Unusually for me, I found myself fairly wide awake last night, around 2:45 am, and I started wondering how I was going to get back to sleep. I remembered that my mom had mentioned a book by a woman who had tried all the western and alternative cures for insomnia, and had finally found that qigong was the only thing that really helped her.
I have to say that I like the title:
Wide Awake: What I Learned About Sleep from Doctors, Drug Companies, Dream Experts, and a Reindeer Herder in the Arctic Circle, by Patricia Morrisroe
As a long-time practitioner of qigong and tai chi, I had never used qigong specifically for treating insomnia, so after a quick search on the magical google, I came across a blog post from Twyla Carolan containing the following exercise:
Medical Qigong for Insomnia
(by Twyla Carolan)
The following version of a famous Prescription for Insomnia comes from Professor Jerry Alan Johnson’s textbook Chinese Medical Qigong Therapy Vol. 4.
The best way to use this effective Medical Qigong exercise, is to go through it a few times to get used to the process, then make a practice of doing the full prescription each night before going to bed.
However, if you’re already in bed, unable to sleep, and you want to give it a try, start with the simplest aspect of this exercise first. Focus your attention on your feet, specifically the Bubbling Well Point, an acupuncture point on the indent on the underside of your foot just before the ball of the foot. Place your entire focus and awareness here for 5 to 15 minutes as you breathe slowly and deeply. This basic technique helps the mind to settle, relax, and calm, so that sleep can occur.
If this simplest aspect doesn’t quite do the trick, proceed to the full exercise below:
Prescription for Insomnia
- Sit on the edge of the bed, rub your hands together briskly to warm them, close your eyes, then place your hands over your back at waist level. Focus on the kidneys, massaging in a circular motion, going up on the outside, in towards the spine, down, and around to your sides. Massage both kidneys simultaneously, 24 times. Then change direction and massage the kidneys 24 times, circling in the other direction.
- Keep your hands over your back at waist level, covering the kidneys. As you inhale lift the hands away slightly from the back and imagine divine healing light coming down from the heavens and filling the kidneys completely. As you exhale and press your hands gently over the kidney area, imagine the kidneys absorbing the light. Do 36 breath cycles (one inhalation and exhalation is one cycle).
- After completing 3 sets of the previous steps, place the right hand on the navel and the left hand on your back at the same height as the front hand. Focus on gathering chi into your lower dantien, which is in the belly area. In Traditional Chinese Medicine the lower dantien is considered to be an energy storage centre of the body.
- Next, women place the left foot on the right knee and the left hand on the belly area. Men place the right foot on the left knee with the right hand on the belly area. With your other hand gently massage the Bubbling Well Point on the bottom of your foot 100 times clockwise and then 100 times counterclockwise.
- Do this slowly. Allow the mind to connect the lower dantien in the belly to the bottom of the foot, and then to move energy from the lower dantien to the bottom of the foot.
As the mind relaxes, close the eyes, lie back, and fall asleep. Zzzzz…
(End of quoted blog post)
Enhancing the Kidney Qi and Water Element to Calm the Mind and Promote Sleep
This medical qigong exercise focuses mainly on the qi, or energy, of the Kidneys and Water Element. The Water Element is related to the season of winter. The energy of winter is slow, quiet, inward and peaceful. When we don’t have enough of this energy in our lives, the Kidney qi becomes depleted, potentially leading to insomnia and sleep problems. This medical qigong exercise is designed to rejuvenate that depleted energy.
The exercise begins by massaging the area of back most near the physical kidney organs. In Chinese Medicine, the Kidney qi is located not only in the kidneys themselves, near the back, but also in the front of the body. The area containing the highest concentration of Kidney qi actually extends from the pelvic bowl, all the way up to the navel. For students of yoga, this area approximately correlates to the Second Chakra. In Chinese Medicine, this area is known as the Dan Tien, or Elixir Field. This name refers the elixir, or medicinal effect, that occurs when this energy center becomes filled with qi.
Counter-Balancing the Effects of Stress on Sleep
Since our culture tends to require a lot of mental concentration and stimulation, a lot of our energy habitually and consistently flows upward to the chest and head. When this upward flow is combined with the internal muscular tension caused by stress, the energy becomes stuck up in the chest and head areas, and is not able to naturally flow back to the lower Dan Tien area.
When the lower Dan Tien area is not full of energy, there is no balancing, grounding and centering counter-force for energy that is stuck up in the chest and head. Thus, thoughts and emotional energy keep spinning, with no force of gravity to help them land. Bringing energy down to the lower Dan Tien helps us to calm, soothe, harmonize, and bring down these unsettled thoughts and emotions. Balancing these energies between the top and bottom of the body allows the energies to settle, promoting sleep.
How This Qigong Exercise Relates to the Kidneys
Thus, in the medical qigong exercise, we can understand the placement of the hands, and the areas of mental focus. The massage of the hands on the back, and the placement of the hands on the navel area, directly brings energy down to the Kidney area through physical stimulation. Then, mental imagery is used to guide energy from above the body down to the Kidney area. Finally, mental focus and physical stimulation is used to stimulate the Bubbling Spring point on the bottom of the foot, which is the first point on the Kidney meridian, and the one closest to the ground.
Keys to Success With Qigong
The key to success with any medical qigong exercise is repetition. For most exercises, I would recommend practicing 4-5 times per week, or daily, for at least 3 months. You will most likely see benefits before that, but your body will need at least a season’s worth of time to begin to deeply integrate the rebalancing, grounding, and centering effects that the exercise provides.
Enjoy, be gentle with yourself, and please feel free to ask any questions that come up about this practice.
