A simple definition of qigong healing, is that it is the practice of using our energy to effect healing within ourselves and others, using our mind, body, breath, and direct awareness of our energy. However, many qigong practices do this to a greater or lesser degree, so in this article we will examine what distinguishes a specific qigong healing practice from other types of qigong to give a better understanding of what qigong healing is.
There are three main areas that qigong has been applied to historically. Health and healing, martial arts or enhancing physical and mental performance, and to spirituality or developing a greater and more nuanced understanding of the world around us. The is a lot of similarity and even crossover between the practices used for each of these areas of application. Practices used for peak performance and for spiritual purposes have clear health benefits, and similarly the practices used primarily for health and wellbeing can contribute to peak performance and yield many spiritual insights. So in a sense any qigong practice can be healing in a way, but there are specific aspects of the practices that come out more strongly within the practices when their focus is primarily on health, and even more so when the purpose is specifically on healing rather than just general health and wellbeing.
So in a sense any qigong practice can be healing in a way, but there are specific aspects of the practices that come out more strongly when their focus is primarily on health, and even more so when the purpose is specifically on healing rather than just general health and wellbeing.
You can think of a practice that is for general health and wellbeing as being like a healthy meal, with a balance of flavors and nutrients suitable for building and maintaining overall health and vitality. On the other hand, a meal for healing will focus on having quite specific flavors and nutrients for addressing an issue within the body or energy to specifically bring it back into balance. Even if it still uses the same ingredients that might be used in a more general meal, it is a much more focused approach. To extend our analogy even further, the healing application could even go as far as using herbs and other substances that you wouldn’t usually necessarily think of as ‘food’ for their specific properties and ability to cause change within the body.
So the primary distinction between qigong healing and other types of qigong practice is the specific focus on ‘healing’ within the practice. There may well be elements common to other practices within qigong healing practices, but the nature of the focus of the practice will also shape it to include certain aspects of qigong more prominently within it than is common in other types of qigong.
Focusing just on qigong healing, we can divide this further into three broad categories of application. Therapeutic qigong exercise, qigong self healing, and qigong as a modality of healing for others. We will discuss each of these in turn.
Therapeutic Qigong
As mentioned earlier almost any qigong practice is likely to have some specific benefits that are helpful for restoring health. A therapeutic qigong practice is one where the practices used are selected very carefully for their specific benefits to help to remedy an issue within the body or energy system. This may include a variety of practices that are also used for other purposes within more general qigong practice, or may include some very specific practices that aren’t often used elsewhere because their purpose fills a very specific niche that is not a common focus within other areas of practice.
In addition to this, while therapeutic qigong may sometimes incorporate many different practices within a session, they will often focus on just a very few select practices, or even just a single practice, which is repeated more frequently than you commonly would with a more general qigong practice. The idea being to focus on just the things that are most useful for achieving the therapeutic effect, and do more of them to get the effect more quickly.
In many ways you could consider therapeutic qigong’s relationship to other qigong practices as being similar to the exercises a physical therapist recommends compared to other more general types of exercise or movement. Sometimes the physical therapist may recommend exercises or movements that are commonly used within other more general types of exercise because they fit the purpose of healing whatever issue in the body is being addressed. But equally sometimes they will use very specific exercises that would not be a common focus within more general exercise programs, because the very specific exercise is able to get in and address something that is only really interesting to address if there is a problem with it, and the exercise wouldn’t contribute much to the overall exercise program of someone not suffering from that issue.
Of course, while therapeutic qigong may be used to address specific physical injuries or weaknesses, the focus will often extend more broadly than that to addressing imbalances within the energy, the organs, and even the mind.
Qigong Self Healing
While qigong self healing may continue to include a variety of practices to strengthen and balance the energy flow that are common to other more general types of qigong practice, where qigong self healing differs from therapeutic qigong is in the more direct intentional focus on the energy. More general qigong practice will often use movement, posture, mental focus and imagery, and the breath to connect to the energy and then affect it. Qigong self healing tends to focus more on connecting directly to the energy to assess it, and then influence that energy directly – using movement, posture, mental focus, breath and so on as needed to achieve the result.
This can make the process simpler in a sense, as the focus is directly on the energy, and then you do whatever is necessary to achieve the desired result. The focus is not so much on the specific details of different movements, or postures etc, but rather directly on the qualities and flow of the energy and how we can influence it. It does require a greater awareness, understanding, and skill with our energy though, which is a subtle thing to develop to begin with. But it is something we can all develop with time and practice.
Developing this direct awareness of our energy then becomes a valuable tool, not just for bringing balance, health, and healing, but also for understanding ourselves better, giving us a new lens to understand our interaction with our experiences in life, offering many rich and nuanced insights.
Qigong Healing as Treatment
Qigong healing as a treatment then takes this process one step further, and rather than focusing just on our own energy and how we can influence it to bring health and healing, we learn to become aware of the energy of others, identify where the energy is blocked, stagnant, weakened, or excessive, and then use our energy flow to help to restore balance and health to the system.
Again, this is a subtle thing to develop initially, but if someone has developed awareness and skill at self healing it is not a big leap to start to apply this same type of awareness and skill on others.
This is a very valuable skill that can then allow us to help others in sometimes quite profound ways. There are many different types of issues that we may face which affect our health in a variety of ways. Some issues may be predominantly physical, in which case addressing them with a predominantly physical form of treatment will often be effective. Other issues might be predominantly mental, relating to the way we think, and in these cases addressing them in a predominantly psychological way will often be effective. And then other issues are sometimes more complex than that, they involve and affect both the mind and the body, and create patterns within our energy. In some ways we can think of our energy as being the thing that connects mind and body, and addressing problems at this level is often effective in resolving issues that are otherwise difficult to address by working with just the mind or body. When we work with the energy, we affect both at the same time, facilitating shifts and changes through the whole system.
Even when someone has skill at working with their own energy, there are some issues that it is much easier to have someone help you with than just to work at by yourself. You can think of this a bit like massage – we can do ourselves a lot of good by learning how to massage and take care of our own bodies, but there will be parts of our body that are difficult to reach and are easier to have someone else work on for us. Also sometimes we may become tired or stiff – and allowing someone else to use their body and energy can greatly aide us in returning to full health and vitality.
As mentioned previously, typically in qigong healing our focus is directly on the energy and working to bring balance and health to that. Because of this our way of looking at issues is a bit different from other approaches. Physical diagnoses may be useful in directing our attention towards what issues there are within the energy, but our assessment will go beyond that, we seek to understand directly what is happening within the energy and address that. And different people with the same physical diagnosis may have quite different underlying patterns within their energy. As such someone doing qigong healing does not treat the physical diagnosis, but rather the underlying energetic condition, and any improvement in the physical conditional is a flow on consequence from the work on the underlying energy.
Proactive vs Reactive
While qigong healing is most often focused on resolving issues within the energy system of the recipient (whether that is self healing, or healing on another person), this does not mean that it is used purely reactively. Of course once an issue or imbalance has been identified, qigong healing can be used as a tool to rectify the issue and restore balance, but equally a qigong healing approach can be very valuable as a way to maintain health as well.
You can think of this a bit like seeing a doctor for a physical to identify any possible issues so that they can be addressed before they become a major problem. In a similar way, a qigong healing approach can be used to directly assess the state of the energy within a recipient, and fine tune aspects of its flow, helping to maintain balance rather than just restoring balance after it is lost.
You may have heard that in times past Chinese Medicine doctors were paid while their patients stayed healthy and had to treat their patients for free if they became sick. It is this approach of tuning in to the subtle functions of the patients energy system and gently intervening to maintain balance, rather than waiting for a problem to occur and then trying to fix it, that made this type of arrangement possible.
Qigong Healing vs Medical Qigong
Therapeutic Qigong, Qigong Self Healing, and Qigong Healing as a treatment for others could all be accurately described as types of Medical Qigong. What distinguishes Medical Qigong from other more general types of qigong is a specific focus on remedying an underlying condition, as opposed to practicing for some other more general purpose, and this applies whether the methods used are regular exercises, energy flow directed on yourself, or energy flow directed to others.
The choice of whether to use the term ‘Healing’ or ‘Medical’ is largely a personal one, and possibly influenced by cultural expectations. For me there are some different connotations to the words ‘healing’ and ‘medical’ that influence my preference for using the word healing to describe these practices.
To me the word ‘medical’ often carries a connotation of passivity. Medicine is something that is administered or applied to you, rather than something you engage in actively yourself. Also, unfortunately in a modern context the word ‘medicine’ often carries a connotation of a reductionist view and mode of action – just focusing on one thing without a great deal of consideration for how that fits into and affects the system as a whole.
On the other hand, to me the word ‘healing’ has a more active connotation. While we may receive a healing treatment, the true healing is what occurs within the recipient. The treatment is just a tool to help aid in that process. To me the word healing also carries a wholistic approach, it includes and takes into consideration the effect on the whole, and all the many parts that may go into doing this effectively. And certainly qigong healing with its focus on working with the patterns of energy flow within us is inherently wholistic, affecting mind, body, and energy together on many levels.
The Path to Qigong Healing
As mentioned at the start of this article, all qigong practices work with principles that can be useful for developing health and wellbeing. All qigong practices also start to develop our awareness and skill with energy so that little by little we can start to work with it more directly. So whatever qigong you have already done, or whatever practices you might choose to explore next will be helpful in developing a base of awareness and skill that can be applied to qigong healing. The more you have practiced previously, the easier it will be to take your existing skill and apply it specifically to healing. Of course it is also possible to focus on this aspect of qigong practice from the outset, if that is your main focus.
If you are interested in exploring qigong healing practice, Long White Cloud Qigong offers courses to guide you in this path.
The Qigong for Self Healing course is a comprehensive online course which builds a solid foundation of understanding of your energy systems and how you can direct and balance the energy flow within them, using tools of mind, body, breath, and direct awareness of your energy. This course is suitable for both people who are new to qigong and want to focus on this specific aspect of it, and also for more experienced practitioners who want to extend their understanding and skill to this area of application. The course also certifies instructors who wish to integrate this aspect of practice into their qigong teaching.
The Qigong Healing Practitioner course is an in person course which guides practitioners on how to apply these same skills to working with and helping others. Completing the Qigong for Self Healing course is a pre-requisite for attending the Qigong Healing Practitioner course, as this will ensure that the attendee has developed a suitable base of awareness and skill to be able to engage in applying qigong healing to others in a meaningful way.
You can find the details for these courses here.