Conversations on Healing

Welcome to the Conversations on Healing Podcast, where host Shay Beider speaks with renowned healthcare leaders, practitioners, and thought leaders to explore the world of wellness, the incredible powers of self-care, and what it truly means to heal today. Join us on this journey to become more whole, healed, and connected.

Shay Beider Hi, I’m your host, Shay Beider, and we’re back for another fun conversation on healing. I’m so grateful to have you joining us for this episode. Today, I’m speaking with Dr. Cynthia Li a doctor of integrative and functional medicine, Western’s medically trained, but also she’s a certified qigong teacher and author of the bestselling memoir, Brave New Medicine. Her most recent book is The Medicine of Flow. Cynthia’s own journey through a complex autoimmune illness changed the way she understands healing, really shifting her focus from a biomechanical perspective to one that’s fundamentally more energetic. This shift can lead to an experience that she calls effortless healing. In our discussion, we explore her newest book, The Medicine of Flow, and also look at just what is the concept of flow, or also sometimes something that in Western medicine is defined as coherence, and what it means to become aware of our own awareness, kind of the eye of the observer.

Cynthia guides us through two qigong practices. So you may want to be in a place where you can sit down and kind of focus, close your eyes, and participate in those qigong practices. And we’ll also be discussing this idea of an inner state and how you can work with your inner state to create a healing experience. What is fascinating is how Cynthia shares, she’s really come to ultimately understand that healing isn’t just a personal journey, but part of something much, much larger, this shared connection to the collective wholeness of our communities, but even at large scale to the universe itself. So I think you’ll find this an inspiring conversation, particularly for anyone who’s had any struggles with chronic illness or health challenges. This is a big reframe on how to think about and experience effortless healing. So let’s have a listen.

Well, Cynthia, I’m so happy to have you back on the Conversations on Healing podcast. Previously, we had you come on to talk about your book, Brave New Medicine, which was really a look at being a patient after having gone through so much training as a physician and figuring out the depth of how you could heal your own personal story and things that you had gone through. And today we have the wonderful opportunity to talk about your newest book, The Medicine of Flow, which is just a really beautiful opportunity and reflection on how we heal at some of the deepest levels. And you’ve leaned into this phrase, which I love, effortless healing, and how we can find an experience of effortless healing. And a lot of what you’ve personally done as your practice is to utilize Qigong and some of the beautiful practices embedded within that method as a way to help you to find an experience of effortless healing.

So we’ll have a chance to talk about all of these things today, which I’m really excited to share with our listeners. So welcome and thank you.

Dr. Cynthia Li Thank you so much, Shay. It’s wonderful to be back.

Shay Good. So I wanted to talk about, you have these kind of seven steps. It’s the framework that you’ve built the book, the Medicine of Flow Around, and then you’ve also added all these specific practices that kind of accompany each of those seven steps. So I thought it might be useful to start a little bit about why you chose this particular framework for the way that you wanted to share the material with the readers and also with our listeners today.

Cynthia Yeah, absolutely. I don’t know if I chose it or if it chose me.

Shay There we go.

Cynthia That’s the first part of effortlessness. No, so I had just a little bit of background that I had talked about in the first podcast is that I am a physician trained in internal medicine and then was really focused on public health and international aid work. And a very complex autoimmune condition took me down this whole other path because my own paradigm in internal medicine had very little to offer. And so it took me down into integrative medicine, which I would summarize as lifestyle medicine, and then functional medicine, which I summarize as root cause medicine. So really looking for hidden root causes of imbalances that are contributing to chronic disease. So it could be a mysterious, ill-defined illness like mine, which was chronic fatigue syndrome and dysautonomia, and also an autoimmune thyroid condition. It could be something that’s very well described like diabetes or dementia.

So one of the modalities that I discovered in addition to diet, in addition to nutrient deficiencies that I needed to correct, was a mind-body practice called qigong, as you mentioned. And qigong is an ancient mind-body practice that’s rooted in China. It’s gone back for millennia. It’s the foundation of acupuncture herbs. It’s the foundation of martial arts. It’s the foundation of. A lot of people have heard of tai chi. So it’s not new. However, what is new and what makes it more accessible to someone like me who was kind of a skeptic or maybe just a little bit afraid of something that felt a little bit esoteric was that there’s science now. So there’s both a lot of data on the health effects of qigong and tai chi, and they’re usually studied together. There’s also emerging neuroscience, which I cover a lot of in this book about the coherence fields of our heart, which I know you know a thing or two about and that you apply in a lot of your healing.

So it began to make sense to me in some way, in some logical way. And so I began to practice qigong as a mind-body rehabilitation practice. And then it wasn’t until I had another crisis sort of along this long healing journey that I kind of had nowhere else to go. I felt like I was sort of maxed out on internal medicine, integrative medicine, functional medicine. And even before that, I had also tapped into learning intuition. How do we develop our intuition? How do we use that for our healing? And then me as a doctor working with patients, how do I use intuition as part of my clinical judgment together with analysis, together with logic and to really amplify healing? So that’s where I was. And so when I had the second health crisis, I kind of just had to surrender everything.

I had felt like I knew a lot, and then I had a second health crisis. So in that moment, I just remember I was on the couch and I was kind of looking out to the night sky and I felt like a drop in the ocean. And I was like, I’m so small. The vast amounts of knowledge that I know is so small compared to this universe that we’re living in. So I surrendered and I didn’t just surrender into nothing. I didn’t resign, but I ended up going deeper into my qigong practices initially just as a coping mechanism. My body’s not feeling comfortable at all and quite desperate and quite near death for a couple of months. And I was just going in there and what happened was I ended up tapping into this or surrendering into a flow state. Coherence is another word for it.

It’s the scientific word for it. And then in Qigong, we would call it activated calm. So sort of unknowingly I was like, okay. I had been approaching Qigong more of as a physical. There was a little bit energetic definitely, but physical rehabilitation was very pragmatic. So then I was tapping into the energetic and the consciousness dimensions of Qigong, which is really where the healing potential lies. The effect of that was that I began to heal quite quickly. And what I had anticipated would take a few to several years was, and a kind of a slow slog through that kind of unfolded over a few months. And I was still doing things. I was still going to the doctor. I was receiving acupuncture treatments. I was also getting IV antibiotics for a tick-borne infection. I was doing a lot of different things, but it had a quality that was just very, as you mentioned, effortless, effortless.

So it almost felt like the healing was happening to me. And when I look back on it, even that period of time, it feels a little bit like a dream. And that’s a quality that a lot of people who tap into flow experience. And we usually associate it with peak performers like athletes and artists, musicians who are just like, they’re at the top of their game and they can step into this state where they then kind of step out of linear time and space. They almost feel like they have sort of supernatural powers and they receive intuitions. But now we know that actually you don’t have to be a peak performer. You don’t even have to be a functional human being. I mean, I certainly wasn’t at that time. And it’s not something that we strive for. It’s actually a state that we surrender into.

And so it’s really, if we can bring the flow state from a psychological mental state down into the body, which is what Qigong does, is we can activate this tremendous healing potential. It’s literally kind of inviting life and inviting the natural harmony of life to flow through us and with us and kind of supporting. So I had a lot of those experiences that a lot of people who describe flow states had in a very, very critical point in my healing. So you might say that that was kind of a remarkable healing or in some ways kind of a mini miracle. And at the same time, it was so ordinary. And that was really something that I began to then incorporate into my work with patients was how do I introduce this so that they might have more ease and less efforting in their own healing, not only for more efficiency and effectiveness in healing, but so that they’re also not blocking their own healing potential.

A lot of times when we get really fixated on the particular goal that we want or the way that we think we’re going to get there, we actually block all the other infinite possibilities of how that might happen. And then ultimately it’s a connection back to oneself in a very profound yet organic way. This is the design of our bodies. It’s not something esoteric and it’s not something even spiritual. This is how our bodies are designed. So I began a journey sort of shifting from the biomechanics and the biochemistry of the body into the bioenergetics. So okay, what does it mean to be an energy being? And we hear it a lot in spiritual traditions or in Qigong, a wisdom tradition. We don’t hear it in medicine. And it’s actually very, very scientific. So I just began down that path. And this book was something.

So when you tap into flow state and you kind of cultivate it so that it becomes a default state, or at least the state by which you’re largely living your life, is that you also receive information that you may not think is what you want to do. And yet you sort of just know this is what I need to do. And so that’s what happened with this book was I hadn’t planned on writing another book and I was really content with my life and my work and it was very fulfilling and it was also continuing to evolve. But I had this very deep knowing one day, I was like, oh, I need to write this. And yes, for my patients and for other people who may benefit, primarily it’s for myself, for me to come even deeper into the understanding of what healing is and who I am.

And then therefore that itself becomes a healing effect for other people because we heal totally in concert with each other. So when I began to write the book, the seven steps just kind of crystallized. And they’re linear in the book because the book has an arc and that’s how we read and that’s how we understand stories. What’s fun about flow too, and I know this is something that you not only know, but you live and you practice all the time, is that it doesn’t really matter. We can enter at any of those and it’s not linear. It’s either spiral and/or spherical. So it’s like, okay, if emptying the mind feels really difficult, I’m going to start with inhabiting my body.

So I began to connect with my younger self back in that moment of critical health. And I did remember that what I was so wishing for was just a guide. I just wish someone could tell me what to do. I didn’t want to think. I was too tired. And also I had no idea what to do. And so this began to be also just a dialogue with myself and also with the collective field, which is what I write about in the book. Because when we go really, really deep into our true self, it’s inseparable from the whole. So I was both kind of writing to myself and writing to life itself, to humanity collectively. So it just felt really playful. It felt very healing. And I was like, oh, okay, you know what? Even though they’re not linear, the steps, there is a way in which I can share what I learned in a not so beautiful, coherent way and crystallize it in a way that is much easier to cultivate this flow state, to surrender into this flow state.

Shay Yeah. And it’s quite interesting because you open the book with this premise that you can actually support your health by doing less, not more. And when you think about it, a lot of people that are in a health crisis, they’re experiencing all the things that Western medicine has to offer, but then if they’ve also been introduced to integrative or lifestyle or functional approaches, then they’re adding more, more, more, more. And so you even talked about that at one point in the book where just the thought of, oh my gosh, all the things I have to do. If I’m in a health crisis, there’s all these supplements I have to take and these things and blood tests, extra blood tests, and all of it. And at a certain point, you completely surrendered into this other way of being and not doing more, but actually doing less.

This idea that sometimes the surrender in and that experience of doing less can actually be where that restorative place starts to open up, that intuitive place and where that flow can start to just kind of come to you rather than you efforting towards it. And I thought that that principle ties in so beautifully to your idea of effortless healing, that there’s a way in which we can put in so much effort in different areas in our life, whether that’s healing or many other aspects of our life. And it’s not to say that at times that isn’t beneficial or even necessary. But there are very different ways, particularly with healing, where you can instead receive and kind of accept something coming through you and to you and alongside you. And it’s just completely different way of understanding what it means to heal. And I think that is one of the things that’s so beautiful about the book is you’re reminding people there’s not just this one way that’s very proactive, but actually there’s this whole other knowledge and system of healing that’s receptive.

We’ve often called it in our work with integrative touch, a receptive listening model rather than kind of an authoritative knowing or a prescriptive model. It’s this way of just receptive listening and then allowing that to be kind of a guiding force. And there’s many, many ways to look at it, but I’m curious to understand what you’ve come to know about this experience of doing less, not more in a healing process.

Cynthia Yeah. So the phrase effortless healing, I adapted from a translation from Qigong and ultimately Taoist wisdom of effortless doing. And the Chinese characters actually translate to do nothing. And it’s very often confused and easily so with idleness and being passive. Often when we think of receiving, it’s like we’re just kind of passive and resigned. And this is very different. So in healing and in medicine, we usually think of two states of being. And most people have heard of, okay, fight or flight, sympathetic, stress state. And to your point, it is necessary often for acute situations, for acute events, and it’s lifesaving. Then we think of rest and digest, or sometimes it’s called rest and restore, the parasympathetic. And so often we’re trying to get out of the chronic stress state and go into the parasympathetic state. And I highly recommend the rest and restore state.

And it’s totally necessary. However, it’s a lower energy state and it tends to be passive. So we’re lounging on the couch or maybe we’re sun tanning on the beach. There’s a third state, and that’s what qigong teaches us, is this flow state or activated calm coherence. And so I use those terms interchangeably. Also, harmony. Harmony is another phrase that we use in qigong. So it’s an activated calm state. So parasympathetic nervous system pathways are activated. So it is a relaxed state. However, it’s activated. So it’s a higher energy state. And that’s why things seemingly can happen quickly. And since most of us understand our devices better than we understand our bodies, the way that I understand it and explain it is that most of the time when we’re living our life and if we have a health condition to heal and there’s all this complexity and we usually do think of more as better.

And it’s like having all these different apps on and they’re running all the time even if we’re not using them. And that’s not even to say the apps that are running from childhood patterns and old wounds that we’re carrying and old condition patterns that are stressful. Those are also running all the time. And so when we come into this state, it’s like closing down a lot of the apps. We don’t even have to know what the apps are. And that’s where the simplicity lies. That’s where the effortlessness lies. We don’t even have to know the specifics. All we need to focus on is how do I harmonize my energy? How do I come into this flow state? What are the practices? And so they’re very, very simple.

So it’s energy efficient. We’re not running just a bunch of programs that we don’t need. And then what happens in the flow state is coherence. And coherence, cohere means to stick together. So when we’re not in coherence, which is most of the time for most people, when we’re thinking and we’re analyzing and we’re engaging with life, we’re usually not in coherence. So our brainwaves will show that. We’re in thinking mode and people who are familiar with brainwaves, we’re in beta state. So it’s not a critique of it, but when we’re only in that state, it actually consumes a lot of energy. And what happens is that the different parts of the brain, they’re all kind of working individually and they’re trying to communicate. And so it also takes a lot of efforting from a physiological standpoint to say nothing of the whole body. So in coherence, when the brainwaves are in flow and observation, so shifting from thinking, like I’m thinking about you, I’m looking at you and I’m analyzing and what are we talking about?

Shifting to a deeper observation state where I’m listening. And to your point, deep listening, I’m receiving, I’m paying attention. I’m silencing my mind so that I’m truly listening and seeing that person rather than this is what I think I’m going to say already as soon as you say something. It shifts our brainwaves. And what happens when we come into flow states is that the whole brain begins to sync up, cohere, stick together as one. And then the body systems can do that together because we’re an energy being. And every time we have a heartbeat and every time we have a brain impulse and there’s an electrical current going, we’re generating a magnetic field. So it’s not spiritual in terms of energy. It is deeply organic to the design of our bodies. And that’s what I mean is we’re energy beings. So we have this beautiful energy field that can be measured, electromagnetic field, several feet out from each of us.

And that’s just the energy fields that we can measure right now. There are much subtler ones that quantum science tells us. So all of the body systems can sync up, can cohere, stick together as one. So it becomes not just an energy efficient state, but energy conserving state. So then you have so much more energy towards healing. And so going back to the analogy of the apps, so it’s not just like, okay, you’re shutting down unnecessary apps, but then the apps that are running, they sync up as one. So all the data is just integrated. So you don’t have to close one down and look at the next one and then try to do it yourself, which is often what the body is trying to do when we’re not in coherence. So the lived experience of that is effortlessness. Doesn’t mean that we’re not doing anything.

It means the resistance and the fighting that is often applied in healing. I’m going to beat this, the language. I’m going to beat this. I’m a survivor, I’m a winner, and I’m going to effort. That begins to shift. And so a side effect of that is we begin to shift our relationship to our symptoms. Instead of fighting, we begin to, okay, how do we flow with them? How do we just open them up so that they’re not stuck? They’re not just stuck on this program that’s just been running, running, running, running.

So there’s so many different dimensions in which it is reduced or no effort.

Shay Yeah, that’s great. And I’m thinking too, Cynthia, for some of our listeners that maybe have heard of qigong, but don’t know exactly what it is or how they might utilize or apply it in their own life. Obviously in the book you go through several different exercises. You also have audio versions that people can listen to. But I’m feeling like for the people that are listening now, it might be wonderful to introduce them to just a very simple qigong practice that they could learn so that they would have an understanding of the simplicity, but yet also the power of this type of work. Yeah.

Cynthia Sure. All right. We can do maybe a five-minute one.

Shay Yeah, absolutely. Whatever resonates with you and feels like it would be a good fit for someone who’s maybe newer to the idea of qigong.

Cynthia Sure, sure. We can do a five-minute one. And again, this is where I really appreciate the science. And so the science that’s now available, it’s not just, oh, we’re going to bring back ancient wisdom and then apply it now. Because first of all, we are so different than our ancestors millions of years ago, sorry, thousands of years ago. But we’re in totally different information bubbles. And so the science now is kind of converging with this ancient wisdom and then creating something new. And so again, I feel like it’s much more accessible. We don’t have to go to remote places and hang out with a teacher in a group for a long time. It’s like we can do this from our living room with no practice. And the science actually shows that coherence, we can begin to entrain our nervous system toward a lasting, sustaining state of flow in as little as 10 minutes, three times a day.

So I mean, that’s pretty compelling. Most people can do that. Even if we’re working full-time or maybe even more than one job and have kids and all that, it’s like you can do 10 minutes before you go to bed. You can do 10 minutes when you wake up, and you can do 10 minutes during your lunch break. So knowing that has been very motivating for a lot of people. You don’t have to do two to three hours a day, that kind of thing, and just not even get started. So most of the audios and videos that accompany my book and they’re on my website, they’re all four to eight minutes. And so it’s doable really for anybody. So we can do one right now.

Shay Yeah, I think it would be great. Yeah.

Cynthia Okay. So I just invite you wherever you are to close your eyes. And if you’re sitting on the floor like I am, can sit cross-legged and just finding a comfortable position if you’re sitting on a chair, placing your hands in your lap. And for all of us, just gently lifting up the crown toward the sky. And this will naturally tuck the chin under slightly and just rotating the shoulders back a few times. So opening up the heart field with this simple motion. And then if we’re sitting on the floor, just feeling the connection between your tailbone and the floor and the earth below.

If you’re on a chair, feeling the feet, all the different points of contact along the floor, connecting with the vast earth below. And so with this simple posture, we begin to open our spine and sort of our whole being, our mind, our breath to flow. So even observing, if at all, you feel a slight activation, relaxation, and just observing whatever comes up. So now drawing your breath down into the center of your abdomen. We call this the lower dantien. And slowing your breath. Also allowing it on the inhalation to drop naturally into the abdomen, allowing the breath to be natural.

And then just gently begin rotating from your low spine forward to the left, back, and to the right. Just slowly making circles, initiating the movement with the low spine, keeping the head, the crown of the head lifted up toward the sky so the spine remains lengthened, spacious, relaxed, keeping your breath centered in the lower dantian in the middle of your core. If you have any tightness or pain, just observing that. No fighting. No resistance, but gently inviting some openness to those areas. And then just gently reversing the direction, keeping the crown lifted toward the sky, feet or tailbone connected and rooted in the earth.

Breath and awareness are centered in the middle of the spiral. So just bringing a soft awareness to what it feels like to keep your awareness, your mind centered in stillness amid movement. So they’re not opposites. In qigong, there’s no such thing as opposites. There are complements. And so stillness and movement can coexist at the same time. They inform each other. They support each other. And just reversing the direction one more time and slowly coming to stillness, keeping your eyes closed. And can you observe or experience the continual spiral flow even as your body comes to stillness?

Just observing your inner state right now, just how you feel. Any thoughts or emotions or sensations arising? And so you can stay right here with your eyes closed as you continue to listen to our conversation or to watch it. You can open your eyes. We’re just noticing when we do open our eyes for those of us who have sight, or if we begin to shift our listening to the sounds around us, we begin to move external rather than keeping our awareness centered in our core.

There’s a different quality. And so one of the practices that I do a lot of workshops around is what I call pure consciousness or qigong in daily life. It’s like, okay, it’s one thing to come into this state or to harmonize our mind, heart, and body during the practice, but then what happens in daily life? How do we cultivate that presence?

The awareness of energy, flow, the stillness and the movement. How do I cultivate an inner stillness amid the flurry of movement of my life? So it begins to really inform and transform daily life. So for example, let’s say we’re amid some kind of situation. It could be a health situation, could be a relationship, could be a work situation, but things are just feeling either very scattered or very much in crisis mode. So the way that it might feel energetically is just kind of like, oh my God, I’m getting tossed around. Or I’m drowning in this eddy of life spiraling around me. And so this is a very powerful practice. It’s like, oh, can you, okay, yes, there’s a lot moving, but you know how to harmonize that spiral. You know how to organize yourself around. You know this movement in your body. You’ve been practicing it three times a day or more.

And then you also know what it feels like to stay centered amid the movement. So we’re not just externally trying to control everything, which is very efforting. And then from this centered state, we begin to see things more clearly. We begin to intuit, oh, this is what needs attention now. This one can wait. And then often in the waiting, this thing over here might even resolve itself. We don’t know. And so a lot of effortless healing is also, it’s both playful and humbling because it’s like, you know what? Who says I know best how to reconcile that? What happens if I just wait? And again, not just wait by withholding, but wait while harmonizing myself. And the real power also of coherence is this collective field. So to cohere means to stick together. So both internally, our systems begin to cohere as one. And then externally, so the science is also validating this.

If you’re in coherence, Shay, you can bring me into coherence without me even knowing. And that’s a powerful realization. So it doesn’t happen all the time. It depends. It seems anyways from the studies that we have so far, it seems to be dependent on the relationship between us and it relates to trust. And people who’ve been practicing together seem to cohere much more readily, which makes sense. They’re trusting, they’re doing the same thing. So there’s an amplification effect.

And so it also becomes a very stable place to be. So if I can, okay, I might not know how to reconcile that situation right there, but I’m cultivating coherence. Maybe it might even help support that other person’s coherence. And then things may right themselves. We don’t know. And that’s another piece of the surrender. We don’t know. We let go of the precise outcome that we think is going to serve the greater good. And we invite the creativity of life or the creativity of the dynamic system, whether it’s a family, whether it’s a work situation, whether it’s the creativity of my inner systems, my organs trying to create something that I could never know. So that’s why, even though usually when I say effortless healing, people go, yes, yes, I want some of that. The surrender part can be challenging because we’re in a crisis or we’ve been dealing with this for so long that we just want to make it happen.

So then to say surrender, it feels very counterintuitive, and we tend towards just resigning and doing nothing. Literally doing nothing, including withdrawing from our own inner state, our presence.

Shay Right. You give a nice example. It’s a story that you share in the book about a couple and they’re about to go on a trip to Italy and the one person starts to get the signs that they might be experiencing gout. So share a little bit about that story because I think it’s a very good illustration of how you can affect your inner state and then see where that leads. So if you don’t mind sharing, I feel like that’s a good example.

Cynthia Absolutely. So this is a friend of mine that I’ve been practicing qigong with for a long time. And she and her husband were getting ready to go on an international flight. And she had confessed, I struggle. I lose myself. I become incoherent, particularly around my husband’s health. And he’s had intermittent gout attacks for a long, long time. She’s seen how debilitating they are. And he feels the inklings of that just as they’re sitting at the gate waiting to go on this long flight followed by a long trip abroad. So she’s kind of going into that state. Now, this is another challenging part about effortless healing and flow is that the primary awareness is about our own inner state. It’s not about, oh, I want to do this so that I can bring that person into coherence or whatever. Because when we do that, we actually block that state.

That also keeps us in the thinking mode. So it’s really about, oh my gosh, I am becoming incoherent. That makes me less effective to support him.

Yeah, it’s also a place where, oh, how do I also bring healing to myself? So she recognized her resistance building up. And she began to practice in the airport at the gate. And before that, she had already said, “Can you take your hydration tablets? And what about your medication?” So it’s not about not doing. And he was like, “No, no, no, I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine.” And anyway, so she was just like, “Oh my God.” She was starting to get frustrated. So she begins to practice just to bring her own self into harmony. And when she opened her eyes, her husband had not only actually taken his hydration tablets and had a whole glass of water, but he was also open to taking his meds to prevent the flare. And that’s a beautiful outcome. So I share a lot of stories in there about either people who’ve shared things so that what does it look like in daily life?

Okay. Flow is a concept or flow during practice, but what does it look like in daily life?

And we also have to let go of the attachment to outcome. So she’s not doing it for him, and so that he might do these things. She has to be very, very focused on no, releasing her own attachments. And so the first three steps in the book, pause into stillness, and it can be a very momentary pause, softening your intentions. So okay, you know what? Her intentions for him to prevent a gout attack, they’re well-meaning. And most would say they’re good. However, when we get really fixated on that, we add resistance to the whole system. In this case, their relationship. And what happens when people feel like they’re being judged or fought or controlled is they resist more. So they tend to become more incoherent in their inner states as well, which then can actually enhance inflammation. So it’s just softening your intentions. And then the third one’s emptying the mind.

So we have to empty. We have to empty. And the saving grace for me about qigong was, oh, because I had practiced various forms of meditation where it was just the mind, it was very difficult because I would then begin to struggle with my thoughts. But qigong, then we have these movements. And there are some practices that are just static, where it’s just the breath, it’s just consciousness. But it’s taken me years to arrive there where I can just be like, “Oh yeah, yeah.

Okay, now I can do these.” And even that we realize is there’s movement in there. There’s movement and there’s stillness. There’s stillness in the movement, there’s movement in the stillness. But the movements, and they’re very simple, can be really lifesaving. If we’re really agitated, really emotional, and we can’t use our breath, we can’t use our consciousness to guide ourselves back to ourselves.

We can go into the movements. And that’s exactly what she did. And there’s also sounds. There’s also vibrations. Sounds that can be really harmonizing for people. It just really depends on who prefers what and what resonates.

Shay Yeah. And you give an example of that in the book. I think you spell it like NNNN.

Cynthia Yeah, it’s just this sound. Yes.

Shay Exactly. And that as a way to use that sound, that might be another fun one just to share with people who are listening who are like, “Wait, how would I use sound? How would that work?” So when you do a practice like that using sound, you’re doing that, how long are you pacing it and in what increments? Or how are you doing that now that you have some practice or experience? Or how do you teach people that are new also how they would start with using sound like that?

Cynthia Yeah, so the sound, I mean, we can do a really short practice. The way I guide it in the book is a heart-centering one. So wherever you are right now, if you would like, you can just, again, close your eyes and adjusting your posture. So the crown of the head is lifted up towards the sky and the feet or the tailbone are connected with the earth below. And this is also really important, this alignment, just because it not only opens our body to flow in terms of the neurons and our spine and our circulatory system, our lymphatics, just everything is kind of elongated and has more space. But spatially, it can help us feel like, “Oh, you know what? Yeah, my body as it is right now is the connector between the sky and the earth.” So it’s like a necessary conduit to connect heaven and earth.

And something shifts in us when we do that. So placing the palms one over the other, over the heart center, really just over the breastbone, the sternum, and taking some deep, slow breaths into where your palms are placed into the center of the chest. And so with each exhalation, you make the end sound.

And then a deep inhalation. So we can also make the end sound just very briefly and paying attention to the silence between the sounds. Deep breath.

So now not making the sound, but just attuning to the vibration of the mm sound. So with each exhalation, it’s as if you are feeling the vibration of the sound. And then we can also take it, we can take any of the practices to the collective field, to the collective practice. And so just visualizing all the different practitioners who are practicing this together across time and space. And so it’s as if we’re immersed in a field, like a chorus of the end sound. And so the next time we make the end sound on the exhalation, it’s as if our sound is joining this chorus, this vast, vast, even infinite chorus of the n sound. So taking a deep breath. Just observing that the n sound continues even when ours stops. So another way we can use the end sound is just observing our body. And if there’s a place in your body that needs healing, and maybe there’s a place in your body that right now feels achy or sore, or maybe it’s hot or cool.

It’s a place that’s asking for attention for a little love. You can gently make them sound to that area.

And it’s not a forceful sound. It’s as if it’s just a natural part of your exhalation. No extra energy. And so when we finish, we’re just placing the hands back on the heart, giving an inner smile to your heart space. Just staying connected to that, staying connected to that harmonizing vibration and sound even as we continue our conversation.

Shay Thank you. You also talk in the book, when you talk about that inner smile, about this space in the center of the head, near where the amygdala is. Maybe you could speak a little bit about that and the creation of an inner smile in that kind of inner sanctum inside of our head.

Cynthia Yeah. So in Qigong, we call that the palace of consciousness, Shinji palace. And in anatomy, physiology, we would correlate that primarily with the pineal gland. And

People will associate that with intuition. And also it’s the master circadian rhythm gland. And so it’s really the orchestra conductor for our body’s organs. What time do you turn on, turn off, cycle? So it’s this beautiful, very, very underestimated gland. However, the pineal gland sits, and to your point, very, very close to all these very crucial glands and organs that are directly related with the mind body. I mean, the whole brain is connected to the whole body.

And there’s this cluster there right in the middle around the pineal, which is, some people will know it as the limbic system, which is the amygdala, the hippocampus. There’s other organs in there that are connected to what we experience as memory and emotion. So trauma is a really, it’s a big field. The healing of trauma, a lot of people have heard of the limbic system because it gets a bad rap.

It’s like, oh, because you had such a strong emotion associated with this event, it sort of just got imprinted there very strongly. The opposite is true too. We have a really, really strong, blissful, joyful experience. It also gets imprinted through the limbic system. And then in the limbic system, it’s also connected to the hypothalamus, the pituitary glands. Basically the master hormone glands of the whole body. So there’s so much signaling that’s happening and connected to the autonomic nervous system, which is connected to flow state and fight or flight and rest. So a lot happens there. And so we can practice actually the end sound into that space. We can also do the inner smile. And so one thing I would just invite people to do, whether you’re watching this or listening, is simply to close your eyes. Well, first of all, this is looking around your environment.

Look at your room.

Obviously, if you’re driving, don’t do this. And presumably you’re not doing it. You didn’t do the other practices either. But then closing your eyes and drawing your awareness back into the center of your head and just observing what that simple shift does. And so there’s a beautiful energy field around this space, and you can just visualize a soft translucent ball of light in the center of your head. So with each inhalation, the soft translucent lights, like a little sun, it just gently expands. With each exhalation, it gently contracts. And so we actually know that physiologically this is what’s happening too. We usually think of the breath as something that’s happening in our lungs with our diaphragm and sometimes with our abdomen.

But with the interconnectedness of the whole body with the brain, the brain actually breathes too. So the extracellular fluid, it expands and then it contracts, it expands and contracts. So looking and listening and feeling into that space and just giving that space a gentle inner smile. And so just noticing any shifts in how you feel. Oftentimes, we connect to the places in our bodies that are challenged only by what’s wrong, by their pain signals or by difficult memories in relation to the limbic system. So a lot of the practices are, they’re simple and they’re not always easy because it’s inviting us to connect with those parts of ourselves directly and to inhabit them to be there, to stay there no matter what is coming up. And then of course we are the master of our own bodies and our consciousnesses And so if it feels too much, we can ease up on it.

And then you know what? We continue to go. And so in a lot of neural retraining practices or trauma work, we call it incremental training. What is your incremental training zone? And in Qigong, we call it comfortably challenging. So if it’s too comfortable, guess what? There’s not a lot of healing happening because we’re not even moving into the places that need to open up and be able to transform. But then if we overdo it, we can risk re-triggering ourselves into a place of paralysis. So then we don’t even go there. And so we’re really trying to find that zone. It’s got to be a little bit challenging, but not too challenging. So it’s the Goldilocks zone.

Shay Right. That’s great. I want to summarize a few key ideas that I think we’ve discussed in this conversation today, and you can add and enhance any part of what I’m sharing. But this idea that we are energetic beings and that more and more science is able to measure that, that the electromagnetic field of the heart is something that can be measured, that it’s the strongest electromagnetic field in the body, that extends several feet outside of our physical limits in our body. And that is something now that we’re seeing in research studies that it’s quantifiable, which is pretty exciting. And that this idea of our inner state and our ability to be with, navigate, using some of the practices that we went over in the conversation today, gives us this ability to navigate our inner state, which then changes our relationship to the world and anyone in the world that we’re connecting with.

And so there’s this capacity that we all have to tune in first because you have to identify how is my inner state now? And then understand, am I in coherence? Am I not in coherence? And then choosing to be in a more coherent state as kind of a practice and a discipline you could say. And then working with some of these qigong exercises as a way to harmonize so that then whatever we choose from that point onward, we’re in this more coherent place. And that this ancient wisdom tradition has held and carried this insight for thousands of years, and that we can also tap into knowing that, that there is this tradition. For anyone else who’s hearing some of these ideas for the first time, Cynthia, are there any things you want to add or clarify or enhance in relationship to what I shared?

Cynthia I mean, I think that was a beautiful summary. Even the inner state, I mean, I guess I didn’t quite define that. And there are some people who don’t know what that is. And it’s really the. I mean, it’s my term that I use in the book. It’s certainly not my term, but it’s the term that I choose to use in the book. And there are many, many other terms for it. But it’s really sort of the total sum of how are you right now in this moment? And so we could name emotions, we can name sensations, we can name thoughts.

And at the level of coherence and flow, it can be much simpler. Because if we start naming all the stories, for example, that I’m currently experiencing right now, maybe it’s influenced by my relationship with my mother or something that happened 20 years ago, and then all these memories are surfacing and then I’m feeling this emotion or my knee hurts and all these things. It can be very, very complex. At the level where we’re practicing flow and qigong coherence is that everything gets distilled into what is the energy pattern? Is it coherent or not, to your point? So let’s say I have a lot of tension in my shoulder and my neck, and I could say, well, my inner state right now is like, yeah, I feel really frustrated. I feel tense. I’ve been trying to reconcile this thing for a really, really long time. And then, oh, is it related to the way I slept last night?

Is it related to this injury I had about 10 years ago? Is it related to the time I was a kid and I just froze and it was a very, very difficult interaction with a particular family member? And at the level of coherence, it doesn’t really matter. It’s just like, okay, there’s blockage there. There’s resistance there. So then how do we begin to harmonize that? And what’s really interesting about these practices that begin to release and transform things that we’ve been carrying for a long, long time, it could be at the level of inflammation, it could be the level of musculoskeletal issues, is that oftentimes people have this experience that they’re just practicing the way it was guided. And then they begin to feel lighter or that area begins to feel more spacious. But then it’s like whatever story that was kind of associated with that tension can sometimes emerge.

They’ll be like, oh my God, I totally forgot. I don’t even remember this happened 15 years ago. And all of a sudden when my neck released, I felt I remembered it. So it’s fascinating how the memories, and again, this is where the limbic system is. These experiences are very, very linked to emotions and to energy patterns. And so when we transform the energy patterns from block to flow, from incoherence to coherence, the stories will come up, but it’s a little bit inside out. It’s not, okay, you had this particular thing. Now we’re going to work with your neck and shoulder in this particular way. It’s not prescriptive outside in. So many times people will have all those stories come up. And that’s another way in which it’s efficient or effortless or certainly less effortful because we’re just kind of really getting at the root, really getting at the root.

The final step though is that because even the flow and coherence states, they can also become sort of goals that we get fixed on. And that’s one of my very, very common traps is like, I’m going to harmonize that relationship. I’m going to harmonize this particular organ in my body because I’m tired of having X, Y, and Z. And that’s not coherence. That’s the old pattern thinking, wanting to fix something. And with that mindset, we do block flow. So ultimately these practices are again, returning us to ourselves. And I talk about this concept, a qigong concept, but it’s certainly not limited to qigong, but of the inner observer. It’s another way we can talk about just our awareness, but us being aware of our awareness. Yeah, okay, I’m aware that I’m sitting here doing this conversation with you right now. And I’m also, there’s some kind of inner observer in there observing that I’m aware of that.

So I mean, why do we even go there? It’s because in that place, we return to our true selves. And that’s the most efficient way for us to come into coherence. It’s the deepest root. It’s even below the energy patterns. However, the flow practices can be very, very helpful to help us uncover that inner observer. Because it was very obscure to me for a long time when people would talk about it. I was like, what? And then what my true self? No, I know who I am. And then the more I just began to practice and practice and practice and let go of resistance and surrender, it was like, wow, okay, there is this inner observer in there.

Shay Beautiful. Well, I want to honor the time. So in closing, I want to ask you, Cynthia, what your sense now in having gone through so many experiences both personally and professionally around health crises with people that you’ve worked with, within your own life story, what would you say today now you feel that you’re really coming to understand about healing and that maybe has evolved over time because of the continuing journey that you’ve been on? So how would you now think about what it means to heal?

Cynthia Well, I mean healing, the word heal shares a root with wholeness. And for a long time I thought of it more conceptually like, “Oh yeah, come into wholeness.” I don’t know if I truly understood what it meant. And I know that I will continue, that word, that experience will continue to evolve for me as I continue on this journey. But my concept of wholeness had been too small before. It definitely felt personal and it felt like sort of just having different dimensions of your life organized, clear, healthy. And now it’s on a whole different scale. It’s related to the wholeness of something much, much bigger, me as part of a living universe. And not even to sound esoteric, but truly. And recognizing also that my definition, my smaller, more nearsighted definition of healing, what I might want for someone may be too small in this grand scheme of what is serving the collective or the whole.

And I do share a story in the book about a very dear friend of mine who had a recurrence of cancer and he was in his 50s and he was also a Qigong practitioner. All those things, everything checked.

And he died. And that it was a real learning for me of just, “Oh, I’m attached to that outcome.” And a lot of people, when I say that, they say, “Well, my God, of course you’re attached to that outcome. What else would you want?” I say, “No, but actually there’s something bigger and this is not a way for me to justify something or to soothe myself.” When we continue to practice that, and for example, even the practice that we did where we’re spiraling and we’re just kind of centered in our core, that core, if we continue to go deeper, it’s an infinite universe in there. This notion of inner and outer is actually a construction by our five senses. There’s an inner universe as that. It’s the same one. And so it isn’t just confined to the bounds of my abdomen in there. So the experience of wholeness begins to really, really, not just deepen, but expand.

And so who am I to say what is healing in this particular situation? And at the same time, it’s okay for me to have my own intentions and hopes for this particular person or for my own health, but to really, really open ourselves to mystery and to the flow of life. And it’s just like we see in nature, there are some things that happen that we would prefer not happen, and yet it’s the cycle of life. So there’s both a somewhat unsettling at times and other times just such solace that no, life knows how to do this. Life knows how to flow. How do we just unstick ourselves, unblock ourselves so that life can flow more through us, with us? And then healing becomes much more playful, much more surprising.

And so I would say that’s a very, very big revelation for me is that we can take the act of healing seriously, but we don’t have to go about it always in such a serious way.

How do we be creative with it? How do we let life surprise us? Which is why I’m so inspired by your work and community because it’s such a beautiful embodiment of that, both at the individual flow level and also the collective.

Shay Thank you. I appreciate that very much, Cynthia. Well, I’m so grateful that we had the opportunity to share your latest book, The Medicine of Flow, with our listeners. And I highly recommend that they also check out through your website some of the resources that are available and other things that they can learn about the practices of Qigong. In the latter part of the book, you give tons of different resources that people can find not only your own, but many, many others that are available as well. So as you said, we’re at a very unique moment where we can access more information than ever before and practice it in our own homes in ways that historically we never would’ve had access to.

And so it’s wonderful that you provide so many beautiful tools and resources to enable that to happen. So thank you so much for the conversation and this beautiful time with you today.

Cynthia Thank you so much, Shay.

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