Wisdom in Doing Bear Turning Clockwise and Anti-clockwise
Amy Choi (Hong Kong, China)
Oct. 8, 2013
In the night before, I dreamt that I was teaching Five-Animal Play Metaphor Balance to a group of people. I was perplexed by a question of mine when demonstrating Bear Turning movements. Should the two fists move clockwise first or anti-clockwise in circling before the area of spleen, stomach and intestines? I felt troubled in the dream. Upon waking up the next morning, I immediately went out to practise Bear Turning to get a feel about it!
During practice, this sentence sprang up in my brain: There is wisdom in doing Bear Turning clockwise and anti-closewise! Then, I remembered that a few days ago my elder son Yu Yat came to tell me that he had constipation, not emptying bowels well for a week. He asked me to help him with balancing. I asked him if he had any worries or fear? He said he had. In two occasions lately, as he was afraid that he would be late for school, he resisted the urge to discharge, not allowing himself to go to the bathroom. I used muscle checking to help him assess. There indeed was tension! I then asked him to press the Touch for Health Emotional Stress Release points himself to release nervous emotion. The next day, while he was still in bed, I did for him a movement similar to Bear Turning: gently massaging clockwise around the area of his spleen, stomach and intestines for about three minutes. It worked immediately. He had bowel movement after he woke up and it was very smooth, according to him.
So in recollecting this experience, I had an insight. Bear Turning movements are related to spleen and stomach: clockwise stirring can activate excessively sluggish operation of the digestive system (such as constipation); and anti-clockwise stirring restrains excessively rigorous operation of the digestive system (such as diarrhea).
My understanding is that standard Bear Turning movements in Health Qigong go clockwise first and then anti-clockwise, just like clearing up pipes. They (the movements) give hints to the body to stimulate the entire digestive system to find balance among digestive functions of spleen, stomach, and small and large intestines.
In using Bear Turning movements to do balancing, whether one should do it clockwise or anti-clockwise depends on circumstances at the time. It should be clockwise for excessively sluggish conditions and anti-clockwise for excessively active conditions. If one cannot identify the condition, one can get messages from body systems by using bio-feedback of muscle checking.
