in the conventional sense of what constitutes ‘work’ in our society, but if it was unlikely that she would ever do regular paid work again, that prognosis could have been presented differently, to give Rosemary a sense of hope of having a fulfilling life, even if not the life that she would have been hoping for as a young woman in her 20s at that time.

In recent times there has been a lot of talk about mental health and a lot of awareness raising in the media, but when it fundamentally comes down to it, has anything significantly changed to ensure that people who have diagnoses of extreme forms of mental illness can find some way of identifying themselves with a meaningful role, a sense of positive purpose, in the world? I’m not convinced that it has. 

Some people are fortunate to be partners, wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, which can help to offset the stigma and isolation that accompanies their condition, but many – like Rosemary – do not.

Rosemary was not an easy person to get on with. She pushed people away, more often than not, and did make lifestyle choices – however hard and judgmental that sounds – that led to her limiting her own life in many ways.  But I have often wondered how different it would have been if, when given that diagnosis of schizophrenia all those years ago, she had been told about all the things that she could keep doing – and all the support that she would get in the process – to help her feel good about herself and her life, whatever form or path that took.

Having extra support at a critical time can make all the difference between us, on the one hand finding our own strength and resolve to come through with a sense of purpose and, on the other hand, wavering and floundering and – at best – just not drowning.

At times Rosemary pushed my patience to the limits and then some (and she knew it!), but I could only try and imagine what difficulties she went through every day. Somehow, through that diagnosis, and prognosis, and the position it placed her in, in the world, all her intelligence, her good memory, her dark sense of humour, her creativity, her kindness to animals and sense of fair play got devalued, not least by her.

Thank you for the friendship that we shared Rosemary.  For the times we spent at nature reserves and animal sanctuaries, the concerts we went to and the smile that you used to greet me with. 

I hope you are now flying high, with the birds.

I’m Glad

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It’s not my real name, but ‘Glad’ is better than sad, and I’ve worked hard in my life to be Glad, not sad.

I’ve recently started decorating my house – our house. This may not seem like an amazing revelation or achievement, but it is for me. I’m 64 years old and have had a long struggle to be able to enjoy doing the everyday things that I can focus on now.

It’s taken about fifty years of unlearning and then re-learning how to be me. Poetry hasn’t been the only vehicle I’ve used for recovery and discovery, but it has been a regular companion along the way.

As a teenager – like many teenagers since and still – I developed a very negative self-image of myself, inside and out.

Out
Out, out into the world
That’s where I wanted to go
What I wanted to do
When I was young
But when I looked in the mirror
All I could see
Was an ugly, unattractive body
Looking back at me

I went on a diet from the age of about 15 that lasted for the next 30 years or so, and affected every aspect of my life (or more accurately non-life that it had become). I didn’t think I had anything to offer as a person, didn’t know how to form relationships, and put all my energy into losing weight. At least if I was thin, that would be something. Except it led to nothing, because it wasn’t solid ground on which to build a life. It was the best I could do at the time, but I did eventually realise, after I’d had a major breakdown in my late thirties, and was trying to get myself going again in my forties, that I needed to eat, to give me energy, to be able to live. I had to finally, eventually, push through that awful sense of self-loathing that I associated with putting on weight in order to emerge as a (literally as well as generally) well-rounded person with an appetite for life.

I still have to work at it, still take anti-depressants, can’t use shop changing rooms or look at myself naked in a mirror, but on the whole this does not affect my ability to enjoy my life – with my partner – and try to make the most of every day.

I can still very easily cut myself off, go into ‘zombie’ mode, more readily associate with entropy than energy, so decorating my house – however long it takes – and writing this blog – wherever it takes me – are positive signs of engagement; action rather than inaction.

I hope my poems and other musings may resonate with anyone who has struggled to find their own identity and path through life. I know now that there are endless possibilities and I hope that the following poem (in six parts) helps to show how important it is for each of us to find our fighting spirit:

Jacket 1
It’s there, on the chair
The red fleece jacket
With hood and drawstring waist
That I don’t want to wear
Don’t want to keep

It’s warm and soft when I put it on
But far too big for me
Drowned in a red sea
Shapeless, I feel
A baggy, saggy, faceless entity

I look at the jacket
On the chair
In limp, loose folds of red, and seams
This isn’t the jacket of my dreams

It’s theirs to wear
Not mine to keep
Their tears to cry
Not mine to weep

It’s there, on the chair
The red fleece jacket
With hood and drawstring waist
That I don’t want to wear
Don’t want to keep
So I’ve put a price on its head
To let it go free
To someone who wants it
But when will that be?

Jacket 2
It’s there, on the chair
The red fleece jacket
With hood and drawstring waist
That I don’t want to wear
Don’t want to keep

It’s warm and soft when I put it on
But far too big for me
Drowned in a red sea
Shapeless, I feel
A baggy, saggy, faceless entity

I look at the jacket
On the chair
In limp, loose folds of red, and seams
This isn’t the jacket of my dreams

It’s not my layer
These aren’t my lies
With drawstring waist
And nylon ties

It’s not my jacket
They’re not my dreams
These aren’t my ties
They’re not my seams

So I leave the jacket
On the chair
To go my way
While they go theirs

Jacket 3
Now it hangs upon the door
That red fleece jacket
That I didn’t want to wear
Didn’t want to keep

It’s warm and soft when I put it on
And not too big for me
Warmed in a red sea
Shapeless no more
No baggy, saggy faceless entity

I look at the jacket
On the door
In limp, loose folds of red, and seams
It’s not the jacket of my dreams
But just a layer to keep me warm
From frozen looks
And glares of scorn

It is my jacket
With hood and waist
To wear a while
From place to place

Jacket 4
What next?

Jacket 5
Jacket in?

Jacket 6
No!