Gentle Exercises for Optimal Health

In a short video that I have included below is a simple Qigong-like exercise to help a heart with any excess condition. Excess conditions are those of too much Yang in the heart, (or too little Yin elsewhere). High blood pressure, angina, tachycardia, and other physical heart issues can be the result. This exercise can also be helpful for such issues as anxiety, insomnia, over-excitement, night sweats, mental and emotional problems and dizziness.

In a two minute video clip, Stephen Sinatra, a cardiologist, talks about how the arms are extensions of the heart. Early in embryogenesis the arms came from the heart area.

Thus,

“If you want to work with someone’s heart, work with the energy of the arms.”

He makes the point that conductors, who are raising their arms in motion, live healthily into their 90’s.

The key to the video is the little exercise Stephen Sinatra shows. He recommends swinging your arms back and forth a couple hundred times a day to keep the thoracic duct open.

The thoracic duct is the major pathway in the center of the chest where lymph flows from the abdomen and legs back to the heart

The video style is intense (itself a stress on the heart), but short.

The Heart/Arm Connection

I’ve often noticed this heart and arm connection with my healing clients and Qigong students. Symptoms in the chest can often be relieved by opening the shoulders and guiding attention, sensation and Qi down the arms, and off the fingers. In Medical Qigong training we are taught to take a patient’s excess heart Qi out of the heart, down three of the meridians of the arm (Small Intestine, Pericardium and Heart). Dredging down the entire arm, not just the meridians, works quite well also.

The arms and hands can be thought of the external manifestations of the heart. It is with the arms that we create, or hug ,or hold tight, or push away, or fight for our space. A post and video I made for lowering high blood pressure prominently uses the arms to release heart tension.

I almost included arm swinging in my Five Flows Qigong Set, and even made a preliminary video of it. (I put it into Five Flows Qigong Set 2). Here it is:

The swinging exercise has other benefits to the heart. It opens the thoracic outlet, relaxes the shoulders, sends blood to to the hands to relieve excess, and improves lymph flow from the arms via the axillary nodes and clavicular pathways.

This exercise—like just about everything else in life—works even better with lower abdominal breathing.

Note: Just about any Kidney strengthening exercises can help with excess heart issues. The fiery heart needs to be supported, nourished and controlled some by the water energy of the Kidneys. This is according to the useful (and quite functional) pattern of the Five Elemental Energies.

Qigong Classes on Monday Evenings in July

This Summer will be the seventh year I have offered free Summer Qigong classes. The first year I held them in Whatcom Falls Park in Bellingham. Every Summer since I have held them at the glorious garden space of my home. 

These classes are open to anyone intrigued or entranced by Qigong, whether new to the art or a seasoned practitioner.  

Yin Yang and Nature

Free Qigong in the Gardens

Summer 2010 

When:     Each Monday in July (July 5, 12, 19, and 26) 

Time:     6:00 pm to 7:00 pm 

Cost:      None  

Where:   1095 East Axton Road 

Who:      Anyone interested; and whoever they invite  as well.  

Directions and Confirmations

There is no need to confirm you are coming. Just show up. However if you need directions, please contact me directly and I will send them to you. 

Come to any of the classes you can get to, or to all of them. 

Contact Robert Bates to get directions 

2010 Free Qigong in the Gardens whole page

2010 Free Qigong Classes postcards (multiple copies)

Qigong is an Investment

Qigong (“Chee Gung”) is the art, science, and philosophy of natural healing and personal energy management. Qigong is extremely effective in increasing wellness, ensuring longevity, and curing many ailments. Qigong is remarkably effective as a significant health care approach, yet amazingly inexpensive (especially this particular series of classes). Practicing Qigong is a superb investment for both building wellness and saving money by staving off current or future health problems. Someday Qigong may be a primary part of American healthcare. The way the medical money tide is growing and insurance avalanche is going, that day may come soon. Start learning it soon so you will be ready. 

Gentle Exercises for Grand Results

This summer’s focus will be on The Five Flows Set, and on specific Qigong Prescriptions. The Five Flows Set is a satisfying set of slow and gentle exercises that brings great balance to the body and calmness to the mind. Prescriptions are specific exercises designed to help particular health conditions. The Qigong Prescriptions will include exercises for several common problems, including colds and allergies, insomnia, hot flashes, heart issues, and nausea. We will start each class with the basic Five Flows Qigong. Then I’ll lead people through particular Medical Qigong Prescriptions. 

Awaken the Breath

When:         Saturday, June 5, 2010

Time:         10:00 to 2:00

Cost:          Only $40

Location:    Robert’s beautiful healing studio at

                  1095 East Axton Road, North of Bellingham.

Sign Up:     (360) 398-7466, or rbbatesdc@comcast.net

Breathe Bigger, Better and Easier

Breath Practices are some of the most powerful healing exercises you can do. You can insert conscious breathing into just about any part of your day and be better off for it. You can benefit from conscious breathing practices virtually your entire life. Any amount of good breathing you do adds to your health.

With These Breathing Practices You Will

•  Massage the internal organs for greater all around health
•  Keep the head clear and promote mental clarity
•  Help move the lymph throughout the body, increasing immunity function
•  Increase your energy
•  Calm your emotions
•  Increase your lifespan
•  Decrease tension
•  Sleep deeper
•  And much, much more

 What We Will Cover in This Workshop

• Qigong breathing practices, each with different health goals
• Simple tests to assess how well you are breathing
• Easy ways to integrate vastly more quality breathing into your   everyday life
• The Framingham Study: How your breath capacity can accurately predict your lifespan; and how to definitely increase your lifespan with breathing practices

 Breathing Exercises We Will Practice

Follow the Breath. Just watch. Notice how you are actually breathing. You can learn a lot about yourself this way.

Graduated Quiet Breathing Meditation. Build awareness and sink into a relaxed, healing mode of being as you activate your parasympathetic nervous system, coordinate your consciousness and balance your brain

Abdominal Breathing. The foundation of proper breathing. Breathe into and out of your abdomen, letting it expand with the inhale and flatten with exhaling.

Belly Book Breathing. Re-teach yourself how to use your diaphragm to pull air into your body by expanding your abdomen, instead of lifting your shoulders to bring air in.

Pelvic Breathing. Sometimes breathe low into your pelvis to build power and prevent many problems.

Low Back and Kidney Breathing. Drawing the air into the lower back to expand that area and fill the Kidney’s with Qi.

Filling the Vase. Fill your torso with breath like pouring water into a vase; the water fills up the lower parts first before working up. Empty your breath in reverse.

Gentle Breath Holding. Holding the breath for a short time—repeatedly—to help relax tensions in the breathing apparatus.

Plus

The Remembering Breath. Put up green dot stickers. Every time you see the dot, take a deep breath. This will give you many deep breaths each day.

10 Percent More. Add just a little to the size or seconds of each breath.

Breathing Awareness Set (to take home.) Begin to take more control of your daily breathing habits.

Hot flashes can sometimes be eliminated in a moment by the use of a simple healing sound from the Chinese Art of Qigong.  I have seen these amazing shifts happen on several occasions with different people.

A hot flash means you have too much heat being produced in the body. Usually the extra heat rises into the head, making you uncomfortable. It could arise for a number of reasons: sudden hormonal shifts, too much sunshine, a liver working too hard, or being drained of vitality so that your body has trouble keeping you cool.

Healing Sounds to Clear Your Body

Part of the expansive collection of Qigong exercises is the art of healing sounds. Over many hundreds of years, Chinese Qigong practitioners discovered and refined particular sounds. The basic use of healing sounds in this discipline is for cleansing the body, mind, and emotions of stuck, stagnant or excessive energy. Sounds vibrate the tissues, releasing contracting-tension and shaking loose what is stuck.

“Sheeeee” Helps Hot Flashes

Here is the sound for excess, high heat in the body: “Sheeeeee.” It is pronounced and performed in a special way. You will simultaneously do these three actions:

• Draw your hands from the top of your head down through your legs and into the earth. The eyes and head follow the hands down.
• Imagine and visualize and sense that you are clearing your body of extra heat from head to feet. It is like your cells are being showered with cooling water, or the inner windows are being squeegeed clean.
• It is a descending tone “Sheeeee.” This dropping sound starts in the high range and descends very low, like going from soprano to basso. The farther down your body you go with your hands and consciousness, the deeper becomes the sound.

Note: Do not bend over as you get closer to the ground. If you bend too much you will, via gravity, put energy in the head. With this exercise you want to get energy out of the head, not put more in.

In March and April of 2010 Robert Bates is teaching Healthy Joint Qigong.

To Sign Up for Classes: (360) 398-7466, or email

Days: Mondays and Fridays. Take one or both days for the same price.

Dates: March 8 through April 16

Time: 12:00 to 1:00

Cost: $60 for the 6-week series

Location: Robert’s Healing Studio: 1095 E. Axton Road, Bellingham, WA 98226

In Healthy Joint Qigong You Will Learn

• Joint Rotation exercises for clearing the joints and increasing range of motion
• Joint Expansion practices for increasing the space between bones
• Joint Pulsing practices for building Qi in your joints
• Joint Strengthening exercises to add more resilience to your joints
• Joint Massage techniques for bringing blood, Qi, and lymph through joints
• Bone Breathing meditations for clearing the joints and charging them up

Joint Motion Exercises Can

• Lubricate the Joints through motion
• Help you feel better. Joint exercises can decrease arthritic and creaky pain
• Decrease calcium and other mineral buildup
• Help you stand and be taller: Expand the body, rather than be compacted
• Decrease the chance of injuries
• Be used as a wake up in the morning
• Be used as a warm up before being physically active
• Increase your flexibility
• Restore much lost joint health

Some Reasons for Qigong Joint Exercises

Health is movement and movement leads to health. Stagnation, in contrast, leads to illness. Impaired joints decrease the amount and types of movement you can do. While it is important to stretch and exercise the muscles and soft tissues of the body, the joints also need to be “stretched” and exercised. As a general rule, gently and frequently moving them in through their natural range of motion, helps them heal, helps them reconfigure closer to the way they were meant to work. If we exercise our joints we will be healthier and feel better. The joints have no blood flow, so they depend upon your movement to pump the synovial fluid through, and the toxins and detritus out.

Qigong is slowly making inroads on the consciousness of America. An article on one of my students was recently in the local newspaper here in Bellingham, Washington, USA, North American Continent, Planet Earth.

Vitality

Lee Willis has been benefiting from Qigong for a decade or so. I find Lee to be one of the most present, friendly, happy, helpful and engaging people I know. The photo and article don’t quite show her effervescence. And she vehemently denies–as the article speaks of–that she is a sufferer or victim of any kind. In the decade plus I have known her, I agree with this self-assessment. She leads not just an active life, but a thorough life.

Lee Willis in 2007

Qigong Awareness is Growing

Anyway, read the article. The benefits and joys of Qigong (and Tai Chi) are trickling up, seeping into general consciousness. Maybe we will soon see a bigger awareness of these arts. Most individuals–and the country as a whole–would be better off practicing these internal movement arts.

Lee Willis teaches a short, gentle Tai Chi form that was designed for people with arthritis (whether or not they are victims), but the form is actually great training for anybody seeking better internal and external balance, smoother movement and less pain in their bodies.

Modify Your Movements When You Need to

Lee mentions the principle of modifying in the article, which is so key in making a practice work for whatever your current physical needs, abilities, and areas of concern. To restate the principle of modifying: Find a way to move that doesn’t hurt, whether this means using less effort, doing slightly different movements, or making the range of the motion smaller. By modifying as necessary, you engage your body in relaxation, which engenders healing responses at all levels of your being.

The Omnipresence of Limitations

Another point she touches upon is the fact that most of us have some “limitations” in our health to deal with. Actually, everyone does. Working within the boundaries of whatever your current abilities are–rather than fantasizing or blithely stepping into the dangerous water of overdoing–is so much of what Qigong is all about. When engaged in healing practices, activated movement within relaxation is necessary. Working within your limits is both wise and pleasurable. Pushing into pain is the path to problems.

Below is the first of five videos of a movement and healing sounds Set that is very effective in helping to alleviate negative emotions. The full name of this exercise Set is Old Man Searching for the Reflection of the Moon at the Bottom of the Tide Pool. That is a mouthful; I usually just called it “Old Man.”

Many People Have Benefited

I learned this set from my Medical Qigong teacher Dr. Jerry Alan Johnson. He credits Dr. Her Yue Wong with introducing it into the USA in the 1970′s. Dr. Johnson told me that he gave these exercises to more people than any other healing prescription. He often found that very sick people were holding so much armor that they were unable to relax enough to let healing enter and spread through their bodies. So he taught them the Old Man to release their holding, usually to impressive results.

Open Blocks and Release Stuck Emotions

Following a sophisticated understanding of the Five Elemental Energies system, the Old Man Set opens blockages in the body so stuck fluids, Qi, and blood can flow again, resulting in healing. By upgrading from stagnant swamp internally to flowing rivers and rivulets, health naturally re-establishes.

Since 2000, I have taught this exercise to many clients. Over and over again they have come back to me with glowing reports of how well it has helped them manage or delete unhealthy amounts of blocking, sludgifying emotions, feelings, and sensations.

Many Emotional States Helped

I’ve truncated the name of the encompassing term of the video to depression, but the Old Man exercise is great for helping with many emotional weights, including: sadness, grief, impatience, judgementalism, anxiety, worry, low energy, unprocessed emotions, indecisiveness, lack of clarity, anger, grumpiness, and rage.

Below is the Overview Video of the Old Man. In the next post I’ll add the video detailing the Lungs and sadness tomorrow; and videos 3, 4 and 5 over the next week or two.

Strengthen Your Immune System with Qigong

Qigong has earned a reputation for being a powerful illness-prevention practice. Qigong can and often does prevent many acute illnesses from arising. While there is no guarantee you won’t get sick if you practice Qigong, your body will stand a much better chance of fighting off sickness. In my experience, there is something even more than prevention that sometimes goes on: The oncoming illness is waylaid, knocked out like a boxer with a glass jaw.

Qigong Workshop

On November 14, which is a Saturday, I will offer a 4-hour workshop on Qigong methods that can prevent acute sickness from taking effect in your body.

Workshop Details

When:              Saturday, November 14 , 2009
Time:               10:00 pm to 2:00 pm. Bring a Lunch.
Cost:                $60. 
Location: 1095 East Axton Road, a few miles north of Bellingham, WA.
To Sign Up: (360) 398-7466, or rbbatesdc@comcast.net

First Clear the Organs with the Six Healing Sounds

First we will warm the body up and begin the purging of stagnation. The Six Healing Sounds clear the organs, tissues and cells of stagnant Qi; open blocked Qi channels; and reinvigorate sluggish lymph.

Then Engage in Slow, Gentle Movements that Move the Qi

For this we will practice the set known as Hun Yuan Qigong. I find this set to be a marvelous way to stave off getting sick.

Move Qi Stagnation

My Own Experiences with Vaulting Past Colds and Flu

Over the past two or three long, cold, wet Washington State winters, whenever I start to feel run down—maybe on the verge of getting sick—I practice the slow motion Hun Yuan set for about 30 to 40 minutes. By the end of the practice I can feel a pulsing, whole-body empowerment. There is a balanced magnetic warmth in my hands, ease in my breathing, and calmness in my heart and mind. I get a strong sense that the healing forces in my body have been renewed and reinvigorated.

So far, it has worked and I haven’t gotten ill when engaging in my preventive Qigong practice. This idea of staving off illness is a very common one in the Qigong literature, a universal notion of the value of the art.

Proved Once Again

Again, there is no guarantee, but I proved to myself just the today that it works. I’ve been very busy lately, with little down time. I thrive on a certain minimum of time off to rest my mind and body. Last night I began to get fatigued-feeling and overly-sweaty. I went to bed early and slept in, feeling even more tired in the morning.

Over the day I practiced 20 to 30 minutes of the above type of Qigong three times. After the second practice–in the early afternoon–I began to feel a definite shift toward energy and strength. Hours later, I feel pretty good over all.

It isn’t just me who thinks Qigong is good for preventing colds and flu. Googling for “Qigong and colds”; and “Qigong and flu” I quickly found these websites extolling the virtues of Qigong practice for preventing colds and flu.

http://www.centralpathacupuncture.com/blog/?p=29

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/11/prweb3226484.htm

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/08/qigong-and-tai-.html

http://www.healingqigongcenter.com/apps/blog/show/899824-swine-flu-influenza

Qigong for prevention of illness doesn’t work every time, nor exclusive of other lifestyle factors. Diet, stress, bad habits, climate, etc. do have their effects. Yet it is surprising just how often and how effective Qigong can be for promoting illness-bashing power.

My Taiji and Xin Yi teacher Bob Lau is will be teaching Yang Style Taiji (Tai chi) once a week beginning in November. Of the several major styles of Taiji, Yang style is the most well-known, with it’s slow, flowing moves. Several studies have shown Taiji like this to be an excellent training for significantly decreasing falls in seniors and increasing organ health for everyone.

Here is his email

“Hi everyone,

By special request, I will start teaching Yang Style Tai Chi at the Firehouse Performing Arts Center on Mondays, beginning Monday Nov 2, 2009. Class time will be starting at 10:45AM and will be a 1 hour class. The cost of the class will be $45/month.

I hope to see you all there.

Questions: email me [boblautaiji@yahoo.com]or call 360-734-2847

Bob Lau”

p.s. Bob is a down-to-earth personable teacher with a great deal of knowledge and skill in the important healing aspects of the internal martial arts. I recommend him highly.