Monday, August 30, 2010

CheeGong (QiGong) for Star Wars fans

Being a fan of George Lucas' Star Wars story and also a humble practitioner of Chinese CheeGong, I'd like to start writing about it and share with my friends.

According to the communist Chinese's spelling method, it spells QiGong. However, I'll bet 99% of the non-Chinese speakers in the world will pronounce it as "KwaiGong", justified by the name Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-wan Kenobi's master.

However, the correct pronunciation should be CheeGong, the Chee as in "cheese". I'll come back to the tone to pronounce Chinese in later blogs.

What exactly is CheeGong anyway? Most of the Chinese Martial Arts masters will reject this but I think no one has ever portrait Chee as good as George Lucas and Star Wars; you can think of Chee as the "Force". It flows inside every living and non-living thing. Learning to gather, accumulate, and control Chee, is what CheeGong is all about.

CheeGong is like Yoga. CheeGong is the basis of GongFu (KungFu).

The character Chee means "air". The learning of CheeGong involves a lot of controlling of your breathing, so this makes a bit sense. A more ancient character used here literally writes as "no fire". It means the kind of coolness, stable, non-heated, but powerful status when you are practicing CheeGong.

The character Gong means the exercise, the practice, the power, the potential. GungFu, which is more popularly spelled as KungFu, means the ability to do any kind of thing that needs lots of practice, not limited to martial arts. For example we can say a chef has great GungFu in his cooking of crabs because he's practiced a lot and is now a master in cooking crabs.

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