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Mindstates
The Six Golden Keys
by Master Mingtong Gu and Jaelle Dragomir, MA
There has never been a more dramatic state of challenge and hope occurring simultaneously in our lifetime. This is an opportunity that can best be realized by setting an intention of self-love to fulfill the calling of our spirit within.
Through the 5,000-year-old tradition of Qigong, we can learn how to effectively realize the power of unconditional self-love. The Six Golden Keys practice, which includes inner acceptance, inner smile, trust, service, the chi field and continuous practice, is a technique we can all utilize.
Given the many ways our society tells us we are incompetent or unworthy, how do we love ourselves unconditionally? To begin, self-love means total acceptance of our perceived failures and successes. Occasionally we have neutral thoughts, but most often we identify our thoughts as good or bad. Positive and negative thoughts are not about moral values. An idea that is helpful for you may be harmful for another person. Therefore, negative and positive are relative concepts. If your thought contributes to a purpose you are focusing on, then the thought is productive for that purpose. So when you think loving and positive thoughts about yourself, you are automatically enhancing your own energy and contributing to your purpose and healing.
Wisdom Healing Qigong teaches us how to cultivate our thoughts more effectively to enhance our ability to love ourselves. No judgment or discrimination is involved. You decide what is good for you by tuning into your own energy body. Visualize loving, healing thoughts as fully as you can. You may notice that limiting thoughts somehow creep into the background. But gradually, when you love yourself and have full acceptance of yourself, these thoughts will start to lose their power and eventually dissolve from your mind stream.
Another component to self-love is the inner smile. Begin with your eyes closed and visualize the inner smile in the center of your forehead. Then let it radiate into your eyes and into each part of your body. The inner smile brings the wisdom frequency of love into your awareness. It instills thoughtfulness, happiness, joy and unconditional love into the body and the energy field so we can attain unconditional love for ourselves.
The next practice is trust. Allow yourself to trust and experience yourself and the universe fully in this moment. Rather than establishing the condition that if the universe is working with you, then you’ll trust and experience it, give yourself 100 percent permission to trust continuously. Whatever percentage you trust today—whether it’s 20 percent or 90 percent—you can learn to cultivate and increase it. Total faith in yourself and the universe is deeply transforming, allowing the love from your heart to express itself in many ways.
One of the ways love can be expressed is through service. In Wisdom Healing Qigong, we cultivate service consciously and energetically by sharing love, presence, and intention. Visualize everybody benefiting from and realizing the same healing that you desire. By imagining family members, friends, the community, and all sentient beings in your energetic field of love, you’re projecting energy of love upon them. Sending this blessing is the ultimate service.
When you’re serving, you’re not really giving yourself to someone else. You’re creating a condition to allow the universal energy to flow to another person, as well as to yourself. By serving another person, community or purpose, you also open your own energy channels. Your heart opens up and the energy of the universe naturally responds to your desire. Giving and receiving therefore come together. By sharing your love with intention, your energy amplifies, causing you to receive more energy, more love, and more fulfillment.
Often we have a strong desire to share ourselves with others. Sometimes we may deplete ourselves, feeling overwhelmed, stressed, or as if we are not producing the results we want. When that happens, the heart starts to contract and our health starts to deteriorate. So the key here is to begin by energetically working (or playing) with the universal chi field.
Simply put, the chi field represents the energy we all connect with. For example, in Qigong, many people practice and contribute to the unified energy field for the specific purpose of healing. So any key ingredients—thoughts, movements, sounds, or contributions—serve that purpose of healing. Every individual in the group contributes to the greatest good. The chi field is a collective wisdom energy and an informational structure. The Qigong practice is awakening the energy structure that is deep inside of us.
By reinforcing and receiving energy from the universe, we’re sharing more with the larger chi field, causing the energy to harmonize itself. Whatever is not serving the purpose of healing starts to dissolve, release, and transform into a pattern of healing. The larger the chi field we connect with, the more service we provide and the more effective we become.
Many people believe they have a limited amount of love and energy to offer. That pattern of thought depends on the tangible, physical phenomenon to serve others. However, serving through the chi field is very different. Not only do we use energy inside of us, we utilize the energy around us and around the person we’re serving. As an analogy, let’s think of the human body as a bottle. Your mind is incapable of encompassing the entire energy field but we can project energy from the universe to fill that bottle. As you fulfill the person you are serving, you are fulfilled. The energy is there for you and you can share it by helping others open up their bottles. This is the service of the chi field—bringing that universal energy into the place where you want to concentrate healing, service, and sharing.
Here, we are using healing as an example, but it’s the same for other things. When we listen to a story of another person encountering a challenge, we provide a larger space than the story itself. We don’t attach to that story, hardship, or trauma, but listen with the awareness of releasing that story to the universe. Concepts of “poor you, poor me,” soon cause everything to become poor and the bottle becomes closed. Just by listening to a little of that story and giving an inner smile to it without reacting, you help that person open the bottle. Then you’re doing service. You can apply this principle to serve in your place of worship, in the environment, or in politics. It’s the same thing.
Today we have a wonderful opportunity. If everyone were connected with his or her big heart, imagine that power. No one would push others away or feel as though they can only support one group. Through the chi field, we can support all there is. There is plenty of life-energy so the key is locating where the mind is connecting with it. If the mind thinks, “I have a limited amount of energy,” then we can only serve in a very limited way. If the mind thinks it has a lot of energy in the ocean of chi, not just in the bottle, then it can fill many bottles. But you have to learn how to fill your own bottle first. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter how large the ocean is; your bottle is still empty. Qigong teaches us how to fill this bottle and realize who we are through self-love.
In any spiritual tradition or practice, we cultivate unconditional love and sharing. In doing so, we expand our energy field. Acts of giving and receiving become very natural in the process of sharing. Providing ourselves the opportunity to bring happiness and healing to ourselves is the blessing of service. Once you have that energetic understanding, there is no depletion. By practicing the Six Golden Keys, we learn self-love to fulfill the calling of our spirit within.
Master Gu has helped his students heal from cancer, kidney disease, allergies, Multiple Sclerosis, back pain and many other diseases through the practice of Wisdom Healing Qigong. He received the highest level of training from Dr. Pang Ming, director of the famous medicine-less hospital in China, the Huaxia Zhineng Qigong Center near Beijing where Wisdom Healing (Zhineng) Qigong was developed. Master Gu is the founder of the Chi Healing Center and Wisdom Healing Foundation. He is offering healing events and workshops February 28 - March 1 at the University of California, Berkeley, March 14-15 at the University of California, San Diego, and March 21-22 at the University of California, Los Angeles. See the advertisement on the back cover. For more information, visit www.chicenter.com. Jaelle Dragomir, M.A., is a writer, consultant and practitioner of Qigong.