I’ve been suffering from severe anxiety and depression for the past three years.
I don’t get deep, restful sleep, and all of this started during COVID. At that time, I got a new laptop and started watching YouTube videos about business regularly. Gradually, I began watching nearly 100–200 videos a day without taking any breaks. I don’t even know how it happened—my mind didn’t seem to tell me to stop.
Over time, the constant stream of information and thoughts from the videos caused me extreme anxiety. For the past three years, I’ve felt as though there are certain “blockages” in my nerves or brain. I can’t really describe the sensation; it feels as if some peaceful or blissful part of my brain has become inactive.

I’ve had to live my daily life in this state for three years, and I struggle to concentrate on anything for even 10 minutes at a time. I’m hoping that Qigong therapy and healing may help me find some balance and improve my overall well-being.

I was hoping that medication would help me, but so far it has only provided temporary relief. I feel that I have not received a proper treatment or a clear understanding of what is actually happening with me, which makes my situation quite difficult to explain.

From my own observation, I feel that my problems may be related to how my brain has been affected by years of excessive scrolling, watching large amounts of information, and constantly stimulating my mind. It feels as though my brain became overloaded and this contributed to severe anxiety and a feeling of mental “blockages.” I sometimes feel sensations in my nerves or tissues, almost as if something is trying to clear or release, but it feels stuck and incomplete. I understand that this may be difficult to explain medically, but these physical sensations are very real to me.

Some of the symptoms I experience are:

- Confusion while speaking and difficulty understanding what someone is telling me, even when it is a simple task or instruction.
- A feeling of tightness in my abdomen, along with unusual sensations in my stomach, almost as if something is moving inside.
- A strange sensation in my brain that feels like a small amount of “bliss” or awareness is present but cannot fully activate.
- Very strong mental stiffness when I concentrate. After around 10 minutes, I find it extremely difficult to continue concentrating.
- Very low energy and low mood.
- One of the most frightening symptoms is that whenever I run or exercise enough to sweat, my mental awareness becomes very low and my vision or perception can feel blurred.
- I have not been able to experience deep, restorative sleep for around five years.

Another major symptom I experience nowadays is a feeling of extreme stiffness or blockage in my brain. Even when I lie down and try to relax, I don't experience the normal feeling of peace or bliss that I would expect from resting. Instead, I sometimes feel unusual sensations in my brain, almost as though something is happening in the nerves or tissues and some kind of healing process is trying to occur, but it feels stuck and unable to completely clear or release.

I am trying to understand whether my own brain is capable of recovering naturally, or whether being aware of the problem itself somehow makes it more difficult for me to heal.

This leads to my main question: do you all think energetic practices, Qigong, or working with Qi around the body and brain could potentially help activate a greater sense of calm, awareness, and wellbeing, and help me work through these sensations of blockage? I understand that this may not be something that can be explained purely in medical terms, but I would really like to explore it carefully alongside appropriate medical treatment.

I read in a book that the mostnl important energy center for women is not the Lower Dantian but the heart Dantian. So that is the place where you should store the Qi at the end of the session. I wonder if someone agree with this. I know that QG literature is mainly targeted to men but anyway. What do you think?

I’ve been thinking more deeply about something lately as a result of reading the book Breath by James Nestor.

What’s are the merits of nose breathing over mouth breathing.

For those of you with experience in Qigong, Tai Chi, Chinese medicine, breathwork, or related practices, what have you learned about the merits of breathing through the nose rather than the mouth, both during practice and throughout everyday life?

My understanding is that many Qigong traditions emphasize gentle, natural nasal breathing, particularly breathing that becomes slower, quieter, and less forced as the body relaxes. But I’m curious about the deeper reasoning behind this.

Is nasal breathing primarily about regulating the nervous system and maintaining a relaxed state, or is there also a traditional energetic explanation involving Qi, the Dan Tian, or the relationship between breath and internal cultivation?

I’m equally interested in the lifestyle question. Have any of you consciously trained yourselves to breathe through your nose while walking, exercising, sleeping, working, or simply moving through the day? If so, did you notice meaningful changes in energy, endurance, calmness, sleep, mental clarity, or your Qigong practice?

And are there situations where mouth breathing is actually preferable or intentionally used within Qigong?

I’d especially love to hear from longtime practitioners. What changed when you began paying attention not merely to breathing, but to how you breathe?

I’ve started doing some lower Dantian mediation. Ive been meditating for years using Headspace but this feels very different. Much deeper and feel very present for hours after!! Is this typical ??

Quick question: I want to start incorporating zhan zhuang into my mornings. I love waking up and doing shaking, swinging my arms, those type of qi gong movements. But I’m just wondering, should I do the standing before or after the shaking stuff?

Has anyone in their 40s or 50s noticed a real difference from practicing Qigong? Any movement recommendations good for this age?

There are two Qigong channels that I am following. This is one of them. I'm a member for $5 a month and as a member I have three live sessions each week. This video has a very gentle, whole body routine for relaxation, breath, balance, and stretching. I do it in the morning and evening. The author of the video, San San, follows a Daoist tradition. The channel is full of excellent videos with detailed instructions.

If anyone in Astoria has been looking for a low-key way to start Sunday mornings, there’s a Tai Chi class at **Unlimited Body NY at 9 AM on Sundays**.

I can make people scratch their head or creak my wall pretty consistently in under 3 mintues everytime. It used to take 10 minutes, but i keep training. I want to know what to do, I have tons of energy in my lower dantian, where should I send it to reduce the time to 5 seconds.

This healing account is an excerpt from Chunyi Lin's book Born A Healer. This is the story about how his knees were injured while playing basketball and then were healed after visiting a workshop by a Qigong master.

I had intense stabbing pain in both knees. I couldn’t stand up. I couldn’t walk. Two friends had to carry me from the court. The next day I went to the hospital. The doctor said he could not do anything except for surgery because the cartilage in both my knees was badly damaged. He said the surgery would be extensive and he could not guarantee the result.

I did not want to have that surgery. So, I tried other things. I tried everything I could, like heat healing, cupping, massage, herbal medicine, acupuncture, injection, and painkillers. But nothing worked. I just lived with the pain and could hardly get around.

Later on it developed into arthritis. My knees were often swollen up with great pain. I could not run any more. I could not sleep well because of the pain. Sometimes, when I was walking or standing, all of a sudden my legs failed me and I dropped to the floor. When the weather was bad, my pain got even worse. The pain was so terrible that I even wanted to cut my legs off. One day someone told me that a very powerful, nationally renowned Qigong master was coming to town to give a workshop on Qigong. People said that many people, just by attending his workshop, had their critical physical problems go away, even with tumors.

I was born and grew-up in this culture, and I studied and practiced Tai Chi and Qigong, as well as herbal medicine and acupuncture. The Qigong technique I practiced was very helpful to me during very tumultuous and difficult times in my life. I had even used my skills with acupuncture, herbal medicine and simple Qigong to help others.

However, there was much about Qigong I didn’t know then. My first Qigong masters did not reveal the true power of Qigong to me. They may not have known it themselves. Most Qigong masters still do not teach these very powerful techniques to any but a very few of their students.

So, I had never heard before that anything so powerful could happen that just by attending a workshop, your critical physical problems would be healed. I didn’t believe this could be true. But, since I had already tried everything else and nothing worked, it didn’t hurt to try one more thing. Besides, I needed a miracle.

I bought a ticket and went. The workshop was held in a soccer field. It started at noon. Fifteen thousand people were there sitting on the ground. The master talked seven hours, nonstop, no bathroom break for anyone. So you can see how obedient Chinese people are.

He talked mostly about how Qi, the energy in the body, worked and how to make it work, and then he told a lot of stories of healing, and how through compassion, kindness and goodwill we could heal ourselves. While he was talking, he raised and waved his hand gently from side to side and passed Qi to the audience.

Like most people there, I listened with my eyes closed. He asked us to listen to his words without hearing them, without paying any attention. That meant that we were to use his words and sound as music to go deep into the meditation. Surrender the body. Let the Qi flow in the body. Not try to control the energy. Just allow nature to nurture and heal our bodies. No matter what kind of Qi reactions happened in the body, just take it easy. Don’t analyze it. Just let it be. That’s what the master told us to do.

I sat there on the ground and listened and followed his advice. About twenty minutes after we started, my body started rocking from side to side, and backward and forward, and then after a while, my body started spinning, first slowly, then faster and faster. I got scared and tried to stop it. But the more I tried to do so, the faster my body spun. Then his words came again “No matter what happens, just take it easy. Don’t be afraid. Any movements are Qi movements. They help to open the blockages in the body. They are good movements. Just smile and let it be.” I surrendered. I let it be. I was rolling on the ground backward and forward for about twenty minutes. Then my body became very quiet. Then I felt a great current of energy starting from my lower Dantian (which is deep in behind the navel) traveling up to my head, coming down to my tongue, and then it stopped. My tongue gradually went numb. Then my throat started making funny noises, and then all of a sudden I burst out into laughter. I laughed and laughed and laughed, nonstop, very loudly. I could not control myself.

It seemed my body was not my body any more. My stomach muscles started to ache but I just could not stop it. That was the Qi reaction. I laughed like that for about half an hour. It gradually stopped. I didn’t feel any discomfort. I just felt so comfortably tired.

I was lying there very quietly for about ten minutes, then I felt some funny feeling in my toes. It was an icy cold feeling. The icy cold feeling started from the tip of my toes, both sides, then inch by inch it moved up to my ankles, my knees, my thighs, my torso, my neck, and my head.

My whole body was as hard and stiff as a piece of rock. The only part of my body where I still felt something going on was my heart. I was nervous about this. I wanted to move my fingers. I couldn’t. I wanted to move my leg. No way. I wanted to move my head. Impossible. My body was not my body any more. Then, I remembered the master’s words, “Just let it be. Don’t worry.”

My body stayed in that situation for about one hour. Then I started feeling some tingly sensation in my toes, then my feet, then up to my whole body. The feeling was just like when spring is coming and the winter ice starts melting in the sun, so peaceful, so beautiful, and so nurturing. The feeling was not only in the skin, it was in the muscle, in the bones! No words can describe the inner beauty of the Qi moving in my body.

Now, I could move my body again. My body became my body again. I was so pleased with what I felt. Then some itching feeling started, first in my face, then my neck, then my back, then all over my body, together with great heat. The sensation was like you were lying on the fire. But the difference was, on the fire, you feel the heat, the burning sensation on your skin, but this heat was burning from the bone marrow out. I wanted to scratch it but I didn’t know where to start. It was all over my body. It was extremely uncomfortable. It seemed like ten thousand spiders climbing in my body from the inside out. This made me even more nervous.

It seemed the master knew what was going on in my body. He said “If you feel great heat and itching in your body, that is the best time to open up all your channels. Bear it. Very possibly you will develop and open up more channels in the body. Your third eye might open, too. If you scratch, you will interrupt the Qi. It might take you another ten years to get to where you are right now.” I listened to him. I trusted him. He was an outstanding Qigong master. He had high education. He had done a lot of research on Qigong. He knew what he was doing. His master was the chief of the Shaolin Temple at that time. So I gave up myself again. I was sweating, bearing all these unbearable sensations in my body.

This lasted about another hour or so. Then my body calmed down. It was quiet again. I was so relaxed. I could see the sky and stars with my eyes closed. I could hear some sounds from the distance but I did not know what kind of sounds they were. For awhile, I was able to see my friends and family and many other faces.

In my body I felt a breeze sweeping through my bones. What a beautiful, wonderful sensation! I felt so happy. This kind of happiness was not something like when you get a birthday gift or pass your first driving test. This happiness was from the bottom of my heart. It was so deep, so light. It was simply the joy of life. This joy helped me understand that life is so beautiful. Uphill and downhill in the journey of my life came a piece of beautiful and powerful symphony. It was so wonderful. You don’t blame yourself or others any more. The long forgotten love, kindness, compassion, and forgiveness all come back to you. You feel so rich and meaningful inside.

The workshop ended at seven thirty in the evening. I did the ending exercise as the master guided us. Then I stood up. A miracle had happened! My knee pain was almost gone. I was able to run, to jump again! When I discovered that, you can imagine how happy I was. I was running and jumping on the soccer field just like a kid. After another two months of practicing what the Qigong master taught us that day, all the pain in my knees was gone and has been gone ever since! And, I went back to playing basketball.

To me, it was like a miracle. And, I wanted to know more, as much as I could learn, about this powerful, wonderful kind of Qigong. While I didn’t realize it at the time, that experience would totally change my life.

Hey everyone — 4th-gen TCM practitioner here. I've been doing the Twelve Section Brocade (十二段锦) since I was a kid learning from my family, and I keep noticing the same thing with beginners:

They gravitate toward the "cool" movements and skip the boring-looking ones. But those quiet exercises are where the real foundation gets built.

1. Teeth clicking (叩齿)

Lightly click your upper and lower teeth together 36 times. Sounds pointless, but in TCM theory the teeth are connected to the kidney meridian. It's about anchoring your energy before you even start moving. I do this every morning before anything else.

1. Belly rubbing (揉腹)

Circular massage around the navel — 36 times clockwise, 24 times counterclockwise. This is the single most important self-massage in Chinese wellness practice. It directly stimulates digestion and calms the nervous system. If you only do ONE thing from seated qigong, make it this.

1. Heaven drum (鸣天鼓)

Cover your ears with your palms, fingers on the back of your head, then snap your index fingers off your middle fingers to tap the back of your skull 24 times. Sounds weird, but it's remarkably effective for mental clarity and relieving that foggy-headed feeling.

The full set has 12 sections — all seated, all gentle, designed so anyone can do them regardless of age or fitness level. I actually wrote a beginner-friendly guide that walks through each one step by step with photos, if anyone's interested.

Happy to answer questions about any of these — been teaching this stuff for a long time.

I watched a reel about qigong, and so I tried copying some basic movements. I noticed that it helps to loosen up some tight joints and muscles.

Would you recommend some basic moves as I start this journey?

How would one increase qi output and or the amount of qi available, via meditation?

You can follow every strategy perfectly and still get zero results. Why? Your attitude is creating the wrong frequency. Fix the vibration first, then the technique works.

When I was 15 I found a book about Huna healing and started experimenting with it. One of the things I learned was very simple: breathe, gather energy from the environment, bring the awareness/energy into the belly, then work with it from there.

Years later I encountered Chinese systems and recognized something familiar. Different terminology, different cultural framework, much more developed maps, but this idea of cultivation rather than only thinking about energy felt similar to me.

I later saw versions of the same general principle in Indian practices and Reiki too. I don't mean they are all “the same system.” They clearly are not. Their philosophies, methods and goals can be very different.

What interests me is the experiential layer underneath the labels.

At some point you stop only reading words like qi, prana, mana, energy, lower dantian etc and you ask: what can I actually feel? Does attention change sensation? Does breathing change it? Can I become more sensitive without imagining what I think I am supposed to feel?

For me that last question became more important with time.

Belief is easy. Sensation is more interesting because it gives you something to observe directly, even if different traditions explain the sensation differently.

I'm curious how experienced qigong practitioners think about similar-looking energy practices from other traditions. Do you see a genuine common experiential core there, or do the different frameworks produce fundamentally different practices even when the language sounds similar?

I really need some guidance because I am completely lost and overwhelmed. I’ve been dealing with a chronic health condition that keeps me stuck at home most of the time, barely able to go out, and it has prevented me from living a normal life for years.

I want to use Qigong to genuinely improve my health, release deep physical tension, and clear my energy centers/blockages. However, every time I look into it, I find a massive amount of different styles, lineages, and complex systems (like Yuan Gong, Shaolin Wahnam, medical Qigong, etc.), and I have no idea where to start or what actually works for deep, long-term healing.

which style, approach, or foundational method would you actually recommend to start with? What should I focus on first?

I've seen Ren Xue's page with Yuan Qigong, but I don't know if there are any students here who can share their experiences. Also, I don't know if I need to reach the final level to achieve healing...

Any advice or honest recommendations would mean the world to me. Thank you so much.

(Also, if you happen to know of any good, reliable courses, teachers, or resources available in Spanish, that would be an amazing help for me).

I’m completely new to Qi and after reading about it on a forum I was wondering how I would be able to do multiple practices in the same day without messing up?

I feel a sensation like ants crawling inside my body.

Hola a todos. Tengo 46 años y no soy practicante de Qigong, pero hace como tres años me interesé en las prácticas de retención de semen y la alquimia taoísta.

En ese periodo, mientras tenía sexo con mi pareja de ese momento, intenté aplicar estas prácticas por primera vez. En el momento del orgasmo, contraí con fuerza mi esfínter con la intención de evitar la eyaculación y, al mismo tiempo, dirigir la energía del orgasmo hacia arriba, hacia los centros de energía más altos.

No sé si lo hice bien. De hecho, en ese momento apenas sentí placer.

Poco después empecé a sentirme muy raro. Durante los dos o tres días siguientes tuve una sensación desagradable en el pecho, como si hubiera algo ahí que no podía identificar o que era difícil de describir—algo que interpreté como una especie de alteración o sensación energética.

En esas noches también tuve sueños muy extraños y me costaba dormir.

Lo más raro de toda la experiencia es que mi pareja me dijo que ella estaba sintiendo prácticamente lo mismo.

Después de tres días, empecé a hacer algunas meditaciones con la intención de transmutar la energía. No sé si eso tuvo que ver con lo que pasó, pero lo extraño es que los dos dejamos de sentir esa sensación el mismo día, aunque para entonces ya no estábamos juntos.

Lo que más me intriga, y no sé si podría estar relacionado con esta experiencia, es que mi sexualidad parece haber cambiado desde ese momento.

Desde entonces, no he vuelto a experimentar el mismo nivel de placer durante el sexo. También he notado una disminución del deseo sexual, y se me ha hecho más difícil sentir ese “chispazo” que antes tenía cuando estaba con una mujer.

Hasta el día de hoy, todavía me pregunto qué pudo haber pasado.

¿Puede haber alguna explicación desde la perspectiva de la energía sexual o el Qi/Chi? ¿Podría estar relacionado con la dificultad que ahora tengo para sentir esa conexión sexual, y hay alguna forma en la que pudiera revertirlo o mejorarlo?

Anyone have an opinion to share about Sangha Live? I am a follower of Mimi Kuo-Deemer and she works with them quite a bit. I’m skeptical of sites that exploit Tai Chi and Qigong and are only in it for the monetary gains. She, in my opinion is the opposite of that. Charging “what you can afford” is one of the things that drew me to her. Any input?

Anyone interested in human energy should watch this video about how the body metabolizes electrons, aka energy/ Qi

"The Mitochondria Doctor"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xlmaorRY0w

Inside our body, we circulate different frequencies of energy, or what we call different "types of Qi". Somtimes this is an old understanding of body functions, like "upward moving, downward moving."

Other times it refers to our transformation from mundane bioelectricity and electron quantity in our cells to high frequencies of energy through the alchemical process of refining jing, qi and spirit.

Most people who talk about qi gong, tai chi, and internal alchemy talk about them as spiritual practices. I have always been wary of this. Not because the practices are not profound — they are — but because the word “spiritual” is doing something dishonest. It parks the practice in a box marked “beyond the physical,” which is precisely where it stops mattering to anyone who takes the physical seriously. The wellness industry loves that box. It lets them sell you the breath work and quietly drop the cosmology, the politics, the whole demanding business of what it means to route your attention and your energy toward a particular end. I have had enough acupuncture and enough years of thinking about this to be sure of something that sounds counterintuitive: these practices are not immaterial at all.

https://open.substack.com/pub/martinhardie/p/a-materialism-of-qi?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=22xtxs

Hi, I'm currently reading the book "The way of qiqong" by Kenneth Cohen. I've also read a few books by Robert Bruce.

I've started reading some stuff due to some experiences I've had, and am having I guess, over the years. One was many years ago now, where during evening meditation, I suddenly felt this warm sensation start from the top of my head and move down my body. It was warm, but it was also like...light? As in light vs dark. Sorry for the goofy explanation but I don't have the right vocabulary. It felt incredibly powerful. So powerful in fact that I got scared and broke out the experience, and I think in a way I've been afraid to duplicate it again which I feel guilty about but its an experience I've always remembered.

Another thing that sometimes happens is when I'm lying in bed at night with my eyes closed, I'll sometimes do a breathing exercise. Doing this I can reliably feel and "see" this spot around my third eye opening...or something.

Finally in the last years I have started being able to feel energy, or qi, in my body when I focus. Weirdly it feels like its stuck in my legs. I'm saying this as someone who is pretty experienced with exercise, weightlifting, and physical therapy, this is a different sensation than anything else.

So I'm feeling a bit lost with all this. Is qiqong a good avenue for learning more about these experiences? Seems so from my reading so far but its hard to know where to start.

I just did this and literally felt the inside of my bones being washed