A Post about Qi, and your thoughts

Most definitely.
I’ve also thought about how it could all be placebo. Tea makes me happy, you throw in a decent amount of caffeine and I am mostly having a better time than I was before my tea session just due to the enjoyment it brings and I confuse that with some sortve property within the tea.
This would also give weight against the sick theory. I am not enjoying the tea obviously when I can’t taste it, and am even in a worse mood than before cause I am wasting tea/know I can’t have a session for a bit.

That is possible, someone feels the qi because they believe they will. Someone else doesn’t believe they will feel an effect and they don’t.

I think you have a built up tolerance, Allan :)

drugs dont affect everyone the same….

Things classified as drugs will have specific effects and will effect everyone, not that everyone will feel drunk after the same amount of alcohol but they will all feel it’s effects where qi one person will feel the effects and another will not.

I am the exact opposite. I feel the qi too often, so need to limit my puerh. I now try to buy low-key sheng in order to be able to drink more.

AllanK by your claims, then all people with ADHD would never need to switch medications after a couple years when they stop working. I’d rather say that drugs are ‘supposed’ to do xyz.

I have a strong & robust constitution. The only time I feel the effects of caffeine are when I drink significant amounts of coffee. I can drink several litres of tea throughout the day, be unaffected by its caffeine, and sleep like a log. Clearly the ‘drugs’ in tea affect different people differently and in case of qi I believe it has both a subjective and objective aspect.

A comparison between alcohol and qi doesn’t have a thing to do with drugs for ADHD. You are inventing things I did not say.

you said “Things classified as drugs will have specific effects and will effect everyone”…I was referring mostly the latter part “will effect everyone” and used ADHD medications as an example, when people with ADHD need to switch medications because their Ritalin no longer effects them. Not inventing anything, perhaps misunderstood, or I could have worded it differently.

If you notice I was comparing alcohol to qi specifically. Where you consider my post to have something to do with drugs for ADHD I don’t know because I don’t recall posting anything about drugs for ADHD. And alcohol does effect everyone about the same, but by blood alcohol level not the number of drinks. Two people with the same blood alcohol level will both have the same trouble driving a car for instance. Where qi is in my opinion not a drug at all. The Chinese believe it to be the energy of the tea plant for instance. If Qi were a drug you would expect people to all feel it to some degree depending on how much had entered their blood stream. But in my experience qi doesn’t work that way.

To add to my comment, tea appreciation takes into consideration your entire sense of health and well being in order to maximize the experience of a tea session. If you want to appreciate teas to the fullest, you must keep yourself healthy and mentally alert. If you’re dulled by illness, mental fatigue, stress, etc, then you can’t fully appreciate tea. See a connection to lifestyle…?

I will also add that after a big steak dinner and a few beers, I do not feel drunk or even feel a buzz. But if I take a breathalyzer, BAC will be over the legal limit. My perception of being drunk/buzzed is irrelevant to my physical state of actually being drunk…measured by my BAC.

I like this point of view. It does seem that the more attention I’m giving to the tea, the more I notice its qi. I think illness sort of overshadows any cha qi in the same way that eating food overshadows the effects of alcohol.

Qi tends to put me in a meditative mood, so I totally agree with the whole mindset argument. For me I always feel it, but I feel it much more if I go with the flow rather than fight it. When I fight it, it tends to make me feel tired.

I think you are describing the effects of theanine which crosses the blood-brain barrier and increases alpha waves in the brain, which is what happens when someone meditates. Theanine also increases serotonin and dopamine in the brain. chaqi is something else. People who chase the effect you’re experiencing are the people who try to use tea as a drug-like substance, and actually, this would be a chemically induced state of being.

once you’ve consumed the tea, the Theanine is in you whether it is felt or not

Qi is a concept developed before modern science. I think both definitions are correct.

No they aren’t. Qi is a non-corporeal and immeasurable concept. it cannot be defined by science any more than something like love could be, even though both are generated by chemicals.

Well put in the sense that qi is immeasurable and not a chemical in tea.

Maybe it’s possible to ask for clearer input on this; if the qi effect isn’t transmitted or caused by chemicals what is causing it? A friend of mine says she can see people’s auras, and I guess there could be room for phenomena out there that we’ve not even begun to define or understand, but I’ve never been remotely clear on the nature of the cause of this one if it’s not chemical.

Qi (or chi) is basically a core concept in Traditional Chinese Medicine. The Chinese define it as a life energy that all living beings have (not just humans).

See here for more info: http://www.shen-nong.com/eng/principles/qi.html

Aside from saying the molecules in our body, it’s incredibly tough to put into scientific terms to describe the cause because modern science is an entirely separate framework that is dependent on measurement, trial and error, and repeatable results.

Science doesn’t really have an explanation we can use for this because they can’t get consistent results to form a solid conclusion based on their hypotheses. They can’t get consistent results because every individual’s body reacts very differently. So even if there’s a large sample size, the difficulty is figuring what to even measure and how.

So anyway, back to the question. Qi is energy so the real question is where does energy come from?

Science says food. We convert the food we eat to energy. But how and where does that initial energy to even convert food come from in the first place? For those who require a less abstract explanation, science says ATP molecules in our body.

Edit: Another way to make sense of qi is to view it in a different perspective. We must understand the origins of this concept and how it was used then translate it to how that understanding can be applied now.

When we feel and experience qi, we are feeling the movement of energy in our body.

Here’s the thing, it couldn’t be any clearer where we are getting the energy we use for life functions. The sun radiates energy to the earth, plants collect that through photosynthesis by turning simple molecules into more complex ones, with different carbohydrates being the versions we use for energy. We eat that, sugar, or a starch, any form, then we break the compounds to simpler forms and in a final step glucose as blood sugar is converted to components to “power” cells. Or we eat an animal that did the same thing, and use the complex compounds storing energy in their bodies as an energy source, breaking that down instead. We also require oxygen. Our sensations are just the function of our nervous system, a feedback system providing input about what’s going on in cells designed for sensation.

I read that page on qi but to be honest it reads like an early model of human functions from the time of the ancient Greeks, about different humors or aspects that sort of map onto functions but was long ago replaced. Check this out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_temperaments

…it was the Greek physician Hippocrates (460–370 BC) who developed it into a medical theory. He believed certain human moods, emotions and behaviors were caused by an excess or lack of body fluids (called “humors”): blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Next, Galen (AD 129 – c. 200) developed the first typology of temperament in his dissertation De temperamentis, and searched for physiological reasons for different behaviors in humans. He classified them as hot/cold and dry/wet taken from the four elements.4 There could also be “balance” between the qualities, yielding a total of nine temperaments…

We no longer believe that, because the models of bodily functions improved, but it seems we can’t cast off the ancient Chinese system because there might be something fundamental in there we could lose, a part that’s still right. Actually that’s correct, in a very limited sense, they were observing human body function for a long time so the patterns couldn’t be completely wrong, but the model definitely could be almost entirely wrong. It’s conceivable there are still parts we’re not absolutely clear on better described by that system, like in the case of my friend seeing auras (the colored halo around a person’s head), or maybe not at all. I think the leap I’m not following that other people are taking is feeling that they are somehow more “spiritual,” and tuned into such things, and then they accept all of the model (just not literally), because it matches what they experience, even though the model is clearly mostly wrong.

I’m saying wrong, but they’re basically describing digestion, breathing, nerve function, immune system, etc., it’s just in a poetic way that is only right to the extent it gets mapped back on to what we now know is really occurring. At the finer level of detail of how it works it’s wrong. To some extent our own models also fail, for example we can’t explain how the brain works completely. We only know parts of that, what a neuron does, what different sections do, how some regulating chemicals work, about development and plasticity, etc. I’m not saying that I personally have it all figured out, I’m really just trying to find the space where any of it makes any sense, and as of yet I’ve not got to that. Some of it surely does, beyond being a poetic model of what we already model better.

Right, but what about the step where we break compounds into simpler forms?

And yeah, TCM is a bit similar to the ancient Greek model in that regard. I agree with what you’re saying in that we can’t cast off TCM because it’s based on thousands of years of observation and a lot of those concepts are still widely used today among Asian people.

Where misconceptions arise, in my opinion, is when people make it spiritual and mix it with many different things. Whether something works or doesn’t from a health perspective is just that, does it work or does it not? Can it be applied to more than one person if used in the right way? I try to think of things that way to avoid being misled.

The poetic terms that you’re referring to were simply the only terms or analogies back in those times. The fact is there’s right and wrong in both Chinese and Western medical models.

I do have to say though, when it comes to the study of tea, modern science has ways to go in terms of explaining the effects various teas beyond basic stuff like antioxidants, catechins, anti-inflammation, etc. That research is still rather limited.

I have also seen vendors advertise that a tea has potent qi. But I generally ignore such ads because even if they are telling the truth it doesn’t mean I will feel the qi from that tea it means they felt qi from that tea. No two people will experience the sensation of qi in the exact same way.