The Refuge of Shibashi

Every few weeks I find myself gravitating back to Shibashi, the beautiful Qigong form that was created in the late 70’s by Chinese doctor and Qigong master Lin Hou Sheng. Shibashi means “eighteen” in Mandarin. These 18 exercises are considered so effectively healing that in China every student of Traditional Chinese Medicine is required to study them.

Although Shibashi is gentle and simple to learn, it encompasses every foundational principle of Tai Chi and Qigong, including weight shift, energy rising and falling, expanding and contracting, and so on. It’s great for improving joint mobility, lowering stress and tension, building balance, clearing the mind, and bringing harmony and flow into all the meridians of the body.

Over the last few years my students and I have found one especially significant benefit of Shibashi: it helps us learn how to drop the insidious and often damaging habit of “over-efforting”.  We practice the “70 percent rule”, which means using just 70 percent of the effort we know we can generate. Why? Many of us are so used to push-push-pushing ourselves, that we often fall into unconsciously harmful patterns in our thoughts and movements.  Shibashi is a true game-changer for type A, competitive types or those suffering from over-use injuries, or stress. It’s a good thing to practice in order to be able to keep doing what we love to do.