Qigong could also be called the art of practicing alchemy in the body. Alchemy, the ancestor of modern chemistry, dealt with transforming one substance into another. In the Middle Ages European alchemists mastered this skill on many levels. They also tried to change dull and common metals into gold which we, in the modern day, understand vibrates in perfect configuration. The mystical Daoist Qigong Masters undertook the same quest in a different form. They explored how to change the body chemistry in order to increase the vibration of life, enhancing one's vitality and longevity. In the West we studied the body's anatomy and physiology extensively. We know a lot about the biochemistry of particles, electrolytes, and molecular structures and have analyzed the substrate of corresponding pathologies if illness appears. This has developed into our rich fields of biomedicine.

In the East they knew about the relationship between the particles and matter too. Ancient texts write about the waves, flow, and the current between things. In the West our European alchemists developed into chemists and contemporary medical research blossomed into tools like MRI, CT and chemical lab tests.

We tended to focus more on the matter itself while the East kept their awareness on the connections BETWEEN matter. They were more interested in communication pathways. They were able to determine the state of health with equally astonishing precision through energetic diagnosis combined with pulse or tongue analysis.

This highly refined art requires a high degree of sensitivity and skill in the diagnosing doctor rather than the development of external labs and tests. Today modern practitioners of TCM combine the elaborate diagnostic skills from the East with the western labs and tests to create a new and powerful integrative medicine.

All of us share a mixture of physical, emotional and mental reactions to the world around us. We in the West have learned to artificially separate these reactions or symptoms calling some tangible, and therefore treatable by medicines, and some intangible (generally considered far less treatable). For example, perhaps you are perfectly functional during the day, but at night your thoughts circle endlessly and worries overwhelm you. Or perhaps your stomach clenches when you are nervous causing heartburn and indigestion.

Often, despite doing all the right things, we find that that negative blocks in our lives remain. Perhaps you two have had this experience. After the psychoanalysis, after you delved into yourself and recognized the family or personal patterns that once again held you in its grasp, after the affirmations, after the visualizations and other work, did you ever still feel trapped?

Did you find that despite these methods you were still locked tightly in the sticky grasp of a negative experience of yourself, of your home life, career or health?

Chinese Qigong Masters would say this is because your vital life force had become stagnant. The physical, emotional and energetic aspects of your physiology were not flowing freely and, therefore, change could not happen. Instead you were caught in distortions of both the world around you and your reaction to it. Qigong teaches methods to release the flow of life again.

The physiological relationships and the connection between emotional, energetic and physical systems have been expressed in symbolic language in Chinese medicine since ancient times. For example, the ancients knew that as we age we can burn out our adrenals with constant, unrelenting stress. They described this burn out as Kidney yin deficiency. In turn, they say this causes deficient or empty heat which rises up and disturbs the heart and the mind, causing a myriad of symptoms including insomnia, hot flashes, and night sweats, as well as palpitations, irritation and anxiety. They knew that long-term unresolved anger and resentment can get trapped in the tissue specifically of the liver/gallbladder meridian and organ (or wood element).

In the West Einstein helped us to understand that matter may move as particle or as wave. The exact location of matter is more a question of probability then a static place. And, in fact, physics is now explaining that matter is a state of motion and shifting relationships between energetically dense and less dense areas. The alchemistry of life expressed in Qi Gong terms could also be described as the art of experiencing this shift from particle to wave, again and again, back and forth, until at any one moment the paradox of the two states of existence melt into one consciousness. This state of awareness is felt simultaneously as both and as One. The Chinese Qigong Master calls this state the Dao: an experience of Oneness.