The following is a complete transcription of an interview with Chunyi Lin, the founder of Spring Forest QiGong, as he explains the four major elements of holistic healing through QiGong. Please note there are a few alterations to the text for fluency purposes. You can see the complete video, Why Qigong is Holistic – A Comprehensive Approach to the Body, here.
QiGong, at its very foundation, is made up of four parts – breathing, movement, the mind, and sound.
Breathing
In Spring Forest QiGong, when you inhale, you visualize the energy coming through the skin and then colleting in the naval. We call it the lower dantian. That is the vitality center. And when you exhale, you visualize the energy you don’t need in the body changing to smoke, shooting out from every part of the body to the ends of the universe.
This energy in the body, which we call energy blockage, is actually extra energy in the body that we just don’t need anymore, so we return it back to the universe. It is not bad energy. It is just energy not in harmony with you.
By slowing down your breathing, you are able to help yourself to gain more energy – oxygen – the basic energy field of the body. The techniques I’ve just shared with you – and I also have self-learning courses – will help you to learn to slow down your breathing from 20 breaths a minute to as low as 6 or even 3 times a minutes. With that slow breathing you are going to have more oxygen flowing into every cell of your body. In this way, you can help yourself to recover from any long, hard work and alleviate the tiredness from your body quickly.
Movement
The next part is the movement of the body. When you move your hands, holding them outward and opening them up with the fingers apart, six meridians in your hands open at the same time. If you close your hands with the fingers close together, the energy cannot communicate effectively with nature.
Experiment: Hold your hands in front of you, open and with fingers apart, keeping them about 12-18 inches apart (imagine holding a basketball in front of you). You’re able to feel a tingling sensation within just a few seconds. If you close your fingers together, you don’t feel the tingling sensation anymore. Open them again and you feel the sensation right away.
Experiment: Take a couple of deep breaths through your nose and see how much your sinuses open. Now, try patting the shoulder and arm 5 times, starting with the left arm, using your right hand. Pat from the shoulder down to the wrist, quickly and somewhat forcefully, but not so much that it hurts. Now do the same with the other arm.
Take another deep breath or two and see how much more your sinuses open. Do you see the difference?
The lungs meridian and the heart’s meridians all start from the fingers and are connected to the lungs. The lungs energy – god or bad, strong or weak – shows out through the sinuses. So when you pat your arms as detailed above, you help to stimulate the flow of more energy into the lungs. People who have allergies or lung congestion or any type of lung disease, these ailments all have something to do with the arms.
I have a very dear friend and student who was on oxygen for 6 ½ years, 24 hours a day, diagnosed with a rare lung disease at the Mayo Clinic. The doctor suggested that she have a lung transplant. She didn’t do that. She came to my class and she practiced these exercises for eight weeks. Then she went back to the Mayo Clinic and the doctor said you don’t need oxygen anymore because all of the lung’s scar tissues had disappeared. This was documented as a miracle healing. That’s why later on I was invited to the Mayo Clinic to do medical studies with those doctors.
There are many, many other stories like that happening at the Mayo Clinic. It is all about energy. The scar tissues in the body are also a form of energy. It can be transformed, too.
Mind
The power of the mind is very powerful, too. In my classes I often use the finger growing game to show people how powerful the mind is.
Experiment. Look at your palm and find the line at the bottom (see figure 1.) Now look at the other palm and find the same line. Put these two lines together and close your hands. You may notice your left fingers are a little taller than your right hand’s fingers (or vice versa). If that happens, put the hand with the shorter fingers up and look at them.
Now say in your mind:
“My fingers are growing longer, longer, longer, longer, longer. And I feel my fingers becoming longer, longer, longer, longer, longer. I feel my fingers are becoming longer, longer, longer, longer, longer.” And you really feel your fingers becoming longer, longer, longer, longer, longer.
Now compare your hands; match the two lines together. Now you should see that the right and left fingers are the same length, or that the right hand is now a bit longer than the left.
Say in your mind, “my fingers, go back to normal”. Give them a little shake then line them up again, and you’ll find that they are back to normal, where the right hand may have originally been longer than the left (or vice versa).
This is the power of the mind.
Dr. Masura Emoto, a Japanese scientist did a study on the water called, “Message from Water”. When you charge the water by saying things like,” you are happy” and “you are beautiful”, you find beautiful water crystals in the water when you freeze it. If you say something like, “I’ll kill you”, “you are ugly”, or say something very bad to the water, the water looks very, very dirty when frozen.
You can google that information on ‘Dr. Emoto’s Message from Water’. There are lots of beautiful pictures there.
That’s the power of the body.
Sound
The other element is the sound; the frequency, the vibration. In Chinese ancestry they practiced and found out that making specific sounds, like saying “cho-eeeeeeeeeee”, is very good for kidney energy blockages, like kidney stones, fatigue, healing the bone density, or with any kind of problems relating to kidney energy like reproductive organ challenges.
I have a lot of this information on this in my books, ‘Head to Toe Healing’ and ‘Qi-ssage’.