Embodied Psychotherapy, Spiritual Recapitulation, and Traditional Chinese Medicine
(Qíng Zhì Bìng – 情志病)
A Six Month Training for Clinicians, Patients, and Students
“If you have the good fortune to have a full life, you are going to go through some shit along the way!”
That has been true for a very long time…
If things get too challenging, you may experience a lack of sleep, too many thoughts, difficulty making decisions, or compulsively making decisions, times of overwhelming emotion, agitation, fatigue, impatience, anxiety, or depression. Life can become intense instinctually, viscerally, intuitively, emotionally, egoically, or existentially.
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.
If any of us stays in these emergency states for too long, it is inevitable that a deeper physiological illness may be activated, or an already existing condition made much worse.
At some point, the one adapting to overwhelming circumstances will become physiologically unable to sustain and restore both the body and the Heart/Mind.
At some point, behavior, reason, subjective reality, and the safety of the community are not sustainable.
Qing Zhi Bing can be translated in several ways, depending on the context. The two most common definitions are; ‘Mental and Emotional Imbalances,’ or ‘Emotionally Disorientating Wounds.’
Qing Zhi Bing is a system of diagnosis and treatment focusing on experiential, organic, and energetic imbalances wounds, and symptoms. A sudden car accident or a long and drawn-out divorce are often Qing Zhi Bing – Emotionally Disorientating Wounds.
The term Qing Zhi Bing can be used similarly to how we use the term ‘traumatic experience’ as well as the practice of ‘trauma therapy’ in modern speech.
Qing Zhi Bing is also a sequential process centered around embodied meditation practice (Nei Gong), breathwork, conscious movement and trauma release practices (Dao Yin/Qi Gong), Hands-on Body Work (Tui Na), Acupuncture, Herbology, and preventative medicine (Yang Sheng).
Qing Zhi Bing is also a form of Spiritual Recapitulation or a way of healing our lives by learning to become our authentic selves. Said another way, becoming the one who can be present to the best and worst days of our lives, the harms we have received, and the harms we have done.<?>
If you have ever gone through some ‘shit’, or support people who are in the process of trauma release and personal reintegration<?>
Did You Feel That…?
As sentient beings, the most important parts of our lives are felt.
When a situation elicits a certain feeling or triggers a challenging memory, we can be transported to another time, reliving and re-embodying one of the best or worst days of our lives.
Sometimes a feeling lingers, defining the past, the present, and the way our life unfolds.
Sometimes we try and hide our feelings – or, from our feelings.
And sometimes we can see how someone feels from across a room.
The Chinese character 情 (Qíng) describes the process of life, and implies the way we become a certain kind of being, the way we emanate our affect, and the way others see or sense our ‘vibe’.
In all forms of meditation, and most forms of psychotherapy, being able to stay connected to and curious about your feelings, and where they come from is a necessary first step.
What Was It...?
Whatever we experience, we record and remember it as either good or bad.
Because we have big brains and can learn, we all have many lists of good and bad memories that help us make better decisions every day.
If anything bad happens, we know what to do because we can recognize the situation and then reorient ourselves. This is true when driving to the store for chocolate, for raising children, and also for keeping a cultural prejudice alive for 1000 years.
In the process of Healing a Qing Zhi Bing, or an Emotional Disorientation Injury - a good place to start is our orientation to the world. Our ideas of good and bad, right and wrong.
This shows us what we think, know, believe, hope for, and are the most afraid of. This process of reorientation, self-empathy, and understanding can also bring clarity about how our feelings and intuition guide our decisions and beliefs.
What if we always feel angry?
What if we are always sad?
What if we do not trust ourselves?
What we feel can determine how we live. Understanding why you feel that way tells you who you have become.
Understanding your Life is how you begin Living your Life!
The Chinese character 志 (Zhì) describes the willingness, determination, and commitment of one's Heart and Mind it takes to become skillful. This can make us wise and gentle, impatient and volatile, or passive and timid.
What does that mean...?
What does that mean...?
We define ourselves by what we feel, what we think, and what we do along the way.
This becomes our story. Our why…, What it all means…
Some stories are heartwarming and inspiring and some are terrifying and difficult. Sometimes our stories feel like a blessing and sometimes they can feel like a curse or a wound.
The Chinese character 病 (Bìng) describes something from the outside changing things on the inside that produces symptoms and erosive changes to one's health. Your long-term and most extreme feelings, and/or your most stubborn beliefs and disorientations will always work their way deeper into life until you recognize it is time to heal.
In Qing Zhi Bing therapy, we explore our feelings and thoughts, our directions and decisions, and our states and stories through the landscape of our embodied experience. We explore what external influences have changed our inner realities so that we can recover our health, our innate freedom, and our sacred autonomy.
Course Content (Over Six Months)
Emotional Intelligence and TCM
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has a long history of helping people explore, understand, and transform their inner lives. Thousands of years of wisdom tell us that each feeling we have comes from an innate and valuable instinct. As we become more connected with our healthy instincts and intuition, our thoughts and feelings begin to come back into harmony with our lives.
Trauma and Trauma Release
Traumatic experiences are a part of life, but having a safe and collaborative place to release them is rare. The most effective forms of Trauma Release therapy are centered on one's embodied memories and somatic patterns of distress. (See Article - Qi Gong, Addiction, and The Four Wounds of Trauma)
In Qing Zhi Bing Therapy, a combination of movement, breathwork, herbal medicine, massage, and/or acupuncture can be used to release latent memories and trapped energies. It is no surprise that the same protocols are very effective in treating Addiction.
Chronic Illness and Self-Image
We have all come to accept how often trauma and distress can cause an illness. We sometimes 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 self-defining. One of the core wounds of Trauma is a loss of trust in others. Loss of trust in your body is an even greater wound.
The Three Whys of Addiction
Addiction is not about what we do to ourselves - it is about why we are trying to destroy ourselves. Addiction is about pain.
The path of recovery from Trauma, Chronic illness, and/or Addiction is a path of honest and patient inquiry. Traditional Chinese medicine's approach to Psychology and Talk Therapy helps people move toward their pain, the hard questions, and the truth of what it takes to truly heal.
Ancestral Grudges and Family Dynamics
Not that long ago, you would have been raised with at least one 'truly evil enemy.' It could have been a race, a country, a religion, or it may have been poverty. Not that long ago, you would have had to choose to be like your family or become an outcast. The push and pull of most families to control their resources and legacy has a unique impact on each generation.
Modern life allows us all to take some time and make some clear distinctions about who we are told to be and who we ultimately must choose to become.
If we are to live conscious, coherent, and authentic lives, we must be free to create a new future.
Early cultures from around the world have many practices and traditions for cultivating awareness.
In China, depending on the tradition, or guild, the focus could be on physical skills like hunting and spiritual warriorship, or on healing and longevity practices, or even on the innate nature of consciousness itself. Each path could be a crucible to transform one's life from a mundane walk in the dark to a sacred dance under a living Sky.
There was always hope and a practice.
As people living in modern Western Civilization, we have two challenges. First, we are a culture of shame, rage, and loneliness. Second, we do not have ancient traditional awareness practices to resort to when it becomes time to feel our lives.
Fortunately, Qing Zhi Bing therapy is organized around several ways to see oneself, one's conditioning, one's unconscious compulsions, and one's embodied experience.
Understandings and Foundations
Humans have needed ways of healing mentally, emotionally, and spiritually for at least 50,000 years.
Module One
The context of mental and emotional well being hits and intuitive nerve. If another person, or ourselves, are 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 emotional overwhelm, and do our best to understand any cognitive disorientation. 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 backard like your 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 wounded and finding a way to heal is very personal, and for many it is a Spiritual journey. If there is a format to many of the ancient traditions it is reintegration, realignment, and recapitulation.
Reintegration is the experience of not being alone or separate, on many levels.
Realignment is the opportunity to participate and transform through connect with the Universe and with others.
Recapitulation is the ancient process of healing past traumas through coregulation practices like cermony, dance, group circles and counselling when with others, and when alone Somatic Trauma Release practices, Inner Cultivation, and through immersive Spiritual practices like Prayer and Meditation.
Module Two
“Feeling is the state necessary for healing!”
How are you at feeling? Is an intentional pause to check in with yourself more stressful, or a like bathing in warm, connection, and self care? If it is more stressful, when you feel overwhelmed what do you do instead?
There are many ancient practices to help relearn the ways and the value of being self aware, consciously embodied, and open to feeling the hardest parts as a path to 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. Relearning to open towards Trust, Love, Belonging, some egoic pain, and eventually complete conscious coherence.
"To Heal emotional pain, you have to move towards the source of the pain!"
The only way to do that in a healthy way is through and roadmap of interactive processis and practices and the ability stay in the 'eye of your hurricane' with the hard won skills of Awareness. To be clear, there is awareness like watching a movie, and there is the awreness of a spiritual warrior commited to patience, adaptability, and compassion.
Module Three
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has a long history of helping people explore, understand, and transform their inner lives. Thousands of years of wisdom tell us that each feeling we have comes from an innate and invaluable instinct.
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.
understanding the TCM physiology of Sentience, Cognition, Emotions, Souls, Ghosts, Hormones, Organs,Qi Functions and Meridian Circulation. A Modern scientific understanding will also be described when the most relevant
Experiential Physiology
- The Ontology of Being
- Your Five Wills
- Your Heart/Mind Spirit (Xin/Shen)
- The Infinite Wheel of Cognition
- Your Three Hun
- The Seven P’o
- 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 aspect of your Meridians
Patterns and Pendulums
Module Four
"Fitting in produces anxiety, belonging is an instinct!"
Developmental Psychology
Your psychology develops in an environment of needs, connection, and meaning.
Cared for cared out sharing
Family grudges, extreme religions or diets, addition or ritual abuse ancestral trauma and ancestral gifts
Unstable cultures, potentially dire future, fluctuations in gender and identity, a culture that fears missing out instead of adding individual creativity and expression. Nearly 20% children facingdiagnosible psychiatric condition(dep anxiety suicide neurodivergence) those 20% and all other children are being raised by parents with am inumal 30% and more 50% likely hood of a diagnosable Psychiatri condition..
From a TCM perspective, a Qing Zhi Bing (sometimes refed to as Adverse Childhood Experiences), can linger and grow, building into a perfect storm of behavioral chaos and consequences
Most Trauma that is predicably and easily ‘triggered’ is really about pain. The Healing journey is to accept that each kind of pain comes from an unmet need.
Module Five
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 work out the ways those days and people are still inhabiting your nervous system.
If you grew up in an environment that that physically or emotionally dangerous, unavailable, or manipulative, your instinctual Polyvagal, or ‘social nervous system’ is in Trauma. 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.
The Four Wounds of Thrauma
- 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
The course also delves into the Three Whys of Addiction - a process of Radical Self Acceptance.
Module Six
What is Emotional Intelligence?
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has a long history of helping people explore, understand, and transform their inner lives. Thousands of years of wisdom tell us that each feeling we have comes from an innate and valuable instinct. As we become more connected with our healthy instincts, our thoughts and feelings come back into harmony with our lives.
“What we give to ourselves, we can then give to others, like love and respect
What we listen to in others, we can finally hear in ourselves”
In a rapidly changing, profoundly overstimulating, and socially disconnected world, many people are unsure of their place in it all.
A primary human need is connection, mutual support, and meaningful collaboration.
Module Seven
Individuation, Aiutonomy, and the Need for Trust, and Belonging
When we are small we wrap our arms around our parent legs and won't et go. As adolescents, we push our parents as far away as we can. Depending on our childhood, if our needs were met, our adult life can unflod in many ways.
Acceptable Difference and Distance
Rethinking Attahment Theory
Supporting Neurodivergent Journeys
Module Eight
Conditioned Identity Structures
How Habitual Behavior and Life's Limitations Define Identity
Aging, Mortality, and Death
Fate, Destiny, and Innate Nature
If Trauma has added up to distrust – about Veisceral, emotional, egoic, and existential pain. A Sacred container for pain
Chronic Illness and Self-Image
We have all come to accept how often trauma and distress can cause an illness. We sometimes 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 self-defining. One of the core wounds of Trauma is a loss of trust in others. Loss of trust in your body is an even greater wound.
Reorientation and Reintegration
Module Nine
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Module Ten
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Module Eleven
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Module Twelve
“If you have the good fortune to have a full life,
you are going to go through some shit along the way!”
That has been true for a very long time…
If things get too challenging, you may experience a lack of sleep, too many thoughts, difficulty making decisions, or compulsively making decisions, times of overwhelming emotion, agitation, fatigue, impatience, anxiety, and/or depression. Life can become intense instinctually, viscerally, intuitively, emotionally, egoically, and/or existentially.
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.
The list of potential symptoms that can arise during profoundly stressful times, after one’s mental and emotional adaptability are overwhelmed is a very long list, and some symptoms are unique to each person. For some most of the symptoms are ‘affective’, or of the Heart and Mind. For other most of the Symptoms are of the Body, causing almost every chronic illness that exists today.
Module Thirteen
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Supportive Therapies
Meditation
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Movement
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Connection
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A Bonus and an Invitation
Bonus Module
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Register Now
(You can register until Nov, 2024)
Please let us know if you are interested as space is limited to ensure the necessary support.
This 6 - month training, includes over 40 hours of LIVE content, intended for sequential training through
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