My Experience Practicing Waiqi 外气 Emission (Fagong 发功)
In lineages such as the Shaolin Gengmenpai 耿门派, many if not most of the advanced practitioners practice a style of Classical Chinese Medicine that involves various forms of qi emission. Most who have visited them for treatment have experienced their electric-like “waiqi” 外气 (external qi) emission, the experience of which feels like you are being zapped by a fairly powerful electrical current. If, for example, you receive this qi emission (faqi 发气) up one of your arms, it is powerful enough to cause all of the muscles in your arm to involuntarily contract, until the person emitting pulls the qi back in and “turns it off.”
In practicing the neigong of this lineage, the first mark of accomplishment is the ability to emit qi from your own body into another person (easier than emitting into inanimate objects), and in the beginning this is done “with assistance” (more on that below). This provides an objective test that serves to demonstrate that the practitioner has activated their lower field (dantian), is able to store qi in it, and has managed some ability to move and control that qi at will. Aside from an objective marker of progress, the skill of faqi can later become very useful in various healing modalities.
