We put so much trust in machines and technology but very little in ourselves. I am not immune to it either, believe me, my phone has become my crack pipe. What I want to get at though is if a television show goes for an hour, we might need the distraction but our bodies could do with an hour of movement as well. You do need rest but a better point is when I first went back to Qigong I was constantly in pain. A Qigong move called ‘Phoenix’ was shown to me and when I did it the pain went away. So whenever the pain surfaced I did the move. 

Eventually after a month the pain was gone but I did the move anyway every day for a year and a half because it felt good. So I did pain management through a number of exercises as opposed to having a tablet for pain relief. The tablet, if that was my solution, would never have healed the issue. The issue was in my body and the tablet was just a tablet. Before I went back to Qigong after a long break and I had a series of problems I first went to the doctor, I went to the hospital and a lot of the time I was monitored by machines.

I also had various tests and scans. To my frustration there were no clear answers. The machines were monitoring my body, the tests were checking for anything nasty going on. Yet what gets me is the answer for me (your experience will be different) was movement. The movement of my body. When I was in pain I got anxious, the anxiety led to panic attacks and it cycled on and on. Being hooked to machines didn’t make me any less anxious. They are foreign, cold and strange. Physically and mentally I was suffering. The answer was moving, myself, my body, that is relaxing.

The other sad thing is our obsession with technology, we are forgetting our own importance. Machines can run or walk or fly but we should always think of ourselves first over being amazed at artificial intelligence or robotics. We should be amazed at our bodies ability to move and heal. Machines can’t do that.