When you begin studying Qi Dao, you will be learning through direct experience of Qi. It is very concrete. You will be able to experience and apply most of what you learn immediately in class as well as throughout your activities. This makes Academy Of Qi Dao different from an academic setting where you only apply the facts you have absorbed later and within a specialized environment.
Qi Dao teaches awareness of Qi through spontaneous movement. This awareness comes naturally and spontaneously when we are totally in the moment. Indeed, the teachings of Qi Dao were discovered through ancient Shamans’ experiences of being in the moment and not through dry research. In this sense, Qi Dao is extremely easy; it does not require you to do anything unnatural or to force anything.
The challenge is that most of us come to this practice with habitual behaviors, rigid muscle and fixed beliefs. These are ultimately the physical and mental manifestations of attachment – attachment to things and events either in the past and the future. If we could let go of these, all of these teachings and indeed the whole world would open up to us without any further prompting needed. But unfortunately, most of us need more encouragement than this. Thus, the heart of Qi Dao is not learning a fixed set of skills but encouragement in letting go.
At the same time, because we at Academy Of Qi Dao don’t want to overwhelm you, we teach this process of letting go in a step-by-step manner, taking small steps in overcoming attachment and towards enlightenment – indeed learning to take small steps is one of Qi Dao’s important principles. So the curriculum we outline is the most typical steps that a person makes in this process.
Qi Dao study takes a spiral path. While we will be outlining below the steps in a typical process of becoming attentive, knowledgeable and powerful, what you, as a student, will experience will likely be somewhat different in chronology and emphasis. This makes Qi Dao study very different from the linear process of academic learning, where student must digest a large number of facts.
Each student will have different places where they find things go naturally and where they wind-up more stuck. By this token, one student may be concentrating on one challenge while another may be concentrating on a different challenge. Just as much, students often find themselves going back to the basic principles and embodying them on more fully. This is a facet of maintaining beginner’s mind, the openness that each of us has just starting a project.
While all this makes the process of learning Qi Dao exciting and somewhat unpredictable, most students find that they digest the material at a rapid and surprising rate. Indeed, learning Qi Dao should be like returning to those times in your life when learning was effortless and you were in the flow.
Academy of Qi Dao 