Everything is completely made up. Atoms don't exist they're just a phenomenon we have observed and conceptualised - today's explanations are our best attempts a

Everything is completely made up. Atoms don't exist they're just a phenomenon we have observed and conceptualised - today's explanations are our best attempts at conceptualising them. We were perfectly able to use fire (and the Romans even had a prototype of the steam engine) long before Lavoisier had a working model of gases and stoichiometry. The model for what qigong is and what qi is can be wrong while still being helpful. Having worked on it I'd argue that it is a mental model / visualisation technique for honing your body awareness and mind-body connection. Visualisation techniques proliferate everywhere. I've been taught visualisations in swimming, martial arts, yoga and singing - so who cares if qigong is "completely made up" if the visualisation training achieved the goal. Only just recently in some self practice on the piano I was trying to achieve a specific multi-voicing effect on a tiny passage and have practiced this single bar at least 5+ hours. I finally had a breakthrough when I stopped trying to control the individual velocity and depth of my presses and just imagined I was whispering the secondary voice. I'm not whispering anything on that piano and my fingers are still just pressing keys. Its as made up as when I imagine I'm playing woodwind instruments during a Mozart adagio but it still accomplishes the effect. This is all airy fairy but my point is that actually my experience has taught me that for certain things, especially where the body is involved trying to think in mechanics or vertebrae and muscles is a lot less useful than imagining you're Mount Everest peaking above the clouds reaching for the sun.