The "Secret" Qigong Healing Methods

You know, one of the things that draws most people to Chinese medicine in particular, as one form of alternative to the conventional medicine system, is really the more metaphysical or what people perceive to be the mystical aspects of Chinese medicine. Now I can confidently say I don't personally know too much about them. I've often gone to seek them out. I moved to China, I bought a one-way ticket to China in my early 20s, lived there for over a year, learned to speak, read and write Chinese, often looking for these monks and mystics and holy people, thinking that that would be my life going forward. That I would stay in China for a decade or 15 years, come back as some enlightened ass-kicking holy man, and then resume my life in, I don't know, some unconventional way. But what people are most often interested in when it comes to Chinese medicine is the mystical and the metaphysical. So in this video, I thought I would talk about this idea of these secret healing methods of qigong and some personal thoughts about them, as well as what I think qigong is really designed to do. Hey guys, Dr. Alex Hein, Chinese medicine doctor, author of the health book Master of the Day on Amazon and Audible. Now before we jump into today's video, there's two very important links right below this video. The first is a link to my free weekly newsletter, which has a free download for you, which is four daily rituals that can potentially help you add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. The second is a link to my private practice and clinic, if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally or online via telemedicine. Now last year sometime, I had a patient come in that was particularly ill, and she had already seen all of the specialists worldwide for her condition. And in general, she was really at her wits end and had assumed that basically the journey was ending for her. There was nothing else really she could do. She had tried everything. She wasn't getting very good feedback from the doctors she had seen, and she was pretty jaded. The thing I love about working with people who are told they're dying is that they often have nothing to lose. And so we can have a really frank and candid conversation about what it may take to heal when all the conventional options have failed or are of no use. Now one thing she was particularly interested in was this idea of these mystical qigong masters. This idea that there are people who will, you know, put their hand down and be able to heal you from a distance with some kind of mystical qigong approach. Now I personally have not seen that. I can tell you stories about that. I can tell you stories of stories of friends of friends or people and monks I had spoken to in Chinese while living in China. But having never witnessed that firsthand, and I know so many, you know, Americans and Europeans find that to be the appealing part of Chinese medicine, rather than maybe the boring clinical part that is well proven to work even in clinical studies. But that seems to be a piece of the mystique that Chinese medicine still has, where in the West, you know, we've always Orientalized it, where you go to the Far East to find the mystics and the holy men and the gurus, right? That image is distinct. It's very, very obvious that it's a special, unique thing we don't see in the West. And I think centuries later, we still maintain some of that kind of romantic aspect of the way that we romanticize the East in general, that still exists to this day. Even though in China, the majority of people are still using conventional medicine, right? People call it Western medicine, but it's really the standard of care pretty much worldwide in most developed nations. Let's talk about going back on track to qigong, because seeing as I have not witnessed a sage perform a distance healing and then somebody's that's the archetypal story, seeing as I've not witnessed that. But let's talk about what qigong is really designed to do in the first place. When I was living in Beijing, I was training with this guy who is a famous Chen style Tai Chi teacher. And this guy was a bodyguard for the Communist Party. So he was the kind of Kung Fu master that I was looking for, meaning he wasn't like some old dude doing Tai Chi in the park and, but you know, some American boxer could come up and knock him out. I was looking for the real old school generation of Kung Fu practitioners. So this guy practiced Tai Chi, you know, it's at face value, it's very soft and flowy, doesn't look like a martial art. But this guy being a former bodyguard for the Communist Party was a fighter. I mean, this guy did, you know, a fireman throw me threw me over onto my head onto hard rock and concrete. He almost knocked me unconscious with a just a clothesline. He did a wrist lock on both my wrists to such an excessive degree that I thought he broke both of them. And I was debating going to the emergency room all night. So this guy didn't play. And that's actually the thing that I loved about him the most. Because I think there are far more charlatans, just like unfortunately, I think in alternative medicine, there are far more people full of BS, who cannot treat real illnesses than there are who are legitimate. And that's a tragic opinion of mine to share, but it is my honest to God opinion. And one of these days, while this guy was beating me up, middle of winter in Beijing, I saw this guy walking around the waterfront. And this guy was walking around in the weirdest way possible. He was walking around like this. He was literally walking around the lake where we were training in the central part of this park, going like this, like for an hour and a half. He walked the whole perimeter of the park, every sense that we were training, clapping, you know, clapping like this. And then one day, I asked my friend, you know, what's this crazy old guy doing? And he said, he's doing a certain kind of Qigong. So it got me thinking, well, what really is Qigong? And how does it work? And what's it supposed to do? And my friend said that, well, there are, you know, Chinese have sayings like like the myriad things often translated in the Tao Te Ching as the 10,000 things. But it's just an expression for all of the myriad manifestations, all the myriad things on earth, a lot of things. Now, there's a saying that there are 10,000 types of Qigong, meaning there's basically an unlimited number of kinds of Qigong that a person could do for their health. But the ultimate purpose of Qigong is fairly similar, which is Tong, which is opening movement circulation, right? The literal word is Qigong, which is Qi work. And so almost always throughout all the different kinds of Qigong throughout all the eras of history, it is unified by breathwork, specific attention, or intention, often with visualization or other physical body postures to guide the body to do a certain thing. And fundamentally, the way I think about it at a low material level is that it's about circulation, right? Unimpeded circulation is an essential aspect of longevity and good health. And even in the most fundamental sense, it's fundamental to even healthy bowels. It's fundamental to being in a good mood. It's fundamental to good sleep. You know, people who are working on their computer all day, the nervous system is active, but the physical body is inactive. Those are people who have problems sleeping. Construction workers who are digging ditches and laying bricks and working hard, they come home, they're tired. They are usually out. Those are the people who complain about being exhausted, but can sleep. Versus the nervous system exhaustion of the intellectual worker, which is they work all day, but they can't sleep. So that is where one aspect of the body is moving and the other is not. But Qigong is fundamentally all about movement, right? Movement of what Chinese medicine considers qi and blood circulation. Now for us, whoever you are watching, there are so many lessons here besides the value of doing Qigong. I mean, Qigong is even well studied in the West these days, but the value is about how continuous circulation is such a necessity for life. The circulation can be intellectual stimulation, right? You always need to be evolving. Our character needs to be evolving. Our hobbies need to be evolving. Our work needs to be evolving. Our marriage needs to be evolving. Our relationship with our kids and our friends, it always needs to be evolving, right? Stagnation is not only literal, but it's also metaphorical. In all the different quadrants of life, in all the different ways that it can manifest, we always have to be continually evolving and continually moving. So Qigong, one aspect of it is that is the fundamental piece that it is trying to do. And so that old man that I thought was a crazy kook, I don't know what he was doing or why he was doing the Qigong, but you can believe after doing that for 10 minutes, your hands will feel warm and will be hot because now that's where the attention and the circulation is in your body. And that's one of the fundamental purposes of Qigong and even of Chinese medicine. Now in regard to those secret healing methods of Chinese medicine in Qigong, maybe they exist. I haven't witnessed them, but just like something like Qigong where they say it can cure the 10,000 illnesses, well, so can exercise. Or for a lot of people, especially in America, so can a good diet or sleeping eight hours a night. But who knows, maybe one day I will be able to shoot lasers out of my eyes, in which case my clinic is going to have to be set up a little bit different. But that's all I have for today, you guys. So until then, don't forget, two important links right below this video. The first is for my free weekly newsletter, which includes a free guide, four daily rituals that can potentially help you add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. And in addition, if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally or online via telemedicine, check out the link right below this video for the link to contact me in my clinic and my private practice. All right, you guys, that's what I have for today. Before you go, check out these two related videos for you right there.