Let's Keep Talking with Braxton Gilbert

4 reasons to practice Qigong (sensitivity > intensity)

Braxton Gilbert

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What if the feeling you’re chasing is already available in your body, quietly waiting under the noise? I share how a simple, repeatable Qigong routine—deep belly breathing, a relaxed pelvic floor, and soft, grounded feet—reshaped my days from the inside out. The practice made me less desperate for external wins and more energized to pursue what matters, a paradox that turned out to be the point: calm is fuel when it lives in the body, not just the mind.

We begin with a short guided segment you can follow along with to feel the core cues in real time. From there, I unpack the ripple effects: steadier emotional regulation during high-stakes conversations, a spontaneous shift from shallow chest breathing to slow abdominal breaths, and the way that physiological change quietly rewired my baseline consciousness. As sensitivity increased, my energy habits changed too—I cut caffeine to near-zero without willpower and doubled down on consistent sleep because my nervous system finally told the truth about what helped and what hurt.

The conversation also moves into intimacy, where presence becomes the setting rather than the goal. Grounded breath and relaxed attention shift sex from a hunt for intensity to an experience of depth, connection, and whole-body pleasure. Sensitivity turns out to be the unlock: it widens the spectrum of sensation and allows arousal to circulate through the body instead of bottlenecking. No mystical posturing required—just repeatable cues that make the room feel different.

This is not about perfect routines or rigid beliefs. It’s about a practical, 15–20 minute, every-other-day habit that cleans the lens and lets you meet life with more calm, clarity, and charge. Try the guided practice, notice your breath during the day, and see what changes when your feet meet the ground. If this resonates, subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review telling me what you felt.

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Why Qigong Changed My Life

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Hello. This is a video and a podcast about how a regular Qigong practice has impacted my life. And I'm giddy about it. Because I really do love this stuff. From what I understand, um, well, I would say I have been practicing regular Qigong as every other day for the little over a year now. And um what I understand, Qigong it translates to energy practice. To be clear, I don't know if any of this stuff makes any sense at all. I don't know if it's it's if it is scientific. I don't know if this is proven that you can that this stuff even makes any sense. I don't know if it's real. All I know is that I have practiced it and I have received tremendous benefit from it. So this is me sharing it with you because I legitimately think you should probably try it. Um I have four different ways that Qigong has impacted my life in really positive, positive ways. Um but first, before I do that, I want to just tell you just really briefly what like the kind of too long didn't read version, TLDR version of this, um, of how Qigong's impacted me. And then I want to do a like a five-minute little Qigong thing, and then go into the other details. So if you're about to hop out right now and just want to know what it's talking about, um, long story short, Qigong um has been about kind of refreshing and resensitizing the feeling in my body. Feelings in my body, the subtle feelings of ease and bliss. Um, I think that everything that I do is to get to a certain feeling in life, like kind of achieve a certain experience so that it can then create to me a certain feeling inside. It's kind of like the how the way that humans operate, it seems. I want to have this so I can feel this, I want to achieve this so I can feel this, I want to have this person or this lover or this uh accomplishment or this vacation or something so that I can feel a certain thing. And to me, Qigong, the byproduct of these practices that I'm about to show you, have slowly started to cultivate inside a space that feels really blissful. Probably hear the birds this morning, really blissful, really tranquil, really energized, in a way that makes the external value placed in those things diminish pretty significantly in a way that feels like a settling. Um and what's really cool, and I'll talk about this more in a second, is that the at the same time that it's diminished my, for lack of better words, desperation for those external circumstances to warrant that internal state, it's at the same time been had such a positive impact on my energy that it has energized me to pursue my goals with a like a really strong energy source. So, okay, a little maybe a few minutes, a couple minutes, a little qigong practice here. If you've never done chigong, follow along. And if you have done chigong, welcome back, my friend. Um, I recommend that you um this this is a practice taken directly from Jonathan White. Um, so if you want to go check him out, check him out. The how you're gonna do this, and I hope the bird is not annoying. The bird probably has a adds a great sound to the audio. Sitting in a chair comfortably, taking a moment to check in. Feet on the ground, and just settle in here with me for a minute. Let's just start there. Just taking a moment to settle, maybe allow your shoulders to kind of relax. Allow the elbows to hang heavy, your hands maybe comfortably resting in your lap or atop your thigh. So here. And let's just pay attention to our breathing. We're not really trying to control it in any type of way. We're just being mindful of it. And if you're in a space you can follow along, I'd really encourage you to do because this is good shit. Just noticing how the body settles in, how it naturally wants to kind of settle in your chair. I recommend that you stomp your feet, maybe just kind of pedal your feet on the ground, maybe pedal your heels on the ground, just to kind of get a little bit of um some vibration going on in the feet, some sensitivity going on the feet, some feeling going on the feet. And I do recommend that you do this practice with your eyes closed. Uh, and if you're driving, good luck. You know your way home. Trust it, man. Trust it, bro. So we're just settling in here and being mindful of our breath. Now, let's tune into the breath a little bit more, and then we'll add one more layer to it, and then we'll kind of back out of this. Feel where your breath is landing in your body. Is your chest rising and falling? That's not what we want to do here. The chest, we don't want to rise and fall, big chest. We want to keep the chest rather relaxed and we're trying to fill the belly with breath. Like if you had a um a pair of pants that was buttoned but just barely. And if you breathe in deep enough, you could shoot the button across the room. You know, that's your big belly breath. That's what you want. Let's go a few of those big belly breaths here. Not so much that you're like really pulling in a lot of air, but just that the air that is coming in naturally just kind of fills the bottom of your belly. Now, the pelvic floor and the middle column, all of the spine, is the central part, the deepest part of your nervous system. So I'm gonna talk about that just for a second. This isn't uh an inherently sexual thing, although I'm referencing kind of your sexual centers here. The pelvic floor, the anus, relax that as you're continuing this breath practice. So we're still just allowing the breath to pull into the lower abdomen. And as you do this, this is a really subtle shift that helps me to center my awareness into my lower abdomen, my my pelvic floor, and really relax deeply to the bottom of that center column of my body, which is the perineum, uh, the anus, the pelvic floor. Again, this is not a sexual practice. This is about relaxing into the depth of that center column of the body. Here's the thought here. Relax the pelvic floor. When you breathe in, breathe in in a way that if you were urinating, it would increase the flow of urine. It would kind of strengthen the flow of urine. That's how you want to breathe in through the pelvic floor, almost like it kind of balloons the bottom of your pelvic floor, your anus, all of those that soft tissue, it kind of swells a little bit. It's very, very subtle. It's extremely subtle, but it's there, it's happening. If you're breathing deeply enough into the abdomen, there's kind of a bulging out of uh the pelvic, the pelvis or the pelvic tissues of sorts. Okay, one last thing here. Um pay attention to your feet, my friend. Maybe a little bit more of a foot stomp. And I want you to be uh kind of play around with this idea here. This is kind of the entry point that I learned. Uh, and this did pretty much nothing for me the first time I did it, to be honest. But here's the here's the kind of spiel. Relax your feet really deeply into the floor. And imagine as if when you inhale, imagine that you're pulling in air through the bottom of your feet. Again, this is not scientific, it's not like uh actually happening. You're not gonna be breathing through your feet, but there's this intention to soften and absorb through the bottom of the feet. If everything is energy and there's not really like a clear physical boundary, it's more of an energetic cluster of atoms, then the idea that we're kind of mixing with our environment isn't too far out. Just and if breathing isn't quite the frame here, just soften the feet as if to receive the ground. So, you know, if there's a force from a physics perspective, your force of your feet pushing down on the ground, there's an equal and opposite force coming up. So just kind of soften into that upward force, just allow that upward force to push up against you. And a couple more breaths here, just softening the feet. Almost like every inhale, like breathing hot air on an ice cube, just kind of melts it. Every inhale, every exhale, just slowly has those tissues melt a little more, a little bit more of an opening, a softening. And okay, so that is kind of like a just a taste of some qigong stuff. It it that's pretty much it. That's that's pretty much it. Um so let's talk about uh the four different ways this this practice impacting my life. Um the first one, maybe as you notice, qigong is extremely well, like strong, qigong is very blissful and grounding just within the practice. It really is something that I think, like, hear me on this, hear me on this, my friend. If you medit if you like had never tried a meditation, and you just sat and tried it, and you're like, okay, alright, alright, close my eyes, meditate, okay. Yeah, I get it, I get it. Close your eyes, peace. Okay, yeah, I get it. Close your eyes, tranquility, yeah. I get it. It's it's calm, it's quiet. There's a depth to it, and the depth is something that is cultivated. There's a depth to the tranquility, there's a depth to the stillness, the presence, and that depth is carved out with time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time. And so you do get it at a taste, but you really receive it on a deeper level the longer that you do it, um, the more time you accumulate doing it. And so this qigong thing, what it true what it has felt like for me is this softening of the body, kind of like that feeling of softening the feet. It's slowly and subtly and subtly and subtly in a way that's compounded, created this experience of really nice bliss. It's like this deep energetic exchange with the environment. Almost like all of the body, especially the lower body, has is really porous. And as you inhale, it's like absorbing liquid into the body. And as you exhale, it exhales, or it kind of expunges that liquid. Starting with the feet, that's where I learned with Jonathan White, starting with the feet, then you kind of do the same practice through the anus, almost like you're this is kind of funny, but almost like you're pulling in energy, pulling in air through the anus. As you inhale, exhale through the feet and anus. Funky shit. I'm not saying this stuff is sexual. This is like a practice with the energy centers in the body, the pelvic floor, being one. The first way that chigong is impacted by life is it's so blissful. Like this experience doing qigong is so nice. And um, grounding. One of my favorite things to do, seriously, is to just get absolutely barbecued. Just get absolutely stoned to the gills and do some qigong. I don't do qigong high every time. I don't think that's a good thing to do because I think the practice needs to be cultivated in and of itself. Um, and if you only do it high, then it's like, you know, the feeling that the practice is like legitimately helpful in and of its own accord kind of diminishes. But once you do have some of that uh feeling of softening and you're kind of like curious about it, you're like, that's weird. I feel genuinely like my body is softening and relaxing and open relaxing and opening, then do it high. It's great. So, first, qigong is grounding and blissful within the practice. It's just such a nice thing to do. The second thing is this practice extends into my daily living and gives me much better emotional regulation. I feel that the plumbing in my body is flowing more freely. Um, this it really, this practice has it started in the in the chair, started at the house, and is extended into my daily living. I um have worse worn sandals for probably the last year and a half, which I'm not sure how that scores uh for the dating that I'm doing. Because one girl that I one girl that I dated, she was like, uh, you know, we were hitting off and everything, and she was like, um, so uh how committed are you to the sandals? I was like, uh very. Very. Did she just wore sandals? You know? It's really impacted the way that I move in my day-to-day living. Um, the sandals is a big part. Like I take the shoes off, I take the sandals off often just to kind of dip my toes in the earth, feel the ground. If I'm in a play, if I'm having a conversation with someone, often I'm just kind of, you know, slipping them bad boys off and just kind of putting the toes on the ground, putting the feet on the ground, and just doing the same practice, softening the feet. I can't tell you how awesome this has been. You've got to try it for yourself and do it a lot. Um, it's helped so much in regulating my emotional state in those moments, with whether it's a tense, you know, I don't know, like a really important conversation with a client, or if it's a really important conversation with a staff member, or if it's a, you know, kind of a charged conversation with um, you know, a potential partner or a mate. Um mate sounds funny, like a Nat Geo thing. He finds his mate in the coffee shop. Um and one thing for me specifically as a man, conversation with other men. You know, there's a tendency in my conversation with men, and I would think it's probably similar with people, just in general, when they're like faced with someone who's kind of a member of their own personal um what would you call it? Like just uh gender or or sex. Um there's kind of a tendency to kind of kind of kind of stand your ground, bow up in a way, and um resist their dominance. I found just the softening has been impactful in that way, in a way that allows me to soften into the moment even when talking with other men. It's really nice. Um, and also I genuinely feel as if the conscious, intentional breath work of the deep pelvic floor breathing, the deep belly breathing, the softening of the feet, feeling as if my body is inhaling and exhaling as one whole unit. I think that the time spent consciously doing that has reworked the way that I subconsciously breathe. I find myself breathing now much more into my belly, in my pelvic floor. And here's the cool thing is if you do the if you do breath work or qigong, then it's likely that you feel different afterwards. It's likely that you leave feeling a little bit, you know, kind of like a the shampoo commercials when they move their hair around like that and it kind of just like flails behind them, like you feel like a dragon just swimming through a cloud. Like you feel nice. It's like a nice feeling. You feel refreshed. If anything, you feel the way you feel when you get misted with water on a hot summer's day. You know, it's really just like a nice feeling. Or like after a good massage or an org or an orgasm. These are great feelings. So that feeling, go with me here, is a byproduct of the of the breath, breath, breath, breath, breath in the body. So if you could shift the way you breathe on a day-to-day basis as a byproduct of practicing it kind of more and more and with a lot more focus, then you essentially can shift the state of your consciousness throughout the day because your breath has changed. If your breath is kind of tethered to the consciousness, the way you breathe affects your consciousness, then if you change the way you breathe on a daily basis, then you're likely to change your consciousness on a daily basis. And that's what I've uh experienced. I genuinely, just another note here, I genuinely think this has helped me in just my entire living in terms of being conscious with my behaviors, because I think that because the breath in the body impacts the consciousness, you know, if I breathe real shallow on my chest and kind of clench down and kind of tense up and kind of get my mind into a hamster wheel, you know, that's like attached to a certain type of breathing pattern. Versus if I breathe like that deep, really receptive, peaceful, grounded breath, then it impacts the way that I feel, which impacts the way that I I feel in my mind, which is impacting the way that I think. And because it changes the way I think, I've changed the decisions I make. So big ups on that. Lots of lots of positivity there. Two more things. This one's really cool. Doing qigong regularly has impacted the general sensitivity of my body. Um general sensitivity to body's energy. I'm more energy conscious as a result of the practice. My Mac just went off. Let me make sure I'm still recording. Yes, we are. Okay. More energy conscious. General sensitivity to the body's energy. I'm more energy conscious as a result of the practice. Yeah. Energy is interesting. And what I'm finding is that energy is a hell of a resource. One thing that's kind of run parallel to this qigong practice is a lessening use of caffeine. I don't know how long it's been since I pretty much cut out caffeine. Yes, I do. It's been about four months or so since I've cut out caffeine as a regular part of my life. I've had, I would say probably like on average, I probably have like a like a fourth a cup of coffee every week. That's probably true. Fourth a cup of coffee. The rest is just decaf. And I also sleep seven hours a night. Every night. Damn, do I try to. Get seven hours of sleep every night. And paying attention to the way that my behaviors impact my energy levels. It's just like, you know, doing the Chigong stuff really has gets you close to your energy. It makes you feel your energy in your body. And it's really nice. And then you feel when things throw that off. And so what happened was as I did more Qigong, caffeine started to kind of like push me too much in my mind. My energy started to feel much more regulated and much more stable. And the caffeine made it feel frantic and scattered, which is new for me because I've always used caffeine. I've always drank lots of coffee, like two, three cups a day. So I think it's pretty cool. And then the rest has been really helpful too. The rest in terms of sleeping. You know, I gotta talk about how this has impacted my sexual experience. You know what podcast you're listening to, my friend. Welcome back. Um it's impacting my sexual experience uh tremendously in a wonderful way. That energetic state of being grounded feels as if it creates the space for really erotic sexy dynamics to spring forth. This is the this is like a practice that um John John Wineland, John Wineland proposes in his book From the Core. Um, you know, next time you're with within the vicinity of your love or your partner, really breathe deeply, deep into your belly. Feel your feet on the ground. And let me shut this up so that way you're not getting too much of this dog barking. Okay. We're back with a quieter dog, or with no dog. Um that deep breathing really sets up a space. So relax the feet, breathe deeply into the belly, relax the pelvic floor. That's kind of my interjection from the Jonathan White stuff. John Winland just talks about feel your feet on the ground, breathe deeply, and when you look at your lover, expand your eyes, not like a chameleon, but like really take her in like you would a like a starry sky, you know, at night. And contemplate how much she would do for her, how much I love her, what I would do for her. And feel that in the body. And just sense how it shifts the energy in the room. In my experience, it's been tangible. In my experience, it is like it creates an exp it creates a dynamic in the room that is teeming with erotic energy. And all that it is is just a deepening of the body. You know, like being on a like having a date with your partner or the person or your significant other or you're interested with or interested in. Just try what happens when you just settle more. Settle into the chair, maybe not be so much everywhere, settle in, settle the feet, maybe slip them bad boys off and find the ground, and relax the pelvic floor and just be mindful of breathing and relaxing your feet. And just behold the beauty you have for the person in front of you. And my friend, have a good time. So that's the uh that's one thing. The other thing is just the practice within the sexual experience back to the sensitivity. What Qigong has done so much for me is resensitized my body. And in sex, it's all feeling. It's all feeling. And what's really, really important here, what I do want to touch on faux show, is yes, it's a physical feeling. Sex is a physical feeling, there is physical sensations, but you know, like my good friend Alexa inspires me to do, um, go deeper. Yes, there's the physical sensations of pleasure. And boy, are that's fun. I mean, you know, I'm still very excited about a lot of the ways of which I'm learning to unlock and experience and circulate pleasure in my body, uh, which is so wonderful. But at the same time, there's a deeper experience going on within the sexual experience with another person that is connection, union. There's like a sense of bliss, that is the feeling of separateness being unified, you know, like dualism being extinguished, like, you know, there is only one. That's like that's like that's what nirvana is, that's what you know, just ecstatic bliss is, is like, oh, all things are one. And um what I'm trying to say is, bro, if you just relax when you're having sex, if you just take these qigong praxes into the sexual experience and relax the body, then I have found that it one, here's the here's the kicker, boom, boom, two parts. One, the sensations are are so much different from a physical level, uh, like these just rolling pleasure streams, and from an energetic emotional level, it's more receptive. It's like I feel this just sense of enjoyment in the body, like hot steam that just moves through the body and kind of like hot balloons the head. It's like, whoa, very nice. All these feelings are subtle and are accessible through Qigong. To me, it's like Qigong trains the palate, that daily living, good coffee, a nice breeze, a beautiful scent, good sex, all of those things stimulate the senses from a physical perspective and from an energetic perspective. And my friend Qigong will help that, it'll help develop the sensitivity to enjoy the full spectrum. And what's really cool here is sensitivity is the the like the real unlock here, not intensity. I've talked about that in some of the episodes here. Sensitivity and sexuality is so helpful. So the first thing is the sensitivity, the second thing is the circulation, you know. Like for me, for me as a young man, I always thought sensitivity was the was the enemy, you know. Um you don't want to be sensitive because then you come too quick. I remember when I was a kid, I used to jerk off and count just to see how long I could count until I, you know. Um and uh, you know, it was like the longer I could go the better without and what would what would I do? I'd be like thinking about you know crayons or fucking math problems or my grandma's armpit or just like anything like a dead dog, like anything to just keep my mind off and just try to last. And that's not good. That's like being that's like me kept uh kept alive through uh through life support. Like, yeah, you're living, but you're not really experiencing anything. So the goal is not to just numb yourself to long-term or long uh stamina, you know, not at all. It's to feel everything so deeply and also be able to spread it out. So like instead of it just congregating towards the groin and causing an ejaculative response, ejaculatory response, instead just breathe be able to breathe it in and circulate it. And that what qigong is really is practicing learning to access and feel through the body how energy moves throughout the body in a way that you can intend to move it. That shit's wild, and I know that's just way out there. And if you're just listening to this because you're slightly interested, then that sounds like some stuff. And uh it is, to be honest with you. It is like that. Uh, there's no way to talk about it that doesn't kind of sound like some using the force type stuff. But to be honest with you, it's been great. It's been great, and it's impacted me tremendously. So um uh, finishing note, uh, this is helpful to add. I often don't want to do the practice. I really don't. Um, it's like something I need to do, you know. I do it every other day for about 15 to 20 minutes. Uh, it's not something I look forward to doing, but it's something I'm really grateful for for the effects, and because of that, I continue doing it. I do, I do look forward to it sometimes. I do like generally like, oh, sit down and do some qigong, uh, especially if I'm really high. But generally speaking, it's like end of the day, uh, I just want to go to sleep. And I'm like, I need I probably should do that qigong practice. So sit 15 minutes, breathe through the feet, breathe through the anus, relax the pelvic floor, circulate the energy, breathe down the front of the body, breathe in, circulate, breathe in, circulate. And by the end, I'm like, that was nice. And go to bed. It seems like a practice. It's like stretching. It's not something I'm like super jazzed about doing every day, but I do it, my friend. And I'm here to say, I think you should do it too. Okay, four different ways Shigong has impacted my life in a positive way. Thank you for listening to this. And um, if you have any questions or want to talk about this, you know where to find me.