I come across a large percentage of people who suffer from cold hands and/or cold feet. This doesn’t seem to be restricted to any age group, although it might be slightly more prevalent in the over 50s, or thereabouts. There are many reasons for having extremities that refuse to warm up easily, but my interest in this focuses more on what to do about it, rather than what causes it.
Using the hands to breathe
Try facing one palm towards the other, with a gap of about 1 foot or 30 centimetres between them.
Avoid pulling the fingers backwards beyond the line of the back of the hand, and avoid closing the palms by letting the fingers curl slightly towards the fingers on the other hand. You don’t want any tension in the palms when pulling the fingers back, but you also don’t want the skin to be too slack in the palms.
Open the bones on the in-breath
The bones to focus on initially are the bones in the palms – the metacarpals; these are the ones in your palms, and are longer than the other bones in the hands. As you breathe in through the nose, feel as though the bones in your palms are separating, and as though your palms are widening. If you overdo it, you will start to hyperextend the fingers, so you can use any tension on the back of the hand as a guide as to how tense you are getting – which you need to avoid. You are looking for a feeling of ‘separation’ of those metacarpals; if your fingers start to also separate more, that’s fine as long as you are not using the fingers to try to widen the palms – it needs to be the other way around… the widening palms separate the fingers. You might find that your fingers ‘judder’ a little as you do this – just let that happen and ignore it.
Relax the palms
The only way to allow the bones to separate is to release any tension within the palms. You don’t have any muscles from one side of the palm to the other that can be used to pull the bones apart. So the only way to widen the hands is to let go internally within the palms, so that any muscular tension between the bones dissolves – you do have muscles that can draw the bones together (as in the diagram).
… and the out-breath When you breathe out through the nose, the bones don’t ‘close’; you soften the muscles between the bones, but there is still no tension in the hands (closing the bones
together can only happen if you use tension in the palms). This is a little like using a ratchet spanner, i.e. the ratchet only works in one direction – the other direction is winding up for the main action. Try to avoid the fingers curling inwards on the out-breath.
Expanding and narrowing the gap As you breathe in, widen the gap between your hands by opening them sideways to your left and right. This could be a separation of a few centimetres or much wider; it comes down to what works for you. Bring the palms back towards each other on the out-breath.
Other add-ons to the exercise There are several additions that can be made to this exercise, e.g. allowing the fingers to lengthen at the same time (but without trying to ‘stretch’ them), but the above is the basics, and the feet can now be included simultaneously.
The feet The feet are of a similar structure to the hands, and the main bones to focus on are the metatarsals; these correspond to the metacarpals in the palms. Very simply, you do the same thing with your feet as you are doing with your hands, but without moving them to left and right as in ‘expanding & narrowing the gap’ above.
You might feel…
I remember the first time that I started to do this exercise.
I had often suffered from cold feet, but the first time that I started to practise it I had a surge of heat in the feet as I unintentionally opened the Kidney 1 points (Yongquan) in both feet.
The equivalent point in the hands is called Laogong, which is the 8th point on the Pericardium channel. When the heart functions better, the blood flows better, and there is an increase of heat in the arms.
So with the end of the Summer, if you suffer from cold hands and feet, you might find this well worth spending a little time on.
___________________________________________________ James Drewe teaches Tai Chi and Qigong in both London and in Kent and online. Details of weekly classes both live and online can be found on the website, and there are classes for 2-person Tai Chi on one Saturday a month. You can also learn both tai chi & qigong through a monthly subscription, and there are also many free videos on YouTube.
CONTACT: http://www.taiji.co.uk https://www.qigonghealth.co.uk Email: taijiandqigong@gmail.com Phone: 07836-710281 ___________________________________________________
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