My earliest experiences with chi, as nearly as I can recall, probably date back to when I was about 12 or so. At that time I had recently learned about certain psychology studies concerning biofeedback and I remember being absolutely fascinated with the concept of having some kind of conscious control or influence on aspects of the body that are not normally susceptible to direct manipulation. I decided to try it out for myself.
What happened afterward wasn't necessarily weird, just the way I went about it. I knew nothing about chi at the time. At some point in the middle of winter I was standing outside waiting for the schoolbus in the ridiculously cold weather, and I decided that I was going to "will" myself to get warmer. Sounds like something an imaginative kid would do, doesn't it? Since it was mostly my hands that were cold I figured the easiest thing to do was to draw heat from my abdomen to my hands. I focused my attention on that supply of heat and was actually successful in using my thought to direct it to my hands. My hands filled up with blood, tingled, and were slightly warmer, though it didn't really help in that cold air. After that I tried to remember my gloves whenever possible, but occasionally when I was cold I'd try to redirect heat again, whenever I remembered to try it.
Now I know a bit more about chi kung and I realize that that is apparently what I was doing without even knowing what I was doing at the time. I wasn't trying to focus on the chi, just its effect of pulling the blood along with it when it gathers in the hands, so in that respect I kind of overshot the mark. I'm still kinda surprised I was able to do that without any knowledge or training. In my mind it's like this analogy: when someone throws a ball at you, will you stop and think about how you're going to move each individual muscle in your arm in order to direct it to the right location in space where, following the trajectory of the ball, you will be able to catch it? Or do you just reach out your hand and grab the damn thing out of the air? I wouldn't recommend trying to learn chi kung or much of anything else that way though. As dangerous as that would be I'm just thankful that I didn't experiment with anything else when I was younger. I might have ended up bleeding from the eyeballs or something.
