I’ve been teaching Qigong for well over a decade. When I stand at the front of a class, I might look out and see twenty people standing in front of me.
But I don’t really see twenty people.
I see twenty lives.
I know only bits and pieces of their stories, whatever they have chosen to share with me. Someone is going through a divorce. Someone is frightened because her grandson is having major surgery. Someone is recovering from knee surgery. Someone is dealing with a hip injury. Someone is so afraid of being judged that he carefully watches what he says and who might be listening. Someone is lonely. Someone is grieving. Someone is carrying something I know absolutely nothing about.
And then we begin.
We breathe.
We move.
We come into our bodies.
Twenty completely different lives begin moving through the same forms.
From the outside, it might look like I’m teaching Qigong. I’m teaching movements. Breath. Balance. Yin and Yang. Energy awareness. Moving meditation. I’m helping people settle their nervous systems and come into a quieter relationship with their bodies.
But after all these years, I’ve come to understand that something else is happening in that room.
For an hour, people get to put some of their lives down.
They don’t have to solve the divorce.
They don’t have to know how the surgery is going to turn out.
They don’t have to fix their bodies.
They don’t have to explain themselves.
They don’t have to be anything other than the human being standing there, breathing and moving.
And then something begins happening that I never planned and certainly never put into a curriculum.
They find each other.
People stay after class talking. They exchange phone numbers. They discover they live in the same neighborhood. They start walking together. Hiking together. Going to lunch together. They notice when somebody is absent. They ask about each other. At the end of a semester (I teach at a college), they bring food and gifts to share.
Somewhere along the way, my students also started applauding at the end of every class.
I never asked them to. The first few times it happened, I laughed and bowed because I didn’t know what else to do.
Years later, they’re still doing it.
And I’m beginning to think maybe they aren’t really applauding me.
Maybe, in some strange way, we are acknowledging what just happened between all of us.
Because I’m not outside of that room either.
There aren’t twenty lives in front of me.
There are twenty-one lives in that room.
I arrive carrying my own humanity. My own worries. My own losses. My own joys. My own children. My own exhaustion. My own questions. My own life.
Then I stand at the front of the room, put my feet on the ground, take a breath, and begin.
This summer, two of my beloved students died.
One was a woman in her eighties who had been coming to my classes for years. She was ready to go.
The other was thirty-eight years old.
He was not ready to go.
He had only been coming to my classes through the summer, but he had already become part of the community. He stayed after class and talked with people. He listened to them. Women old enough to be his grandmother adored him. When he missed class, people asked where he was. He was considering becoming a Qigong instructor himself.
And then suddenly he was gone.
His death has affected me far more deeply than I expected.
It has made me think about something I learned many years ago when I worked as a nurse in the NICU. Back then, I developed a kind of professional detachment because I had to. I cared for tiny babies repeatedly as their primary nurse and sometimes those babies died. I had to learn how to grieve and still walk to the next pod and care for the next child.
I don't have that detachment as a Qigong instructor.
And I don't think I want it.
Because I'm beginning to understand that there is a cost to creating genuine community.
If we allow people to matter to us, then losing them will hurt.
If we create spaces where people are truly seen, then eventually we will notice painfully when someone is no longer standing in their usual place.
The answer cannot be to care less.
Maybe the answer is to develop the capacity to remain open.
To let people matter without believing we can keep them.
To recognize that we are not responsible for saving any person who walks through our doors.
To understand that sometimes all we can do is give someone an hour in which they feel safe, connected, peaceful, alive and at home in themselves.
And perhaps that is not a small thing.
I used to think my responsibility was to teach Qigong well. I still do.
But I understand the work differently now.
We aren't just teaching movements.
We aren't just teaching people how to breathe.
We aren't just helping them regulate their emotions, balance Yin and Yang, move Qi, become grounded, or enter meditation.
We are creating spaces where human beings encounter one another and come home to themselves.
We are witnessing lives.
We are watching people arrive carrying things we may never fully know, and sometimes we have the extraordinary privilege of watching them put those things down for a while.
We are watching strangers become friends.
We are watching people remember their bodies.
We are watching people remember themselves.
And sometimes, heartbreakingly, we are watching people who will not always be standing there.
Perhaps part of teaching Qigong is learning the same lesson we ask our students to practice:
Be here.
This breath.
This movement.
This person.
This moment.
Because perhaps the answer isn't learning to recognize the last time.
Perhaps it's learning to recognize THIS time.
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