Heads up: this post is about some of my academic work on qigong, so reader beware.]
I presented an academic talk on taijiquan silk reeling practice and what I call “kinesthetic earworms” back in April 2021 at the Pacific APA meeting.
The full title of the paper I presented is “Kinesthetic Earworms and the Epistemology of Chinese Mind-Body Practice.” Here is the abstract:
ABSTRACT:
The notion of a musical earworm—that is, a bit of “involuntary musical imagery” or a “song running through one’s mind”—can help us understand how body movements and postures can be interestingly cognitive or epistemic. Musical earworms are often more than mere sequences of auditory images: they are multimodal and can include thoughts and behavioral dispositions that track a song’s content and broader significance. I argue that there are kinesthetic equivalents of earworms that are sometimes created by performing ritualized, contemplative, mind-body practices. These “kinesthetic earworms” (or, more properly but less memorably, “semi-voluntary kinesthetic imaginings”) are multimodal and contentful in much the same way that musical earworms are, and they constitute or give rise to knowledge that straddles the knowing-how/knowing-that distinction. As a case study, I examine a cluster of Chinese mind-body practices that involve repeated circular movements: taijiquan silk-reeling practice, Daoist microcosmic orbit meditation, and “taiji ruler” qigong.
In that Pacific APA session, I was lucky enough to have both Bin SONG (Washington College) and Shay Welch (Spelman College) deliver formal commentaries. Joe Lynch (California Polytechnic State University) was the session chairperson. I got a number of good comments and suggestions from the members of the audience during the Q&A at the end of the session.
(Nota bene: Even though the abstract mentions taiji ruler qigong, I don’t think I even got around to mentioning that [well, maybe I briefly mentioned it, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t say much about it] in that 2021 Pacific APA presentation of the paper.)
The 2021 Pacific APA meeting was forced online because of the pandemic, but one nice consequence of that was that the session got recorded. Here is the video of my talk (with a few moments of me playing Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” in the middle of the talk removed in order to avoid any copyright troubles and all the other portions of the full session cut out so as not to include anyone who was there who might not want to have the parts of the video they were in made publicly available):
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