Embodied Psychotherapy, Spiritual Recapitulation, and Traditional Chinese Medicine

The context of mental and emotional well being hits an intuitive nerve.

If another person, or ourselves, is experiencing some form of inner or outward behavioral disturbance, what should we do?

We can all appreciate the erosive nature of trauma, long term distress, chronic illness, a person in shock, or the slippery slope of emotional overwhelm.

We all do our best to understand and be supportive when meeting a person experiencing cognitive disorientation or decline. This is human empathy. Like belonging, it is a social instinct.

“The Mind and Body Meet in Sensation”

The Heart/Mind and the Body move forward and backward like our left foot and right foot. Every serious mental, emotional, or physical wound, is a step backwards (metaphorically) and every treatment, therapy session, and personal realization is a step forward.

Being traumatized or wounded and finding a way to heal is a very personal, and for many a profoundly Spiritual journey of becoming a whole and authentic self.

If there is a Spiritual ‘formula’ to many of the ancient traditions it is acceptance, reintegration, realignment, and recapitulation.

Acceptance is not a passive state, it is the moment that we take complete responsibility for our past, our future, and how we navigate all of our relationships.

Reintegration is the experience of not being fractured, alone, or separate, on many levels. Sometimes this is reconnecting parts of ourself on the inside, and sometimes it is being met as a more whole and adaptive expression of ourselves on the outside.

Realignment is the opportunity to rediscover our deepest truths, while transforming through a connection with our authentic self, with others, and with the Universe as we understand it.

Recapitulation is the process of healing past traumas through hands on treatments, coregulation practices like ceremony, dance, group circles and counselling when we are with others. When we are alone, Somatic Trauma Release practices, and through immersive Spiritual practices like Inner Cultivation, Meditation, and Prayer.

There are many ancient practices that evolved in times of need long ago. Those practices will always be relevant in times of need.

Module One Contents:

• Introduction – Why Therapy Exists
• Embodied Psychology and Traditional Chinese Medicine
• The Science of Somatic Experience, Neuroception, and Polyvagal Awareness
• The Origins and Evolution of Qing Zhi Bing
• Modern Challenges meet Ancient Wisdom
• As Above, So Below - An Ancient View of Becoming and Being
• A Closing Circle – One – Medicine Wheeling in the 21^st Century

 

“Feeling is the state necessary for healing!”

How are you at feeling your feelings?

Is an intentional pause to check in with yourself more stressful, or is it like bathing in warmth, connection, and self care?

If it is more stressful to check in, what do you do to check out?

There are many ancient and contemporary practices to help you relearn the ways of cultivating self awareness and conscious embodiment. The value of being open to feeling the hardest parts of life ensure you are on a path to finding and feeling the truth of who you are.

Relearning to feel all of your sensations, emotions, intuitions, instincts, visceral aliveness and visceral agony, your adaptive flow, and your experience of overwhelm can take some time and a lot of resources.

“To Heal emotional pain, you have to move towards the source of the pain!”

The healthiest way to heal is to follow a tried-and-true roadmap of interactive processes and practices. Traditional practices have the longest track record of success, because they have been and are still effective. Any approach to heeling emotional pain requires the ability stay in the ‘eye of your hurricane,’ while applying the hard-won skill of recapitulation through cultivating Self-Awareness.

To be clear, there is awareness like watching a movie, and then there is the awareness of a Spiritual Warrior committed to patience, adaptability, and compassion.

Module Two Contents:

• Self Assessment as a Practice
• Feeling is the State of Healing
• Conditioned Blind Spots
• Listening with Your Whole Body and Being (Ting Jin)
• The Journey of Conscious Embodiment
• Cultivating Self Awareness
• Radical Self Acceptance (Where do you place yourself?)
• Your Three Selves
• Your Three Treasures
• Your Three Dan Tian
• Your Six Innate Minds
• Your Six Pain Bodies
• The Way of Enough
• A Closing Circle Two – The Four Puberties of Life

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has a long history of helping people explore, understand, and transform their physical health and their inner experiential lives.

The profound understanding that TCM has of Mental and Emotional distress includes a ‘physiology’ of Sentience, Cognition, and Emotionality, that can be harmed or healed through your Organs, Qi Functions, and Meridian Circulation.

Thousands of years of wisdom tells us that each emotion we have comes from an innate and invaluable instinct. Your instinctual and visceral drives and reactions are directly connected to your internal organs and can affect their ability to function.

This is why long-term emotional distress can be so destructive to your health.

It is also why people in poor health are less able to regulate and resolve strong emotional distress and trauma.

Qing Zhi Bing (the psychiatry and psychotherapy of TCM) also includes an understanding of Ancestral Trauma that can help people come into contact with their sense of Soul, while also facing their families ‘Ghosts.’

As you become more connected with your healthy instincts and intuition, your thoughts and feelings begin to come back into harmony with your daily life.

The opposite is also true.

If your Vitality (as Qi and Meridians), or your Embodiment (as Somatic sensations and Organ functions) become overworked, under-supported, stuck, or exhausted, your mental, emotional, and Spiritual/Existential experience will also be affected.

Having a predictable and consistent understanding of the physiology of experience and embodiment, and there are many predictable patterns and needs to that subject, is the only way to understand what has gone wrong, why, and what can be done about it in a holistic way.

Throughout this course, a medically scientific understanding will also be included when it is the most relevant and helpful.

Module Three Contents:

Experiential Physiology 

• The Ontology of Being
• Your Five Wills
• Your Heart/Mind Spirit (Xin/Shen)
• The Infinite Wheel of Cognition
• Your Three Hun – Ancestral Gifts and Generational Trauma
• The Seven P’o – Family Grudges and Incomplete Lives
• The Classic Seven Emotions

Organic Physiology

• Adaptive Overwhelm and the Physiology of Distress
• The Five Organs System and Visceral Reality
• The Four Constitutions

Qi and Meridian Physiology 

• Qi Dynamics
• The Simultaneous Expressions of Qi
• The Eight Classic Qi Wounds
• The Psycho-emotional Expressions and Needs of your Meridians
• A Closing Circle – Three – The Seasons are Alive

“Fitting in produces anxiety, while belonging is an instinct!”

Your personality, adaptability, and sense of Self develop in an environment of needs, connection, and meaning.

There are six ways that we learn, grow, and become a complete self.

• Instinctually
• Viscerally
• Intuitively
• Emotionally
• Egoically
• Existentially

These are the ways we develop patters, some urgent and some wise. As children we have no other choice than to keep up, run, or hide. It is those patterns that need to be met as adults.

It is those early patterns that make us so loaded that we can be easily triggered!

As modern culture is becoming more self-reflective, the subject of Developmental Psychology has changed significantly. Fifty years ago, the focus was getting the most out of the work force through industrial education. Presently, we are rethinking the entire structure of enforced and overcrowded education.

How we raise our children has also changed considerably. From the number of children per family, to the invasion of screens over faces, young people spend a profoundly dangerous amount of time alone, comparing themselves to others. Being raised to become a curious and confident social animal is becoming the exception instead of the norm.

All forms of social polarization, from wealth disparity, extreme diets, politics, religion, are ensuring that the deepest cultural and familial grudges are well tended. Growing up in an unstable culture, with a potentially dire future, fluctuations in gender and identity has created a world where a strong sense of self is maladaptive. We become ourselves adapting to our environment, and presently our culture fears missing out more than adding individual creativity and expression. The last 20 years, more than any time in history, has created a crisis of Mental, Emotional and Existential health in our children.

Nearly 20% of children are facing diagnosable Psychiatric condition (including depression, anxiety, neurodivergence, addiction, and suicidal ideation) That 20%, and all other children, are being raised by parents with a minimum 30%, and more likely 50% probability of a diagnosable mental or emotional ‘condition’ of overwhelm in their lifetime.

From a TCM perspective, a Qing Zhi Bing (also translatable to the wounds of Adverse Childhood Experiences), can linger and grow, building into a perfect storm of behavioral chaos and consequences that appear later in life.

Most Trauma that is predicably and easily ‘triggered’ is really about pain. A person, or a weapon, cannot be triggered unless it is already loaded and ready to explode. The Healing journey is to accept that each kind of pain comes from an unmet need, as well as accepting that most needs can only be fulfilled in the presence of others.

There are many approaches and practices to gradually work with childhood wounds. Some of these can be done alone, and some can only be done with a mentor of some kind.

As adults, one of the hardest things to accept is that we are responding to our woundedness in a wounded way. Being mad at yourself for all of your volatile behaviours is unlikely to resolve anything.

As adults with a wounded inner child, it is possible for both of you to learn to trust structure, stability, and wisdom together. It just take time and intention.

Module Four Contents:

• Developmental Psychology
• Met and Unmet Needs
• Adverse Childhood Experiences
• Inner Child Work – Recapitulation 101
• Latent Wounds and Forming Identities
• Relative Maturity
• A Closing Circle Two – Four - The Four Colors of Time

Life is hard!

Life is meant to come with bad days and rough people.

Life is also meant to come with opportunities to connect with the right people and work out how those bad days and rough people make you feel.

Anything more than rough is wrong.

Modern life is faster, more impatient, and overstimulating than any time in history. As obvious as that is, it is meant to bring up the context of adaptability.

Every living being is limited by its ability to adapt to its environment.

All animals, humans included, are born with a nervous system full of physical and social instincts. All animals are meant to grow up with parents to show them the finer details of behavior. Specifically, physical behaviors like fight, flight, and freeze, as well as social instinctual behaviors like tend, befriend, and cower.

If you have ever been through a physically overwhelming experience like a rock-climbing accident or survived a war zone, or if you have lived through ritualized physical and/or sexual violence, then that part of your nervous system is in Trauma.

That does not mean you are broken; it means it is now time to find opportunities to connect with the right people and relearn how to release the embodied memories and recapitulate the ways those days and people are still inhabiting your nervous system. Recapitulation is a way of consciously reliving a memory as a part of a practice to move through and beyond the pain and behaviours coming from that wound.

If you grew up in an environment that was physically or emotionally dangerous, unavailable, or manipulative, then it is likely your instinctual Polyvagal, or ‘Social nervous system’ is on a Trauma avoidant setting. Sometimes this defines your life through avoiding any and all risk, or for some, the need to take risks.

That does not mean you are broken; it means it is time to create opportunities to connect with the right people and relearn how to read body language and open to how it feels to belong.

Addiction is the opposite of Belonging. First, addiction separates you from your anxiety, then your pain, then your family, and then the few remaining friends that have held on as long as they could, and finally, addiction can separate you from yourself.

Module Five Contents:

• Introduction – Redefining Trauma
• Trauma and Chronic Illness
• Trauma and Addiction
• The Four Wounds of Trauma
• The First Wound is Hypervigilance
• The Second Wound is Comfort Seeking
• The Third Wound of Trauma is Social Disorientation and Loss of Trust
• The Fourth Wound is Loss of Self Trust and Existential Pain
• How Trauma and Distress are Addictive
• The Three Whys of Addiction
• The process of Radical Self Acceptance
• A Closing Circle – Five - Walking in a Good Way

A primary human need is connection, mutual support, and meaningful collaboration.

In a rapidly changing, profoundly overstimulating, and socially disconnected world, many people are unsure of their place in it all.

“Connecting with others gives you perspective, with connecting with yourself gives you a practice.”

Technically Speaking, Emotional Intelligence is the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one's emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships compassionately and empathetically, while also maintaining a process of self regulation, self-awareness, emotional reflection, trigger awareness, and when needed, some Trauma Release and Restoration.

Understanding the importance of your emotional life, your inner somatic and sensual life, the experience of all of your relationships, your response to intense change and boredom, is one of the most transformative choices anyone can make.

“What we truly listen to in others, we can finally hear in ourselves”

By valuing the quality of your inner life and your experience of relationship, you are free to resolve old reactive patterns and become your authentic self.

Module Six Contents:

• What is Emotional Intelligence?
• Self Regulation, Coregulation, and Conscious Communication
• Pathological Emotions come from Instincts and Unconscious Conditioning
• Pain, Love, and Hate. Innate Nature and Potential Aliveness
• A Five Element Journey – Emotional Spectrums and Visceral Terrains
• Stalking Latent Emotions
• Ranges and Spectrums of Awareness and Emotion
• Heart Vexation (Xin Fan) and Emotional Overwhelm
• A Closing Circle – Six – Ceremony and Softening the Scars around Your Heart

Becoming a whole person is a gradual process of individuation. This is a life-long journey of finding your authentic self, balanced by with the need for Belonging and Trust.

When we are small, we wrap our arms around our parent legs and won’t let go. As adolescents, we push our parents as far away as we can. The rate and intensity of separation in young children can define the rest of their lives.

This creates either Acceptable Distance or destructive distance.

As children, and as adults, our needs for connection and distance are very unique and different. Depending on our childhood, the dance of connection in our adult life can unfold in many ways.

Rethinking Attachment Theory.

Through the lens of TCM and Qing Zhi Bing theory, a person’s attachment style is based on their Pin Ge or their Character, and the specific traumatic experiences (Qi Wounds) they have experienced. Attachment Theory offers just four styles or adaptation to long term connection, bonding and trust.

This is a good beginning, but with a deeper understanding of developmental psychology, and applying a physiology (predictable processes and needs) that includes sentience, cognition, emotionality, and the long-term effect of specific forms or trauma, how we understand and restore healthy attachment is much more individualized.

Supporting Neurodivergent Journeys

It is likely that 1 in 4 people is diagnostically Neurodivergent in some way. Although we are all unique in many ways, Neurodivergence describes a different set of needs that are much more than just preferences. A divergent path is not about better or right, it is about the freedom to learn and grow in as yet undiscovered ways.

This can become Acceptable Difference or a social impasse of difference.

Acceptable Difference and Distance is an important conversation to have. If you were to recapitulate each of your primary relationships, the ones you will never forget, what do they show you about connection in your life.

Module Seven Contents:

• Becoming a whole person 
• Trust, Bonding, and Belonging Adaptations
• Rethinking Attachment Theory
• Bonding Adaptations and Sexuality
• Abandonment is Soul Crushing
• The Gifts and Challenges of Neurodivergent Existence
• Supporting Neurodivergent Journeys
• A Closing Circle – Seven – Archetypes, Genders, and Contemporary Traditions

All societies exists, only because each individual decides to collaborate with the future of their society.

As individuals, we can become for, against, or ambivalent about our society, culture, or religion.  This choice has a great influence on the structure of our identity.

Every experience that tells you who you are supposed to be, influences how you structure your identity.

Where do you begin and end?

What are your for or against?

How you experience your Innate Nature, your Fate, the aging process, and your unique mortality, can all influence your sense of identity.

If your life has included Visceral and Existential pain, or profoundly Emotional or Egoic Pain, it likely that those experiences have had an influence on your sense of Self. The pain of life and the ways each of us avoids pain can define your adaptive capacities and limits.

It is also easy to accept and understand how a traumatic life and chronic distress can cause almost any physical illness.

It is easy to forget how the constant and erosive burden of chronic pain, fatigue, nausea, or a hundred other haunting symptoms of chronic illness can be traumatic, life-changing, and also self-defining. One of the core wounds of Trauma is a loss of trust in others. A loss of trust in your body is an even greater wound.

If you have experienced any form of chronic physical illness, the symptoms and limitations have most likely had an influence on how you see your self and how you think other see you.

One of the greatest challenges in Qing Zhi Bing therapy, and on the path of Meditation, is to completely accept the structure of your identity and your Self Image. Forces that are even more powerful in the age of social media.

Each person’s sense of woundedness, their volume of distress throughout a year, or on any given day, will influence their habitual patterns, addictive behaviors, and ways of acting out against life’s Forces and Limitations (Da Xian).

There are many ways to understand and accept the pain of our lives. In some healing traditions, it is necessary to create a Sacred container for all forms of pain.

Module Eight Contents:

• The Necessity of Conditioned Identity Structures
• A Sacred Relationship with the Pain of Life
• Habitual Behaviour
• Resistance to Change
• Limiting Beliefs and Universal Limits (Da Xian)
• Chronic Illness and self Image
• 10 Most Common Causes of Chronic Illness
• Aging, Mortality, and Death
• The Five Taxations
• The Five Inner Organ Virtues
• Fate, Destiny, and Innate Nature
• Closing Circle - A Sacred Basket for Pain

Your Somatic experience is your felt sense, moment by moment, consciously attentive experience of your embodiment. Embodiment has to two sources, what you feel interactively and what you feel passively.

Like an actor, you could embody an intense interaction as a character in a play, or, like a hungry child, you will embody instinctual, visceral, emotional and existential distress every time you get hungry.

Imagine getting a whole-body massage, noticing how your muscles feel from your head to your toes. Scan your body like that for a moment. Receive every sensation.

Now imagine giving a massage, head to toe, assessing tone, injury, circulation, pain, constraint, or collapse. Scan your body like that for a moment. Interact and assess every muscle.

The first step in Conscious Embodiment and Trauma Release is accepting and exploring your Volume of Distress. Depending how wound-up, constrained, or collapsed you or I feel, the volume of distress we are embodying can be almost unnoticeable, or completely overwhelming.

Just like the volume of a stereo, or a noisy neighbor, distress can be too loud for too long.

The oldest healing traditions in the world both have embodied self-regulation, self-healing, and meditation practices. Both Yoga and Qi Gong include Embodied Trauma Release practices.

The process of Trauma release begins with understanding which embodied states arise from traumatic experiences of the past, and which embodied states are meant to hold all of the energy and emotion from exploding outwards or collapsing inwards.

The path of Trauma release is meant to help you balance your use of and response to distress, while applying your emotional intelligence towards a better future.

The practice of Trauma release includes Conscious Movement, Breathwork, Progressive Relaxation and Release techniques, as well as Somatically Recapitulating every memory that is held within your body, and keeps you from inhabiting your body and mind completely.

‘The Body is the Mind, Before the Mind is the Mind.’

Module Nine Contents:

• Embodiment Practices takes Practice
• The Embodiment of Instinctual Activation
• The Embodiment of Social/Emotional Overwhelm
• The Embodiment of Existential Pain and Exhaustion
• Somato-mapping
• Progressive Relaxation
• Breathwork
• Somatic Recapitulation
• A Closing Circle – Nine - Dirt time and the Practice of Stalking

“Everyday, each of us comes into being in a state of being.”

How is your state right now?

That state, be it open or uncomfortable is the quality of your aliveness, or the Qi of your day. Over time, if you come into being in an intense default state it can become a form of almost automatic Mind/Emotion/Embodiment experience and existence.

There is a theme in Traditional Chinese medicine referred to as separating the Clear and Turbid. This is an important way to look at food and cleansing, healthy relationships, and certain parts of Qi Gong. It is also a great way to have an honest relationship with emotions, moods, states, stories, and attitudes that muddy to clear water of your existence.

One of the first things that people notice on a healing journey is their mood. Once you really begin to notice and attend to the subtle constants in life, there is a default setting that often comes with a fascial expression waiting to take over your affect, your breathing, your posture, your thoughts, and your unconscious needs and impulses.

“Your mood and Your predisposition about life can come from many places and can mean many things.”

Mood determines your affect (Qing) – Just like how a smell can change a room, or the background music can define part of a movie, your mood can take over your mind.

Modern Psychiatric Mood Disorders: Major depression, Disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, Premenstrual dysphoric disorder, Bipolar disorders, Cyclothymia, Oppositional Defiance Disorder

Your disposition expresses your (Zhi) – Some experiences and behaviors can be understood to come from your ancestors, cultural conditioning, character traits, and personality types. TCM describes some of these influences as coming from your Ethereal Soul (Hun), which is an aspect of sentience that is similar to the idea of a collective unconscious. Hun is also understood as an individuating expression of a collective human soul.

A Disposition is like a mood, an embodied state, and a story that can last for years, say after a divorce, or can last your whole life. Traumatic events trigger immediate reactions as well as long term unmet needs for release through connection and trust. A disposition can become so intense, reactive and isolating that it takes over your personality completely.

Modern Psychiatric Personality Disorders: Paranoid, Schizoid, Schizotypal, Antisocial, Borderline, Histrionic, Narcissistic, Avoidant, Dependent and Obsessive–Compulsive Personality Disorder.

Your defining moments create a sense of meaning (Bing) – On a personal healing journey, you have the opportunity to defend your story and state or learn from the places it takes you – both good and bad.

One of the most beautiful lessons we learn is the innocence of our unconscious reactions.

Innocence frees us from guilt, shame, blame, and self hatred.

Your Mind Guides Your Qi. Physical, emotional, and energetic health can only happen with a consistent and healthy mindset. As you learn to adapt to your mood, make clear choices about self image, you are beginning to experience the benefits of Self Regulation.

Learning Self Regulation skills is very much like learning a combination of martial arts and emotional first aid. Just before an intense interaction, you can center yourself like a warrior before battle. Right after an intense interaction, you can check in instead of checking out, reinhabit your body, let go of the butterflies in your stomach, and connect with someone you trust.

 Module Ten Contents:

• Mood and Disposition
• Classic Temperaments – East and West
• Learning from Your Stories and States
• Journaling, Group Therapy, and Counselling
• The Many Forms of Mental, Emotional, and Embodied Agitation (Xin Fan)
• The Hero’s Journey
• Down Periscope
• Your Inner Sailboat
• A Closing Circle – Ten - Staking Your Heart to a Truth

A long-term goal of Qing Zhi Bing, as a system of therapy, is to help people to become aware of and change their conscious and unconscious drives and dispositions.

How we find, maintain, and apply our will (Zhi) is through our orientation to life. Your orientation to life can be successful, or it can become disorienting and cause patterns and pendulums of distress.

Healing your Zhi is possibly the most powerful step in becoming free of your past.

Reorienting your Zhi not only eases and opens your Qing (Mood, Feeling, Self Empathy), it can also help free you from patterns of addiction and dysfunctional relationships.

Another long-term goal, for those who embrace life and themselves in a Sacred manner is a complete recapitulation of your life, the events that have harmed you the most, the ways you have harmed others, the grudges and ghosts of your family and ancestors, and the self-limiting beliefs that you have about yourself and what is possible for the rest of your life.

Module Eleven Contents:

• Patterns, Pendulums and Perspectives
• Somato-mapping and a Path to Freedom
• State Shift is your Birthright
• Self Acceptance and Exploring New Ways of Being and Relating
• The Recapitulation Process
• Spiritual Recapitulation has No Religion
• Recapitulation of Conditioning
• Recapitulation of Identity
• Recapitulation of Separate Self
• Case Studies
• Becoming the One Meditating
• A Closing Circle – Eleven - The Way of Non-Interference

If you are a clinician or you have had a very stressful life, knowing the most common symptoms of overwhelm, and understanding what they mean can change everything.

At some point, we all go into a low-grade state of shock, or Adaptive Overwhelm, or the Qi and Heart and Kidneys begin to separate.

There are countless possible symptoms, each can indicate different processes and potential dangers. In TCM there are five classes of symptoms (see below) that are all clues to an understanding of ‘why’.

It takes a skilled, curious, and patient team of detectives (clinicians and patients) to gradually learn what needs to be released or restored, and in what order.

Relief care is essential, so there is no shame in beginning with symptom management. In fact, that is the most effective way to build trust with your team and invest more fully in the process of Healing.

The following list of symptoms is not extensive. They were chosen from a long list to show how some symptoms are cognitive, emotional, existential, somatic, physical, and clearly those of an illness.

 

 

Common Symptoms Include:

Chronic Shock	Recurrent Shock	Panic Attacks
Rage and Shame	Loss of Focus	Hyperfocus/Obsessions
Volatile Behavior	Substance Abuse	Derealization
Dissociation	Anxiety	Mania
Dysthymia	Depression	Delusion
Blunt Affect/Torpor	Suicidal Ideation	Cults of Liminality
Social Rigidity	Social Withdrawal	Socially Capricious
Mental Exhaustion	Emotional Exhaustion	Paranoia
Hallucinations	Inner Voices	Shame
Ticks and Tremors	Indigestion (IBS/Etc.)	Insomnia/Parasomnias
Extreme Diets	Anorexia	Chronic Stiffness or Pain
Exhaustion	Allergies/Autoimmunity	Low Libido
Extreme Libido	Poor digestion	Physical Weakness/Fatigue
Restlessness	Fatigue	Energy/Mood Swings
Nightmares	Weight Loss	Weight Gain
Rashes	Night Sweats	Palpitations
Rapid Aging	Physical Agitation	Solar Plexus Guarding

 

Module Twelve Content:

• The Physiology of Adaptive Overwhelm
• The Importance of Relief Care
• The Symptom Progression from Arousal to Exhaustion
• Organic Symptoms of Qing Zhi Bing
• Affective Symptoms of Qing Zhi Bing
• Cognitive Symptoms of Qing Zhi Bing
• Somatic Symptoms of Qing Zhi Bing
• Existential Symptoms of Qing Zhi Bing
• A Closing Circle – Twelve – Healing Begins when You Remember there is no Cure!

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has five primary modalities of treatment.

• Hands-on Body Work (Tui Na),
• Acupuncture,
• Herbology,
• Conscious Movement and Breathwork practices (Dao Yin/Qi Gong), 
• and Preventative Medicine or Nourishing Vitality Practices (Yang Sheng Fa).

A sixth method is counselling and co-regulation practices.

Qing Zhi Bing, or emotionally disorienting wounds, are similar to most chronic physical illnesses. Over time, the erosive nature of chronic symptoms, the limitations they put on your life, and a predictably worsening future. Many chronic symptoms, be their origins physical or emotional, are just as erosive as being tormented by an angry dog trying to ale a piece of you with them.

Both Acupuncture and Herbal medicine can be used to reduce acute and chronic symptoms of most conditions, while also bring in balance to the root cause of the illness. Their restorative influence can last for days, and often builds over time.

Healing and illness share one quality- called momentum. It is essential, with Qing Zhi Bing conditions, to experience the momentum towards ease and improvement.

The Qing Zhi Bing approach to Embodied Psychotherapy and Spiritual Recapitulation comes from a family oral tradition that goes back 15 generations. In that tradition, talk therapy is usually combined with acupuncture, herbal medicine, a healthy diet, conscious movement (Qi Gong) and some advanced meditation practices (Nei Gong).

Prof Leung Kok Yuen, who’s family developed and taught this approach, was one of the most respected and renowned Doctors and Professors of TCM of the last century. He taught at several colleges and hospitals in China, and then became the first licenced practitioner in North America. Later in his life, he committed his time to international outreach programs around the world.

The counselling process of this approach is centered around recapitulating both the somatic and psycho-emotional aspects of suffering simultaneously. In this context, Qing Zhi Bing becomes a practice of Conscious Coregulation while releasing embodied traumatic memories, exploring visceral and egoic responses to cultural conditioning, and explore esoteric truths about life.

The diagnostic process in ‘modern’ Traditional Chinese medicine has become a combination of observing and deducing patterns of function and dysfunction through a person’s symptoms and signs, and if relevant a person’s western medical diagnosis.

Although these two systems of healing approach diagnosis and treatment differently, they are both just a descriptions of a person’s physical, emotional, and cognitive existence. The TCM pattern helps guide the therapeutic process because of the internally consistent system of associations that connect all aspects of physiology and psychology

Module Thirteen Contents:

• Treating Symptoms, Pathogens, Reactions, and Syndromes
• Leung Family System of Acupuncture
• Five Stages of Rehabilitation (expanded)
• Acupuncture Treatment for Acute and Chronic Symptoms
• Acupuncture Treatment of Patterns and Syndromes
• Neuro-Somatic Acupuncture Therapy (NSAT)
• Pain-point Specific Acupuncture (PSAT)
• Herbal Treatment for Acute and Chronic Symptoms
• Herbal Treatment of Patterns and Syndromes
• Long Term Support
• Lifelong Conditions and Lifelong Protocols

If you have ever gone through a challenging time in your life, you may remember standing still or pacing around with no idea what do, or lying in bed, tossing and turning, beyond your wits end with it all.

Everyday, we are all given at least ten chances to improve our health, vitality, and outlook. The first lesson of Inner Cultivation (Nei Gong) is to find a daily rhythm of awareness practices. A personal favorite is to sink into 2 minutes of Standing or Seated Meditation every hour, most days of the week.

An Awareness Frequency practice is always up to you. However you choose to bring all of your resources and attention to a practice, or to your wellbeing, or perhaps a certain challenge in the world, you are in a coherent state. From this place, you can apply the skills of state shift or shapeshifting. If you can completely direct your intention and embodied state several times a day, your life will change dramatically.

When life moves towards pacing, fretting, tossing, and turning, you will have several opportunities per day to consciously applying your awareness. How you guide your attention, appreciation, compassion, Qi sensitivity and expression, will determine the direction of your Inner Cultivation, and your confidence in your Spiritual Path.

What is Nèi Gōng 内功?

Nèi Gōng 内功 can be translated as ‘Inner Practice or Cultivation’, subtle skills, or what happens beneath what can be seen. The Term Nèi 内 also implies the boundary between Separation and Non-Separation – an essential aspect of Daoist Cultivation.

The term Nèi Gōng can be used in a martial art, a Qì Gōng 氣功, a meditation, or in any other spiritual practice context. For the purpose of easy communication, I will refer to Nèi Gōng as if it is a distinct branch of practice that focuses on Cultivating Inner Awareness.

With regular Nèi Gōng practice, you are beginning the journey of re-discovering your Innate Experiential/Existential Nature (Xìng 性) and your Aliveness Potential (Mìng 命). This practice also brings your subtle Energy Systems, Internal Organs, Meridians, Energy Centers (Dan Tian), and your Six Innate Minds (Yuán Xīn 元心), as well as your Energy Gates into balance.

The Chinese Characters for your Meridians, in general, are Jīng Luò 經絡, which can describe the tension and integrity of the warp and weft of a cloth, the obvious and subtle aspects of circulation, the collagen matrix of your connective tissues and membranes, or perhaps even the fabric of Space-Time.

Each of your Meridians expresses a core instinct and is connected with innate gestures based on ancient animal reflexes, human body language, as well as the behavior, expressions, and experiences of your Ancestors. These subtle, sensual, emotional, and instinctual, qualities of your Meridians also affect your posture, some physical characteristics, the health of the tissue of your whole body, and the free movement of Qi and Blood throughout all your body’s physiological and conscious activities.

Finally, your Meridians express the vitality and functional health (or the challenges) of your internal organs.

At this level of interaction, the more ancient Dao Yin (Trauma Release, State Shift, Down-Regulation, Fascial Tensegrity) practices become essential. This can involve several forms of Breathwork and specific exercises to open each and every joint and membrane of your body

What is Xiū Dào 修道?

Daoist Cultivation (Xiū Dào 修道) involves several practices that focus on Embodied Meditation.

The two oldest, most comprehensive, and most common forms of meditation still practiced today are Chan/Zen (禪) and Nèi Gōng 内功. Chan is focused almost entirely on Apophatic Realisation, while Nei Gong begins with an Embodied Approach to cultivating awareness in preparation for Chan/Zen practice. In some ways they are very different, and in some ways they are the same path.

In the Yi Dao Huan Yuan tradition of Daoist Cultivation that I have learned and now teach, any committed meditation journey begins with the study of both, but with an initial dedication to the somatic, instinctual, visceral, and existential renewal of Nèi Gōng 内功.

A contemporary Nèi Gōng practice begins with learning about and embodying your meridians, exploring subtle aspects of Qi circulation, Qi wounds, and Self Healing (Nei Yang Gong), as well as connecting with your Energy Centers (Dān Tián 丹田), all while opening your Microcosmic Orbit and Energy Gates, Portals, Apertures (Qiào 竅), and becoming very skillful in several forms of Shaolin and Daoist Breathwork.

As these skills come together, you will learn how to ‘induct’ a refined state of embodied harmony and stillness – allowing you to enter into the Mystery Gate of Daoist Meditation. This opening is available to everyone, and is found through immersive states of profound coherence, tranquillity, stillness, and resolve.

While sharing these traditional skills and methods, I also like to include some clinical evidence on what is happening on the levels of physiology, hormonal and neurotransmitter balance, as well as the tone and resilience of your fascia, your immune system, and your nervous system.

Six Initial Grottos of Nei Gong

A Grotto, in Daoist practice, is a metaphoric cave of safety, beauty, and silence; or a crypt to place the aspects of oneself that have died away in meditation. A Grotto can also mean an inner chamber of evolution – you only go in if you are committed to coming out transformed.

Each stage of this Inner Cultivation process is referred to as a Grotto because of the implication of change, the completion of a step on the journey of creative evolution, and the awareness that when you are ready, you can enter the next Grotto. And so, it continues forever.

The Six Grottos are sourced in the medieval source text (1642 AD) the Yi Dao Huan Yuan, which transmits some unique insights on TCM and Daoist Cultivation.

The First Grotto – Life (Qi) exists between Yin and Yang (Sky and Land)

The Second Grotto – Who is Meditating on an Inner Landscape?

The Third Grotto – Many Minds, Many Bodies, and Many Ways of Coming into Being

Fourth Grotto – TCM Physiology of Inner Cultivation and Nei Gong Inductions

Fifth Grotto – Narrow Passes and Inner Openings

Sixth Grotto – Coming Home – Returning to the Source – (Huan Yuan)

Getting to this level of Qi Gong practice and experience usually takes a few years of dedicated and professionally guided practice. This course will give you the tools and guidance to begin and personalize this life-changing and life-extending practice.

Contents:

For a full description of this six-month course, TAP the link below.

https://somadaoqigong.com/opening-your-meridians-and-dan-tian-nei-gong-one/

 

Healing is a need for everyone – at some point, in some way.

Sometimes, we need support from others, and most of the time we need to find it within ourselves to commit to our own healing. If you need support, besides Acupuncture and Herbology, seeing a Medical Qi Gong Therapist is a highly effective option. You can relax and go inward as your Qi field and internal energy systems are realigned, while you are guided into conscious breathwork, using awareness to resolve energetic or emotional wounds, as well as reintegrate the many expressions of your internal organs and meridian system.

Learning Therapeutic Qi Gong is a highly experiential (practice-orientated) Ten-Month Healing Journey.

There are thousands of forms of Qi Gong, all focusing on Vitality, Healing, Fertility, and Longevity in some way. Most of the practises taught in this course have been reserved for monasteries, Daoist lineages, martial arts lineages, and those taught in the oral traditions of Qi Gong and Traditional Chinese medicine for the last 2,000 years. This program will take you on a ‘deep dive’ into the most potent and practical aspects of one of the oldest intact Healing Traditions on Earth.

Contents:

• Qi Gong for a Panic Attack
• Down regulation
• Joint rehabilitation
• Self Regulation
• Learning to Feel and Listen
• Learning to Shift State and Occupy Space
• Five Animal Frolics
• Nei Yang Gong – Self Healing and your Internal Organs
• Self Expression and Play
• An Introduction to Nei Gong
• Four Branches of Breathwork – A Complete Practice
• Sensual Breathwork, Incremental Breathwork, Threshold Breathwork, and Trance Breathwork
• The Six Healing Sounds
• Clearing Ancestral Wounds from your Six Dan Tian

For a full description of this six-month course, TAP the link below.

https://somadaoqigong.com/therapeutic-qi-gong-a-ten-month-journey/

Modern Psychotherapy originated as a replacement for talking to a priest. Talking to a priest replaced talking to an Elder, Healer or a Shaman of some kind.

For some things to change within yourself, they must be witnessed by another.

Psychotherapy implies that you are working with a licenced Psychotherapist, applying specific theories and therapies towards you long term psychological health. The treatment process is usually focused on personality types and traits, behavioral and mood disorders, and even more serious concerns like Schizophrenia.

Counselling implies talking with someone who has training or significant life experience in a subject, such that they can offer you ‘counsel’, or a conversation that leads you in the direction you need to go. Counselling is often more invested in the counselling relationship and the bigger picture of how you approach any problem, more than being treated for a condition. Some forms of counselling are rooted in philosophical or religious systems of thought, while other focus more on Embodiment, or even art.

Co-regulation is a natural process that occurs between two of more people who choose to maintain an awareness of their interaction, ensuring that neither person is taken out of their sense of autonomy or adaptability. This approach to resolving a Qing Zhi Bing is preferred because the focus is on state of Being, even more than the story – or the parts you have words for.

The process of Qing Zhi Bing therapy follows an open landscape for some intuitive self-assessment and flow. There are many models of self exploration and awareness, from your internal organs, meridians, ancestral influences and Soul(s), energy centers, aspects of cognition, innate aspects of Mind, all the way to common embodiment patterns of distress.

Your Embodied experience of distress is the landscape of your Healing Journey.

Your daily life and sensitivity to dysregulating experiences is the weather, gradually supporting life and/or eroding the land. In practice, on your own, or in a Counselling and Coregulation Session, you can choose any attribute of Being (like the embodiment of apprehension), and then apply the appropriate practice, from Conscious Movement, Breathwork, Self Healing forms of Qi Gong, Voice Dialoguing, personal reframing, and Spiritual Recapitulation skills.

Having a map, you can plan your Somatic Processing journey over a few months with a counsellor, and throughout the rest of your life as you encounter deeper and deeper layers of Embodiment and Self.

If your Life has been disorienting enough, the Personal Reorientation (Qing Zhi Bing) process is self-guided, intuitive, very rational, and also Step-by-Step.

If you feel in need of Spiritual Recapitulation, your journey will necessarily include aspects of Being beyond the Egoic Self. One way this is accomplished is called Lun Dao, or conversations about practice and the Teachings of the Ancestors.

A good conversation can be life changing!

Contents:

• Talk Therapy Throughout History
• Modern Psychotherapy
• Counselling and Coaching
• Coregulation
• The therapeutic process of Qing Zhi Bing is an open landscape
• Intuitive flow and Planning Your Journey
• Every Journey of a Thousand Miles…
• On Guiding and Being Guided along this Journey
• One day at a time…
• Speaking About the Teachings (Lun Dao)

“Conscious touch is the best way to move towards unconscious pain.”

There are many forms of hands-on bodywork in the world. Some are more focused on sports injuries and rehabilitation, some of relaxation and comfort, while others focus almost entirely releasing traumatic memories from your nervous system, connective tissues, and fascial membranes.

What is Neuro Somatic Therapy?

As a system of healing, Neuro Somatic Therapy (NST) focus on the treatment of physical pain, emotional distress, trauma release, and recovery from exhaustion and overwhelm.  The most common and most erosive medical challenges that people face today.

As a form of Massage, NST is a combination of

• Neuro Muscular Therapy
• Myofascial Release Therapy
• Somato-Emotional Release Therapy
• Chinese Therapeutic Massage (Tui Na)
• Cranio-Sacral Therapy
• Postural Rehabilitation
• Therapeutic Breathwork
• Acupressure

The Experience of Neuro Somatic Therapy

As an experience, NST is a hands-on journey through tension, a restoring of injured tissues or the inner emptiness of exhaustion, and a release of embodied patterns of distress.

During this personal and revitalizing journey, NST focuses on several qualities of treatment, including:

• Guiding a person into deep states of Mind-Body and breath integration to assist them during their recovery from injury, exhaustion and/or personal trauma.
• Relieving sensations of distress throughout a person’s whole body.
• Increasing circulation to tired and sore muscles as well as the internal organs.
• Relaxing hyper-tonic (tight) muscles and encouraging full range of motion in all of the joints.
• Encouraging a conscious relationship with each person’s bodily sensations and to the way that their Mind-Body subconsciously protects itself from further injury.
• Creating a comfortable environment for a person to relax into, and let go of, old patterns of embodiment.

Exhaustion, in modern society, usually occurs as a gradual transition from struggling against something, to feeling unable to struggle or withdraw any farther. In some instances, exhaustion can occur very suddenly after an infection or a serious physical or emotional trauma; the proverbial “straw on the Camel’s back”.

As a society and as individuals, we must begin to respect the most erosive force in our lives, or we are just going to get better at believing that we are supposed to use our lives in this way.

In NST we focus on resolving the physical and energetic recruitment that keep our Mind-Body on red alert, exhausting our resources.

In Applied Neuro Somatics® theory there are Nine Layers of Complex Distress. The first three are instinctual and happen “before your mind”, three are determined by your relationship with others, and the last three are existential states of mental and emotional (personally experienced) distress.

Depending on where and why your nervous system is holding a larger pattern of Embodied Distress, the approach to treatment will meet you there.

Contents:

• Neuro-Somatic Therapy - Theory and Practice
• Embodiment of Instinctual Distress
• Embodiment of Visceral Distress
• Embodiment of Existential Distress
• Hands on Tissue Rehabilitation
• Routines for Assessment
• Routines for Body Regions
• Postural Rehabilitation
• Somato-mapping and Bodywork