Michael Winn's Qigong & Tao Meditation Courses Frequently Asked Questions concerning qigong infinite health astrology magical medical healing martial alternative form chronic power diet enlightenment life

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Because qigong has been around for thousands of years, there are thousands of qigong (chi kung) exercises to choose from, ranging from martial to medical to spiritual. Some exercises are taught as family qigong styles, some as part of “big schools” or organized religions. Some teach “spontaneous” qigong where your personal chi is encouraged through ecstatic-in-the-moment movements, to unwind any blocked chi in the body.

Most qigong exercises are good for cultivating a particular kind of energy. IF taught properly, most qigong will improve your health and give you some particular kind of energy. But please know that not all “energy” is the same. As you mature in my system of progressive training, you will learn to distinguish between the different kinds of energy and what they are best used for.

If you want to duplicate what I have done – and spend decades chasing around after dozens of teachers to figure out which qigong exercise is best, and spend thousands of hours testing how the internal mechanics of qigong and inner alchemy meditation work – please go for it!

Some folks are in love with the Search itself. I don’t want to deprive any one of the pleasure of their personal process. I do not wish to control anyone’s great hunt for optimum health and enlightenment – that is part of the thrill of each person having a unique Tao or “Way”. One of my favorite mottos is: Your Life is Your Path. Only you can walk that path.

But it would greatly please me if you start off (or continue) your Search with the best tools available. I know you will get practical results a lot faster. Qigong is known as China’s “miracle exercise”. It will satisfy my soul to help you quickly cut to the core of what is most important in practicing qigong. In this way, I believe my Qigong Fundamentals package will save you a LOT of time and money on your own quest!

Even if you choose to use what I’ve taught to go elsewhere in your Search, that also fulfills my mission. My soul mission is to help you complete the unfolding of your true Self. My notion of Self is of an open ended process that is unfolding uniquely for each person.

My approach to qigong is quite different from many other teachers. I am not just teaching qigong exercise forms – there are plenty of weekend warrior “masters” to offer you that. And plenty of legitimate martial arts “sifu” (teachers) offering lineages and eager to prove themselves in competition.

What I am offering in my Qigong Fundamentals is a combination of qigong and neigong (nei kung). It is my integration of the “outer” (waidan) and “inner” (neidan) paths of chi cultivation that make the Qigong Fundamentals uniquely powerful.

This combination helps you tap into the free energy from the outer environment as well from the hidden infinite space inside your body. I offer both a quick way to “feel the chi flow”, and more important, show you practically what to do with the chi once it begins flowing.

I have little interest in fighting, although I recognize the value of the discipline and skill that martial art training offers. If you mainly want to study fighting applications, you should study with the great teachers at my summer retreats at Dao Mountain. (See HealingTaoRetreats.com, or click on navigation bar on the right). If you are a fighter who wants to go deeper inside your self and your chosen movement art, then you will have plenty to learn from me that will complement your previous training.

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Qigong Fundamentals is suitable for any age, sex, race, religion, and any body or personality “type”. So you could meet just about anyone at my courses.

Those who make the effort to attend live workshops & summer retreats discover a wonderful community of free-thinking souls. These folks want to play with their life energy in healthy, deeply fascinating ways.

We have fun. We laugh a lot. We get “naturally high” on the free energy in the chi field all around us and inside our body. We work hard, and we play hard to transform ourselves. We steadily grow our relationship with the Life Force. Sometimes people cry. Many people have spontaneous healings and visions and powerful energetic breakthroughs.

There is no “group think” about the way people should behave or believe. So everyone feels relaxed and open, with no expectations. Deep friendships and love affairs are born. I met my wife at a Taoist retreat in 1983. Its a place for like-minded souls to gather and play, and explore joy and freedom within their bodies.

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Here are five common reasons that attract people to my qigong teaching:

1. They study qigong to take charge of their health.

Some are stressed out from job or marriage, seeking quick relief. Some realize their health insurance won’t keep them healthy, that they need to preent ill health from ever happening. Others cannot afford health insurance and want to protect themselves. Some are aging Baby Boomers seeking to prevent the chronic illnesses they saw their parents die from. Many don’t trust drugs and surgery and doctors, or worry about their side effects. Some want to mix western and conventional medicine. Some are perfectly healthy, but want to experience an even higher level of wellness.

This category also includes health professionals who are seeking practical methods to improve or supplement their own healing modality. They also come to learn to protect themselves from "healer burnout". Yoga teachers who have hit a plateau and want to deepen their energetic skills. Acunpuncturists and herbalists, massage therapists, psychologists seeking more body-centered techniques, and psychiatrists seeking to empower patients beyond the use of drugs.

Energy healers from all different schools ranging from reiki to shiatsu, physical therapists, hospice workers, senior citizen catetakers, medical doctors who want to understand alternative and complementary care better. Corporate types seeking to be more effective in managing themselves and others. Artists seeking creative breakthroughs. The list is endless. Every professional can use more energy and creative flow in their work.

2. They study qigong & Tao alchemy to explore sexual energy.

They want to improve a sexual relationship, or relieve sexual frustration. They want to heal sexual dysfunction or PMS, both medical and psychological. A big one is folks seeking to integrate sexual desire into their spiritual path. A lot of people interested in inner alchemy have Scorpio in their astrology chart – it pushes them to explore the relationship between sex & mysticism. The “elixir” used in inner alchemy crystallizes the sexual essence of the body into a subtle energy vessel that allows continuity of consciousness after death, i.e. immortality.

3. They study qigong to have “high energy” experiences.

They want to “feel the chi”. They’ve done drugs, had intense emotions, taken big risks in business, or tried other adrenaline stimulators like romance. Now they want something pure, natural, self-renewing, to dependably feel effortless chi flow. They intuitively believe a field of free energy exists, but haven’t figured out how to tap it yet. Underneath, they want to feel magically supported by Life itself.

4. They study qigong to get grounded.

Physical, mental-emotional, or spiritual grounding is desperately needed by most people. Grounding is same as centering. Hidden underneath need for grounding is desire for Divine Embodiment, i..e matter as the embodiment of spirit. Most humans haven’t yet realized the human body is their primary spiritual ground.

I feel the planet is going through a cyclical vibrational shift right now, and that makes grounding even more essential. As energy levels go up globally, people who aren’t grounded willl feel “itchy” at the soul level and feel like jumping out of their skin for no apparent reason. It will be passed off as “the crazy times we live in”. Grounding is the main thing everyone needs while adjusting to the new frequencies coming in daily.

5. They study qigong & Tao because they are done with dogma and gurus.

The independent spiritual types are attracted to qigong and Tao. They love God, but don’t want someone else telling them what God is. They don’t trust Big Religion or priesthoods. They don’t trust big Master-egos seeking to consume or enslave Little-ego followers. They do trust the Life Force, as its something they can directly experience.

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Short answer: take what you need, a little at a time, and leave the rest.

This is why I structure my Energy Body training as progressive. You take each qigong exercise or internal method one bite at a time, digest that bite, and then take the next bite. My qigong exercisess are not long – usually 5 or 6 movements to a set. By comparison, a long tai chi chuan (taijiquan) martial form will have up to 150 movements – more than all my qigong forms combined.

The secret to rapid progress is to take these short qigong forms and practice them a lot. Repetition of a few movements is the key to rapid success in feeling chi flow. When you approach qigong in this way, it always stays simple and natural. Your capacity to “digest” deeper practices will happen naturally over time.

It’s really no different than growing up. You discard your old clothes when you outgrow them. In this case, you temporarily leave the old qigong exercises behind when you graduate to the next level of internal process and its qigong exercise.

Say you move from Qigong Fundamentals to Fusion of the Five Elements or Healing Love. Then when you later return to the qigong fundamentals exercises, you discover that they feel totally different. Because your experience of chi flow is totally different after integrating the emotional chi from Fusion and the sexual chi from Healing Love. You are actually expressing the same through a different body. You body is fundamentally comprised of flowing chi.

Keep a perspective: I am posting on the site the distilled essence of 30 years of exploration. You may be trying to stuff it all in your head at once as “information”, and it won’t fit. Qigong is about the experience of flowing chi, not about accumulating mounds of information in the head.

I am putting a large amount of information on open display on my website so each person can evaluate its potential. And I want to stimulate public awareness and discussion of an emerging energy science. But don’t imagine for a moment the mental information received from reading the website will change your life – only qigong and meditation practice will do that!

There is an old Chinese saying: “Talk does not cook the rice”. Likewise, reading too much information from the website at one sitting can overload your brain. Only in-the-body practice will change your life. That is why I focus on offering oral and visual homestudy courses. You cannot learn qigong or inner alchemy meditation from a book or online text. The combined oral and visual transmission is the most effective, apart from live transmission. Books can help focus and stimulate one’s practice, but they should not be mistaken for replacing one’s practice.

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Please note that my father was a gifted heart surgeon, and I have no bias against Western bio-medicine. I believe in using whatever works best - at the least cost, both financially and in terms of side effects. In regards to healthcare, I hope everyone will listen to their direct guidance from the Life Force first, to health care professional second, and to then follow their personal 'Tao or Way.

Western medicine has made many sophisticated and fabulous discoveries, especially in the area of acute illness, diagnostics, and surgery. But the reality, based on numerous studies, is that most of the gains in life span in the last century have come from improvements in sanitation, public health, or from one single wonder "drug" - antibiotics, which is is really just natural nold put to good use. Most drugs are just likewise just extracts from traditional herbal remedies.

But western medicine has an abysmal record of either preventing or actually CURING chronic illness - most of its wonder drugs are suppressing symptoms, not treating the whole person illness. And because of this, they often have serious side effects that compound quickly if taking more than one drug. Death from side effects is now one of the leading causes of death in the USA.

Both prevention and cure of chronic illness is the major strength of Chinese medicine, and qigong therapy is part of Chinse medicine. Medical qigong is standard curriculum at traditional Chinese medical schools. When you cultivate using my Qigong Fundamentals training program, you are getting the oldest and most effective proven forms of medical qigong in China.

Plus my Qigong training program includes custom qigong forms I've developed from my knowledge of "internal medicine" - which is another name for Taoist internal alchemy. i believe that the principles of Classical Chinese medicine all originated in internal chi cultivation practices, and were later codified and applied out into herbology, acupuncture, massage, etc. But these externally applied methods are secondary, someone else is "fixing you up".

Qigong and inner alchemy are both primary treatments, together form the most powerful combination of internal medicine I've experienced in my vast search for the fastest and most effective healing available. The oldest Chinese medical classics such as the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine were not strictly medical-physical, they were primarily based on Taoist cosmology and thus must be considered primarily medical-spiritual texts.

Admittedly, this combination of Qigong and dynamic meditation based on internal energy pathways requires some discipline and practice on the part of someone seeking to heal themselves. But it is much cheaper that external medicine (both Eastern and Western) and carries infinitely richer long term benefits. For chronic illnesses that are not yet at the acute life-threatening stage, I believe it is far superior than going the way of dependence on drugs, surgery, and buying insurance for expensive hospital and nursing home care.

Qigong training is self-care at its highest level, and I believe that especially the wave of aging baby boomers will gravitate to these cheaper and more effective qigong methods for raising their quality of life. Even if you invest in a qigong practice for its prevention benefits along, you will likely save a fortune in expensive medical care and needless suffering and disability.

Note that I put my money where my mouth is: I have not had health insurance for the last 30 years, and relied on my energetic practices to stay healthy. The money I saved on insurance I've invested and keep safe in a fund for use to buy both alternative and conventional health care as needed. At age 55, I'm far richer for it, both financially in terms of money saved, and in terms of not psychologically being weakened by dreaming that "health insurance " will keep me healthy. The ONLY insurance anyone ultimately has is to take care of themselves. This comes down to determining the best prevention method. Qigong - along iwth a healthy diet and lifestyle - is the best prevention plan you can find in my experience. Note: I am NOT recommending that everyone who studies my qigong training go out and immediately cancel their insurance. It certainly may make sense for people with families or in certain states of health to have insurance. This is a complex personal decision that each of us must make based on a variety of factors, ranging from financial to one's committment to a qigong lifestyle to one's level of development.

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This question gets asked a lot, because of the publicity-stunts performed by some qigong “masters”. These stunts include: walking on eggs without them breaking, breaking boards on your forehead and bricks with your bare hand, tying a rope around one’s waist (or genitals) and stopping a truck from driving away; emitting hot chi into a coin that then burns your skin, or using chi from your palm to set a newspaper on fire. Levitation for brief periods. Bending steel rods or swords that are pushed into one throat. Throwing chopsticks into a wooden door so they stick like darts. Emitting fragrances. Speaking in celestial tongues. The most popular one is a teacher waving his hand and his student goes flying across the room. The list goes on.

I call most of this “circus qigong”. Many of them are merely magician tricks. Some of them of real but are not as difficult as they appear. Some require quite a bit of training and skill. Some are special abilities that a person is born with and further developed with qigong.

But in my opinion, none are important enough to chase after, and thus are not taught by me. You can train your bodily chi to do many amazing things. So yes, you can obtain “super-powers” from qigong training – but not from me.

I choose to NOT teach circus qigong. I will teach you some amazing feats. But these are not tricks. For example, just learning the basics of rooting structure will allow you to stop 10 strong men from pushing you over. It looks amazing, but in reality is simple to do if you know the secrets of bone structure and rooting.

From my view, no single trick is as amazing as simple good health, inner peace of mind. authentic clear feelings, and an abundance of sexual-creative energy. If you have that much centering in your life, why would you need special powers? The only “higher power” I seek is greater balance and harmony, experienced at “higher” levels of my Greater Self.

Our greater self is embodied in the greater field of Nature – sun, moon, earth, planets and star levels, and in the collective spirit of humanity. Here I use the map offered by the Taoist hermit One Cloud’s Seven Formulas for Attaining Eternal Life. If you choose to practice these levels of Tao alchemy meditation, the portals to higher dimensions within your body gradually begin to open.

The most amazing magical super power of all is to find a higher level of freedom, right here inside this tiny human body-mind. That freedom gets expressed as love and wisdom. At the very high end you may have the satisfaction of cheating death itself. Using inner alchemy, you can train yourself to stay conscious at the moment of death (either soul or spirit immortality). So if you are going after a “super-power”, that is the one I would pick. And I do train how to cultivate that possibility.

Answer:   Qigong is not really mysterious. Human beings are mysterious, that is built into our nature. Also, human language used to talk about the Divine can make spiritual processes seem faraway, abstract, and mysterious. It's why I avoid over-used terms like God that have become meaningless exept for our personal definition.

Qigong is really about taking that mystical talk and making it useful, practical and experiental-in-the-body. The fact that the ordinary chi (qi) in our body is super-initelligent and flows through multiple dimensions also gives it a mysterious quality. But if you focus on your personal relationship to it, it will stay tangible, and be a very good guide for you moment to moment.

Answer:   I've been studying Chinese approaches to longevity for 30 years, with particular emphasis on Taoist methods. The most important ingredient in your diet is the quality of Chi (a.k.a. Qi), or subtle breath. So the first item in a healthy diet is regular daily practice of Qigong (chi kung), it is not what you buy at the grocery store. Qigong builds strong organ function. Having strong digestive chi is essential to absorbing nutrients from good food - without strong digestion, expensive quality food is basically wasted, it passes out your bowels. Mantak Chia called it the "golden toilet bowl" syndrome: you buy the best, but cannot digest it. The more chi you feel in your body from this type of superior exercise, the less hungry you are for food. And the smarter you become at choosing exactly what your body needs to eat. Because everyone is so unique in their energetic needs, I avoid recommending any particular diet. Food diets are all partial in their effect because they are necessarily "generalized", i.e. not customized for your particular configuration of five elements (see free astrology reading on homepage to get your natal 5-element chart). The diet that is prescribed by Taoists is known as Five Elements Diet, i.e. eating a balance of different colors and tastes that satisfy all the major organ spirits (heart, liver, spleen, kidneys, lungs are each considered to have their own consciousness and appetite, which is the "taste foundation" of all Chinese herbology). This gives you a way to combine your need for body movement (but without stressing your body, by overexerting as some Westerners are prone) and your own personal dietary choices. I have been testing this hypothesis on myself and many western students of Healing Tao USA for dozens of years with great success. Time to get off thinking that what you eat physically is more important than the quality of what you "breathe" in from the Life Force, from nature or methods of absorbing nature like qigong and medidtation. As far as physical diet goes, first examine the quality of the chi in the food you eat. The fresher and more organic, the better the chi. Then consider the amount: is it moderate? are you leaving some room in the stomach, so as not to get to extreme fullness which inevitably reverts to feeling of emptiness/hunger. Remember that physical food is just a secondary source of Chi - the most important thing in your diet is to get it as Primary, i.e.direct from Qigong and meditation, from absorbing clean air, pure water, proper balance of sunlight and darkness (sleep).