June turned out to be unstable: as soon as you put on a dress in the morning, gusts of wind increase in the street, and the temperature begins to tend to zero. Such days are dangerous due to sudden hypothermia, and no matter how much we are told “do not freeze”, no one is immune from this. How to quickly bring yourself back to normal and not get sick, says the expert.
There are dozens of ways to abruptly and unexpectedly overcool, and in our latitudes this is extremely easy to do. Get caught in the rain with the wind, sit on the fresh grass during a picnic. The earth has not yet warmed up, and the blanket that you took with you to the park will not protect your body from the effects of cold.
If a person is cold, his first reflex desire is, of course, to warm up, and this is logical. And most often we use a hot shower for this. However, it does not always help, since the heat from water, according to Taoist ideas about the interaction of the elements, does not penetrate the body as deeply as necessary.
In addition, if a hot shower is not available here and now, for example, in the country or during a water outage, we have a set of exercises that will warm up the body and protect the body from diseases.
Moxa from wormwood
Moksa is one of the Chinese tools for deep heating of body tissues. The warmth of this wormwood cigar penetrates deep into the tissues and literally drives out the cold that we have “captured”. For example, if a girl has overcooled the pelvic organs after sitting in the cold, and this situation threatens to exacerbate some kind of “female” chronic disease, then moxa will be an excellent solution.
The stick is set on fire from one end and with its help the lower abdomen is warmed up: for this, moxa must be slowly driven along the entire zone of the lower abdomen, and as close as possible without the risk of getting burned. Unlike a hot shower, moxa provides dry heat that penetrates deeper into the tissues and acts more effectively.
A similar solution “for the whole body” is an infrared sauna. But again, according to the Chinese ideology of health, it should be exactly dry, and not steamy heat.
Whole body pat
To enhance the effect of warmth, you can add an exercise to patting the whole body. Thus, you activate the protective energy of the body Wei Qi, as if calling it to “work” – to the surface of the body.
Take off your clothes, stand up straight and start patting the body from the periphery to the center: first the legs – from the bottom up, along the front and back surfaces. Then the hands – also from the bottom up, from the palms to the shoulders. In the same way, pat your stomach, chest. Loin and back – where you get it. Patting should be neat, without fanaticism, but tangible enough to give a slight feeling that the body is warming up.
Breathing exercise
Another method of internal warming that we master as part of female Taoist practices is a breathing exercise called “bellows”.
Stand in the so-called “goalkeeper position”: legs wide, knees bent, palms rest on the knees. The back is straight, the face looks down. Move your attention to the stomach and imagine that with the help of its muscles you want to sharply push all the air out of the body. Belly in itself – a sharp exhalation through the nose. Inhalation happens by itself – as relaxed as possible. And exhale again.
Take sharp exhalations, gradually accelerating the pace of breathing. Please note that the exhalation will be accompanied by the tension of the abdomen, because it pushes the air. And when you inhale, you relax your stomach, allowing your body to inhale as deeply and freely as possible. Relax for this all the muscles of the pelvis, buttocks, lower back.
Breathe like this for 1-2 minutes, and you will feel how the heat gradually spreads in the pelvic area. According to the Taoist tradition, this is a zone of energy storage, and by breathing in this way, you activate it, start circulation, as if warming up the whole body from the inside.
If you regularly breathe like this, as well as do other breathing exercises from the arsenal of female Taoist practices, you will notice that you become less cold and less likely to get sick. People who practice qigong manage internal energy so well that cold becomes not dangerous for them: even if it penetrates the body, you will have all the tools to expel it and restore health.
In Taoist monasteries, novices do the following exercise, which trains their resistance to cold: they wrap themselves in a wet sheet and go to bed. During the night, their task is to dry 3-5 sheets with the help of internal energy. Of course, this is an option for advanced practitioners who have excelled in the management of internal energy. So don’t repeat this at home! But such an exercise gives an idea of how much we can develop our skills in protecting the body.