The head or 'monkey mind' is very dominant in our culture - we're very, very busy in our heads. The mind lives to create disturbance - it loves the surges of sudden excitement and wild fluctuations that arise from its addiction to stress as a favored lifestyle.

When we allow ourselves to live in this highly analytic, stressed out state we become preoccupied and inattentive and therefore less effective as human beings. When you've got 101 things going on in your mind, you end up not really paying attention to any of them. And all of your relationships--business, family, social, romantic - suffer accordingly. Because, really, nobody is at home anymore. Just an empty, preoccupied husk. One of the skills you learn in qigong is how to stop, let go, and be attentive.

You have to seduce the monkey mind, while its back is turned, to calm down and allow you to get back into your heart and stomach intelligences.

Our modern civilization has become a society of wounded hearts, busy minds, and toxic bodies. A wounded heart could be a neglected or abandoned heart. A busy mind is distracted, inattentive, and preoccupied. A toxic body is tight, closed, and stagnant.

We have become fragmented beings. We have lost our integration and joie de vivre and ability to operate in a connected, passionate way with life. If you want to be effective in business, if you want to be competent and truly help people, you need that passion in your life. If you allow yourself to get stressed out as a matter of course, it's going to affect every aspect of your life, including the most practical. How practical is it to be sick in bed? How effective is it to be dead?

Qigong teaches us to get in touch with the subtle, bioelectric energy that we need to be alive. It's important to learn to play with that, like a musician. Learn to be fluid with your energy, in touch with it, massage it, as it were.

When you train yourself to move in a very slow, relaxed way, you can remove all of the tension and blocks in your body, and become more like a wild animal. If you have to, there can be a sudden release of strong energy. But for the most part, you stay in a buoyant, relaxed state, rather like a little kid. As we get older, because of the way we create stress in our lives, we tend to lose that buoyancy, which is so essential to our overall vitality.

Our addiction to stress is one of the most devastating aspects of our modern culture. According to the Chinese, your vitality is intimately bound up in your adrenal and kidney areas. When you allow yourself to respond to pressure by stressing out, you're depleting yourself and becoming sick and toxic inside. You start feeling run down. That's your life-wax melting away.

The irony in our society is that in our quest for creature comforts we've actually created more stressors. We've produced a competitive environment. When the telephone rings, or when a fax comes in, our bodies react to these stressors. When a car cuts in front of you on the freeway, you have a potential stressor. Going to action movies, reading the newspaper, watching TV - all of these activities trigger that adrenal steroid surge. Most of us have come to associate stress with pleasure - to the point of being addicted. Many of us, when not in a state of excitement or arousal, don't feel that we're enjoying ourselves. There are these lulls when we feel sort of depressed and out of it, so we start looking for the next excitement. That's a roller coaster.