KEYNOTE:
The Qi Harvest: The Abundance All Around You
This keynote is led by Lad Hudac. I intend to invoke the energy of the season (Fall) to teach about the “Metal Element” (a la Chinese Medicine) the Lungs. I will speak much about the breath and just how one gathers qi weaving in the bountiful presence of it all around them.
“The Qi Harvest” centers on the ready availability of the breath and the benefits of developing it correctly. I will speak to the mechanism of acquiring postnatal qi and what that means through various lenses of interpretation. We will practice the opening and the refinement of the breath and then I will establish a bridge for the attendees between the “world” of “practice” and the “real world”. My primary objective is to make the process a tangible experience for the attendees which they have carried out themselves for the sake of opening their awareness of the genuine abundance the environment provides.
Weather permitting, I will likely prompt this large group to move outside at some point to explore my prompting them on environmental abundance on their own. The purpose of this is many fold, but primarily, I want to give people the opportunity to experience it directly for themselves without potentially 60 people all trying to do it as well in close proximity. Second, because of the energetic nature of the discussion, I want to give people a chance to get outside and ground during the talk to break up the intensity of the topic. Talking about qi and invoking qi can be ungrounding with so many people in a shared space, thus this is as much an intention for safety as it is for varying and deepening the experience. This will also give me a chance to keep an eye on the attendees and make sure they are doing ok in their regulating the information both of my lecture and the retreat as a whole.
If participants attend my module before this presentation, it will deepen and enhance their understanding of the module content. If they attend this presentation before my module, their understanding will be primed in a beneficial way such to pick up on the content more effectively.
The presentation will end with my guiding people through a grounding and rooting exercise where we utilize new awareness of the breath and its value to more stably root and solidify the energetics of the body.
Key Points
Attendees Will:
gain an awareness of the ready availability of the environmental qi around them as well as how to connect to and facilitate its cultivation through “Life as a practice”.
Understand more clearly how to “grasp” qi for the “Harvest” through refinement of the breath
Understand the importance of grounding new experiences and rooting the awareness in their bodily matrix
Exercises
Guidance on how to naturally open up the breath
Prompts to connect to some aspect of the outside environment to “feel and carry out a ‘Bountiful Harvest’”
Possible mention of a few acupuncture points
Seated grounding exercise to close