Nearly every explanation gives you one sequence: Jing refines into Qi, Qi into Shen. That is true and it is half of it. Cultivating runs upward. Creating runs downward, and nobody teaches that one. Knowing which direction you are in tells you exactly what has gone wrong when you are stuck.

Shen is spirit, and it is the treasure you cannot chase. It arrives whole, like a flash that lights the path and then goes, leaving thoughts where it was. Which means you have probably already had yours, and heard it so often you doubt it. You are not a beginner at beginnings.

Qi is breath and feeling, seated at the heart and chest, and it is the bridge you cross in either direction. Look at what is physically in that centre: heart and lungs, moving breath, circulating blood, and feeling. That last one is a function of the centre, not a metaphor about it.

Jing, Qi and Shen are the three kinds of energy. The three Dantians are where each one lives. Most explanations stop after naming them, which leaves out the part that makes the system usable: these do not sit in a fixed order. They run one way when you are cultivating and the other way when you are creating.

Dimensions 21 to 25, the group that decides whether you are still teaching in 10 years. Transmission rather than transaction, teaching as your own practice, students as mirrors, and the paradox at the end: you care enormously and you hold none of it tightly.

Dimensions 16 to 20, about what actually gets absorbed rather than what you covered. Why the body has no interest in an explanation of the Lower Dantian, why safety is built from unglamorous things, and why the first time you learn shape, the fifth time energy, the twentieth something else.

Dimensions 11 to 15, where most teaching is won or lost, and it is almost entirely about restraint. Precise cuing, permission language for the person in the room who is afraid of their own body, and why an invitation opens a nervous system that a directive keeps braced.

Dimensions 6 to 10, the mechanical layer most teacher trainings actually cover. The five-element container, why teaching the same class fast and then slow will teach you something, why nobody notices a good transition, and why ending on time is a form of respect.

Dimensions 1 to 5, and the ones nobody sees. Your own daily practice, the difference between knowing something and knowing it in your body, saying I do not know out loud, trusting the practice enough to stop pushing it, and staying willing to become a different teacher than you are now.

Teaching Qigong is not teaching a set of exercises. Most of what makes someone good at it is not on any syllabus: what to do when a student starts crying, the difference between speaking from what you have lived and what you read last week, and the fact that your students are mirrors. Twenty-five dimensions, in five groups.

A document I give certification students that opens with a warning about itself: some of these cues contradict each other, and that is deliberate. Eight categories, 23 cues, and why handing a student all of them at once produces someone concentrating so hard they have left their body.

The question I get more than any other, answered from the research rather than from experience. What the trials actually used, the dose-response finding that surprised me, and four things the research does not say, including the fact that nobody has ever tested the minimum.

What is the least you can do and still have done real Qigong? A structural answer rather than an encouraging one: six components, 30 to 45 minutes, and the reason each one cannot be removed without the practice stopping being a practice.

Opening, Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water. The arc a Qigong class travels, with what each phase is for, roughly how long it runs, and the named practices that live in it. Learn it well enough and you can design a 30, 60 or 90 minute class without writing anything down.

There are two questions in front of you when you design a Qigong class, and they are not the same question. What kind of practice is this, and when in the class does it go. Answer only one and you have either a well-labeled pile or a shape with nothing in it. Holding both is what lets a teacher walk into a room without a script.

This is the foundation that gets cut when a class runs long, and cutting it is the most costly edit available. Everything before it generates energy. This is where the body absorbs it. Skip it and you have exercised. Include it and you have practiced.

Soften the knees. Root the feet. Lengthen the spine. Those three cues do more than make you look upright, and standing still turns out to be among the more demanding things in the practice.

Flow is where Qigong starts looking like the thing people picture. It also runs on surrender rather than effort, which is the hardest instruction in the practice for anyone who learned that doing something well means trying harder. I found this one hard for years.

We stretch the way cats do. Gently and often, through soft spirals and waves, rather than held positions and gritted teeth. Frequency over duration, and why that changes what stretching is for in a Qigong class.