Philip S. Lansky, M.D. Reprinted from The New Frontier

Back from China after a month of travel and intensive study of medical qigong, the jet lag is not nearly as severe as the culture shock. I arrived in China after an expensive Japanese weekend involving bullet trains, first class hotels and Zen temples. My guide, himself a physician, and I exchanged both stories of patients, herbs, t'ai chi forms, as well as Chinese renminbi yuan for American dollars. On the black market, renminbi go 8 for a dollar (3.7 at the bank). My guide earns 100 of them a month, and pays about ten for a month's rent. After a weekend of three-dollar cups of coffee in Japan, the economics seemed positively surreal.

Qigong itself can be surreal. Qigong is the formal pinyin version of using English letters to write Chinese words; the Wade-Giles version is chi kung, Qi is translated anywhere from energy to soul. Kung is practice. Qigong seems to encompass everything from breathing exercises, to psychic phenomena like ESP and psychokinesis, to (perhaps) the actual emission of a powerful biological energy from the hands of a skilled qigong master healer. There are extensive cases documented by these practitioners in which the emitted qi caused tumors to shrink, muscles to relax, and minds to become ordered. A sensitive healer can actually see the aura of qi emitting from a person's fingers, extending like something out of a Kirlian photograph or from old stills of Franz Anton Mesmer practicing animal magnetism. There is in fact, a great similarity between Mesmer's formulations and the idea of qi, where mind and body become mixed in an eerie sort of hot energy steaming forth from the surface of the skin.

A simple exercise can be performed by anyone to get a sense of the feeling of qi. In a relaxed standing or sitting position, hold your hands out in front of you imagining that you are holding a ball of air between your palms. The ball initially should be bigger than a softball but smaller than a volleyball. As the hands are gently and slowly moved away from and towards each other, the sense of that ball of air may become more real and maybe actually bigger.

Eventually, you may experience a sensation of heat. Once this much is appreciated, one can learn to utilize the breath and the mind to concentrate qi in the tantien or "qi ocean," an acupuncture point located about one inch below the umbilicus (belly button), and eventually to feel it circulating first along the midline of the back and down the front of the torso, and later through all the acupuncture meridians of the body (especially through the arms and legs). Cultivating qi in this way increases the life force in one's body, presumably prolonging life and increasing resistance power against illness. For some, the qi can be further utilized as a force for healing or as power for combat. Qi which is accumulated becomes a valuable treasure of the body, pure somatic gold.

One encounter in the world of Chinese qigong had a deeper impact on me than most processes I have studied. The encounter involved not a Chinese practitioner, but an American. Richard Pavek is a pilot, airplane mechanic, and electronics wizard, who experienced a human breakthrough while performing hands-on healing on a woman in 1977. The woman went through a process in which she 'gave birth to herself." As this occurred, Pavek felt tremendous energy in his own hands and . set out to understand what had happened both to him and his "patient." He began a detailed, systematic study of qigong and its Indian equivalent, yoga. What he developed was a quasi-electronics model of the human energy system and a therapeutic system for interaction. He calls his system SHEN (specific human emotional nexus) and elaborates his method in his "Handbook of SHEN" and in workshops he offers mostly in California, though he gives workshops on the East Coast and in Europe, and has also been invited to teach in China next year.

His system is based on the principle that each person emits energy primarily through either the left or right hand, hence each person is either a left- or right-handed sender. According to Pavek, about 99%. of the population are right-handed senders, and that there is no relationship between true handedness and whether one emits qi with the right or left hand. Pavek claims to be a left-handed sender, though he is right handed.

My skepticism began to 'melt when he worked on me, as I felt a huge chunk of the unconsciously self-imposed iron prison around my heart drop away into nothingness as his hands worked their gentle magic on the surface of my lower abdomen. That layer of stress and pain melted away and has never returned, in a very quiet way, without a lot of primal fanfare. But the real clincher came in the presence of perhaps the greatest Chinese master of emitted qi, many of whose teachings are based on imitating the positioning of the Buddha's fingers, as can be observed from the traditional paintings and statues. Richard wanted to thank the master for his classes, which he found so inspiring. The master looked deeply and concentratedly into Richard's eyes, sizing up the qi in his body. "Not bad," he said through a translator. "But you are funny. You have more qi coming out of your left hand. You need to use it to send it to your right."

Thus, my simple faith was strengthened. The qi I felt was apparently real.

From the NEW FRONTIER