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Slow Movement with Awareness: Better than Hard Exercise? | Psychology Today.

Slow Movement with Awareness: Better than Exercise?

How you move is as important as how much you move

Published on July 6, 2010

Cardiovascular exercise is now known to be essential for health and well-being. If exercise is your only form of movement, however, it is not a very balanced diet. There is mounting evidence that slow movement, with body sense – awareness, has astounding health benefits by itself and in combination with regular exercise routines.

According to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, there are a growing number of pain clinics and integrative medicine centers that offer slow movement, awareness-based therapies (like hatha yoga, tai chi and qi gong) for pain in a wide variety of conditions including “pain caused by cancer and cancer treatments, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, and other diseases and conditions.”

Throw away the pills? Stop getting injections? Scrap the pain management therapy groups? Stop the sweaty workouts? Maybe not entirely, but regular slow movement classes are increasingly seen as having essential “nutrients” for the body.

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Qi Gong (pronounced Chee Gong), is a slow, gentle, moving meditation. The movements, which are easy to learn, encourage a climate of internal calm, opening up the energy pathways of the body and  promoting the free flow of oxygen throughout the body.  This has profound implications both in treatment of diseases of the body and mind, and in the creation of high-level wellness.

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