Qigong (say 'chee-gong,' sometimes spelled Chi Kung) is a 5,000-year-old Chinese system for building, moving, and storing qi, the vital life force that Chinese medicine treats as the basic energy behind all body and mind function. The word joins qi (life force, breath, vitality) with gong (skill, practice, cultivation over time). Qigong covers thousands of forms across dozens of lineages, from the big flowing movements of five-animal qigong (imitating the bear, bird, deer, monkey, and tiger) to the complete stillness of standing meditation called Zhan Zhuang. What ties every form together is directing your awareness into the body, the breath, and the subtle energy field, on the belief, built from thousands of years of careful observation, that awareness directed at qi changes qi. 'Where the mind goes, qi follows' (Yi dao qi dao) is the core principle of every qigong practice.
Zhan Zhuang, meaning 'standing like a tree' or 'standing stake,' may be the hardest and most rewarding of all meditation postures. You stand with your feet shoulder-width apart, knees slightly bent, weight sinking into the ground, arms rounded as if holding a big ball in front of your chest, and you simply stand, for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, or in the case of advanced practitioners, hours. The posture looks like nothing. Inside, it is complex. The slight bend in the knees means your leg muscles keep working, which builds heat and eventually makes the legs tremble as they tire and let go. The trembling is seen as blocked qi releasing. The arms held in the round shape get tired and ache, then reach a point where the pain fades and a feeling of warmth, tingling, or fullness, which practitioners call qi, fills the arms, hands, and chest. Master Wang Xiangzhai (1885 to 1963), who created the Yiquan system from Zhan Zhuang, spent 30 years studying standing meditation across every martial and medical tradition in China and concluded it was the single most powerful tool for building both martial power and health.
The microcosmic orbit (xiao zhou tian) is a foundational meditation in Taoist internal alchemy, taught by Mantak Chia through his Universal Healing Tao system and by traditional masters including Grandmaster Chen Huixian. You circulate qi along the body's two main channels: the du mai (the governing vessel, running up the spine from the perineum to the crown) and the ren mai (the conception vessel, running down the front of the body from the crown to the perineum). You sit in meditation, gently draw the pelvic floor up (the root lock, or hui yin), and with slow, deep belly breathing, guide your awareness up the spine on the in-breath and down the front of the body on the out-breath, closing the loop at the lower dan tian (the energy center about two inches below the navel). With practice, the feeling of qi, warmth, tingling, a light electrical current, or a sense of fullness that moves as your attention moves, becomes unmistakable. The traditional claim is that circulating qi through the microcosmic orbit refreshes the organs, clears energy blockages, and gathers jing (vital essence) into the lower dan tian, turning it into qi and eventually into shen (spiritual energy), in the classic Taoist formula of cultivating the three treasures.
The biomedical research on qigong has grown a lot in recent decades. A 2010 systematic review in the American Journal of Health Promotion by Roger Jahnke and colleagues looked at 66 high-quality studies of qigong and tai chi (a related practice) and found consistent evidence for effects on bone density, heart and lung fitness, balance and fall prevention, quality of life, self-confidence, anxiety, depression, and blood pressure. The proposed reasons include activating the parasympathetic nervous system (the slow, deep breathing and focused attention of qigong reliably shift the body toward rest-and-digest mode), regulating hormones (lower cortisol and lower inflammatory cytokines), and better body awareness. Whether the felt experience of qi lines up with real bioelectrical or biophotonic activity is still being researched in biophysics, with Hiroshi Motoyama's work in Japan measuring the electrical properties at acupuncture meridians as one promising line of study.