Boiling an empty kettle

A lot of Tai Chi or Chi Kung instructors teach their students to move their Chi here and there inside their body. This is like trying to boil a kettle before filling it up with water; or to borrow the terminology of Taoist internal alchemy,'trying to operate the firing process before the fire is ignited'. Not only will one achieve no results, he's risking causing damage to his physiological and chi system. Yet some teachers teaching these fake techniques to students are being hailed as 'masters' of this lineage or that!

Unfortunately, this seems to be the situation in many other well-being (or 'body-mind-soul' in more 'new-agei' term) issues such as meditation, yoga. A common thing for meditation teachers to tell their students to do is to cross their legs to sit in a lotus (or near-lotus) position motionless and do mind gymnastics by either breathing in a certain way, or moving their energies from this chakra to that, or by playing with some mental images, or by visualizing the Divine this way or that. For most westerners, sitting in a cross-legged position is as un-natural as getting a cat to walk on his hind legs! How can they obtain a peaceful mind if their body is in agony? If one studies either the Yoga system (not only Hatha Yoga) or Taoist spiritual practice, one will realize that sitting meditation only comes at a later stage after the aspirant has completed all the previous stages such as bodywork, energy work and cultivating the right attitude and comprehending the basic  precepts. Otherwise, all false meditation efforts are going to end up like 'boiling sand in the hope of gaining a meal of rice' - a complete wast of time and effort.Firm warnings have been sounded by numerous Taoist luminories in their written works such as the following:-

Swallowing saliva and performing breathing exercises are mere human contrivances; only when medicines are produced inside can transmutation take place. If there is no true seed in the crucible, that is no difference from boiling an empty pot with high flames.
 --------Chang Po tuan 'Understanding Reality' [translation based on Thomas Cleary's version with adaptations made by the author]