Ancient Technology for Modern Living
This 5,000-year-old healing tradition can enhance your health and resilience.
In the last 20 years or so, we’ve seen greater interest in modalities that involve the body to help increase self-awareness, process and integrate ongoing stress or traumatic memories and events, and better regulate arousal and emotions. These practices or approaches can provide a key component of our self-care and wellness regimen, as well as help us build resilience and agency, in part because they teach us to engage our physical, mental, emotional, and even spiritual self in our healing and development.
For many years now, my modality of choice has been Qigong - also spelled Chi Kung (and pronounced “chee kung”). I first was exposed to Qigong as part of my martial arts training. I delved more deeply into it over the years, to the point at which I jumped in with both feet and pursued my degree in Medical Qigong.
Medical Qigong is a subset of Classical Chinese Medicine (CCM), a 5,000-year-old healing tradition that follows a body-mind-spirit paradigm and considers the whole being to enhance health and resilience.
Our starting point within Medical Qigong is: “All disease comes from the spirit”. Thousands of years ago, early healers recognized how emotions and thoughts relate to our physical body and can support health or cause illness.
Medical Qigong works with the energy centers and pathways of the body, helping to clear out disease, blockages, old hurts and wounds, and emotional stagnation - kickstarting the body’s ability to repair and heal.
Ancient, Proven Technology
Qigong treatments and exercises promote balance and harmony and the free flow of energy to restore health, prevent disease, and facilitate productive change and transformation. This ancient, proven “technology” is often coupled with modern knowledge such as energetic bloodwork analysis, corrective exercise or physical therapy, nutritional recommendations, and lifestyle / stress management strategies. It’s an excellent complement to western medical treatment, as well as counseling or therapy.
I’d like to share more about Qigong with you in coming posts. Many people have either never heard of it or aren’t quite sure what it is. I’m often asked if it’s “like tai chi”. (It’s actually better!)
Medical Qigong treatments are like acupuncture, but without the needles. (Plus we also work directly with the organ systems and the deeper energy channels within the body.)
Qigong exercises are simple and accessible and combine breathing, focused intention, and specific movement patterns into a powerful practice that helps:
Transform stress, center, ground, and improve health and internal energy;
Redirect attention from stressful physical or environmental stimuli to a more inward, relaxed focus;
Stretch and strengthen the physical structure, including muscles, tendons, ligaments, and fascial structures;
Promote a greater sense of personal control and resilience.
As a Medical Qigong Doctor, I prescribe qigong exercises for specific conditions. Exercises and forms can also be performed as part of one’s overall health and wellness practice. Some forms and approaches are used to develop martial power. Others are more meditative and used for spiritual development.
Some Qigong forms are over 3,000 years old! It’s amazing to me that we can benefit from this ancient wisdom that has been handed down over many generations - sometimes through written records, more frequently through oral transmission.
I’ll share more going forward. I will also be more consistent in posting. Please consider subscribing (or recommending this to others) - and I welcome your feedback.
You Can Do It!
Dr. Karen