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In this piece I'm going to talk about how reishi mushroom has truly improved and deepened my qigong practice.

Now if you do not know what qigong is, it essentially means energy work or energy cultivation, and it is a Chinese art that's kind of, slightly similar to yoga if you're familiar with that, nevertheless it is generally gentle, delicate movements coordinated with the breath, coordinated with the mind, that then moves energy and the blood more effectively through the body which then improves health and improves just the whole body system from the ground up.

So qigong is the method of working with and moving the energy in the body, and it requires a while to develop a sensitiveness to the energy in the body because it's completely subtle, and we have to calm our nervous system and improve our health and improve our blood flow and our joint circulationâ€"all of these things. And then we start to feel it, and we start to notice it more deeply.

So how reishi has helped me is because it is such a good shen tonic, it is such a good chi tonic, that just about taking it puts you into a meditative, just about qigong mental condition. And the things begin to come more naturally. Actually , plenty of folk believe that, people like Lao Tzu and a lot of the other Taoist sages, and even plenty of the originators of the selfdefense skills, were taking reishi. So taking reishi is really just using that consciousness and, in my judgment, when I think of the archetype of the master or the archetype of where I want to be when it comes to qigong and martial arts and just practicing and working with the body, definitely herbs are often a gigantic part of that. It is a thing we kind of left out, however it is kind of coming back, because in America, we have super-foods and these sorts of things. Which is nothing new, because in Asian nations, they have always had these class of super-foods and tonic herbs that they incorporated and utilized in their diet, incorporated and used on a constant basis.

When I practice, when I do qigong or meditate, I mostly try my best to take reishi previously, because I know I'm going to be calmer, I am going to be more relaxed, I'm going to feel more grounded and more in my body, and I feel stress kind of melting away, which then is about to make the practice so much easier and so much more effective and let me progress quicker. Because reishi can open your right brain, more of your intuitive side, which will permit you to have flashes of understanding where you say, "Oh, I was moving like this but now I really should be moving like this," or "I was moving my hand this way but it should be that way," etcetra. You just start to see things and make connections and really, in brief, just raise your intelligence.

When you do that, the rest improves, whether that is a yoga practice, a qigong practice, tai chi practice, meditation practiceâ€"everything improves because your intelligence, your knowledge, your intellect, your consciousness is shaping up, and you're improving chi flow or you're getting better blood flow, your liver is getting better, your lungs are improving, your senses are getting better. All of these things come in and lead up and manifest and come to fruition in your practice. You're capable of being more calm, more relaxed, more tranquil, more grounded, more in the moment, which is really the end result of the practice that's attempting to get you to. It's trying to get you to a condition of consciousness and a state of mind, not just necessarily taking you through a handful of motions and all of these things, but get you to a point, get you to a perspective, get you to a state of consciousness, so if you can already move your consciousness nearer to that, don't you think the body movements will flow out of that much easier? Of course they may.