Yvonne Lau, President of Mayway Herbs and Dr. Skye Sturgeon discuss Qi! In this conversation, we explore the nature of Qi, where it comes from, how it functions in the body, and why it remains central to Chinese medicine. The discussion touches on cultivation, how acupuncture and herbs influence Qi, and how practices like Qigong support its movement and strength.
Watch the video, listen to the podcast, or read the transcript (below)!
Yvonne Lau: Hi, Skye. I was saying because we have such fun conversations during our meetings when we get off topic and talk about something that's not business related that I thought it would be fun to actually record us talking about something else. And because we don't know who's actually listening to our podcasts or watching videos, they could be practitioner or their patient or an acupuncture student or anyone basically, I thought it would be fun to have this conversation about something super basic in Chinese medicine, the concept of Qi.
So, thank you for joining me today. I love that we get to have just a fun conversation.
SS: Okay. Good.
YL: So, my first encounter with the concept of Qi was probably when I was seven years old, 1977. And this was watching Star Wars, the movie when it was in the theater. In Star Wars, there's this concept of the force, which is this universal energy that the Jedi warriors are able to harness and then focus and have these superhuman powers, like superhuman strength or that they can even levitate or control people's minds, which was completely inspiring and amazing, of course, to a seven year old. And decades later, when I read that George Lucas had actually been inspired by Buddhist concepts and Taoism and the concept of Qi when he came up with this idea of the force, I found that just amazing. And it might be a little misleading, if someone equates the force with Qi, so I would love for everyone to get a clear explanation of it from you today. And so, what is Qi?
SS: Well, I should say my first encounter was I had a lifelong problem with bronchitis. And a friend of mine suggested that I try acupuncture, and I knew nothing about it. I thought that's some kind of voodoo medicine where they stick needles in you. And my practitioner told me that I needed to work on my lung Qi. And I went home, told my wife that I didn't know what this woman was talking about. Somehow I was going to tonify my lung cheese.
YL: Your lung cheese?
SS: Yeah, cheese. What kind of cheese is that? So, that was my first encounter with the idea. And she educated me really nicely. It's been a lifelong study since then.
That was my first encounter with it. So, what is Qi? Well, actually it turns out it's a lot of different things in different circumstances. And I think life force is a good place to start because really everything has Qi. Meaning that it has an energy to it.
Things vibrate even if we can't perceive them. I mean, for instance, a rock, you say, well, a rock has rock Qi because it has heat. And it's putting off electromagnetic energy that could be said about anything, as a matter of fact. Yeah, Qi is a universal thing. And even in physics, when you talk about the different forces that are present, gravitational force, electromagnetic, or all these types of things, there are also forces that hold together atoms, and we're still exploring what that is.
But in ancient China, which certainly knew nothing of the scientific method particularly, they had to create a metaphor for understanding how things are what they are. And so, Qi winds up playing a prominent role in trying to describe how things are done, how things can become unbalanced because there's an imbalance in the Qi. So in a way, it's a very large term that means different things in different circumstances.
YL: A lot of people have tattoos of Chinese characters and they often have the word Qi in Chinese. I think they think it's energy.
SS: They do think it's energy. But if you look at the radical or the character, I should say, it's composed of two radicals. One of which means uncooked rice.
And the other means breath or air. So, when we talk about where does Qi come from? In the human body, there's the contribution to Qi from food and the contribution to Qi from air. And so one very simple understanding in humans--where we get the energy that we have, that we use in different ways is that we oxidize glucose.
So this is basic biochemistry. You take glucose, add oxygen to it, and get energy, which is stored in the body in different ways. One of which is ATP, plus carbon dioxide, which is a waste product that leaves the system, plus water. What kind of water? Intracellular water, because inside of the cells that produce this Qi, it's a bag of water. And so where does that water come from?
That comes from the metabolism of glucose with oxygen. So that's a very basic way to understand. Now, the other thing that I like to think about is I could have a bowl of sugar and put it on a table. There's oxygen in the air, nothing happens.
Why? Because in our bodies it does happen because we have another form of Qi. Because nothing happens unless you add energy to that bowl of sugar. So if I take my kitchen torch and I put that onto the sugar and caramelize that sugar and I'm making creme brulee, we're gonna get energy, right? Because I have added energy to that system.
Interestingly, in metabolism, we are not adding that energy, but we are lowering the amount of energy required to have that biochemical reaction take place. How is that lowered? That is lowered through enzymes. And the enzymes that we use in our body to do this are all made of protein. Proteins that are configured in a particular way that they lower the energy of activation sufficiently that that reaction takes place so that we get the energy from the glucose. It's not adding energy, but it's lowering the amount of energy required to make that happen.
So where do those enzymes come from? They come from Yuan Qi.
YL: Yuan Qi.
SS: Yeah, Yuan Qi, which is original Qi. And that original Qi comes from Jing or essence. What is the Jing? The Jing is our DNA. And encoded in the DNA is the amino acid sequence necessary for those proteins to make the enzyme that lowers the energy of activation.
So that is Yuan Qi. A different kind of Qi, and it comes from our DNA, comes from our Jing.
YL: So is Yuan Qi also known as prenatal Qi? Is that what Yuan Qi is or is that something different?
SS: When we talk about prenatal, generally you speak of prenatal Jing because that is what you get from your parents.
You get Jing from your parents, and so it is created at conception. That is the prenatal gene. After you're born, then to sustain, and all of the information that is required to make a human being is in that prenatal gene. Not only is the information there, but somehow the creation of these cells that make us the multicellular organism that we are, they know where, how and what to become. So for example, this group of cells in the developing embryo becomes the liver.
This becomes the lung. All that information is encoded in the prenatal Jing.
You get what you get from your parents, that's where your starting block is, that's what you develop from, but that has to be sustained. And that is sustained through the food Qi plus air Qi gives you the 'correct' or 'upright' or 'righteous' Qi that is what is necessary to continue to be alive. So that's the postnatal Jing. But Yuan Qi is, in my interpretation of it, you take the original starting material, which is the DNA, which has the code, the genetic code in it.
All these genes that have different functions, oftentimes all they are doing is creating a protein that is used as an enzyme that runs all kinds of biochemical reactions in the body.
YL: I'm finding it fascinating that you're interweaving science plus TCM concepts together. And, you know, they both make sense, like, with each other, like this dance that you're doing in terminology.
SS: So, my take on this from the very beginning has always been like, I need to know why this isn't just woo-woo. Okay? To me, it was always there, this reality and there are different ways of expressing it, different languages. And so, in China, pre-science China, they still had to create ways of life and ways of sustaining health and treating disease. And they came up with a physiology that is metaphorical.
You know, people got killed in battle and their guts came out and everything, and they could see what the organs were. But there was never any study of anatomy in that way because that was considered to be a kind of a taboo that you would dissect bodies. But they knew that there were organs, but they didn't know exactly what their function was, so they created a language that described what they saw. And they discussed that among each other and came up with these theories in a way of metaphorical understanding, which was important, especially when it turned out to be predictive and reliable and got results that you were looking for.
So if you had this language at work, well then, now we've got a language of understanding things that are really based upon very fine structure, electron micrographs and biochemistry and physics and all this stuff, but it's the same body. It's the same.
YL: Function that's happening.
SS: Yeah, the same being. And so, it's just a way of understanding it. So, to me, it's like translating language. I want to understand because I have found Chinese medicine to be just marvelous. And what it's able to do, a different way of looking at health, different way of looking at disease.
Disease isn't just a thing that happens to people, but it's an interaction between a person's diet and lifestyle and physiology and their genetics and all these things come together. So, it's just a different way of translating these concepts in a way that is understandable. My mind, I was trained in science before I ever got involved in acupuncture. So, I had to find a way to make it seem logical and real and practical and not just like say, woo-woo. So all of these are, again, concepts, they are metaphors to reach an understanding of something.
I'll give you an example that's always intrigued me. Imagine a tree, a beautiful tree, that's got leaves and branches and grows out of the ground, reaches up to the sky. And if you were to go to the very tip top of that tree and find a leaf, you would find that it contains moisture. And this moisture is necessary for it to be alive. Apart of being alive is using water in various ways.
And so, the way that tree gets water up to the very, very tip top is that it has little tiny receptacles at the top that catch the rain as it comes…. No, wait a minute-- that's not how it happens. The rain comes down, goes into the roots, and the tree is able to bring the water, against gravity, all the way up to the very tips of its branches and its leaves, and there's no pump. How does it do that? I've studied botany and I know about the structures of the tree. But the easy answer to understand is that there is 'tree' Qi.
The tree knows how to do what it does. Another example might be our circulatory system. We've got a pump that takes oxygen that it got it from the lung, sends it out to all parts of the body. And it starts with arteries, and they get smaller and smaller and smaller until they become capillaries. So, every single cell is in touch with the bloodstream, carrying oxygen and nutrients and chemical messengers and white blood cells and everything to every single cell in the body.
And it starts out with a certain pressure, push that blood out till it gets to the very, very smallest little capillary. And there's an exchange that takes place where the cell gives up the carbon dioxide waste product and takes in the oxygen that provides the metabolism for that cell. And that blood goes into the venous system very, very tiny little capillaries, becomes larger venules, and then becomes veins, and then comes back to the heart. As it approaches the heart, the pressure gets greater and greater. How is that blood able to flow back to the heart?
It's not a closed system. There's all kinds of places it could leak out, but it doesn't. That's because there's heart Qi. I don't know how to do this. I'm a smart guy.
I don't know how to do it, but my heart does. And that is Qi. That is Qi because our organs, our systems have evolved over millennia, over millions of years, to the point that it functions correctly. Amazingly, over and over and over and over again, functions correctly. This knowledge, this inherent knowledge that is within these systems, these tissues, these organs, is Qi.
It knows how we can go from a gene in a fertilized egg to a multicellular organism, all the parts of which work on ongoing basis. And all I have to remember, and I don't even have to remember this, but all I have to do is breathe. And I have to eat.
So, by getting the Qi from food, the nutrients from food, adding oxygen, all the biochemistry in my body works, I don't know. This knowledge, I can study it, I can understand it, I can use equations, and I can study all kinds of physiology and everything else. But in China, they knew how it happened. It was Qi. Very easy to understand because it's obvious, it works.
So, there must be this force, this life force that is creating all of this. The cells go to the right place, they know the right thing to do, they interact with each other. And one of the problems that we face disease-wise is cancer. Well, cancer is nothing more than a proliferation of cells that displace normal healthy cells. And that displacement, just pushing them away in the wrong place causes dysfunction because the Qi has been disturbed.
And that's the cause of the disease. You might call that evil Qi because it's not promoting health or vitality, it's a disease. So, we call that evil Qi. So, evil Qi can appear in different ways. It can be a virus, a bacterium.
It can be an enzyme that's not made correctly. It can be an organ that starts to fail because it's been damaged by epigenetic factors that change the functioning. There are all kinds of ways that disease can occur, and we can call that evil Qi because it's different than the righteous Qi. Righteous Qi is the correct tree that maintains homeostasis and promotes health.
YL: Yeah. It's so interesting. As I'm listening to you talk about Qi, I realize that just in the Chinese vernacular, how Qi is so important. Because like when you're talking about our cells and everything, our bodies know what to do because the Qi is flowing. And in Chinese, when someone dies, you call it broken Qi, actually.
And when we get angry, it's sheng Qi, like we grew Qi, because I guess it suddenly raises your Qi a little bit to be angry. Or when we say you're wasting your time, we say you're wasting your Qi. So much of Chinese thinking, and just even the vernacular, it surrounds the word Qi, I guess, because it's such a deep concept for us culturally. You know?
SS: I think there is an acceptance of the way life works. And you don't have to even necessarily understand it in fine detail to be in alignment with the way things are supposed to be. You mentioned getting angry. So, Qi also has to do with Shen, our consciousness. I mean, if you think about how humans have evolved, we have evolved to be a multicellular organism with different tissues and different organ systems and we have these perceptions and we have a memory, we have the ability to self-reflect with this consciousness.
And this consciousness is just another way that Qi is manifested. Qi can provide for movement because our muscles can move. And how is that movement accomplished? Well, our cells in our muscles that are doing biochemistry that allow the movement to take place. Well, we would call that Qi.
And Qi is supposed to be able to move, and Qi is supposed to support us. And so, our emotions are a manifestation of Qi. It's a complex interaction of lots of different things. And if you could get the Qi balanced and correct, then you would expect that things would have some sense of normalcy. This is the way you should be.
YL: So, if Qi is an underlying principle of life generally and of traditional Chinese medicine, then all the Chinese medicine therapies that we use, most of it is actually about doing things to your Qi, correct?
SS: Yes. Well, I think that we have these diagnostic methods that we learn that help us to assess the condition of a person. And it might turn out that we would say, you know what, I mean, there's things you look for like a weak pulse, for instance, or digestive problems because you might have distension after eating, or you might have bowel problems. These things are a part of the overall understanding of how the body works. And we say that's Qi, but if we do our assessment and we determine that the person is tired all the time, they have a weak pulse, they have digestive problems.
We might think that, you know what the problem is here, is this organism doesn't have enough Qi. It's lacking, okay? There's a deficiency of Qi. And so I am going to want to tonify that person. There may be something where the Qi seems to be blocked.
And that comes to an understanding that Qi also means the function. So, we have these organs that we have defined metaphorically, and each of these organs has a function. In fact, that's the way the people who develop Chinese medicine thought of the organs is that they had functions and responsibilities that they were supposed to carry out. So, if the function is dysfunctional, then we think, well, maybe the Qi for that organ has been blocked. And then you would want to unblock the Qi or move the Qi or get the Qi to move correctly.
YL: I'm going back a little to diagnostics because you mentioned pulse, and I just wanted a little clarification because not everyone listening understands that we're not talking just about your pulse at the western medical doctor if they were measuring your pulse.
SS: Yeah. Well, so there's this idea in Chinese medicine that every part reflects the whole. So, when we check the pulse, we don't just measure the rate or the rhythm. But we have identified 28, at least, different attributes that you can feel if you train yourself to feel them. And then we have identified meanings to those feelings so we can make an assessment of the pulse.
So, a normal pulse would be felt, it would flow through, we usually check it, not the only place, but normally you check the radial artery, you can feel a pulse through there, but then there are different positions that we believe reflect different organs. Organ systems. And so, you can make an assessment based on pulse. You can also make an assessment by looking at someone's ear, or looking at their face, or looking at their tongue.
Over time, you notice patterns and then you can identify those patterns and you ask a lot of questions of the patient, you try to find out what symptoms that they're having what their medical history is, maybe what the medical history of their parents was or their siblings and you have to make an assessment then of their diet, what their lifestyle is, how much stress they have. You get a complete picture of a person and from that you identify what we call a syndrome, which is a pattern that you have figured out that is applicable to this person. And there's this saying in Chinese medicine, one syndrome can actually be many different diseases, can all come from the same syndrome. Alternatively, one disease can be caused by many different syndromes. So, what we endeavor to do in Chinese medicine, rather than treat the disease, we treat the syndrome.
We figure that if we can bring that syndrome back to normalcy or balance, then we expect the symptoms to improve. And it's remarkable to me, this is how I became interested in it because it works. I no longer, after a very short period of time, something I had for thirty-five years, I no longer had bronchitis. And all because this studied Chinese medicine person worked on my lung Qi.
YL: With acupuncture or?
SS: Acupuncture, yes. But what really turned it around for me personally was the Chinese herbs. Because I would get this bronchitis, I'd be coughing and the whole house would shake, you know, when the coughing was really bad. I'd wake up at night, I couldn't sleep, coughing, coughing, coughing, coughing really deep in my chest. And this would happen two or three times every year.
YL: Into your thirties?
SS: Yeah, to my mid-thirties. Yeah. And so, with the acupuncture was there was an intention, but then when I met this person who was a Chinese man who would come to visit. He was only there for six months, but he was a master herbalist.
And he gave me an herbal formula for the first time in my life, something other than codeine stopped my cough and it got my attention. And then he gave me a formula after that. He says, this will repair your lungs. Okay, fine. So, he was working on not only the lung Qi, but the lung yin as well.
And repaired my lungs, and after a few months of taking those herbs, I never had bronchitis again, never. And that got my attention that caused me to become, study Chinese medicine myself. I thought this is 'cool'.
YL: I find that so amazing because modern science tells us that there are certain chemicals in herbs. Right? Herbs are made of plenty of chemicals and that somehow they interact and become like the same as drugs actually in our bodies. And yet thousands of years ago, herbalists were already attributing these effects without that scientific knowledge or language. But they were able to put together these herbs that were based on Qi and where the herbs were going, and stuff like that, could heal someone. It’s amazing.
SS: When you look at the language of the medicine and the language of the herbs, not only do the herbs themselves have their own inherent Qi, which means they have their own intelligence, they have their own information within them, they have their own function within them, they can create effects when applied without knowing what the chemical constituents are. The herbs are the therapeutic agents. And the way that this was described originally was based on taste and temperature and where the herb went in the body. Based upon the channels.
And of course, the channels, we think of more of an acupuncture type of an idea, but this is how the channels were how Qi got to the organs. Because even though the channels are within the superficial layers of the body, they're not just on the surface; they're inside. But all of the channels go eventually, or by some method to their respective organ, belied in their name. Like your tree metaphor. It is, it is like I had someone say to me recently, you know, we've done dissections of human beings, and we don't find these channels.
And my response to that is, well, they've dissected brains too, but they don't find any thoughts in there.
YL: Or memories.
SS: Or memories, yeah. They're not there. And so just because there's no physical aspect of something, that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist because our minds basically, as far as we know, I mean, there's this brain organ, but it's all a part of the entire organism. It's not separate. Yet even the Buddha in his sutras would talk about this kind of thing. It's like, how is it you can see across the room?
Is your mind over there? Where is your mind And so channels were the way that the herbs got to the target, got to where the action needed to take place. Not necessarily where the disease was, but those organs that are responsible, their interaction in response to the disease required them to function in a particular way, and the herbs were able to do this. Of course, scientific medicine is busy studying this right now. And I think I've told you before that I spent a lot of time on Google Scholar, which is a separate part of Google.
It's like Medline, where you can find the research being done all over the world, but mainly in Asia, where they're investigating these kinds of questions like how are these herbs working? And they're now looking at herbs functioning on the cellular level or intracellular level, on tissues, on organs that are You would never know to look at the herb or even to look at a chemical profile of the herbs that it would necessarily work that way because the chemicals that are in herbs oftentimes are not something that somebody made in a lab. These are things that are part of living systems. So, there's a character, there's a Qi to those botanicals that enables them to function in a way that they do. And of course, as we know, many of the herbs are processed in very particular ways in order to direct the function to the area that you want it to work.
YL: Ah, that's true.
SS: Yeah. So, it's all a way of understanding this complex system that we are as organisms. Yeah.
YL: It's just so fascinating. Ceaselessly fascinating.
SS: I always think of it. There's a quote from Ferris Bueller's Day Off. You think you know, but you don't know.
And so, we've invented all kinds of ways using the limitations of our language that only represent reality. It's not reality itself; it represents reality as a way of understanding. And yet after all this, there's so much we still don't know. So, my question has always been, is it useful? Especially as a doctor of Chinese medicine, is it therapeutically useful? Does it help? Does it help create healing? Does it take away pain? Does it somehow mitigate a disease? And if it does, I once said, I had a discussion with someone; they were complaining, 'Oh, it's all just placebo'. And I'm like, You know what? If I take some rattles and bones and shake them over a patient and I chant, da da da da da da da da, and they get better, what do I care? It worked.
In other words, I got a result. And so, by investigating, frankly, the lineage of knowledge. It isn't like this is something that somebody came up with on some weekend bender. They talked among themselves. They were trying to figure it out. They didn't know.
And so, they sought knowledge by observation, by trying things, well, that didn't work, or this did work until something did work. And then they wrote it down; they passed it along to other colleagues and other doctors. And it became a tradition of medicine that there's value to that. And if it requires you to learn another language, another way of looking at it, to have that success, then I think we should embrace that.
YL: Mhmm, absolutely. You know, going back to Star Wars again and the Jedi, with their harnessing of the force or what could be perceived as Qi, they can do superhuman stuff. And so I've seen what I thought was kind of superhuman stuff. And my understanding is it's because of Qi.
I was in the Shaolin monastery in China, And the monks there who who do a lot of Qigong, you know, I saw them do crazy leaps and had having spears at their throats and things like that that didn't harm them, like chopping their arm with knives and it didn't penetrate. And I was told that it's because they are masters of Qi, that they have studied Qigong to the point where they can be they can harness it, or they can focus it on something. I see that a lot of people study Qigong here and in China, of course, all over the world, but they also practice Qigong. And I think that's something that people can help themselves with. So, what is Qigong?
SS: So, my understanding is that gong means to cultivate or to exercise, work. To put an effort into it. So, Qigong is exercises for Qi. And you can cultivate your Qi, and I would say you're going to put your mind to it, okay? And with that, you can do things, most of which are like, who cares? Parlor tricks. And yet at the same time, they had to cultivate that in order to get there.
When I was building my practice in North Carolina, I did a lot of outreach wherever I could. And I went to the hospital in town, and they had a patient education director. And I asked if they had different patient groups, and they had one called the Better Breathers Club. And these were patients that had COPD or bronchitis or asthma. I said, "I will teach them something that they'll use for the rest of their life."
So, I went in and I taught them Qigong. What did I teach them? Basically, I taught them how to breathe. Most people frankly are unaware of their breath. They're breathing, okay?
And if they have a lot of emotion, like if they're angry, they might be holding their breath. Or if they're grieving, they might be crying. So, their breath is doing what it does to support their mind and their emotions. And so, what can you do to cultivate this breath, this Qi? Because Qigong is not about eating. That's a whole another aspect of Chinese medicine, which we can talk about at another time, about eating well, okay, and not eating stuff that is harmful for you. But in the second half of the equation, food Qi plus air Qi. So, Qigong is about air Qi. It's about breathing and most people don't know how to breathe, or they don't understand how we breathe. I'll do this in a group of people.
I'll say, "Okay, everybody take a deep breath." And everyone goes (lifts chest and breathes a noisy breath sound). And I said, no, that's not a deep breath. Because your lungs go all the way down into your back. And in Chinese medicine, we say the kidneys must grasp the lung Qi, which is like, what now, the kidneys have little hands on them, they grab onto it? That's not what it means.
It means that you're supposed to breathe all the way down to your kidneys, or truly to your adrenal glands, which sit on top of the kidneys. Right above the adrenal glands is your diaphragm. The diaphragm is this pancake-shaped muscle that is the muscle of breathing. And if you breathe with your chest, you're not using your diaphragm. If you breathe with your diaphragm, when you breathe in, your belly comes out.
So like this, watch my upper body here. (Breathes into abdomen, chest does not move appreciably.)
YL: So, it's your belly, yeah.
SS: So, my belly comes out because when I breathe all the way down to the bottom of my lungs, putting air into that space pushes my abdominal organs forward just ever so slightly. And then when I contract to breathe out diaphragm, my belly comes back in again. So, in, out. This is what I did with the asthma patients. I said, you say you have trouble getting a breath. When you have trouble getting a breath, breathe out completely. So, you're empty. Completely empty. Now relax. That breath is going to come in without any effort on your part at all.
So, I taught this hour-long class to this group and there were three nurses who were running the program. All three of them started taking classes from me on Qigong because they wanted to teach all of their patients how to do this breathing. Because this kind of breathing doesn't require any equipment, nothing special. You can do it in a wheelchair. You can do it lying in a hospital bed.
And what happens is that when you do this, you breathe in, you get more oxygen into the system, and you get rid of more carbon dioxide. Getting rid of more carbon dioxide also changes the pH of your blood in a positive way because there's a buffer attached to the carbon dioxide in your bloodstream. So, it is very health promoting. Now, if you can do movement with it, it could be anything, it could be lifting your arm, like with the wheelchair patients I say, okay, when you breathe in, lift your arms. Now, when you breathe out, let them down.
So that is activating the lymphatic system.
YL: That seems like the most basic Tai Chi move too,
SS: It is the most basic Tai Chi. It's, what do you call it? It's like I think "water going over the waterfall". So, you can add all kinds of movements to this. You can take a ball of Qi out of the air.
So, you bring your hands together until you feel the electromagnetic field around your body and you grab ball the Qi. So, you can push it out, breathe it out, can pull it in. Lift it up. Bring it down, and turn to the side, turn to the other side. You can move this ball of Qi around. (Breathing in and out rhythmically with each movement.)
This is a Qi ball exercise. And you're using your mind to imagine, even if you don't feel it, just imagine you've got a ball of Qi. You can do it standing still, put your hands like this and you say, Monk holding a pearl. Or you can put your hands out here, Monk hugging a tree. So, the monk holding the pearl is like one hand placed in front of the other over the center where your breathing occurs.
It's called the Dan Tien. There's an acupuncture point, Qi hai, Ocean of Qi. It's like an inch and a half below your navel. Or you can reach your arms out in a circle imagining surrounding a tree. You can actually go to a tree and do this. Put your arms around the tree, put your forehead on the tree, and just breathe. That's cool. The tree is going to give you some energy, too. You're going to get some 'tree Qi'.
YL: Tree Qi, yeah.
SS: So, there's all kinds of movements that can be included. And there are plenty of people these days out there teaching Qigong and they have learned from some teacher somewhere or from a family that carried lineage throughout. There are 64,000 kinds of Qigong. All actually come back down to the breath. Breathing in the oxygen, breathing out the carbon dioxide and using this muscle, the diaphragm to do that.
It's very centering, clears your mind, takes you to calmness and harmony. It's actually hard to have negative emotions while you're doing this breathing.
YL: Sounds like meditation.
SS: Well, meditation is absolutely a kind of Qigong. In fact, the basic meditation technique is counting your breaths to 10. And when you get to 10, start over again at one. Oh, and if you lose count, just start over again at one. So, what you're doing with that technique is you're developing this place of awareness called one.
Start at one, get to 10, start over again at one. You come back to one, you come back to the breath, you come back because the mind is going to go everywhere. Yada yada yada, talk, talk, talk. You know, what are we going to have for dinner? Did you have a good flight today? Blah, blah, blah, all this stuff is going on in your mind. But the focus is developed; the concentration is developed by coming back to one. Some people call that an anchor. Some teachers call that a primary point. But it's just a way of creating concentration and focus.
And you can then use this whenever. You can do it walking. You can do walking meditation, focus on your breath. You can breathe every other step. I mean, I can make all kinds of little variations on this as a way of being present in the present moment. Because coming back to breath always brings you back to the present moment.
YL: So, people with meditation practices just need to add on or to be aware of breathing all the way into their diaphragm, into their back as much as they can? If they're doing seated meditation, for example?
SS: I think they can. I don't think it's necessary for meditation to do that. But generally speaking, when you're doing meditation, you are going to use some technique to focus. So rather than using your diaphragm, you could concentrate right here on the philtrum where the breath comes in. You can feel it.
The tip of your nose. Breathing out, you can feel it coming out. So, that could be your anchor. That could be your place of concentration. Yeah, you also notice that there's a gap.
So, when you breathe in, there's a gap between breathing in and breathing out. When you breathe out, reach a point where there's a gap. So, you could focus on that. It's a way of getting to a place of not thinking or before thinking, you know, and this is what Qigong can do for you. It's that kind of thing.
YL: Yeah, we're taking the Qi from the air into our bodies.
SS: Yeah. And that promotes health. Especially if you're having breathing problems, it can be so healing of your breathing problems. It takes effort.
It takes gong. It takes cultivation and it takes repetition. And for a lot of people that repetition is boring because the mind wants to have fun. And that's what it does all the time; it plays and just like makes associations and brings up memories and emotions and goes all over the place. And this is a way of reigning that in and creating harmony and balance.
You don't have to do it all the time, just develop a practice and then it will serve you. It will show up in other places as well.
YL: Yep. Any last words about Qi, Skye?
SS: I can't think of anything more rewarding for your health than to pay attention to what you eat and to breathe. Those two things together create our biochemistry that is necessary for homeostasis and health and focus, even emotions, and just being in this world.
YL: Thank you so much, Skye. This was fun!
SS: It was fun. Yeah. I liked it.