Wu Ji Gong (Primordial Tai Chi) is a sacred movement ceremony that offers a bridge between personal Love Qi flowing in our human hearts and the universal Love Qi flowing in the heart of Tao.

“Love is the bridge between you and everything else.” – Rumi

“If you want to embody the Supreme Way (Tao), nothing is more important than understanding the Heart. The Heart is the axis of the Way”. -Zhang Boduan, Awakening to Reality, Classic Inner Alchemy text, 1075 c.e.

The very first time I practiced Wu Ji Gong, also known as Primordial Tai Chi or Primordial Qigong, I felt a wonderful expansion in my heart. I was in a room crowded with people, at a World Qigong Congress in San Francisco in 1997.

Ten minutes before, I’d just finished the first Wu Ji Gong training ever offered in the USA by Zhu Hui, an 81 year old Medical Qigong & martial Tai Chi master visiting from China. We learned the form in three hours. Afterwards, I was waiting to meet someone for lunch. A strange tingling feeling arose in my heart that was quite dramatic. My heart began to glow and radiate a feeling of deep warmth and love.

I looked about the room to see if there was some high Qi master present who was transmitting powerful Love Qi (same as Chi, both pronounced “chee”). Soon I was sitting in an altered state, floating in a deep pool of expanding heart bliss, smiling. The room disappeared. I never ate lunch nor met my friend. I was happily drowning in an ocean of love.

I was immobilized and mesmerized by a feeling of happiness that was beyond “deep”, It was a profound, immersion in a new dimension of love. It took me a while to realize that it was the Wu Ji form that I had just learned from Zhu Hui that opened my inner spiritual heart, beyond my emotional heart, beyond my current power as a meditator. Only later did I figure out that the high-level Qi master

I was seeking in the room was inside me, my own soul, or perhaps my over soul or Inner Sage. I had somehow tapped into a higher power that filled me with pure love from source/Tao, flowing into my body through higher dimensions of my Self.

This was a stunning realization – that true Self-love, the experience of rebirthing myself, of filling my body with divine love, could be stimulated by a simple movement form. In the previous 20 years I had tested hundreds of different yoga, qigong, and tai chi forms and countless meditation methods. They all stimulated the flow of beneficial energy. The movements of Wu Ji Gong were somehow different. I had an intuitive feeling that its mysterious power to open my spiritual heart came from its spiraling movements and gestures in all directions that created a unique sacred geometry.

I had noticed in this first training that Wu JI Gong’s sacred movements were structured as a spiraling bagua (“8 trigram”) shape. The bagua, symbol of 8 cosmic forces, comes from the I Ching, the Book of Unchanging Changes. This 3000 year-old text is the foundation of Taoism, which is the root of Chinese culture. I observed my body stayed in one place, like a pivotal axis, as I spiraled through 8 movement cycles. By standing in the center of this “moving I Ching” pattern the form created a fusion of many cosmic forces. This somehow opened my personal heart to the heart of the cosmos by symbolically concentrating the totality of universal Qi flowing through this I Ching matrix of Time, Space, and Beings.

Michael Winn