Cultivate Qi: How to Strengthen Your Life Force By Benebell Wen Edited by Nicole Noles Collins
Most Eastern esoteric paths suggest Taoists and metaphysicians proactively cultivate and strengthen the personal Qi, or life force. Metaphysical work draws from your pool of personal Qi. If you’re not mindful of replenishing that Qi, then the constant weakening of your life force from the work that you do (this includes divination) may cause depletion. So to maintain optimal wellbeing — physical, mental, and psychic-spiritual — cultivation practices are necessary.
The Metaphysician’s Qi Divination, ceremonial ritual, pathworking, astral journeying and other practices are believed to exhaust your personal life force, and so as a Taoist, you want to establish a routine practice
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of cultivating your Qi to maintain wellbeing. It is a practice everyone and anyone can benefit from, much like how everyone should be mindful of nutrition and physical exercise. However, the nutritional needs of your everyday office worker is different from the nutritional needs of an Olympic swimmer. So we can make the comparison here of a Taoist to the Olympic swimmer, because it’s considered an out-of-the-ordinary lifestyle, and so your nutritional needs — in this case psychic-spiritual nutritional needs — will be different from the average person.
First, Know Yourself If you don’t know what your true weaknesses are, how do you correct them? Knowing your temperament, your physical body constitution, and having a clear understanding of your lifestyle and the impact of that lifestyle on your personhood will help you prescribe the best course of Qi cultivation for yourself.
