氣 Rice, Steam, and the Energy That Moves Through Everything

I remember the first time my teacher Gilles Marin showed me the Chinese character for Qi and explained what was hidden inside it. And most recently again in a Contact Improvisation Workshop. It was drawn by hand on a piece of paper, with a little bowl of rice sketched next to it, steam rising from the top.

It changed my life back then and continues to..

The character 氣 is made of two parts. At the top, three wavy lines representing steam or vapour. At the bottom, the character for rice. Steam rising from a bowl of cooked rice. That's Qi.

What I love about this is how ordinary it is. Not a bolt of lightning. Not something from another world. Just a bowl of rice on a fire, and what happens when heat meets nourishment and something invisible rises from it.

The rice is Qi. The steam is Qi. The transformation happening between them is Qi. Even the vessel holding the rice, and the fire beneath it, are Qi. It's not one thing. It's a process. A constant movement between the material and the immaterial, between what we can hold and what we can only feel.

The earliest written form of Qi was simply three wavy horizontal lines, like breath visible on a cold morning. Over time, rice was added to the character, grounding something invisible in something as simple and essential as food. Nourishment. The stuff that sustains a body. And what arises from it when life is present.

This feels true to me in practice every single day.

In Chi Nei Tsang, the name itself translates roughly as working with the energy of the internal organs. What we are doing in a session is helping Qi move again. Not because movement is some abstract spiritual goal, but because a body that isn't moving well, digesting well, breathing well, or sleeping well is a body where something has become stuck or stagnant. In Chinese medicine, illness is understood to stem from Qi stagnation, the energy is not properly changing or transforming.

The belly is where so much of this stagnation gathers. Undigested emotions. Clogged gut. Tension held in the organs. A digestive system that has been running on stress for too long. When I work with someone's abdomen, I'm not just addressing the physical layer. I'm working with the whole process, the rice and the steam, what the body has taken in and what it hasn't yet been able to release or transform.

Steaming rice is a symbol for the energy the body receives from food, while the structure of the character itself points to the eight directions in which Qi flows. Outward in all directions. Through the organs, through the breath, through the nervous system, through the connections we have with other people and with the world around us.

When I place my hands on someone's belly and feel it slowly soften and begin to move differently, I always think of that little drawing. Rice. Steam. Transformation. Something simple becoming something alive.

That's what we're working with. That's what Qi is.

If you are curious about Chi Nei Tsang and somatic abdominal bodywork, I offer sessions in Berlin. Feel free to reach out and connect.