Qigong Breathing Exercise to Remove Chronic Disease From Your Body

In China, there was once a highly prized practice that was formerly purely guarded for monks and people who are initiated into a certain lineage. And this practice was said to be one of the main ways you could ensure longevity and good health without needing medicine, putting anything inside of your body, and without these extremely difficult workouts that are very, very taxing with excessive exercise. Now, that practice was called qigong. And qigong, you could literally translate as chi work or breath work. Now, qigong isn't just some mystical thing. It's well-supported by modern scientific research and evidence, and it goes back thousands of years in traditional Chinese medicine and even Taoist medicine. So in this video, we're going to highlight one specific qigong practice that you can do on a daily basis, as well as what qigong is designed to do and how it can help you in your life. Hey guys, I'm Dr. Alex Hein, board-licensed doctor of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine and author of the health book, Master of the Dead. Let's get it. Now, qigong is very, very fascinating. I think because in the West, qigong has been very, very mystified. And people think that qigong has to be some kind of mysterious energy that you can shoot lasers out of your eyes to take down your boss and melt them into Play-Doh. But qigong on a daily material level is a way of integrating breathing with exercise and visualization. You know, when I was visiting as a resident, a hospital, medical hospital in China, and we were speaking with some of the doctors there about what integrative therapies they do for cancer. One of the best ones they said was qigong. And when I was speaking with one of the doctors, they said that qigong is both well-studied, but it's also well-studied for cancer patients specifically because qigong is one of the only ways you can increase that battery charge, their overall vitality, regulate their hormone profiles without introducing medicine into the body. What this doctor said to me was that qigong is one of the best things for cancer patients because it improves energy, sleep, and pain. And if they do a lot of it, it can actually improve their blood values, which is pretty amazing. So it's very neat to see how qigong is used in an integrative fashion in Chinese hospitals, and not just in my own practice of qigong or doing it in monasteries with Taoist monks, but to actually see it in a purely medical fashion. I thought it was very, very interesting to see that. Now, before I blab on any further, let's jump into a full qigong exercise from my 21-Day Qigong Challenge so you can see what this practice looks like. Now, this qigong has different names. Sometimes it's just called gathering qi from the universe and descending it. So let's jump in. So now let's go through another kind of qigong that's basically, sometimes they just call it gathering qi, and sometimes they call it descending qi. But basically, you know, when we talk about the three components of qigong, visualization, breath work, and physical posture, the physical posture here, the physical movement is very simple, right? We're just coming, inhaling, exhaling, inhaling, exhaling. We inhale, we exhale, inhale, exhale down, right? And then we repeat it. That's the physical movement. The visualization is you are putting your arms out. You're sucking in. And imagine this is just a huge, you're like a machine that can suck in particles, right? You can suck in atoms from nature that recharge your batteries. So you're putting your hands like this and creating like a giant funnel. You're like sucking in all these energy from your environment, and you're putting it down through the ren channel, is a channel that goes down the center line of the body. You're sucking it down, pushing it into the dantian, into that battery charge we talked about in your low abdomen. So physical movement we talked about like this, simple. The breathing is inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. And the visualization is you're sucking in all these resources. You're bringing them down the ren channel in the body to push it stored in the dantian. It's like we're like sucking in stuff. We're putting it in a giant, you know, silo, right? We're getting the grain. Imagine you're like a giant or like your God. You're just grabbing the grain from the farmland around, scooping it up, just like pushing it down to that silo to store it, right? For the farm animals or for winter, whatever those silos are for on farms. So you're doing that just with this concept we call qi. This is a great qi gong to do in general. It's also good for lowering blood pressure. It's good for sleep. And it's a great overall just qi gong to help with relaxation. So it's very simple and it's very soothing. It's also great on a physical level for upper back, neck pain and shoulder issues like frozen shoulder. Let's get comfortable again here. And we're just going to do the basic movement with the same rhythm, right? Sometimes we'll do the universe stance or you do shaking, right? You're shaking, do all your tapping. And then from there, basically what we're going to do, you can do your universe stance. We'll drop the hands, then inhale. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, gather, exhale. Pushing it down, right? Then either you can come back up, inhale. Or sometimes we do this kind of swimming motion, right? Inhale, and then we're back to the center. So let's do it a few times so you can see the overall rhythm and the overall pattern here. And then we'll go into the breathing, the visualization, and then we'll do it all together. We are going to just adopt the neutral wuji, emptiness, formless pose, just to make it simple. Then inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, lengthen the breath. Exhale, inhale. Exhale. Now we're going to inhale, exhale. And remember here, after we're exhaling, imagine all of these plants have atoms that are energy particles you can't see that are recharging you. We're going to scoop them up. Inhale them. You're gathering them like a big hamper, dirty laundry full of energy here. Push it down the center line. White light through the skull, cervical vertebrae, upper back, low back, the wrench handle. Swallow, feel that, get a somatic sensation into the low abdomen. And when your hands reach the bottom, your waist, imagine it getting stored. Like a quarter you threw into a coin jar. It's filling up more and more and more each time with cash. We inhale, exhale. Inhale, gather. Visualize it. Pulling it all in. Exhale, push it through the skull, the crown, the center line. Swallow to get a physical somatic sensation of this pill of energy recharging your batteries. You can feel the saliva going down, right? Imagine that's that channel, that conception channel. You finish your exhale, stored into the battery charge, the dantian, right? Another 25 cents put in there to recharge your batteries. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, gather. Exhale, bring it down the center line. Swallow to get a physical somatic sensation of that qi going down into battery storage in your low abdomen. Inhale. When you're all set, just relax. Stand up, stretch out. You can basically do this qigong, I would recommend for 10 to 20 minutes straight. By the end, you'll notice your palms are warm, you're calm, your heart rate is lower, and you're feeling much, much better. Now, if qigong breathwork and these kinds of energetic practices are interesting to you, and specifically you're burned out, you're wired but tired, you can't sleep, you're stressed or exhausted, make sure you download my free 10-minute qigong practice for burnout. It's part of my free qigong breathwork longevity challenge. You can download it right below this video, and you'll get some interesting videos regarding qigong. And if you wanna get started with it, I would highly recommend trying that next video. So the link and the URL is right below this video here. Now, briefly, how does qigong work? We say that when people are seriously ill, what is damaged is what's called the mingmen, the gate of life, which is your kidneys. So your mingmen is said to store what's called your yuanqi, which means your original qi. And you can think of that conceptually as like your genetic material from your parents. Were you a sick and weakly child, or were you a strong kid who really didn't get sick much, and didn't complain about your stomach at all? Taoist adepts say that qigong is one of the only ways to replenish your original qi, that battery charge you were gifted at birth, without taking medicine internally. So it's viewed as uniquely special for that purpose. It's also, again, used in cancer treatment in hospitals and for all kinds of chronic illnesses. But how does it work from a Chinese medicine point of view? The first is that it prevents qi stagnation. Qi stagnation is sort of like that very early stage of an illness before it becomes pathological. It's the tightness in the chest, the headache you get after a long day of work, the menstrual irregularities from stress before they become serious. So breathing removes qi, which clears stagnation and strengthens your organs. Additionally, chronic disease in Chinese medicine comes from depletion or blockage. So deep rhythmic breathing strengthens what we call your digestive function, spleen, stomach. Also, it regulates what we call your liver qi, which is really the stress hormones that pent up tension. And finally, the slow, deep, rhythmic breathing with the inhaling and descending the qi like this and storing it in the body, this is what we call nourishing kidney essence. This is like regulating your adrenal function and your metabolism, calms anxiety and helps with vitality overall. Now, what's interesting here is the science in qigong because modern science is finally starting to show why it works so well for chronic health issues. For starters, several studies have shown that qigong practice directly lowers your cortisol. That's your main stress hormone. When cortisol levels stay high for too long, it drives inflammation, belly fat, sleeping problems and even chronic disease. And there was actually a review published in Complementary Therapies in Medicine, which found that qigong consistently reduced both cortisol levels and blood pressure. Pretty cool. Now, another big one is heart rate variability or HRV. Now, that's a measure of how adaptable and resilient your nervous system is. A higher HRV means your body can handle stress and recover quickly. And in one controlled trial, just eight weeks of qigong significantly improved HRV in adults with high stress. So that's a measurable sign your nervous system is becoming more resilient. And it's not just stress. In China, qigong has been studied in clinical settings with people dealing with very serious issues. For example, breast cancer patients who practice medical qigong during treatment showed improved immune function and less fatigue compared to controls. Patients with COPD, a serious lung issue, had better lung function and better quality of life scores. And people with type 2 diabetes, daily qigong practice lowered your fasting blood sugar and improved your insulin sensitivity. So an ancient doctor said, qigong moves qi and clears disease. Modern researchers would say it reduces stress hormones, balances the nervous system and strengthens immunity. Now, in traditional Chinese medicine and really in medicine, it is all about that qi flow. Qi flow is life. Stagnation and blockage are death. Look at cancer, heart disease, still the major killers here. These are chronic degenerative diseases pointed to chronic stagnation and lack of flow. So something like qigong or exercise are really, really essential for modern people today. Let me know below this video, what are you most interested about in terms of qigong? Have you tried it? Have you not tried it? Let me know with a comment down there below. And then also, if you're curious, what are the three qigong exercises I recommend every day for better health? Make sure you watch this related video on those three exercises here.