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How Do You Perceive Qi?

  • Writer: James Spears
    James Spears
  • May 12
  • 5 min read

This is an important question to ask oursevlves and relates to many contexts in healing. Perceiving qi is useful for treating patients, finding acupuncture points, guiding our clients through healing processes, and is vital for our own health and well-being.


We all know that qi is subtle energy, but how do we actually feel it?

What are the qualities of qi that allow us to sense it?


qi energy in the body

After decades of pondering this, the most useful framework I have found is that qi may be perceived as subtle vibration, subtle light, and subtle sound. This fits in the context of traditional practices in TCM and qi kung, and even has important implications in the clinic.


As subtle vibration, qi may be felt as warmth, tingling, magnetism, or in other ways that relate to faint sensations. As sublte light, qi may be visualized as light in the body and dan tiens.


Feeling Qi, Interoception, and the ANS


Learning to feel qi is vital to healing both the body and mind, and modern science understands many of the physiological and psychological mechanims for this. When we feel into our body's qi, the internal sensory experience occurs via specialized sensory receptors called interoceptors. These are the sensory nerves that allow us to feel our heart, stomach, breath, and internal organs. Additionally, the interoceptors monitor the physiological state of your internal organs and play a vital role in regulating organ functions via the autonomic nervous system. [1,2]


When we develop body and interoceptive awareness through practices like qi kung, yoga, body scanning, or somatic therapies, there are also psychological benefits that result from bridging the gaps between physical sensations and emotional processing. [3, 4]


Feeling qi in our bodies through interoception can:


Improve Emotional Regulation: Emotions affect the body and can cause physical tension and get stored in the body in various areas like the jaw, shoulders, chest, abdomen, and pelvis.


Reduce Stress and Anxiety: By noticing physical signs of tension early, you can consciously implement relaxation techniques to activate the parasympathetic nervous system. This shift from "fight or flight" helps lower stress hormone production and increases a sense of calm.


Help Heal from Trauma: Trauma is often "stored" in the body as physical tension, hyperarousal, or a lack of safety. Somatic awareness practices help trauma survivors retrain the brain to process these internal signals differently, fostering a sense of safety, orientation, and grounding.


Feeling Qi, Body Awareness, and Healing Shen Disturbance


As we learn to feel subtle sensations in the body, healing stress reactions, anxiety, depression, PTSD, and other forms of trauma and shen disturbance can occur via the ANS and through emotional regulation.


One primary method to work with shen disturbance is to have patients locate their emotions in their body's. This is similar to working with physical symptoms like pain, because one of the first things we want to do is locate the pain. Similarly, when we have a patient locate where they feel their emotions like anxiety or depression, we can then focus on what that emotion feels like.


We do the same with physical pain, when we ask a question like, "is it a dull or sharp pain that you feel in your (head, abdomen, chest, etc)."


When a patient localizes anxiety in their chest, we can then ask a question like, "what does the anxiety feel like, is it constricted, tight, jittery, pounding, etc."


Similarly to what we would do for physical pain, we can continue to ask questions that help the client clearly describe the way they feel emotions in their body.


By doing this, we are assisting the client in developing better body-mind awareness, while regulating their ANS and emotions.


Trauma Therapies and TCM


In conventional trauma therapies, guiding clients into their body's is a key practice used in Somatic Experiencing (SE) and other somatic based practices. In short, there are 4 primary somatic methods to release emotions and trauma from the body. These include:


Breath Techniques: These can help to increase parasympathetic activity quickly by doing extended exhalations and physiological sighs.


Movements: Many conventional forms of therapy utilize movement as a way to release emotions and trauma. These include TRE, somatic movement therapies, EMDR, yoga, and dance therapy. Traditional qi kung may also be used such as forms that involve shaking, grounding, and centering.


Touch: Therapies like SE, NeuroAffective Touch, CST, and Trauma Touch Therapy aim to release and resolve trauma from the body. Acupressure, EFT, and self-touch may also be used. Qi kung forms that involve touching energy centers can also be useful.


Sensory & Interoceptive Processes: Practices that increase body awareness such as body scanning and tracking are similar to qi kung forms that focus on specific areas of the body and move qi through different areas.


The Role of Grounding & Centering in Shen Disturbance and Trauma


I first learned about grouding and centering in qi kung classes, and modern forms of trauma therapy also use grounding and centering as useful practices. Grounding practices are diverse and aim to "anchor us in the here and now." Some grounding exercises include feeling our feet on the floor, or in qi kung, "rooting into the earth." Centering exercises bring our attention inward and may include breathing into our center or aligning through our spine. There are numerous other forms of grounding and centering exercises that come from both traditional TCM practices, qi kung, and modern psychotherapy.


By teaching our clients grounding and centering techniques, they offer patients "resourse and anchor points" that can help with balancing and regulating emotions. Additionally, this helps to regulate the ANS and increase parasympathetic activity and feelings of safety, self-agency, and even self-empowerment.


Fundamental to both TCM practices for shen disturbance and modern methods of trauma therapy, is developing the capacity to feel our bodies. We can conceive of this as feeling qi or tracking body sensations. However we understand this, interoceptors play a role in subtle energy and sensory perception. Additionally, interoceptors are an interface between suble sensory feelings, the ANS, and our emotional centers. Through practices like qi kung, yoga, body scanning, and other somatic based methods, we gain the ability to regulate our emotions, calm our minds, and have greater mental focus and clairty.


If these topics are of interest to you, be sure to read more on my website at the links below. I will also be developing more material on a trauma informed acupuncture practice, and how we can use traditional practices with modern findings to help our clients with shen disturbance, emotional regulation, and healing from trauma.


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