If you’ve ever wondered what Liver Qi Stagnation felt like, all you have to do is get in your car in a big city at rush hour in stop and go traffic. Add to that a hot summer day in August and no air conditioning. Maybe to really experience it, throw in a broken sound system that only plays am stations. That frustration, that desire, or really, that NEED to move but being unable to, THAT is what Liver Qi Stagnation feels like. Being stuck is the essence of this pattern. When the qi cannot move, the blood also stagnates. We get frustrated, we get hot and our muscles get tense. Maybe our jaw clenches, our head pounds, and our shoulders can be found by our ears. We loose patience easily, maybe we yell out or throw some inapproriate hand gestures.
Sufjan Stevens is a young artist, mainly a musician, who has created a movie and musical score based on this sensation of sitting in traffic, specifically on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, or the BQE. Sufjan may not know anything about Liver Qi Stagnation (or maybe he does, I don’t really know) but he describes the sensation, and also his personal transformation beyond it after 9 months of driving on the BQE in an interview with Steve Inskeep on NPR’s Morning Edition. I encourage you to listen to the interview, check out the trailer for the film and maybe this about your own flow of qi while driving in traffic.
One of my favorite parts about the film is his use of hoola hoopers (is that a real term?) His reasons may not have anything to do with qi flow, but one of the BEST ways to get your Liver Qi moving is to move your body, and anyone who has spent any time with a hoola hoop can tell you that nothing gets the Qi flowing, and possibly the laughter as well, like a hoola hoop!!
The interview: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114288376
The movie trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6sRXCLVyoc
