A Man With Something To Say Anout Chi and Healing.

The photo above is of a chi kung teacher and healer who posted the letter below in a yahoo medical chi kung group. His website can be found at the following link;
http://www.iqiyou.com/
A man named David (not me) asked a question and this was Andrew's reply. I found what he said to be very wise and helpful, I hope you do as well.
David, Many forms of qigong can be applied to your problem. Much qigong is designed around Chinese Medicine theory surrounding organ systems, including their main meridians and acupuncture points, which deemphasizes muscular-skeletal issues. Thus, muscular and skeletal issues are addressed with qigong indirectly by linking the areas of pain to meridians or the pain itself to certain organs, which are then treated with a kind of big arrow pointed toward your pain. What you might wish to emphasize in your learning in order to more directly deal with your pain, is the power of intention to locate, surround, penetrate and ultimately dissolve qi stagnation. Qigong involves three essential elements: proper alignment, proper breathing, and proper intention. The qigong forms you might learn, either from a master or from local classes, will teach you these three things. What isn't always mentioned in such classes, though, is that most forms can be modified by intention in order to direct their effects to where you want them. Whether you do your qigong as taught or alter it to serve your purposes, your effectiveness will depend on the level of power you've developed in intention. Intention power develops when 3 general abilities develop: stability of focus, cohesion of attention and connectivity to the senses. Much literature on Zen or Taoism will describe these things in terms of negatives, as in freedom from the "monkey-mind" (stability of focus), freedom from distraction or desire (cohesion of attention), and relaxing into the Now or Great Stillness (connectivity to the senses). But, I like to move toward things rather than away from them, and thinking of it this way helped me make progress. Developing stability of focus is not something, I find, that can simply be chosen or decided upon. My experience is that it's more like rehabilitating an abused animal. You can decide you want to and the be infinitely patient, but ultimately it's the abused animal that sets the timing of your progress. Just so, your focus will either respond or not, and if it does it will do so in its own time. The bait that you hold out to it patiently is uninterrupted time and singularity of focus. A focus meditation that can help is to sit or stand in a qigong-true posture and lay your attention on the Baihui point, Du 20 or just the top of your head. Then, try to leave it there for the period of your meditation, following qigong's 70% rule not to strain. It's likely that you'll have trouble with this at first, as the mind diverts and tires. But, eventually, the spot you focus on actually becomes a kind of home for your attention that you miss when you're not meditating. Around that time, too it will stop jiggling and jumping so much. Gradually, it rests quietly on whatever you've chosen to focus on and you're not even tempted to divert your focus. The peace that comes from this is so enticing, nothing seems worth it. It's in the nature of reality that consciousness activates or vibrates it. Direct your attention consistently on one spot for a period of time and you begin to own that spot, in that it begins to obey your conscious intention. The response is cumulative to several factors, and one of them is the amount of un-interrupted time during which your attention has shone on the object. Interrupt the flow of consciousness, and the effect is something like failing in skip-roping: the whole thing has to be restarted to get it up to its former momentum. Stability of focus, therefore, gives you more bang for your buck when you shine your focus for a period of time on your own body. The stable focus more readily pulls the object of your focus into your awareness and martials its qi to your purpose. Developing cohesion of attention can be practiced by doing qigong or nei gong breathing exercises, and counting each breath that you've been able to complete without thinking of anything other than your breathing. When you first begin, you'll find a distracting thought interrupting you within a 1 or 2 count. If you're interrupted by a stray thought, you begin the count again on the next uninterrupted thought with 1. Over time, you develop the ability to achieve higher counts, and thus greater cohesion of attention. This differs from stability of focus in that this exercise puts you into an active, dynamic situation. The focus that has learned to be stable in a static situation must learn to follow the flow of a dynamic one without losing the central purpose or theme of action. I use the term cohesion to reference the concept I've read about in physics. In experiments, scientists have found that they can concentrate light into a laser form that's then they split, using a mirror for instance to reflect only a portion of the beam elsewhere. When they then do something to only one reflected portion of the beam, the effect will register even in the other parts of the beam. The whole laser beam, in other words, is reacting to the effects of actions taken on only one portion of it, as though it were a single object. Scientists call this super-cohesion. The concept has also been used to compare the cohesiveness of different lasers, finding that a more cohesive laser will suck a less cohesive laser into its wave. Thus, the more cohesive light retains its purpose, while the less cohesive light re-aligns to the greater. I like to think of developing cohesion as developing the ability to choose my reality and my actions rather than simply react to what's happening. The less cohesive I feel, the more a victim I am to my circumstances, or other people, and so is my qi. A a conscious being, much of your perceived reality is under the perview of your unconscious mind, higher self or whatever you call that other side of you. Building intention power is assuming responsibility for some of your perceived reality that has heretofore been controlled unconsciously. Taking that power back requires you to attain with your conscious thought a high level of cohesion. The last aspect of intention, connectivity to senses, reflects the degree to which you can connect to and process the data that's impacting your sensory system. In the previous example using lasers, the more cohesive laser was only able to assimilate the less cohesive one when they were in close proximity or overlapping. Your sensory system is your method of projecting intention into your perceived reality with cohesion. Where your intention is trying to affect a location, your sensory system directs your intention to that location. Your sensory system, therefore is your coordinate system that unlocks reality. You have to feel it to affect it. This is the shortcoming that makes many of the recommended methods in these feel good, new age books seem ineffective. It isn't enough to imagine, believe and project, though these are instrumental. One must connect with things to effect them. When dealing with your pain issue, you want to practice putting your focus on a source of pain and holding it steady there for a time. Use your senses to register the entire surface of the pain, as though it were a landscape of miles and you were getting to know every inch of it. When you've traced it's surface, you'll have a small planet of pain in your attention that you're sort of rolling around to keep your focus on all its sides. It's in the nature of qi to respond to your attention by expanding. So, the stagnant qi will soon loose some of its cohesion, which is to say its inertia. This will allow you to sink deeper into the sensation of the pain, as though it were more like jello or water. Eventually, your sensory data comes form all parts of the pain, indicating you've penetrated clear through and through it. Your inner representation of such a a form will have a tenuous surface, so that its distinct but not static, undulating like a liquid would in outer space. Given even more time, the qi will begin to expand further, so that you can't distinguish its edges so well. The edges will feel fuzzy. Eventually, the whole thing will be a haze. The last stage is for the haze to expand outward until it leaves your immediate sensory vicinity altogether. It isn't necessary to do anything to achieve these things other than to connect to your senses and intend to sense the location as completely as possible over time. The rest is a kind of default reaction to the quality of your attention. The main limitations to achieving this degree of healing is time and intention power. Once you have these in sufficient quantities, though all you need is good alignments and proper breathing and you could heal standing, sitting, lying down or even working on other things. Many masters, for instance, practice calligraphy, not only the beauteous writing, but the spontaneous creation of the poetry they're writing, while sending their intentions into an object. Thus, they estimate that the quality of their result reflects on the quality of their intention and attention. While you haven't developed sufficiently to completely dissolve a location of pain, you might set yourself to 10 minutes at a time of dissolving one layer of it, or a half hour dissolving a small layer of all your pain. When you try this, practice such that whatever you dissolve gets all the way out of the field before you move onward. Stopping in the middle can have adverse side effects, where the qi, now more mobile but still having a toxic affect on you migrates to another location or collapses back into a spasm. That's not fun. Bruce Kumar Frantzis writes a lovely book called "Relaxing into Your Being," that describes a 16-part Nei Gung system for achieving internal alchemy. The breathing exercises described in it are clear and relatively simple meditations. He also describes the dissolving process better than I have. Coupled with a good teacher to teach you alignments, this should be enough to help you deal with your pain. The pain itself can serve as a beacon to your attention to keep you focused, but freeing yourself of it will require that you be more cohesive than the pain, so don't rely too much on it. I just wanted to chime in before we hear from everyone's pet qigong forms, that your most direct route to healing is the development of intension power, and then finding any good qigong teacher. Hope this helps, Lihai Certified in Medical Qigong Qigong Instructor