I Believed in Chi Twice

The first time I was sure I could feel an invisible force, I was sixteen, knees bent in a cold gym, holding a low stance until my thighs shook. Somewhere below the navel a warmth would gather and spread. My teacher called it chi, pooling in the lower dantian. I believed him without reservation. I believed that if I kept gathering that warmth, morning after morning, it would hand me something other people didn't have: strength that wasn't muscle, power that would never show up on a scale.

I was right about the warmth. I was wrong about almost everything I attached to it. And two decades later, sitting still with my eyes closed in a very different kind of room, I made the same mistake a second time.

If you've ever wondered whether chi is real, or prana, or ki, or whatever your tradition names the energy, the question that actually pays off isn't whether you feel something. You almost certainly do. The question is what you let that feeling prove.

The cold gym

I grew up on kung-fu films. Bruce Lee on a borrowed tape, watched until the picture turned to snow. I drew posters. I copied stances in the mirror long before I knew what any of them were for. By my teens I was training Chinese martial arts seriously, and somewhere along the way I absorbed the cosmology that came bundled with the movement: chi, the dantian, the small circulation and the large. I came to believe that cultivating the field below my navel was making me genuinely formidable. I believed Chinese arts sat at the root of everything, the original source the other traditions had merely copied. A man fighting in a ring who hadn't trained these forms looked, to me, like an amateur who'd skipped the real syllabus.

It took me close to thirty years to notice the obvious. The beautiful forms are art. That's why you can watch them performed at the opera. A teenager running a wushu routine with total precision is doing something difficult and lovely, closer to what a folk dancer does than to anything that survives contact with a person who actually wants to hit you. I can still enjoy moving through a slow form on a quiet morning. I've simply stopped expecting it to turn me into someone who can fight.

The one room where the claim could be checked

In my case, the correction didn't come from inside the tradition. It came from the single place the claim could be tested against reality.

In 1993, at the first UFC, a thin man in a white gi named Royce Gracie won an open tournament against strikers from a spread of respected styles, mostly by taking them to the floor and waiting them out. The bout that landed closer to home came in 2017, when a Chinese MMA coach named Xu Xiaodong faced a celebrated tai chi "master," Wei Lei, and finished him in seconds. What happened next told the real story. Xu wasn't quietly ignored. He was punished: viral abuse, suspended accounts, death threats, and later a court ordering him to apologize and pay damages for having called a famous grandmaster a fraud. An entire apparatus moved to protect the myth. Whether anyone involved would say it out loud or not, that's the kind of overreaction you see around something people can't afford to have tested.

The thing I'd gotten wrong for decades was not about China at all. The variable was never the nationality of the style. The coach Matt Thornton gave it a clean name: aliveness. Train against a partner who genuinely resists, with real timing and motion, and you build something that works under pressure. Drill cooperative patterns where your partner falls on cue, and you build choreography that feels like skill right until the first uncooperative stranger arrives. Aikido can fail that test. Plenty of traditional karate fails it too. And a Chinese art can pass it cleanly: sanda, the full-contact kickboxing the Chinese state itself developed, produced fighters like Cung Le, who went on to win in Strikeforce and the UFC. Same heritage, but pressure-tested, so it actually works. None of this is special to kung fu. It comes from practicing in an echo chamber where the other person always falls on cue, and you will find it under every flag.

The seam I couldn't see

Notice what's still standing after all that demolition. The warmth below my navel was real. The focus was real. The strange, settled coordination I felt moving through a form was real. None of that was the illusion.

Look closely and you can see the exact step where it happens. I felt something inside me and treated it as proof of something outside me. Warm thighs meant chi; a quiet mind, years later, meant the transmission. Sensation in, supernatural claim out. The jump is so natural that I made it for thirty years without ever noticing the seam where sensation quietly became claim.

The second room

Which is exactly why I didn't recognize it when it showed up again.

In my forties, years into a second meditation tradition, I sat with a practice built around a transmitted energy: a teacher acting as a conduit, passing a subtle current to students even at a distance, and that current was supposedly what made the practice work. It was, more or less, a kind of chi reimported from India under a gentler name. The structure was identical to the one in the cold gym: a real inner experience, the quiet and the settling, plus an external claim about an energy doing the work, available mostly to people inside this one community. I'd already spent seven years in a stricter version of this, so I knew the shape of belonging. I just didn't clock the shape of the claim.

Here the pattern opens out past any single tradition. China has chi, India prana, Japan ki, the Greek Stoics pneuma, Polynesia mana, and Wilhelm Reich even tried to bottle it as orgone. Most people read that long list as evidence the thing is real: surely if every culture found it, it must be out there somewhere. I'd flip that. Universal agreement that something is there points less to a force in the world than to a feature in the observer, and every tradition is conveniently certain the energy speaks with its own local accent. Drop the same nervous system into any of these cultures and it turns up the same handful of sensations, then grabs whatever word is lying around to name them.

Psychologists found a blunt version of this back in 1977. Reviewing a stack of experiments, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson concluded that people often have no direct access to the real causes of their own choices, yet will confidently produce an explanation anyway, borrowed from whatever theory is lying around.¹ Their evidence was about ordinary decisions, why you reached for one thing over another, not about meditation. But it points straight at the cushion. When the stillness arrives and you reach for "the transmission did that," you aren't reporting something you observed. You're guessing. And the guess your tradition handed you arrives dressed as memory, which is precisely what makes it so easy to trust.

The ring I built for myself

So I did the one honest thing I could think of. I built a small ring of my own.

For about two years I meditated without the layer of suggestion: no claim that an energy was present, nothing being transmitted, no quiet narration about what was flowing where. Just me, a chair by the window, the radiator ticking, thoughts wandering off and getting walked back. The result was the same as it had been ten years earlier, when I was a full believer with all the suggestion switched on. Around me, people I'd practiced beside for years kept chasing every live session with the teacher, certain the current ran stronger in his presence. I'd stopped being able to feel the difference, and eventually stopped looking for it.

That experiment can't prove an energy exists nowhere. A punch is falsifiable in a way a quiet mind never will be, so the chair could never hand me what the ring handed me on the mat. What it can settle is narrower and sturdier: the exclusivity is false. Whatever the practice gives, the community doesn't own it, and no teacher has to channel it to you. The experience doesn't need the system built around it.

What I wish I'd understood at sixteen, instead of fifty, is plain enough: you can keep the practice and cut the claim.

That move has a cost I'm slower to admit. A ring works when the claim can be checked from outside, the way a punch can. Point the same reflex at people, at trust, at the things that only open after you commit, and the instrument that freed me on the cushion becomes the one that leaves me in the doorway. I've held friendships at arm's length and let closeness wait, holding out for the kind of proof you only get once you're already inside. On the mat the test saved me. Here it just keeps me out.

Two rooms, one mechanism

Two rooms, twenty years apart, and the same operation underneath both. A real experience, and a false cause glued onto it. The glue was doing a specific job each time, the same job twice. The false cause made me special: a young man cultivating hidden powers, then a student carrying a rare transmission. And it made me belong: a member of the group that held the genuine article while everyone else settled for imitations. Those are the two hooks, importance and belonging, and if I'm honest about why they had such a grip on me, it wasn't some abstract human need. I'd learned early to earn my place by being useful, and never fully trusted I'd be kept around just for existing. A claim that hands you both in a single move is built for someone wired like that. Truth was never really the point, which is why arguing against it does so little to loosen its grip.

I'm not running a debunking service. Throw out the warmth along with the story and you're left with a colder kind of certainty, which is just another costume. The warmth was the real thing the whole time, on the mat and on the cushion, twenty years in. I didn't have to drop the practice. I had to fire it from the job I kept giving it: proof that I was special, and a place to belong.

Which is the part I still have to watch. "The man who sees through it" is also a flattering story, and it arrives with its own small tribe of people who see through things. The same two hooks are sitting in the posture of having outgrown them. I don't think I'm being fooled a third time. Then again, I didn't think so the first two times, and that's the only sentence here I'd stake anything on. Deciding which explanations to trust was always mine to make, not theirs.

The warmth still shows up some mornings, below the navel, exactly as it did at sixteen. These days I just sit with it and let it be warmth.

Keep Exploring

If this resonated, you might also find these useful:

• What Nobody Tells You About Spiritual Organizations — how belonging and clear sight can run on separate tracks.
• Your Beliefs Probably Aren't Yours — telling a borrowed belief apart from one you actually tested.
• I Learned to Verify Everything. Then I Got Stuck. — when testing a claim quietly becomes a way to avoid deciding.

Notes & References

1. Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977) — "Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes." Psychological Review, 84(3), 231–259. ↩