Three floors above a busy Bangor intersection, in a small, sunny, mirrored room that smells like lunch and lead paint, Robert Leins tells me to close my eyes and just be. “You don’t have to remember anything,” he said, “just let go.”

I peek. I feel my knees lock up. I unlock them. I peek again and see that he’s not looking at me. Good sign. So I try, for a minute, to let go.

Trying defeats the purpose of relaxing, but when you’re busy and stressed-out and a little skeptical of new things, it doesn’t come easily. But I tried to just be.

Then I noticed the swaying.

Standing there in my work clothes, minus the shoes, with my knees slack and my eyes closed and with no one looking at me, I felt my whole body tilting a centimeter to the front and then a centimeter to the back. It didn’t throw me off balance. It felt kind of like an ocean wave. A few silent, wavy minutes later, Leins said, “You may feel a swaying sensation. Like seaweed in the water.”

Weird, I thought. How did he know?

The swaying, Leins explained, happens when the energy flowing through the body hits an obstacle, a sticking point, a problem area. Apparently I had many. Who knew I’d find them by just standing there?

Leins knew. For the past five years, he has practiced qi gong (pronounced chee-gong), an ancient Chinese technique that aims to build and manipulate energy in the body. The practice dates back to 1122 B.C. and qi gong forms the energetic foundation of most of the martial arts.

Until recently, qi gong was overshadowed by better-known Eastern disciplines such as yoga and tai chi, but it has steadily gained popularity. Leins and the instructors at his QiGong Studio now teach classes throughout the Greater Bangor area.

“This seems to be the third wave,” Leins said.

Qi gong focuses on “qi,” what doctors call bioelectricity, and its movement, blockage and accumulation in the body. Through a series of movements, breathing and relaxation techniques, qi gong is said to refuel the body’s energy stores, aid in healing chronic illnesses and restore the connection between mind and body – that’s where the swaying comes in.

“One of the benefits of qi gong that I’ve found … is the integration of mind and body that it helps to bring about,” said Roger King of Bangor, a student of Leins’. “We tend to be a little bit divorced from our body so we don’t have the capacity to control it and to move energy around it and to know where our bodies are at any given point and control their motion. It seems that that is one of the things that qi gong is about – trying to overcome.”

By standing still, with no sensory input, it’s easier to turn inward and really think about what your body is doing – in my case, I had a hard time keeping my feet parallel. It felt like I was pigeon-toed. It was hard to keep my knees bent. The wavy feeling was a little strange. After you figure out what’s going on with your body, you can start doing the movement exercises.

“Chinese see the human body as an energetic being and the organs connect to the environment through the fingers and toes,” Leins said. “It’s very important for this energy to constantly move through the body and constantly exchange with the outside environment.”

In Eastern medicine, it is believed that blockage of energy flow causes illness. To keep the energy moving, qi gong uses a series of arm motions, symbolic of filling, gathering and releasing qi. The movements reflect nature, with names such as “push the hua mountain up,” “white crane spreads its wings,” and “move the cloud to reveal the moon.”

“I like to feel the images,” Leins said. “You’re learning [to] absorb qi, emit qi and sense that it’s there. This is not like your normal five senses that you’re used to. You’re trying to do three very strange things all at once.”

At first, it’s awkward. Once you let yourself go and stop worrying whether the motions are wrong or right, it comes a little more easily. It’s different for everyone, though. You may or may not feel the energy the first time. During the sensory portion, I felt a tingly, warm feeling in my fingertips, but not everyone does.

“It tends to be very individual,” Leins said. “It’s very adaptable to the very hectic lives that we lead – slowing ourselves down internally to be able to cope. It can relax, it can rejuvenate.”

Many area gyms, whose members always are on the go, are adding qi gong classes to offer a more rounded approach to fitness and to help people slow down a little.

“It replenishes the energy that we deplete through hard impact,” said Susan Webber, general manager at Gold’s Gym in Bangor. “It’s the whole concept of the yin and the yang, so you’re balanced out. More gyms are trying to go in the direction of total wellness.”

Because qi gong doesn’t put any stress on the joints or muscles, anyone can do it. Leins said he has taught people as young as a sophomore in high school and as old as 85. He regularly teaches qi gong at the Hammond Street Senior Center in Bangor.

While qi gong appeals to a wide age group, everyone gets something different out of it. At the QiGong Studio, there are six instructors who deal with the mental, spiritual, medical and martial aspects of the practice.

“At this point in time there’s a lot of people exploring new-age solutions to things,” he said. “If you’re in shape, you can play the game. If you’re not in shape then the game can play you.”

For Leins’ wife, Vernita, qi gong serves a double purpose. It reduces stress, but it also helped her gain the physical and mental strength to bounce back from complications with fibromyalgia and menopause.

“It helps me to slow down internally and yet still be able to maintain my daily responsibilities,” Vernita Leins said. “I don’t get so scattered. I tend to deal a lot more easily now.”

Maureen Armour of Trenton learned about qi gong during a trip to China several years ago and started taking classes with her husband, Norman Nadel, at the Down East Family YMCA in Ellsworth. She said she doesn’t have the discipline to practice qi gong every day, but she feels better when she does.

“It seems to me to establish a sense of balance … an internal sense of balance and harmony,” Armour said. “Peace isn’t quite the right word. Contentment isn’t quite the right word, but there’s something like that – a feeling of well-being and rightness.

“There’s a lot that we as Westerners can learn from Asian – Chinese particularly – practices, particularly in today’s culture of frantic activity and overconsumption and profit-making gone wild. It’s a way of getting back to the fundamentals of living.”

For me, a half-hour of qi gong didn’t change my life. It did, however, change my day. It felt good to slow down and recharge. I even felt a little graceful. But the best feeling of all was the five minutes of nothingness that came when I closed my eyes and stood there, swaying, like seaweed in the water.

For information on qi gong classes in the area, call the Down East YMCA in Ellsworth at 667-3086, the Bangor-Brewer YWCA at 941-2808, or the QiGong Studio in Bangor at 945-4545.