What is the Yi anyway ?

What is the Yi?

It’s kind of wild how different people can be using the same word and mean completely different things by it. Sometimes it’s just a subtle shading of meaning. Sometimes it’s an entirely different definition altogether. Unless that difference is made explicit, it’s ridiculously easy to talk past one another.

Yi is one of those words.

Generally speaking, the way I’ve understood and used the word yi is that it refers predominantly to one’s focus. The yang aspect of awareness. I often use it to describe the shape of the mind—how attention is formed, directed, and held. To be clear, I’m not claiming correctness, I am describing how I personally use the term in my own practice and teaching.

What I’ve noticed is that other people tend to use yi in a much broader sense. In those cases, there isn’t a strict delineation between yi and nian, or even between yi and aspects of shen. Everything kind of gets grouped together. That’s not wrong either—but it is a different way of carving up the same territory.

And holy cow, do I find that fascinating.

In my martial arts practice, yi—as focus—is used intentionally to affect the physical body, energetic patterns, and various layers in between. It’s the part of awareness that is able to touch almost every stratification: physical, etheric, and purely energetic. When used skillfully, it’s really quite potent.

At the same time, there do appear to be limits, and potential downsides.

There are certain stratifications where yi, at least as I define it, doesn’t seem to affect. It acts much like contraction does in the physical body. It creates stagnation and resistance, and in the presence of an abundance of yang qi, that resistance generates heat. The yi uses a high percentage of cognitive and energetic bandwidth. At the stratifications that yi is insufficient, nian (passive awareness) is often the better tool. That isn't to say that yi is bad or wrong, but it isn’t the right tool for every layer.

Why do definitions matter so much?

Without a shared agreement on what these terms actually mean—or at least the knowledge that we may be using them differently—it’s incredibly easy to misunderstand one another. Two people can be having a long, detailed conversation and never actually be talking about the same thing.

Anyway, I’m not even sure why I felt compelled to write this other than the fact that I think it’s genuinely interesting. These distinctions matter, especially in internal arts, where the work is subtle and the language is already slippery. If nothing else, take it as a reminder to slow down, clarify terms, and recognize that these terms help define and label phenomenon, they are not the phenomenon themselves.—different maps being used to describe the same terrain.

Sifu Jesse