Chinese Healing Exercises (2 page)

Crafting Your Health and Longevity Program

Many people reading this book will currently be in good health with no obvious problems. If you're fortunate enough to be part of that group, you can take advantage of these exercises in the way they may be strongest, as preventive health maintenance, a way to increase your baseline of good health, and to promote longevity. Even in good health, everyone's needs are a bit different, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach. This flexibility allows you to use the exercises to their fullest advantage. Unless you are following Exercise Prescriptions to work on a health challenge or using the self-care exercises for special purposes presented in the next section, this is the way to craft a self-care program that will suit you best.

Go through
every
exercise, trying them all at least once. Look for two things when you do. If any exercise feels particularly good to you, include it as part of your daily practice. Your body is responding to something it needs, and your enjoyment is a reflection of a need being met. Second, look for any exercise that you are resistant to, that you don't like. There's a good chance you feel that way because that exercise is shining a light on a trouble area, something you might not be aware of that may take some work to correct, and you are feeling a physical or psychological resistance to opening yourself to that potential discomfort and work. That too is an exercise to include in your daily practice. Most people find that in a few weeks to a month, they come to enjoy those as their body begins to experience the benefits of the exercise. The other possible cause for resistance is that the exercise may be too simple for you, not getting into anything you need. Be completely honest with yourself when making that assessment, and revisit that exercise periodically to make sure you haven't discarded a practice that would in fact be valuable for you.

Despite individual differences, everyone's body
structure
is more or less the same. Be sure to include at least one or two exercises from every category and every chapter so your entire body is addressed each day. You can select different exercises from those categories daily or change them weekly, as long as the entire body is regularly addressed. Start with the ones you can do most comfortably, and add more challenging ones as you're able. Once you've learned them, you can do twenty exercises in just twenty to thirty minutes. A minimum of twenty minutes a day is recommended, and on days when you have more time, go as long as you'd like.

Everything in chapter 11, on whole body practices, should be learned and performed regularly, preferably daily. To varying degrees, all of them provide deep benefits for the entire body. Many are introductory or preparatory practices for complete qigongs, helpful if you should decide to learn qigong farther down the road. By themselves, they provide more benefit on a qi level than any other exercises in the book, helping to keep you healthy from an energetic standpoint, and are the best for anti-aging and longevity purposes. They may require a bit more work and time to learn to perform them properly. If you ever need them to address a health problem, it's best to already know how to do them well.

If you become injured or ill, remember that addressing the injury or illness must always take priority. Do the exercises that best facilitate your healing and recovery first. Once your health is restored, you can safely resume your practice.

Self-Care Exercises for Special Purposes

1. Preventive Maintenance: Stabilize and Improve Your Health Holistically

Prevention of a disease or other health challenge is always preferable to curing it once it has occurred. That's what is meant by the Chinese proverb “Dig the well before you are thirsty.” Of course, we all come into this world with our own strengths and weaknesses, things subject to our personal constitution and genetic makeup. You are unique, and as such, a holistic outlook will give you the best chance of maintaining and improving your health.

In its fullest sense, holism as practiced by the Chinese involves seeing the connections among all things, all of the interrelated factors that influence a person's health, not only the more subtle interconnections within a body. This includes things like diet, familial and social relationships, immediate home and work environments, regional climate and geography, seasonal energies, and more. The focus of this book is on the internal body connections, but these other factors are noted for you when considering holistic health comprehensively.

These exercises can help reveal hidden areas of weakness or dysfunction. For example, if you experience pain or tension when doing a particular exercise, in a part of your body that you previously thought was functioning normally, that's very likely a sign that there's a problem there. The exercise isn't causing the pain, as almost all of them are too gentle to cause any such damage even if done incorrectly. (If any exercise has the potential to cause injury, you will be alerted to that possibility in the instructions for that exercise.) The exercise is shining a light on a preexisting problem as an early warning for something that may have gone unnoticed until the problem becomes more serious. No single body part exists in isolation from the rest of the body. In the Chinese view, neither is the body separate from the emotions and the mind.

The Western medical approach has been labeled
allopathic
in counterpoint to
holistic
, but
reductionist
may be a more accurate word. Allopathic is more correctly the opposite of homeopathic, which is only one type of alternative medicine and not synonymous with holistic. Reductionist medicine looks for the one smallest thing that may be causing a disease, and then develops one treatment, either surgical or pharmacological, to remove or otherwise remedy that cause. But Western medical science is beginning to understand and apply, in its own way, some of the holistic interconnectedness that the Chinese have known and practiced for thousands of years without modern technology. For example, for many decades, blood tests requiring only a very small quantity of blood have been used to reveal much about the chemical state of entire body, and urinalysis, frequently used to screen for possible kidney disease, can also reveal many other hidden or asymptomatic diseases throughout the body, such as diabetes, ketosis, bacterial infections, jaundice, hyperthyroidism, and so on. Stress has long been recognized as the root cause of many physical diseases. Recently, the concept of bioindividuality is becoming more common in Western medicine, and as advances are made in genetic medicine, it will become the new standard. Remember, every single strand of your DNA contains the information that potentially informs and regulates the growth and repair of every cell in your entire body, and some aspects of genetic expression are known to be influenced by emotional and mental states. The whole body is interconnected, and the health of one part of the body is crucial to the health of seemingly unrelated body parts throughout the whole person. This is why, in the Exercise Prescriptions section of the appendix, you will find recommended exercises that may seem to have nothing to do with the disease or overt symptoms being addressed.

This understanding is also the basis for various holographic models of the body and for the holistic therapies that developed from that understanding. Some examples include auricular therapy, or ear acupuncture, and Korean hand acupuncture, in which points are needled in only the ear or hand respectively to treat specific regions or organs throughout the entire body. Another example is foot reflexology, in which pressure is applied to specific regions of the foot to treat corresponding body regions.

One useful way to figure out your individual maintenance needs is to take inventory of the arc of your life, identifying all the physical and emotional traumas that you've experienced; behavioral, emotional and mental habits, even ones you've cultivated; and all recurring stresses in your life, including those that may seem beyond your control. Those are some of the things that can make qi and blood stagnate, causing you to feel anything from mild, intermittent dull aches to persistent, sharp, debilitating pain. They can create other imbalances in your body, leaving you fatigued, emotionally distressed or irritated, setting the stage for impaired function of muscles and organs, and other disharmonies and pathologies. If unresolved, these are the things that accumulate and cause most of the debility of older age, the things your doctor may tell you to learn to live with, or may prescribe drugs for in order to dull your perception of them, but not resolve the problem. Once you've identified some of those factors, you can select exercises that address them. If you are younger, doing these exercises can help prevent various accumulations before they occur. If you are older, they can help release the bound qi, improve circulation to break up blood stagnation, reverse some or all of their debilitating effects, increase energy, and improve mental outlook.

2. Promote Longevity: Put Out the Small Brush Fires First

Once you've established a health maintenance program, using these self-care exercises either alone or in combination with other practices is a big step toward creating a healthy longevity. Still, you need to pay attention to any new functional or organic health problem that may arise. It's very easy to get too attached to doing something the same way regardless of how your circumstances may change, and erroneously believe that the health regimen you've painstakingly worked out will eventually resolve the new problem too. This can be even more of a problem for someone who has invested a lot of time learning an involved practice such as taiji, and yet still may experience a lingering or new health challenge.

For example, maybe you've been enjoying good health but have a chronic mild low back problem that only acts up once in a while. Much of your self-care practice is geared toward maintaining that good health, supporting every part of yourself equally, while putting just a little more attention on healing your back. At some point you may notice that you've developed a shoulder pain, or insomnia, or a headache, or poor digestion, something else you've never had before. If it only lasts a day, or even a few days, and then disappears, it's likely nothing to be concerned about. But if it lingers more than a few days, it's a good idea to change your self-care practice to address it (as tempting as it might be to ignore it), even if it cuts into the time you'd normally spend working on healing, say, your back and the other parts of your health maintenance.

A new problem is usually relatively superficial, relatively easy to heal, and should be resolved before it becomes a pattern, something more deeply entrenched in your body. You may consider it to be just another minor nuisance, but your body will expend energy to try to heal it regardless. You have a finite amount of energy available to you at any time. A nuisance ailment will siphon off some of that energy, giving you less to use to heal your back in this example. If the nuisance persists, it can grow into something more intractable, and demand more of your body's energetic reserves. Not only will that slow the healing of your back, it will reduce the amount of energy available to power the healthy functioning of other organs, and before too long, another minor ailment will appear, demanding more energy, and further diminishing the overall functionality of your body. This is the progression of entropy, the downward spiral of declining health that accompanies and even defines aging, and it will shorten your life. If you want to live long and in good health, you have to put out the small brush fires before they can become a forest fire that consumes everything in its path. Select the appropriate exercises to address the new problem, and practice them daily until it's gone. Always do what you
can
; heal the things that are easiest to heal. Once the new problem is resolved, you can go back to putting your attention on healing a chronic problem (your back in this example), and general health maintenance.

3. Restore Health: Treating or Managing Disease

If you have a preexisting condition, illness, injury, or debilitation, the first thing you need to do is address that condition and improve it to whatever degree may be possible. This is another aspect of the advice given in the preceding section, to do what you
can
. Many conditions can be completely resolved, almost all can be improved, and only a very few are beyond any help.

For example, you may have obvious bony changes in your hands due to advanced arthritis. The bones will probably never return to their previously normal state, but your hands can be improved nevertheless. Any associated pain can be reduced or eliminated. Within the limits of the bony restriction, you can have greatly restored functionality. That will become your new baseline “normal,” and from there you can begin to rebuild some of the strength you may have lost. But you have to do the exercises you can in order to bring that about. Some may need to be modified to accommodate your restrictions, and that's fine. Over time, you may be able to add more exercises and prevent or slow degenerative changes in other parts of your body.

In recovering from a lingering or chronic illness, you may see that there are six exercises for your condition recommended in the Exercise Prescriptions, but you may only have the energy or ability to do one or two. Do those one or two. Do what you can, and in time that will help you improve enough to do more. There's no need to push yourself beyond or even to your limit. In fact, that's counterproductive to healing.

Last, maybe you only have a few minor health challenges, and your main interest is in promoting longevity. Still, you need to address those minor challenges first, and do your best to resolve them before you can truly begin the work of increasing longevity. Good health is always the foundation for long life.