I went to China to learn the key to longevity. Here's what I learned.

I bought a one-way ticket to China to learn about the Far East's approach to longevity. You know, for thousands of years, East Asia has been associated with longevity, with mysticism, and with monks, and these cloud-covered peaks where hermits and sages have lived in these little grottos. And seekers from the West have gone, myself included, over there to try to figure out what these rituals are that these mystics, monks, and medical practitioners do every single day. So in this video, we're going to talk about one of those rituals in particular. Hey guys, I'm Dr. Alex Hein, doctor of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine and author of the health book, Master of the Day. Let's jump in. Now, on one particular trip of mine, this was actually me right here in a monastery in the Sichuan province. I was staying as part of a group of foreigners that had gone under one of my mentors to stay in a traditional Taoist and Buddhist monastery to live in this little enclave where the monks lived. To wake in the morning every single day doing qigong and doing meditation to eat with the monks three times a day. And in the afternoons and during the day, to listen to lectures from doctors of traditional Chinese medicine that came in from all the surrounding medical schools and from the countryside in their little local clinics to learn about longevity, wellness, and disease, and how we treat those from a traditional Chinese medicine point of view. In the evenings, we would again do qigong. We would do our own little practice that my mentor led. And from there, we would do a closing sort of zazen meditation and then wind down to repeat it all again. Now, one particular thing struck me and really jumped out at me when I was there. I was having this conversation with one of the monks, and in particular, she's the head abbess, the female head monk, and I was observing that she was always so smiley, so happy, even though her day-to-day life seemed sort of mundane, right? It was kind of the same thing every single day. And I said to her in my broken Chinese, I said, 我每一次看到你,你很开心,为什么? So basically, every time I see you, you seem so happy, why? And she said something along the lines, I can't quite remember, and my Chinese is not so good, but she said, 生活是开心的, basically, if I got that right, that life is happiness. And it opened up this whole conversation about life is about flow and expansion and movement and growth. And she talked about nature and that the nature of plants is to grow and come out of the ground and have these, bud these leaves, and then to die, and then for that to be absorbed again and then to grow. And that in the same way, people have to daily cultivate themselves. And about how in traditional Confucianism and Daoism, every day, the cultivated person works and chisels away at their character and is working on greater ease and greater flow in their life. And in general, I got this impression that what she was saying was really a lot about this term flow, right? She was talking about movement and continuity and this kind of flowy quality. And she said that, you know, to the Daoists, proper qi flow is the key to longevity and the key to health. And when I sort of asked her to clarify, I didn't really quite understood what she meant. And I thought that qi was sort of like a mystical energy. But she also explained it from a very practical and a pragmatic point of view that I want to share here. You know, when she talks about qi flow, flow is something that exists, yes, not only in the energetic, if you want to use that term, but also physical flow, right? Physical exercise, physical lymphatic movement, bowel flow, emotional flow, the flow of having something positive to look forward to in your life or the light of the spirit, just doing something that lights you up, that gives an otherwise boring and Monday life real meaning. The Daoists talk about doing without doing, or trying to be like water. And I like to think of the analogy of, you know, this development of disease is like there's a river. And let's just say the river is your intestines, to make it simple, because we can visualize that big tube. And let's say you're eating the wrong kinds of foods. So some foods are getting stuck in your intestines, and you're getting constipated for a couple of days. And other foods are causing inflammation in the intestines. And you're having, let's say, diverticulosis. And other foods are maybe causing a lot of bloating, maybe some bacterial overgrowth, or some fungal issues. And all of these are sort of clogging this river. So this river that was a nice, beautiful, serene river, is now like a muddy pond, where there's nasty green algae, and there's beavers building dams and damming it up even more. And there's fungal issues and mold and lichens growing off it. And that once beautiful, serene river that was flowing, now has something that actually looks like a festering sore. And in this way, we can understand how proper flow of digestion can lead to healthy digestion, while improper flow leads to disease. Now one of the free guides I've put together here, it's the first link below the video, on this concept of health and longevity, is four daily rituals that can potentially help you live to 100, with traditional Chinese medicine. All about four essential principles, from actually a very famous Taoist hermit. It's a pretty neat story. So you can check it out, it's the first link below the video, and there's also info below on how to book a visit with me as a patient, or doing a telemedicine visit with me as well in my practice in Los Angeles. So when we talk about flow, we can talk about flow in the context of the physical body. Cardiovascular disease still is the number one cause of death in probably all of North America, and increasingly in developing countries as well, that have the diets of civilization, and the diseases of civilization. For example, check out this one research paper here. Now in this particular paper, it's called, A Brief Review of Cardiovascular Diseases, Associated Risk Factors, and Current Treatment Regimes. The authors here talk about how cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of premature death and disability in humans, and their incidence is on the rise globally. The underlying pathogenesis and progression associated with nearly all of them is predominantly of atherosclerotic origin. Now just to clarify what atherosclerosis is, we're going to jump on over to here, to Johns Hopkins Medicine, and I want to highlight this one line, atherosclerosis is thickening And it talks about some of the risk factors here that we know, diet, activity, certain kinds of smoking, and that sort of thing. And what is perhaps the most fascinating is that when you look at studies on centenarians, the people who live to 100 in very high percentages, much higher than normal populations, what is fascinating is that these people are not going to the gym. What they're doing is lots of low-level, day-to-day exercise just over the course of life. They're hiking around and walking up these steep hills, they're shepherds with their sheep, they're working in their gardens, or they're walking to meet their relatives instead of driving. It's lots of low-level movement. So movement is the key to longevity and one of the keys to life. But flow can also exist on a psychological or emotional level, like the flow that happens in the mind or in the spirit when someone is doing something that makes them feel so alive. You know, I'll never forget the story of a guy I knew that was broken up with once. He was broken up by the lovers of his life. And so what happened? He went from being a totally functional adult man to no longer wearing his suit to work, leaving dishes pile up all over his kitchen, his apartment looked like actual hell, just trashed, disaster. And he was like that for a few weeks. He always ordered out pizza, he ate out of these pizza boxes every day, he stopped cooking, he gained 5 or 10 pounds in the first month, everything stopped. His life came to a crashing halt. One day his ex-girlfriend called him back after a month apart and she said, You know what, John? I made a mistake and I want to try this again and see where it goes. I can't even explain how fast this dude shaved, arranged his hair, took a shower, cleaned his apartment, cleaned all his dishes, stocked his fridge, and his life went from 0 to 100 in literally 24 hours. But what just happened there? Because nothing actually changed in the moment. He's sitting in his room alone. There's no woman there. But what happened was that positive expectancy changed his spirits, right? The psychology, the emotions, the effect that cascade has in your physiology is a powerful healing force or it is a force for disease at the same time. Because of that, that activation of the spirit, if you want to use that term, it began a powerful healing force that was very cathartic for him. And even for me in my own life, I often tell the story of when I was coming back from my trip when I was living in China, I bought this one book for the very long flight back from Beijing where I was living and I wandered into this one little bookstore. And it was the typical tabloids, right? The best-selling magazines, the best-selling books. And there's this one little tomb, a thick, thick, thick textbook. And I open up the textbook and it's full of all these practices of herbal medicine and acupuncture channels and mysticism and healing. And I just thought this was the thing I've always wanted to learn my entire life. This is the thing. So I take this book back home. I translate it every Sunday for a couple hours. And after a few years, this guy approaches me in a coffee shop seeing me read this book and he says, you know, I'm a student at a local acupuncture school. Did you know you're translating the most important book in all of traditional Chinese medicine? The actual tomb of Chinese medicine, the canon. And I just thought, how is that possible that I'm now a doctor of this medicine? And a decade before, I went into one obscure bookstore in an airport that didn't have a medical section. I picked up one book that was a textbook in an airport that happened to be not just a book on Chinese medicine, but the most important book in history. And I was translating it for fun every Sunday. That feels a lot like fate to me, whether that is real or not. That is the way I choose to believe it and view it. And the purpose and the drive that I get from every day doing work that feels like work I'm called to do, that feels like a divine purpose, is more than I can get just from being a driven person willing to succeed. In the same way as we have flow in the physical body, flow in the mind and in the spirit can happen in this way as well. And those are healing forces too. So these were some simple lessons I learned in terms of healing while living in China, this particular recent trip I took. I've also begun opening up this brand new program. It's called Healing with Traditional Chinese Medicine, the Original Science of Longevity. And I'm putting people on a little waitlist because I haven't actually launched the course yet, but it's going to be an online program anywhere in the world. And it's basically going to keep this channel permanently ad-free, no sponsorships, no other marketing messages. But I'm building out this healing library full of courses on how you can heal with traditional Chinese medicine. So if you guys want to know about this program when it comes out, it's the first link right below and add your name to the waitlist on that newsletter and I'll let you know as soon as it comes out in about two or three weeks. So before you guys go, I have a related video on healing right there and I'll see you soon.