Tami Simon: Welcome Ken, toInsights at the Edge. Here we are in the Sounds True studio in Boulder, face to face. To begin with the Qigong master, people I think maybe know or think they know what Qigong is. “Oh that’s something kind of like tai chi, right?” What is Qigong?
Ken Cohen: Let’s backtrack a little bit. I don’t like titles very much, but I’ll accept them. But the word that’s often translated as “master” actually in Chinese is Laoshur, which just means “teacher” or “professor.” You can call me a Qigong Master with that explanation. So the question is: What is Qigong?
TS: Yeah.
KC: Qi means “life breath” or “life force.” It’s the energy of life and being. It’s not only within the human body; if you see a beautiful sunset, you could say that there is Qi in the sunset; if you read a great poem or see a great work of art, that’s Qi. It’s that “essence of life.”
Gong means “skill.” So Qigong is the skill of refining and nurturing the life force primarily to improve health. Most people who study Qigong learn it as a series of exercises and meditations for health. However, if you’re involved with sports, whether it’s Chinese martial arts or tennis or swimming, or golf or anything else, you can use Qigong to improve performance by increasing your strength, flexibility, stamina, sensitivity, coordination–all the different skills that we need for sports performance. And many people study Qigong because of what could be called “the spiritual effect”– that is, it creates a quiet, tranquil, alert mind. It’s of course linked to Buddhism and Taoism, but you don’t have to be Buddhist or Taoist to practice Qigong; it’s really just for mental quiet and peace. It’s a great way to release stress.
To put it simply, Qigong is energy cultivation and skill. It is ancient Chinese exercises and meditations to cleanse the life force of any toxins, to get it moving and circulating and to build up a reserve of healing power both for your own self-healing and resilience after times of stress. And you can practice it for sports and as a spiritual cultivation.
TS: Okay, just laying out the basics here, what is the relationship between tai chi and Qigong?
KC: What more people call tai chi, which is actually pronounced “tai-gee” because the word “chi” is not in the title for this exercise, is a more complex choreography. It is a style of Qigong, in so far as tai chi is a healing exercise. Tai Chi is also a martial art. It is a relatively recent style of Qigong that focuses on overall health and has a rather complex series of movements, so there’s much more memory and learning involved. Whereas Qigong are like these little sound bites so you can learn a simple exercise to improve organ function, slow down your breathing and deepen your breath, to increase strength. You can learn these kinds of styles of Qigong in a relatively short period of time. But as with anything, for instance, music, you learn a musical scale but if you play the violin, it takes so long to develop a perfect note. It’s the same thing with Qigong. The exercises are relatively easy to learn, compared to tai chi, but the emphasis is more on quality than quantity. And to explore the depth of what it means to breathe, to stand, to sit, to lie down, to walk–that could take a lifetime. We’re never done with that process. Even something as simple as standing, there is always a way to improve our function.
I will give you an example of one out of so many: we are in a lock-knee culture where people tend to stand. Let’s say you’re waiting in line at the movie ticket or you have a job where you’re standing up, if you’re standing with your knees locked, then you’re freezing up the muscles in the lower spine and then every action, even the action of walking, will tend to jar the lower back. And a lot of our lower back pain is because of locking the knees because these are your shock absorbers; you want them to be working. If you want them to work, you’ve got to create joint space, space in the knee joint, by keeping the knees bent. So there are these little reminders of things we do in everyday life, all the time, within Qigong, so that we can learn how to improve them. That is, to improve our functioning, have more energy, have more joy of life.
There was something that I realized, Tami, is that in looking at all the different books and literature of different things out there about Qigong, there’s something so obvious that I try to emphasize in my Sounds True programs and in my teaching and my work that is even much more important than developing energy and refining chi; it is to appreciate life. The joy of life is a big part of it. If you’re just going to do this because you have this morbid fascination with your body and health, and you become obsessive about it, you’re going to shorten your life instead of lengthen it. You’re going to create a new kind of stress. So I think we need to emphasize, and I try to emphasize, Qigong as a way of having more enjoyment for just everyday things, not just how your body functions but your relationships with other people and your enjoyment with nature, these kinds of everything things.
There’s a saying from a very famous Qigong master, someone I greatly admire, named Wong Ciong Jai, who passed on in 1963. I worked with one of his students. He said, “The ordinary is the extraordinary.” That is, if we learned how to truly be attentive, that we don’t have our mind doing one thing while our body is doing something else, maybe part of our body is going backward while another part of our body is going forward, we’ve disintegrated. If instead, we could be so well organized that our mind and body fully participate in everything we’re doing, then we are revealing at each moment the mystery dimension of life. Then the ordinary is the extraordinary. I think that’s the kind of wisdom tradition, the inner heart of Qigong that people often miss because of their fascination with the exercises, which are beautiful. They are wonderful and fun! But there is another message that is revealing beauty in the every day.
TS: You mentioned standing, sitting, and lying down. Now isn’t it intuitively obvious to do these things? I mean, we are human after all. Do I need to learn a bunch of exercises so I can learn how to stand?
KC: Maybe people need to unlearn. It might not be a matter of learning. It might be a matter of unlearning bad habits that tend to result in the kind of world that we’re in today. We’re in a very sedentary culture, where people’s minds are racing like a videogame or TV set that they’ve forgotten how to turn off.
TS: I can confirm that.
KC: Some people call it the “monkey mind.” It’s a common problem for so many people. So I think it’s a matter of unlearning those aspects of this organized or inefficient use of the body and bad role models. How many of us have been exposed to people who are truly healthy, happy, and comfortable in their bodies and used to using their bodies as a part of everyday life rather than just sitting in front of a computer screen?
So you’re right and not right. That is, yes, sitting, standing, lying down, and walking, these are entirely natural, why do we need to learn it? We do it already. I would say that if we could go back in time a thousand years, and live the way our ancestors lived in nature, where it was required to have knees bent because you want to sense the ground under your feet because you don’t want to step on a branch and scare away the prey that is going to be your food for the next week. If we could go back in time to the period when we did not interfere so much with what is given to us–our bodies and our minds–we wouldn’t need to learn. But today, we need to learn and relearn.
TS: Yet Qigong was developed in an indigenous cultural context. So why was it developed if people were not living sedentary lives in front of computers?
KC: Actually, in China, I hate to destroy a stereotype…
TS: That’s okay! I want you to destroy it, you know, just a little bit.
KC: People think, “Oh the mystical Chinese. They were peaceful all the time just living in the natural world and everybody was writing poetry.” But in fact, look at the period where Qigong really took off. That is from around the second century A.D. through fairly recent times. A lot of Chinese people were separated from nature and working in office jobs. I mean, not in front of a computer, of course, but the only way you could advance in Chinese society was through a series of civil-service exams. That would get you out of poverty and you would be able to better provide for your family. So because there was such a large portion of the Chinese population that were in fact sedentary, and because the human body is the same way, whether you go back a thousand years or now, it’s basically the same biology. I mean, we have new diseases we face. There was a concern of how to relieve human suffering and how to live with more grace, dignity, and more internal strength, how to resist stress.
People had stresses. Whether the stresses were because you might be attacked by a saber tooth tiger or that you’re worried about a family member who is ill, or you’re worried about taxes or finances today; people have always had stress. It’s just something that is basic to human nature. I think Qigong was developed as a way of relieving stress and whatever way it came, and of course it was part of Chinese medicine as well. Let’s say you’re ill and you go to an acupuncturist who will insert a needle at a point that acts as a damn in the river of Chi, the river of life force. When you put the needle in the correct point or points, that blockage is dissolved and the chi flow becomes even.
The basic understanding is that if you have too much energy, or chi in one part of the body, there’s a tendency toward excess, inflammation, and autoimmune diseases. If there’s too little chi, or energy, of course there’s a tendency toward weakness, depletion, maybe poor circulation – cold hands and feet and immune deficiency diseases, such as cancer. From a Chinese medicine perspective, that’s depletion of chi. So if you dissolved the blockage by putting in that acupuncture needle, then the balance is presumably restored. The area that had too much energy is drained out. The area that had too little energy is filled up.
Acupuncture is very old. It goes back well three thousand years. Qigong is equally old and equally ancient. In Qigong, instead of or in addition to going to the acupuncturist, you learn how to regulate your body’s own energy, that is, What kind of practices can I do? What kinds of specific exercises, breathing techniques, maybe even sound – use sound to stimulate the internal organs? What can I do to better manage my own health. That’s a natural human concern. It was as important two thousand years ago, as it is today because people always want to live better.
TS: Just to clarify, whatever romantic notions I have of Taoist sages in caves some place, can you help me understand: what are the origins of Qigong? Can we trace it to a specific person or group of people?
KC: Not one specific person because there are several streams, you could say, that create this modern river of Qigong. Qigong itself is not one thing. In addition, it’s important for people to realize that there are many different styles of Qigong and you’re not expected to learn all of them. You find out a few methods that work. Basically, in putting together the programs for Sounds True, the various DVDs and CDs, I was trying to think about what would be the most effective for the general public. What styles of Qigong could they learn effectively from these kinds of medias? It would really help improve their quality of life.
There are several origins of Qigong. Probably the earliest, I would say, is called shamanism. In Chinese it is pronounced Wu (woo). There was and still is an indigenous form of Chinese spirituality. Very similar to shamanism worldwide, but by shamanism I mean an attempt to contact the transpersonal and spiritual realms (in-dwelling, not just other) to contact that realm directly (through your sensitivities, dreams, your intuition) rather than going through a church or a priest or a book or some other form of an intermediary. In that sense, it has many similarities to Native American, African Indigenous traditions and so forth. There’s definitely a shamanic element in Qigong.
I don’t want to burden you now with all the fine details, but just one example of how we know that, if you look at ancient Chinese rock art, pictographs, you can see representations engraved by Chinese tribal people, of Qigong-like postures. Maybe they were done as part of dance. Maybe you imitated an animal and realized over time, “Hey, by imitating the crane, over time I can develop more grace, relaxation, and balance. Or by imitating the bear and dancing like the bear in my tribal ceremony, I can develop more strength, or perhaps more courage or confidence in being who I am. There’s what could be called the “Shamanic Root of Qigong.”
And then, as you mentioned, there is Taoism. Taoism is the original pan-Chinese form of spirituality. That is, it didn’t belong to some specific tribal group but it became one of the earliest spiritual and religious traditions of ancient China. It began around third or fourth century BC with the philosopher Laoza, whose name means the “old child.” It still exists today. Taoism is a little bit hard to define. This is why I want to do the four-CD set with Sounds True, but Taoism you could say is the search for the Tao, not only philosophically, but through practices such as meditations. By the “Tao,” I mean, harmony with nature.
Nature outside of you and also your own inner nature, to understand that more deeply and how to live in greater harmony and balance. Taoism was very concerned with the chi, the life force. The Taoists helped develop many of the Qigong exercises and also Qigong-related arts. For example, if you do a Chinese calligraphy, or if you do any kind of painting, with a sense of centeredness, quiet breathing, good posture, clear mind, of course your art is going to be more beautiful, more expressive. There’s less blockages to the creative impulse. Taoists were also very much involved with not only philosophy and Qigong, but how you could apply the concept of chi, of life force, to the various arts, including cuisine, cooking. And what kinds of foods contribute to health. We have indigenous tradition or shamanism, Taoism, Chinese medicine, how to dissolve blockages in chi so it flows more easily, so you’re in better health and more resilient. Finally, China has always been fascinated with the martial arts. It’s just the national sport. I like to tell my students that if Qigong had developed in the US, we would have had baseball qigong and golf gong. But in China, because everyone has always loved the martial arts, naturally they were looking for ways to improve your strength and performance–whether you are practicing it as a kind of energy play, a sport, or in the old days, as self-defense.
TS: I will not attack you, don’t worry Ken. We don’t need to test that part of it.
KC: Good. I prefer not to. We’re friends after all.
TS: Exactly.
KC: Although, in martial arts, they say that the highest skill is to turn your highest enemy into a friend. Actually, even in the martial arts of self-defense, we’re looking for a way not just to avoid conflict, but how to skillfully help someone realize that their own aggressive impulses get them in trouble. An example is that someone punches you and you move out of the way, as though you’re saying, “Ah, you want to punch me? I’ll respect your opinion; I just won’t be there where you want to punch.” There’s a certain mindset, a Taoist mindset, in the martial arts.
In any case, the idea of using Qigong exercises to condition the body, make you more impervious to injury, make you quicker on your feet and on the punch, more sensitive to the interpersonal situation of the martial arts. Naturally, because of this, there were many styles of Qigong that developed just as a way of improving your martial arts or today, you would say your sports performance. I think we need to take Qigong out of the specific martial-arts context, which was natural for China, and look in this country to how we can use to more greatly enjoy and improve our ability in whatever is your favorite sport. You can take the Qigong exercises that are used for health and on the Sounds True CDs and use those same exercises to improve your ability in volleyball or any sport you like, even football.
TS: Football? Even football?
KC: And basketball. One of my students was a basketball coach and his team won a championship. I have other students of soccer, actually girls, and a high school soccer coach, and his team also won a state championship. Here’s one reason: If you develop a strong posture and a feeling of being rooted into the ground, so you’re like a tree with deep roots. The deeper the foundation, the taller you can build the building. So if you do that, and let’s say in basketball, somebody is dribbling, and they had this Qigong training, someone else comes to block them and somebody’s body touches them and they fall down. The referee can’t call a foul because the other didn’t push him. I’ve seen referees say, “Oh my god. What’s happening here? Seems like something supernatural.” It’s not. It’s just that if you use your body more efficiently and you’re more in touch with your inner strength, you improve your ability in whatever sport you’re involved in.
As I was saying, shall I admit this on air? I don’t know much about football. I don’t watch football. But I had this guy who was this famous football quarterback and everyone in the workshop was saying, “Oh my god, do you see who that guy is? Do you know who that is?” He was there because he was just interested in Qigong, and I think mostly for health. But I asked him at one point to try to push me. So you’re supposed to be really good at tackling, right? I’m just going to stand in this particular posture and I don’t have huge bulging muscles. And I said, “Push me over” in front of my students. He was using all of his strength and I asked him, “Why can’t you move me?” He said, “I’ve never seen anything like that.” And I said, “Because you don’t know yet how to get maximum efficiency in posture and in your own power. You apply these principles of Qigong so that everything is organized according to your intent so that if you’re going forward, part of your body isn’t walking backward.”
If you can get that degree of what the Chinese called “Jung Ti Gin,” whole body power, not fragmented power, whole body power. If you push someone, your hand is expressing the pressure of your foot on the ground because the force is rising up through the leg and then into the hand. If I use my whole body, there’s a lot of strength. I told this quarterback that if he learned to do that, then he would have twice the amount of power. He had more than enough strength and power to push me over. Considering the difference in our size and his athletic training, he should have thrown me against the wall. The only reason that didn’t happen is because part of his body was in internal conflict and that is what needed to be taken care of. And then his ability in football would improve.
We can use Qigong to improve ability in any sport. Again, to go back to your original question, the streams, as I called it, that feed the river of Qigong are native Chinese shamanism, Taoism, Chinese medicine, and the martial arts, or sports. Not necessarily in that particular order. But these are the origins of Qigong and they also to a larger extent explain why someone would study Qigong. Even the shamanic aspect…if you wanted to have a deeper communion with the spirit of nature and learn how ancient people perceived the world, what contributed to their feeling of belonging in the universe? Well, you could practice Qigong for that. Essentially you’re cultivating the shamanic aspect of Qigong.
TS: Okay, so there are a lot of different streams and it makes sense. There are these four main different streams. If you had to summarize the principles that they generated, the core principles of Qigong, could you do that for us? What would be your encapsulated summary?
KC: Body, breath and mind. If I had to summarize, I would say those three things. And those three facets have been used also in the most modern definitions of Qigong because people have been looking recently, scholars in both China and the West, have been trying to come up with a good, simple definition that everybody could relate to. So another definition (and there are so many we could use) in addition to the one I gave at the beginning of this program is: Qigong is a way of tuning or regulating the body, breath, and mind to bring them into a state of harmonious unity.
Let’s go into that just a little bit more…basic principles of Qigong: First, pay attention to the body. That is, learn how to improve your posture, breathing, and movements. Most people think of Qigong as ancient Chinese gentle exercises, so that’s the body aspect. But once your body is in order and in harmony, then automatically, the breathing can slow down. When we’re anxious, breathing becomes shallow and quick. The average respiratory rate in the United States is about seventeen breathes per minute. When someone is even more anxious than what is considered normal in our society, the breathing rate will go up to about twenty or twenty-two breathes per minute. With Qigong, you can slow down your breathing within one month of practice, whether you’re doing the exercises and/or the meditations, you can slow down your breathing from the average of seventeen breaths per minute to the optimal breathing of three to five breaths per minute.
TS: Wow.
KC: Most people will drop down to five to seven breaths per minute within one month of training but eventually you’ll get down to about three and five. That’s already a sign of greater efficiency because your body’s need for oxygen at the cellular level, that oxygen is the energy of life, the body’s need for oxygen doesn’t change according to how you’re breathing. You need a certain amount of oxygen to survive. If your breath is shallower, then your breathing rate quickens to get the oxygen. But if your breathing is deep and you’re not interfering with the breathing process, then the breathing rate can slow down because now it might take you only ten breathes to get as much oxygen that it took earlier, twenty breaths.
So, pay attention to the body first. Get the good posture first and healthy movement. Then you start working more on breathing. And the emphasis on Qigong breathing is primarily slowing down the breath, deepening the breath, learning how to breathe in a healthy way. Basically it’s belly breathing. You know, when you inhale, the diaphragm drops, the belly goes out and when you exhale the diaphragm pulls back a little bit toward the spine. It is knowing how to breathe in a much healthier way so you have more energy and vitality and again, more joy in life.
The last one, once your body is in order and your breath has slowed down, then as a side effect, the mind becomes quiet. And this is part of the brilliance of Qigong. That is, you can change the psychology by changing the physiology. That’s not to say that psychology and learning about how our mind works or might be influenced by past experiences and so forth or by our hopes and dreams. It’s not to say that that isn’t important. Of course it’s important. But the beauty of Qigong is that instead of working exclusively on the mind, that is, only practicing meditation or only going to a counselor or psychotherapist, the Qigong approach is complementary. It basically says, learn how to relax your body, your breath, and automatically your mind is quiet, tranquil, clear, and alert. So, body, breath, and mind.
TS: Wonderful. I want to go back and underscore five to seven breaths a minute, because listening to you, I’m experimenting with that. First of all, it’s not as easy as I would’ve thought for me to slow my breath down to that pace but I get that it’s possible. I get the mental benefits but can you explain why this is better for me physiologically if I breathe five to seven times a minute?
KC: Sure. The internal organs have what some people call organ reserve, that is a kind of energetic reserve so that if you overstress yourself, for example, you overstress your liver with too many contaminants with a lot of polluted air and water and so forth, then you reach a point where the liver level of assault. You begin to develop problems with the liver enzymes and detoxification, maybe a greater tendency toward cancer. There is very good research that links problems in liver enzyme activity and initiation of cancer. When you slow down your breathing, you’re developing a stronger reserve and a better threshold against those kinds of assaults against the human organism.
In addition, quick breathing tends to create quick brainwaves. That is, our minds are entrained to the rhythm of the breath. You can show this scientifically by having someone’s brain monitored with an EEG, and you can see that if someone’s breathing slows down, the quick brainwaves, how many waves hit the shore per minute, if you’re standing on a beach, those brainwaves start to slow down. So you have less waves hitting the shore per minute. Scientifically this means that you’re in a more relaxed state in general. So slow breathing makes the mind more relaxed and less anxious, less stressful. There is less stress-related disease.
There’s also a lot of very good research now that shows the effect of breathing rate on specific illnesses. For example, heart pain and angina pain seems to be affected by breathing rate and slightly slower breathing will tend to create slightly less pain. Someone who has headaches or migraines – when you slow down your breathing, the blood vessels tend to open and dilate a little bit. For certain kinds of headaches that can reduce the symptoms and pain, some headaches could even be cured. For seizure disorders, some of the great neurologists and neuroscientists have shown a decrease in the frequency and intensity of seizure disorders with slow breathing.
We could go on and on. You can look at the footnotes in various books, including my own book on Qigong to find the details.
TS: I’m feeling inspired, believe me!
KC: There’s no question that slow with deep breathing is one of the best things we could ever do for our health. At the very least, it will reduce the amount of stress. It won’t reduce stressful events. You might still have to drive in traffic. But the problem is not the stressful event, it’s your reaction to it. That is, it’s not the bad news that you received but the fact that there are tragedies in everyone’s life, but that doesn’t mean that you have then go into a state of being hyper alert, where your sympathetic nerve system is on over drive, where your blood pressure goes up and heart-rate quickens, breathing quickens and any back pain gets worse and you forget how to turn that off. Now for the next month, instead of it being an immediate problem…yes, we have our emotional reaction, we want to have our compassion, we still want to feel; we don’t want to turn of the body and mind. We still want to be sensitive. But the problem is that a lot of people in our society today, they’re under stress and that stress just stays with them. They are worried about the economy and they’re physiologically worried every single minute of every single day, and blood pressure and heart problems. We know that stress can cause things other than cancer. Cancer cells tend to develop more quickly under stress than the same person doesn’t have stress. There are so many reasons to slow down the breathing. It’s one of the best things you could do for yourself is to learn to breath more quietly, more relaxed.
I’ll tell you some of the mistakes that people make when they hear that they should slow down the breathing. Here’s what they do, they tense up the breathing, and quick. If it’s slow breathing, it’s silent, quiet; there’s not friction. You want to get rid of internal friction. It’s one of the definitions of stress.
Qigong can teach you how to get rid of friction because as I said earlier, you’re working at odds with yourself, and I gave that image of one part of you walking forward while the other is walking backward. Or your blood vessels are constricted or the bronchial passages are constricted. If you can get rid of those areas of friction, of course you’re going to feel more alive and have more grace and even one could say dignity in everyday life.
TS: Two of the things that always interest me are the teacher and the teaching. So the teaching of Qigong that you’re offering here is so clear and so inspiring. And one of the things I’m curious about is in your own life, when has Qigong been there for you as a resource that you could draw on when stressful events happen, which of course happens to all of us? We’ve known each other for a long time and god knows that big waves keep coming and keep knocking us both down. When has it been a resource and when did you think, “God, even Qigong can’t help me now?” Or did you ever reach that point.
KC: Of course, we’re all human beings. There will of course be times when even with all of the Qigong, where I feel overly stressed. But then I get over it pretty quickly. However, let me express the positive side, now that you know that I’m a human being… this is why I don’t like the word “master,” because sometimes people think, “Oh it’s the divine master and this person is not subject to any kind of stresses or sorrows.” Then they think that when they find out that some family member died and they’re just going to say, “Oh little grasshopper. We’re born and then we die.” I don’t want to live that way. I want to be sensitive and engaged. But Qigong is definitely an extraordinary help.
I wish my daughter was sitting here with us because it would be a great question to ask her. She always tells people that if, god forbid, there was ever a nuclear war, she said that she would want me to be around because she knows that during events that would put most people into a state of panic, I tend to get very calm because I know that only if I’m in a calm, quiet state and my mind is clear, and I’m used to that state from years of Qigong training, only when I’m in that state will I be capable of making good decisions. Otherwise I’ll go out and drive and have a car accident.
TS: Can you give me an example of how you would put yourself in such a deep, calm state in the midst of something extremely stressful? Something personal?
KC: The main thing is to have a practice. If you have a Qigong practice, even if it’s just twenty minutes every morning, then because you are familiar with that physical, psychological, spiritual state, you can go back to it; it will come back to you when needed. I’ll give you an example: Recently I heard about an old friend who had developed cancer and was quiet concerned and I think a lot of people would have gone through tears and heartache. I still feel and concern for my friend, but when I heard the news, my breath became quiet, and I felt that sense of strength and inner power that I get when I do my standing meditation. It’s a type of meditation done from a standing posture. I think I was able to offer some pretty good advice.
Another example is: I had an infection in my hip joint about twenty-five years ago, actually, and it’s given me some limited range of motion, some different physical handicaps. I went to see one of the best known hip surgeons really in the world about three years after that infection. He looked at my MRI and my x-ray and he said, “I don’t know how you can even walk. Are you in pain?” and I said, “No. “And he said, “Looking at your x-ray, you shouldn’t even be able to move your leg.” It is because of the Qigong that I am able to control inflammation. Even if someone has an extreme condition, such as bone-on-bone, I’m not saying that anti-inflammatory or medications or surgery are out of the question, not at all. I really do believe in complementary medicine. But if we could manage our own health better so we’re not so dependent on the experts, we could interact better with our physicians. We would know what questions to ask or what complementary therapies would work best with standard Western medicine so maybe you need less medication. That’s so important.
For me personally, if I didn’t know Qigong, I’ll tell you frankly that I think I would be in a wheelchair because I had that infection in the hip. I got the antibiotics. I had everything Western medicine could do but it left me with bone-on-bone in important areas of the body that you need for walking and moving and living. But I’ve not needed surgery, and I’ve been able to stay mobile and free of pain, healthy and happy. Aside from that, everybody goes through heartaches in their lives for one reason or another.
The Buddha was right when he said, “Life is suffering.” As I get old I realize more and more that I think it’s true. It doesn’t mean that that’s all life is; it’s not an exclusive statement. We’re all going to face times of suffering or heartache, sorrow, grief, or regrets. It’s just part of being alive. And I’ve had them for sure–worries about myself, family members, and life changes. Of course, I don’t have two of me. That’s not a very scientific statement. I can’t say, “What would I have been like if I had not done Qigong?” But I can say, looking at myself and students of mine that have gone through their own challenges, Qigong is extraordinary. It gives you greater happiness, more aliveness, and appreciation for life–more not just physical flexibility but I think even more importantly, mental flexibilities so that if there’s a impediment in the river of life, you can flow around it and not bash yourself against it. Or you will know when effort can be used to create a slight change that is beneficial or when what’s required is just sitting back and accepting and finding out what balance is there.
That’s a difficult skill and I think it’s part of Qigong, Qi-Skill, is learning the skill of how to use mindfulness and awareness efficiently because sometimes an act of will is really an act of obstinacy. You get in your own way and sometimes an act of will is required to change things so we have more a harmonious outcome. So if one of the benefits of Qigong is becoming less stubborn and more flexible with life’s events, and realizing again, as the Buddha taught– who I feel is a great sage, that if we can get rid of some of our personal preoccupation and less selfishness, then we are generally a lot happier. You can also learn that through Qigong practice, because the body and mind are really one system. I know that we say in conventional language, and maybe it’s a necessity of language that we say that the mind influences the body and the body influences the mind.
But really, we’re not divided. We look like that under the microscope, but we’re one system and if we can restore a kind of systemic well-being and health, then we are going to flow with life’s challenges more gracefully. It’s not going to throw us onto the ground where we can’t get back up. I’ve had some students who have had some very serious health problems. Qigong is not a cure-all for everything. I think it pushes the odds more in your favor. You tend to stay healthier, but sometimes things happen to people that we don’t expect. Even if you’re living the right way, sometimes the person will still get the heart disease and cancer. It could still happen.
I am thinking of one student in particular. He was a beautiful man who right up to the end, he maintained his composure. He didn’t suffer any pain until the very end of his life. He was dealing with a terrible cancer. I think Qigong is pretty amazing stuff.
TS: Ken, one of the things that I know about you from your biography is that you were chosen as one of nine Qigong healers, energy healers of different kinds, to be studied at the Menninger Clinic. I’m curious, first of all, to understand a little bit about how Qigong can be used for healing other people. I presume that this was part of the study. And then what took place during the study and what they found out about you and about the other people that were studied.
KC: These were not Qigong teachers or practitioners or masters. It was actually looking at a group of originally fourteen “Energy Sensitives” – people who were known to have some unusual subtle energy healing ability, whether they were doing therapeutic touch or Qigong or indigenous medicine. We had one person who was doing European spiritual healing. It was to look at this group of nationally or internationally known figures and find out when they do their thing, is there something we can measure? The first thing that scientists are interested in is: Can you measure it?
TS: Yeah – I’d like to know this, too.
KC: In that particular study, they weren’t even looking at whether it works in terms of healing a patient. Of course that’s important, and there are other studies that demonstrate the actual healing effects of Qigong or energy healing or Reiki, or things of that type. But this particular experiment, which lasted twelve years, 1983 – 1985, called “Physical Fields and States of Consciousness,” looked at and analyzed what can we measure when people who are known for exceptional healing abilities practice their respective methods. Before the experiment with the fourteen healers even began, they did six hundred experiments with people who were not known for their healing ability. You could say they were ordinary people chosen largely from Menninger Institute staff or people that were known by member of the staff. In those six hundred controlled experiments, nothing unusual was seen. That is, when they would have someone sit in a room with copper walls and sensitive electrometers attached to the walls (remember that Copper is a good conductor) they didn’t find any unusual electrical fields around the body. When they measured the EEG, the brainwaves, or measured flow of electricity on the skin – what’s called “body potential,” there was nothing unusual. Nothing unusual was expected or seen.
Then they take these fourteen healers, and they found that the fourteen produced very unusual, easy-to-measure effects. Then there was a subgroup of nine most-exceptional healers. I ended up being in both the group of the fourteen and the subset of nine. The nine healers, every single one of them, produced extraordinary surges of electricity on the skin measured with an electrode on the ear lobe and on the ankle. That is, you take a baseline reading and you find out, is there a change in the electrical flows when they practice their healing method? And all nine of the healers produced extraordinary fields around the body. So you have a subflooring of copper, a copper ceiling, and copper wall front and back, attach the electrical meter and see, if when for example I’m doing Qigong meditation or I’m circulating the chi through my body through directed awareness and breathing, find out whether or not the copper wall in front of me or anywhere else is measuring an increase in electricity. And even from six feet distance from the body, myself and other healers were able to sometimes cause a five or ten volt spike. That’s extraordinary!
Measuring various other parameters, I won’t go into all of them, a significant one was the EEG, the brainwaves, because the healers were able to produce slow brainwaves, a sign of more inner awareness and quieter state of mind as well as brainwaves that were higher in electricity. If we go back to that image of standing at the ocean side and you’re at a beach and you’re watching the waves hit the shore, you’ve got how many waves hitting the shore within a given period of time? You have more waves coming in more quickly. That’s called the “frequency.” But we want in this brainwave analogy is a slower frequency. But you’ve also got the height of the wave. If it’s a stormy sea, then you have big waves and big wave has more energy and can knock you over. The brainwaves, when they are high, they have more energy and more electricity. That happens as a consequence of more of your neurons, more of the brain cells, doing the same thing at the same time. When your mind is more organized, the electrical output of the brain is stronger. That was clearly seen among all nine of the healers in the Menninger Institute experiments.
You asked me before about healing subjects, about healing a patient or client. There were indeed some experimental sessions in which patients were randomly chosen by Menninger Institute staff and brought into the experiment room and either seated across from me (take me as an example if I’m the healer) or they were in another office in the same building and I wasn’t allowed to meet them. This was to look at distance healing. And again, without knowing anything about them, not even their name, nothing about their health history or their physical or mental condition, I would be asked to attempt a healing, without any physical movement, because I was being videotaped from two angles. You know, it’s easy to in a less carefully controlled experiment to produce false results. If I take my fingers and rub them on a silk shirt, I can create electricity. This was very carefully controlled and the data was analyzed and later published in peer-reviewed scientific journals by some of the best- known scientists in the United States.
Here I am sitting in the chair and there is the patient. I’m mentally intending to transmit chi to the patient. And then we look at what is happening to my brainwaves and what is happening to the electrical output from my body. They found that the moment that I began, automatically there would be this output of chi, but what they are seeing as bio-electricity, or an electrical field that surrounds the body, increases a healing effect as a result of simply tuning into that and saying, “I’m going to transmit healing energy.” There were changes in electrical fields, in electricity on the body, changes in breathing rate, and heart electricity, and changes in so many parameters that they were measuring. And later, of course, the difficult part, they were analyzing to find out what was happening and what it meant and if all of the healers are producing this electrical bioelectric phenomena.
One of the most interesting experiments during that time at the Menninger Institute was when I was doing a distance healing; that is, I was told that there is a person who has been chosen to be my healing patient who is on another floor in the same building and they asked me to tune into this person and attempt a healing. Again, what they were looking at was not whether the healing works, that’s of course also important, but rather simply to see if something is happening, can we measure it? The moment I began, there was evidently a surge in electricity measured on these copper walls and I saw in my mind’s eye an individual sitting on a chair, and I saw that she was in a psychologically depressed state, and I imagined that instead of doing my usual Qigong energy healing, I imagined that I had a feather fan and I was fanning her trying to wave away some of the depression and sorrow.
A year after the experiments were over, I got a print out of the data from the experiments. I didn’t know that anything unusual was happening. The scientists were measuring all of this, but I wasn’t allowed into the room where they were seeing the data. I didn’t know that I was producing unusual brainwaves or electricity or any of that. I was just attempting to do my healing work or my meditations. But a year later when I received a printout, a transcript of what happened, I found out that after the experimental session, when one of the scientists came in and said, “Well, how was that for you?” And they record my answer. I spoke about seeing someone who was depressed and how I was waving the feathers. I then read that the client that they had chosen, when they asked her the same question, she said, “Well, I had been very sad. I came here with some depression. And it was very odd when I sat down after a moment or two of centering myself; I saw feathers all around my body.”
There was an unusual coordination between both the energetic state and sometimes the mental state or imagery of the healer and the heal-ee. This happened a number of times and of course not just with myself, other people who were there as the so-called exceptional healers. The reason I say “so-called,” Tami, I really should mention this, I think everybody has these healing abilities. I’m not unusual. Even though in the reports they say “exceptional healer” or “an energy-sensitive,” these are skills, sensitivities; healing abilities that I feel were entirely natural to all of our ancestors. If you’re living in nature, then you discover it and work with your own natural human abilities. The problem is that we’re out of touch with that today. And Qigong is a way of restoring that connection with nature and with your own natural potentials that have been there all along.
TS: This is one of the things that I’m curious about. We’ve been talking about the personal practice of Qigong, and then I asked you this question about the studies they did on you as a Qigong healer. Do you feel that these healing abilities are simply the natural outgrowth of being a practitioner of Qigong and they just sprouted? Or is there some special gift that you have? Did you purposefully cultivate the healing ability?
KC: That is a wonderful question and one I’ve certainly thought about and it comes up often as people think about healing. Certainly a person can be born with a healing gift. That can be good or bad because some people who have a gift of personal health or being able to help others, they squander those gifts because it’s so natural, they didn’t have to earn it. They didn’t have to work toward it. So they might say well, I never get sick anyway so I’m just going to have big, fatty hamburgers for breakfast and who cares about the amounts of trans-fats? Those people pay the price eventually. It may not catch up with them immediately, but eventually they’ll pay the price because there’s only so many assaults that the human organism can handle. So there are times when people nurture their gifts and other times when they use the fact that it’s a gift, and it’s so easy for them to avoid it and follow a different path in life. I don’t think I have the healing gift. Maybe I did. Who knows for sure? But I don’t think so because I was ill much of my childhood. You asked me earlier about how Qigong has helped me on a personal level; I probably should have started from my childhood.
I grew up in New York City. This is another break from the stereotype. I didn’t grow up in China and I wasn’t raised in a monastery somewhere off in the hills. I grew up in New York City and I was just not adapted to that environment. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the crowded conditions, the bad air, the interpersonal relations, the amount of fear and paranoia that I sensed as perhaps an oversensitive child. And so I started becoming ill and I had almost continuous bronchitis, I was constantly getting colds. Of course, this was the 1950s when a lot of physicians unfortunately did not know that you couldn’t use antibiotics to treat a virus. So I was given antibiotics, one after the next and then there was this kind of downward spiral where the more my immune system was destroyed by those antibiotics, the more sick I got and then the more I would get the antibiotics. I had a lot of health problems.
I started doing both Qigong and tai chi when I was about sixteen or seventeen years. And there was such a turn around in my health. The bronchitis cleared up; I had more energy. I started getting rid of some of the toxins that probably had built up in my body just from taking so many medications. And socially, I started making a lot more friends. My mother used to comment about how when I started those strange Chinese exercises, I seemed to become more sociable. She saw the changes that were occurring in me. So on a physical and psychological level, the Qigong was just fantastic.
TS: Circling back to my question, it’s really, if someone says, “I’m going to commit to a Qigong practice” will healing abilities naturally emerge?
KC: I think so because it happened for me. I’m not sure that I had the gift. Honestly I don’t know. But I do know that for sure, from my own experience and from having worked with so many thousands of students over the years that Qigong can improve your ability to heal yourself and to be of healing help to others as a sort of energy practitioner.
TS: Is there some sort of natural thing that happens, which is once the chi is circulating and being stored in my own being, then I can very simply raise my hands and emit? Is it that natural?
KC: I would say that it is. There are ways of dramatically increasing your ability to transmit chi and to sense aberrations in the chi fields and interpret the signs of “there’s too little chi over that organ and there is too much chi over in that organ.” Or rather than just doing an intuitive treatment, is there a specific type of energy treatment that will reduce excess or build insufficiency or sweep away pain or discomfort; or remove toxins from an internal organ; or create less wear and tear on the body?
There is within Qigong this extraordinary repertoire of healing techniques. The answer to your question is yes and no. You can be born with a gift. You can develop chi for personal well-being and for healing others. The gift of healing and the ability to heal others is something natural to the human being. But you can increase that ability through practicing Qigong. And this is why, in some of the experiments that have been performed mostly in China but increasingly in the West, we’ve seen a difference between a trained Qigong healer trying to emit chi to a laboratory animal that has been injected with Heptocellular Carcinoma, a cancer of the liver. The laboratory animals have been injected with the disease. (I don’t like testing on animals but I read the literature and they do prove that it’s more than just a placebo effect. We presume that the rat isn’t healing because the rat believes in the power and efficacy of the Qigong master.) The Qigong healer holds his or her hands near the animal. You see a reduction in the size of the cancer. You see a certain number of laboratory animals not even developing the cancer, even though it has been injected into their bodies. Then you have other people that have no Qigong training (I’m talking about an experiment that was done in China) imitating the movements, over the animal, but there is virtually no healing effect.
There’s no question that again from not just this experiment but from many others, that if someone trains in Qigong or some other energy-medicine modality, they can have a stronger healing effect with good training and dedication, than someone who doesn’t have the training in the healing modality.
TS: That makes sense.
KC: That’s why I say that it’s natural but we can go back maybe to what are the natural abilities that we had in pre-technological culture, maybe even pre-civilized, where we were so in touch with it. I don’t think I’m romanticizing it. Some people would say, “Oh you just think everything was fine a thousand years ago.” It’s not that. We still had diseases, suffering, and we were still human beings. But we had not learned to so interfere with nature. We weren’t spending our time doing things that the human organism is not genetically adapted to do. And that is to sit in front of computer games or TV screens or be sedentary all day long and not take care of the business of life, which is hunting and gathering and preparing our food, taking care of our children, creating clothing and tanning hides and repairing and mending our living structures and so on. We’re not living natural lives so naturally we are not in touch with the chi, the life force, as our ancestors were. So we are reclaiming something that is just inherent in human beings.
TS: Ken, thank you so much for being with us here at Sounds True; Insights at the Edge.
CC: Thank you this has been a pleasure. So great to talk to you again, Tami.
TS: A real pleasure, very inspiring. I feel kind of fanned just by sitting next to you. Ken Cohen, the Qi professor or Qi teacher. The author of several Sounds True programs including a 100 day Qi training course and a DVD on Qi Healing techniques, how to use Qi to heal other people. All available at Soundstrue.com. Sounds True, many voices, one Journey. Thanks Ken.
CC: Thank you.
