Don't Over-Complicate Practice, Surrender Into It!

Qi Gong Practitioners often develop problems in their practice due to a predictable pattern of behavior. The root of this is placing very high expectations on your experience of practice.

High expectations tend to develop in one of two ways: the first is where you begin with a simple practice that has some powerful experiences and real results, and so want to maintain that intensity and try to do so by doing more: making more advanced practices, longer exercises, adding little details, etc. until you have overburdened your practice.

The second is where you are doing a practice and feel that it is not working well, so you decide to modify or add to it. This produces a positive result, which was really caused by making a change, but which you might interpret as having been due to adding complexity or greater effort. So you continue to add more complexity and detail in your practice to try to keep increasing your experience.

This focus on excessive complexity can lead to creating a false illusion of effectiveness, that only seems to be creating results for you as long as you keep trying to build it up and innovate in your practice. It is doomed to lead to a collapse.

So it's important not to over-complicate things, not to worry about meeting some kind of ever-growing quota of expectations.

This is often a sign you are in a cycle of creating a false reality (maybe of your success, or even of struggle), when you need to create ever increasing complexities to the work you're doing or to the results you expect; this is actually you trying to dedicate more and more of your own Qi to create a bubble of fictional reality around yourself. It's because there was something that you found useful, so you clung to it.

But in so doing, you lose what's actually useful (and often, good and enjoyable) about it.

So when you realize that this is what you're doing, you have to let the bubble deflate (before it outright pops), and return to the moment, and return to figuring out how to show up in the Active Consciousness to this moment, to this simple practice, to this pass-time, to this job, etc.

The key isn't about complexity, it's about being able to relax in your practice.

It's always about relaxing into it. So for a lot of people, relaxing feels like a really profound surrender because they're so resistant to the letting-go of control that relaxation entails.
Remember to breathe.