Why do we get colds? It turns out that the reason for this is not a jacket that got wet in the rain, not a walk in pantyhose in the cold. But our body is able to accumulate cold in itself, Taoists believe. How this happens, what threatens and what to do about it – the answers are given by qigong practitioners.
Where does a cold come from? We freeze and then get sick. However, Taoists believe that sometimes the effects of hypothermia do not appear immediately. Our body seems to accumulate cold, retains it in itself.
For example, a woman gets caught in the rain several times, walks in thin trousers in the cold, and nothing happens. She seems to be healthy, and suddenly, when there is no apparent reason, she develops acute cystitis. Why?
The level of cooling in the body has reached a critical point.
How does the body trap cold?
There are many ways to cool down: wet feet, too light clothes, and so on. But the result is the same – sooner or later the body responds with inflammation: cystitis, thrush. Which far from always go away even after a course of antibiotics, because the cold remains inside us.
Often women come to my classes who consider themselves perfectly healthy. But after doing the exercises, they suddenly begin to feel cold in the lower abdomen, in the lower back. They are surprised, because it is warm in the hall, where does the chill come from?
The fact is that during classes we relax the pelvic area, open it, free it, let it breathe. And the body “releases” the cold that it kept in the tissues.
How to release the cold
How to “accumulate” the cold, we know, but how to get rid of it? There are several ways in Chinese medicine.
- Infrared sauna – such heat penetrates deep into the tissues and warms them up. Unlike, say, a hot bath: the water only heats the outside. In addition, after a hot bath, you can freeze again if the house is cool.
- Warming up with moxa is a popular treatment in traditional Chinese medicine. Moxa is a wormwood cigar that the doctor sets on fire, keeps at a certain distance and thus warms up the necessary parts of the body.
- Acupuncture – heating from the inside. The doctor places acupuncture needles at active points on the body, thereby increasing blood circulation in this area and the circulation of Qi energy. It warms the body from the inside, driving away the cold.
- Women’s Taoist practices – a series of breathing exercises that increase blood circulation in the pelvic organs and thus expel the cold from the inside.
Practices can be used both as an opportunity to strengthen women’s health for many years, and as an emergency technique: if you catch a cold, you can do the exercises. Then the cold will not stagnate in the tissues.
Genuine breath
The simplest exercise is called “authentic (genuine) breathing.” It underlies more complex breathing practices, but also in itself allows you to control heat and cold inside the body.
1. Lie on the floor with a book or something similar in size and weight pressed against your stomach. Inhale through your nose to lift the book as high as possible. Pay attention, the breath should expand the stomach, inflate it. Then exhale. Repeat several times from the beginning.
2. Sit with a straight back on a chair or on pillows, cross your legs. Stretch your crown up, relax your stomach and lower back. Now inhale again, as if inflating a balloon. The stomach will expand a little less, because you are sitting, not lying down, the body is not so relaxed. But try to breathe in the same way as you breathed lying down. When exhaling, do not speed up or slow down.
Breathe like this for 3 minutes. Bring your attention down to your belly. You may feel a surge of warmth. This means that you are doing the exercise correctly. If you feel cold, it means that it has really accumulated in the tissues and now it should be removed.