You have probably seen it without knowing what you were looking at. A group of people in a park, moving slowly, arms rising and falling in something between a stretch and a dance. It looks like almost nothing is happening. That is rather the point.
Qigong is a Chinese practice of slow, deliberate movement paired with breath. It is around four thousand years old, which makes tai chi its comparatively modern cousin. If you know tai chi, you will recognise qigong straight away: the same unhurried pace, the same standing posture, the same sense that the person doing it has more time than you do.
The difference is that qigong is simpler. Tai chi is a long choreographed form that takes months to learn. Qigong is a handful of movements, repeated. You can learn one in an afternoon and still be finding new things in it a decade later.
What the word means
Qi is usually translated as energy, and gong means work or skill. So: energy work. And this is precisely the point at which a lot of sensible people stop reading.
Stay with me, because you do not have to believe in anything.
You can take qi as a traditional way of describing something perfectly observable: the difference between a body that feels alive and a body that feels like it is running on empty. Every culture has words for this. The Chinese happen to have four thousand years of practice built around theirs.
What you actually do in a qigong class is stand up, move slowly, and breathe deliberately. What that does to your nervous system is measurable and unmysterious. The vocabulary is optional. The effect is not.
What it looks like in practice
The form I teach is called Ba Duan Jin, the Eight Pieces of Brocade. It dates back around a thousand years and it is the most widely practised health qigong sequence in the world, which is a good sign: things that do not work tend not to last that long.
Eight movements. Each one takes under a minute. You do them standing, in whatever you happen to be wearing, and the whole sequence runs to about ten minutes once you know it.
There is no mat. There is no floor work. Nothing is held, nothing is stretched into, and nothing requires you to get down onto the ground and back up again. If you can stand and breathe, you can do this. If standing is difficult, every movement can be done seated.
The movements have names that sound faintly ridiculous in English and are worth learning anyway. Two Hands Hold Up the Heavens. Drawing the Bow to Shoot the Hawk. Wise Owl Gazes Backwards. Punching with Angry Gaze, which is exactly what it sounds like and is more satisfying than you might expect.
What it is not
It is not a workout. You will not sweat, you will not need lycra, and nobody is counting reps. If you leave a class feeling like you have been to the gym, something has gone wrong.
It is not meditation either, or at least not the sitting-still-with-your-eyes-closed kind. This matters more than it sounds. A great many people have tried meditation, found they could not switch their brain off, and concluded they were doing it wrong. They were not. Some minds will not settle when the body is still. Give those same minds something slow and repetitive to do with the hands and the breath, and they settle without being asked.
That is the thing qigong does that nothing else quite does. It occupies the body just enough to let the mind stop arguing.
What tends to happen
Most people notice two things in their first session. Their shoulders come down from around their ears, and their breathing slows without them consciously slowing it.
The steadier effects come with repetition rather than duration. Ten minutes a day for a week does more than an hour once a fortnight. Better balance, which matters more with every passing year. Fewer stiff mornings. Evenings when you can actually wind down instead of lying there running the day again at three in the morning.
None of that is a cure for anything, and I would be wary of anyone who told you otherwise. Qigong is gentle, adaptable movement that suits older bodies better than most forms of exercise, and it asks very little in return.
Where to start
Honestly? Stand up. Let your arms hang. Take three slow breaths, and on each one, let your shoulders drop a little further than feels necessary.
That is not the whole practice, but it is the same idea, and you have just done qigong.
If you would like to try the real thing, there are classes in Marlborough, and a live class on Zoom every Thursday at 6pm. No experience, no kit, and nobody watching to see whether you are doing it right.