We all love to gather with loved ones and celebrate the long days and warm weather. Summer brings a certain magic that starts in childhood and persists throughout our entire life (as long as we continue to pay attention to it). Summer carries with it the spirit of joy, love, and adventure.
In Qi Gong, each season invites us to cultivate different qualities within ourselves. In our last blog post, we talked about how summer can be a great time to nurture love and share our joy. Today we’ll explore the relationship between stress and joy, and discover how summer is a great time to celebrate life.
Letting Go of Stress
There’s something about the sunny skies and blossoming flowers that makes us want to get outside and have some fun. As humans, we don’t even need to try to be influenced by nature to feel its qualities. However, if we do bring our mindful attention to the seasons, we can enjoy much more than a sunny afternoon.
Nature expresses itself in a very outward and clear way. Underlining each manifestation of the natural world lies powerful energy that we can harness and learn from. During summer, we can learn how to shed our worries and embrace the beauty of life.
Many of us carry around pent-up anxiety or stress from our daily activities. Work, family, and even vacations can cause us to develop stressful thinking that we hold onto. Holding onto things is a natural tendency that all living things have. In many cases, this can serve us. In prehistoric times, holding onto things helped us to prepare for long, cold winters. Today, holding onto a job or relationship is sometimes the right decision, even if there are challenges in doing so.
In other cases, it’s best to let go. Just as winter is a great time for storing energy and turning inward, summer helps us to learn the lessons of letting go and opening up. We all have pain and stress that builds up inside us, and releasing our worries can be a deeply nourishing experience.
Letting go isn’t always easy, but it certainly helps when you have some positive encouragement. Summer energy provides the perfect inspiration to open up and release your worries. The shining sun is setting an excellent example of how to spread warmth and joy, and Qi Gong is a great way to integrate those lessons.
Releasing Our Worries with Qi Gong
By using Qi Gong to mirror the energies of the summer season, we can learn the lessons of the natural world. Summer brings us a precious gift of liberation and joy, and Qi Gong can help us connect with that gift.
Different movements awaken different parts of ourselves, and Qi Gong for Summer can help us connect to our joy and love for life. As we practice during the summer months, we can feel the season’s excitement and inspiration channeling through us.
Some of the practices focus on transforming what is already within us through meditation. Others use flowing movements to tonify and support the liver. By learning techniques for building strength and resiliency, it becomes possible to break old patterns of stress and anxiety. The Swimming Dragon is one such practice that helps us to cultivate our internal power and embrace the season’s joy.
One of the things that we love about Lee’s practices is that you can take them with you far into the future. By taking advantage of each opportunity that Lee teaches, you can add to your own internal reservoir of practices and wisdom that will always be there for you.
Qi Gong isn’t just an internal practice that helps you feel better, it helps you to be a better person. By harnessing the gifts of nature, you can live in alignment with your truest purpose and highest self.
What happens when you truly integrate the qualities that summer has to offer? Internally, you feel more energized, more inspired, and less held back by stress. In the external world, you have a strong motivation to get out and celebrate life with those you care about. When we’re truly in touch with the things that matter most in life, we really just want to experience joy and share our love.
Qi Gong for Summer Workshop
We’re excited to bring you Lee’s Qi Gong for Summer Workshop! This is a great opportunity to cultivate awareness of what the season has to offer and learn directly from Lee. The practices that Lee teaches focus on harnessing the positive qualities of summer and celebrating the season’s beauty.
This is a recorded workshop and can be practiced whenever you’d like from the comfort of your own living room. Once you purchase the program it will be in your media library so you can review the material as often as you’d like.
Summer has a lot to teach us, so check out the workshop page below to learn more and start practicing today.