All Oriental Medicine practitioners can benefit greatly from the frequent Oriental Medicine or practice of meditation, Tai Chi, and chi kung or qigong. These techniques can help strengthen and boost the flow of your own chi and can also provide added protection in the treatment of disease and pain from your patients, an occupational hazard in the art of healing. A lot of the masters think that when selecting an acupuncturist, one of the most important considerations is the ability of the doctor to generate chi through the needles and his hands. This skill amplifies both his healing and diagnostic sensitivities. Additional higher chi cultivation techniques such as Tai Chi weapons “play,” particularly the Tai Chi Ruler’s sword, can also assist in the transference of chi power with greater healing potential, whilst bolstering the art of needle insertion. Sadly, rarely do practitioners follow this path.
The wide variety of benefits of Oriental Medicine bestowed on the patient has been well known for thousands of years. Have you even considered the almost magical benefits that await the practitioner on the other side of yin-yang? The Eight Branches Style of oriental medicine is described as follows:
1. Chi Kung is the battery and creates chi
2. Tao meditation is the “gatherer of the light” or chi
3. Chan Su Jin-silk lubrication is provided by these spiral and reeling exercises
4. Nei Chia/Tai Chi Chuan is the fuel and promotes chi circulation. The shen or spirit-mind-heart serves as the light bulb that receives and uses energy for illumination.
5. As touch is governed by the heart-shen or Fire Phase, so too does Tui Na touches both the spirit and body
6. Moxibustion elevates the shen
7. Herbal therapy boosts the intellect,
8. Acupuncture in Cleveland activates the physical energies
Among the Eight Branches of the Healing Arts of Taoism, there always tends to be an overlap of all of these qualities.
The techniques of self development are grounded on softness, looseness, and openness that allow you to become spontaneous more easily. Shen, Chi, and Jing are the three fundamental Treasures that are part of the process of your alchemical transformation and self development. They can be likened to the wave, gaseous-vapor, and liquid states of matter making them an essential part in the harmonization, regeneration and restoration of the state of health and well being of your body/mind. In other words, the cellular essence preserves the different states of imbalance and balance based on the quality and quantity of chi (bio-electromagnetic energy) that is channeled via states of consciousness and the nervous system.
The practices of Shen Kung enable us to experience the constant states of matter and energy from the raw to the more refined levels particularly when one is in the state of Alpha. Tsu Ran is a beautiful image used by Taoists to describe something that’s used to mirror the state of meditation of self spontaneity. Instead of cracking being or outer shell, soften it, thereby doing away with pre-conditioning. Another term is Wu Wei which gives us the concept of moving with effortless effort, active spontaneity that’s in accordance with nature, flexibility in body and mind and going with the flow.
According to the Internal Kung Fu, “If one searches for the truth outside oneself, it gets away further and further.” Buddha said, “Don’t depend on any type of experts, sort things out for yourself.” The Taoist Sage says, “The Tao is very close, unfortunately everyone looks far away.”
By practicing advanced chi cultivation every day, one can start to experience so-called Alpha brain wave state. Perhaps, this can be the start of a greater coherence in the body/mind and therefore greater wisdom and awareness. The developed Tao masters say, that sooner or later, one starts to live more and more in Tsu Ran and Wu Wei until it eventually becomes permanent. All these concepts are anchored in the ancients’ natural life medicine and can be experienced directly through such techniques as Shen Kung.
At the least, Chi kung has five major schools of thought: medical Taoist, martial Buddhist, and Confucian. Spontaneous chi kung practices during the last few years have no set forms and are gaining popularity in the US. Chi development has four levels including Shen Kung, Nei Kung, Chi Kung, and Jing Kung. The three chi kung techniques of practice include down, sitting, and standing positions are performed in both moving and stationary forms. In the Nei Kung Chi Liao or NKCL, the aspect of “healing ourselves” is addressed via Shen Kung or the higher levels of chi kung. If you’re just starting out and have no background in Tai Chi or chi kung, the exercises known as the Taoist Elixir Style 31 foundation should be taught first.
Being an advanced form, the Shen are made up of six seated methods and six standing methods, including the “quiet sitting” or Earth Meditation to balance and bring harmony to the body-mind via the eight psychic or extra meridians. These meridians are where deeper energy flows and are the reservoirs that carry the ancestral energy called jing chi, nourishing and giving rise to the twelve organ meridians. A huge part of the regulating energy at the RNA and DNA level and the body-mind’s programming is the jing chi.
Between the eight Trigrams of the Mysterious Turtle or the Ba Gua and eight extra meridians are several, far-reaching relationships mirrored eight thousand years ago by Fu She. This medical genius has also introduced feng shui, tuina, acupuncture and all the eight Branches with the same universal principles that unify the nei chia-chi kung connections and the trigrams meridians.
In following the natural harmony and balance of the principles of yin-yang, the life-nourishing art of Taoist Shen Kung is practiced for self healing. The practitioner performed Medical Chi Kung- NKCL on a patient when he wants to heal others. Now we need to take a look at the system of healing known as healing without touch or “acupuncture minus the needles”. This brilliant technique is reputed to be the first healing art of ancient China. It is simple to performed, which is in keeping with the Tao which is also why it is so profound. People with the motivation and desire can learn it and apply it to others.