Spiritual Balancing; What Is Qigong and How Do You Find a Good One?

What Is Qigong and How Do You Find a Good One?

Qigong describes a form of physical exercise that facilitates the flow and the balance of the energy inside the human body to achieve optimal health. Many people in the Chinese American community know that qigong is very beneficial to our physical health. Often, those with chronic illness and suffering from difficult diseases that cannot be cured turn to qigong to find new hope. Nowadays, not only in the overseas Chinese community, but many people in the West today are increasingly practicing qigong to benefit the physical and mental wellness.

So how can qigong help our health?

To understand the therapeutic effects of qigong, we must first have some basic knowledge about traditional Chinese medicine.

The traditional Chinese medicine has a very clear understanding of the human body’s energy system: as long as people are alive, their bodies have biological energy. And it is because of the biological energy that we have vital signs. An electrocardiogram and electroencephalogram can monitor the presence or absence of biological energy, but doctors do not know the true nature of biological energy, as it is invisible.

Traditional Chinese medicine calls this biological energy “qi.” The qi is like air, invisible and intangible, but it is vital to human life activities.

Similar to blood circulation taking place in blood vessels, qi travels via invisible channels. This channel system is very complex, like a network, called is the “meridians” in the traditional Chinese medicine. If the meridians are blocked or run in the opposite direction, it will cause various problems in the body.

In traditional Chinese medicine theory, qi also has a balance issue: there is heat and cold, dampness and dryness, movement and stillness.

For example, the kidney provides “cold” energy to balance the “heat” energy from the heart. In women with menopause, the kidney energy is deficient and can not balance the heat, and thus they will suffer form hot flashes and night sweats.

Qigong can balance the qi like what acupuncture and herbal medicine does. Instead of receiving herbs and needling, one practices qigong with slow and smooth movements and mindful meditation.

So how can one exercise qi? And how do we make make qi, blood, and the meridians more healthy?

From a simple point of view, the role of qigong (energy exercises) is to enable the movement of qi, so as to achieve the following purposes:

  • Promoting the flow of qi and blood and keeping the meridians open;
  • Keeping qi and blood moving in the right direction;
  • Maintaining the energy properties of qi and blood, including the balances between heat and cold, dryness and dampness, and stillness and movement.

How Does Energy Affect Your Health?

As energetic beings, we are extremely sensitive and vulnerable to our environment and people around us.

For instance, if a person wants to attack you physically, he or she has to touch your muscles or bones in order to hurt you.

However, if a person wants to hurt you in terms of energy, he or she doesn’t need to touch you at all. He or she just needs to say a vicious sentence to you, give you an indifferent look, or give you an attitude, all of which can in effect make you feel physically and/or mentally sick.

Then, if one stays in an emotionally unhealthy environment for a long time, it can cause energy blockage and imbalance, consequently physical and mental dysfunction. It is why a person with past trauma can have persistent health issues.

On the other hand, when a person is calm, and the qi and blood both flow very well, the body will be healthy. This is why traditional Chinese medicine practitioners say that peace of mind is the secret to longevity. Traditional Chinese medicine practitioners especially emphasize the need for a peace of mind and the importance of breathing regulation and calmness–the foundation needed for traditional Chinese medicine to produce good results.

However, it is easier said than done, because there are many things in this world that can affect our mind, and it takes practice to achieve a peace of mind.

A person’s emotions are reactions and judgment to what is happening around him or her. If it is something bad, he or she may be angry; if it is something good, he or she will be happy.

So, what determines our judgment? It’s our values. It’s a matter of one’s worldview and beliefs. Therefore, beliefs are very important.

Traditional Chinese medicine also places special emphasis on “virtue,” which is actually a very healthy eternal energy. Since qi is very unstable, it will be constantly consumed; and since qi is very sensitive, it is easily affected by emotions and by external factors. As a result, qi will often move in the wrong direction or lose balance. People say that if there is qi, there are illnesses. Many people have a lifetime of hustle and bustle, and in the end, they end up with only qi. All the emotions are qi, including anger, joy, and many others.

Say I have never paid much attention to my beliefs, emotions, lifestyle, or interpersonal relationships, and I only paid attention to my own body. Now I am locking the stable door after the horse has already been stolen. This is because ultimately, people do not live for their bodies. Even a healthy body will eventually come to an end, and the maintenance of the body alone will eventually make people feel empty and fearful.

However, the essence of human life, or in terms of traditional Chinese medicine, the human soul, can be nourished by virtue and morality. In fact, the Western and Eastern concepts of benevolent thoughts and meditation are the same, and in modern medicine they’re called positive energy psychology.

Virtue is a wonderful type of energy produced when humans act benevolently, and it has an eternal effect on our souls. This virtue is also called gong de.

In other words, besides exercises, gong actually refers to an eternal energy generated when a person cultivates and tempers his or her heart, and this is directly related to the future of one’s soul.

Therefore, true qigong practice is both internal and external: not just moving your body’s energy, but also cultivating your spiritual health.

How to Choose a Better Qigong Practice

We know that the West has many forms of exercise, such as yoga; in Asia, there are also many schools of qigong, some of which require a lot of tuition to learn. In this case, how do we find the right qigong practice for ourselves?

Currently, among yoga practices, meditation methods, and other regimens, many are based on the concepts of earliest traditional cultivation practices. As the later generations didn’t understand the true nature of cultivation practices, they dismembered these systems of practice, took out some of the contents that met their own ideas and needs, thus turning cultivation practices into various methods with newly created terminology. Therefore, all these different types of yoga that we see today have become a kind of therapy for people, and naturally they have to charge for it.

However, the original cultivation practices were free of charge. In the past, Jesus didn’t charge people tuition for teaching his own cultivation practice. He only told people what to do and what not to do. The Buddha and Lao Tzu, the founder of Buddhism and Taoism, respectively, didn’t charge their followers, either.

The purpose of these true traditional cultivation practices is to save people’s souls, and the physical benefits they bring are only a by-product, not the main focus.

Therefore, I personally recommend that you choose an original, authentic, and complete cultivation practice, rather than a modified, improved, and mutated method. This is because the true qigong cultivation practices are free of charge, as their purpose is not to make money off you, nor are they entirely for your health and fitness.

The importance of an excellent cultivation practice system is that it enables you to benefit at all levels, including the biochemical level, energy level, and your soul. It is an integrated, complete, and comprehensive system.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Epoch Health welcomes professional discussion and friendly debate. To submit an opinion piece, please follow these guidelines and submit through our form here.

Jingduan Yang

Jingduan Yang Author, teacher and international expert on acupuncture and Chinese medicine, integrative medicine, and psychiatry. Dr. Yang is based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You can find out more about Dr. Yang at his website http://www.YangInstitute.com
Health 1+1 is the most authoritative Chinese medical and health information platform overseas. Every Tuesday to Saturday from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. EST on TV and online, the program covers the latest on the coronavirus, prevention, treatment, scientific research and policy, as well as cancer, chronic illness, emotional and spiritual health, immunity, health insurance, and other aspects to provide people with reliable and considerate care and help.

Meditation is our Natural State

WELLNESS

Meditation is  Time-Tested Way to Holistically Alter Gene Expression

This improves heart and cranial health, boosts immunity and self-healing power, kicks in ability to break down viral RNA
BY HEALTH 1+1  JULY 2, 2022

In recent years, meditation has become a social trend. While the body appears calm on the surface when meditating, the genes in the body change dramatically.

Meditation is typically a seated affair, but there are moving meditations also, like tai qi and qigong.

From the late 1970s to the 1990s, a variety of Chinese qigong masters came out to teach qigong practices, and many Chinese people developed the habit of going to the park in the morning to practice, a trend that came to be called “qigong fever.”

Epoch Times Photo
A meditator in Central Park. Falun Gong’s popularity was such that between 70 million to 100 million people took up the practice within a decade. (Samira Bouaou)

Later, qigong spread from China to the West, such as the widespread practice called Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa). Most of these qigong and yoga practices originated from the Buddha school. In the past, yogis emphasized spirituality and spiritual enhancement. Nevertheless, after yoga came to the West, its spiritual aspect was excluded, and only the physical adjustment part was left, which is the most popular form of yoga that we see today. The yoga practices with more depth also emphasize the use of meditation to train people’s consciousness, not just to improve the balance of the body.

Meditation is becoming increasingly popular in the West, with even some executives practicing meditation during their lunch breaks to improve their work efficiency.

Epoch Times Photo
Research shows that just 10 minutes of meditation per day can increase business students’ physical, mental and emotional awareness. (Shutterstock)

According to a survey conducted in 2019, 14 percent of people in the United States had tried meditation.

Meditation has become a very important social phenomenon. Why did this occur, and what are its benefits to people?

Improved Heart and Cranial Nerve Health

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were some studies that tried to use meditation to help patients alleviate their COVID-19 sequelae or vaccine side effects.

As early as 2020, professors at the University of California–San Francisco recognized that the impact of COVID-19 was so severe that it could damage multiple human organs at the same time. Two doctors, Juliet Morgan and Meghan Jobson, found that meditation could help patients recover from their symptoms.

Even beyond holistic health communities, there seems to be a degree of international consensus that meditation is helpful for people recovering from the side effects of COVID-19 vaccines and the lingering effects of the disease itself.

The Western medical community has been doing research on meditation for two to three decades, and meditation has been found to have the following benefits:

  • activating specific brain regions;
  • increasing heart rate variability;
  • suppressing inflammation; and
  • increasing telomerase expression, which affects the body’s aging mechanism.

In addition, meditation has been shown to be beneficial for both myocardial damage and neurological side effects caused by the COVID-19 vaccines.

Researchers have observed changes in brain activity during meditation through brain imaging techniques and brain wave tests, and they found that the insula and premotor cortex were effectively activated during meditation.

A 2013 study published in The Journal of Social Psychology showed that even five minutes of meditation improved heart rate variability, a parameter used in Western medicine to reflect the elasticity of the interval between each heartbeat. A high heart rate variability indicates strong cardiac regulation.

Epoch Times Photo

Moreover, there are different stages of meditation, and the meditation experience of the study subjects varied. For instance, the effects experienced by long-term meditators and occasional practitioners were discovered to be different.

Immune Genes Significantly Upregulated

When meditating, the body may appear to be still, but there are dramatic changes taking place at the microscopic level.

A large-scale genomic study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) showed that meditation activates the body’s immune system.

In this study, the subjects used a meditation method that emphasized stimulating inner thoughts and potential, rather than just focusing on physical movement and the muscle and bone balance.

Three hundred and 88 subjects participated in an eight-day meditation practice, and their blood samples were collected for comparison at four different points in time: two time points before the session, the last day of the eight-day session, and three months after the session.

It was discovered that after eight days of meditation, many genes in the human body were significantly upregulated, and the range of their upregulation was two to four times.

Three months after meditation, the regulation of some genes returned to levels close to those before meditation, but there were still some genes whose upregulation remained. This means that the effects of meditation are long-lasting. And the finding that an eight-day meditation practice still has positive effects after three months is delightfully surprising.

Meditation Activates Powerful Self-Healing Genes

The researchers classified the genes according to their effects and found that many of the genes that were most substantially regulated after meditation were antiviral and related to immunity enhancement.

A total of 220 immune genes were upregulated, and 68 of which were related to interferon and belong to the innate immune mechanism. The eight days of meditation had a very significant strengthening effect on the overall immunity of the body.

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This study was conducted on peripheral blood and showed that meditation had an effect on the entire body’s immunity, not just on one organ.

The study also observed that meditation not only enhances the interferon and immune activation responses, but it also improves the body’s ability to break down and metabolize RNA so that if there is an invasion of viral RNA, the body can degrade it relatively quickly.

Epoch Times Photo

The Healing Effect of Meditation on Long COVID and Vaccine Side Effects

Is meditation effective for patients with long COVID symptoms or vaccine side effects? The answer to this question pertains to each patient’s own physical qualities, immune potential, and the severity of the disease.

However, it’s clear that meditation can regulate a number of genes that are important for the regulation of the immune system, including TRIM22, STAT1, and STAT2.

STAP2 is closely related to interferon and can bind to STAT1, and it can combine with the interferon regulatory factors to affect innate immunity. TRIM22 also affects the expression of gamma-interferon.

Meditation has a positive effect on these key genes. Therefore, overall, effective meditation will definitely help with recovery from COVID-19 symptoms and vaccine side effects.

Epoch Times Photo

The study also compared meditators with patients with mild and severe COVID-19 symptoms. The researchers used red dots to represent upregulated genes related to natural immune and antiviral mechanisms, and blue dots to represent downregulated genes. The genes in meditators were essentially red, compared to many genes expressed in blue (indicating severe impairment) in people with mild and severe COVID-19 symptoms.

Many genes related to virus resistance are significantly upregulated, so in addition to helping with recovery, meditation is also very effective in preventing infections and severe COVID symptoms.

Epoch Times Photo

Qigong and Tai Chi Also Cause Changes in Gene Expression

In addition to meditation, studies have found that yoga, tai chi, and qigong can all improve our health at different levels.

A study published in Frontiers in Psychology comprehensively analyzed the effects of yoga, tai chi, and qigong on the human body at different levels, including changes in gene expression, biomolecules, and neurotrophins. And it found that yoga, tai chi, and qigong can have multifaceted effects on antioxidant, anti-aging, and anti-inflammatory aspects, as well as on cancer prevention and immune system enhancement.

Researchers used microRNAs to test and compare the expression of multiple genes in both yoga practitioners and walkers who listened to relaxing music in a natural setting.

The conclusion is that during the short period after yoga practice, 97 genes in the yoga practitioners’ bodies were regulated, with increased expression.

In the reference group of walkers, there were 24 genes with increased expression. That is, 73 extra genes were regulated as a result of yoga practice.

This was not a large-scale study, and only a small number of genes were analyzed. Nowadays, as genetic sequencing technology is becoming increasingly advanced, we hope to see larger analyses of the effects of these traditional health practices on gene expression.

 Health 1+1  is the most authoritative Chinese medical and health information platform overseas. Every Tuesday to Saturday from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. EST on TV and online, the program covers the latest on the coronavirus, prevention, treatment, scientific research and policy, as well as cancer, chronic illness, emotional and spiritual health, immunity, health insurance, and other aspects to provide people with reliable and considerate care and help.

Meditation, Our Natural State.

Meditation is a natural relaxation state of the mind and perhapsthe most importantda7644252cfd8101559590a4d2ea6d3b meditation mental exercise to practice during our lifetime. Meditation is actually our natural state and can be practiced throughout the day.

Mindfulness can be practice all the time by simply focusing on the current moment, not yesterday or tomorrow but the present moment, paying attention to what you are doing, being aware of your your surroundings, your  thoughts and emotions.

The proper way to meditate is just start by developing a practice over time,  but start with what works for you. Sitting in a chair or floor with good posture, close your eyes, take 5–10 slow deep breaths, following your breath. Your relaxing your mind so try not to think of anything. Just focus on a point in the front of eyes. You will find your thoughts drifting to problems just bring the focus back to the point in front of the eyes. The time you meditate is up to you.

This is the first step of Dzogchen, an esoteric tradition of teachings considered to be the highest and most definitive path to enlightenment by Tibetan Buddhism. Buddha found enlightenment with the breath sitting under a tree. So with the will and wisdom, Dzogchen becomes an incredibly profound and effective method for achieving enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. The fundamentals of Dzogchen meditation meditation_quotecan be found here, and even may be the most powerful meditation technique.

Make meditation part of your life and you will see the world anew.

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