Your stories of healing

[everything]

How has qigong or IMA helped you heal?

Any positive stories you care to share?

How about helping others?

[Taste of Death]

It cured me of boredom.

[wiesiek]

In our contemporary society nobody /except RSF members / likes to train 2- 3 h a day which is kinda of minimum if you use qigong as the only cure...
so
I`m alone in my research/practice
brighter side is , that it works for me

[Bao]

I've healed back pain twice with santishi standing. It went pretty fast as well, five minutes or so, though I could hardly move my back before getting into the posture. It seem to straighten up and balance the body posture pretty well.

I've heard a lot of other stories from IMA practitioners about allergies, asthma, skin deceases, stomachs etc. There should be tons of stories that the board members could share, from their own experiences or from their friends.

"How about helping others?"
I have been thinking about doing some research on asthma together with an organisation. Just need to get time for it. And I would happily teach people with Asthma or Fibromyalgia for free exercises and methods that I know have helped others.

[Michael]

In our contemporary society nobody /except RSF members / likes to train 2- 3 h a day which is kinda of minimum if you use qigong as the only cure...
so
I`m alone in my research/practice
brighter side is , that it works for me

Cool ,wiesiek. I did that for about five years. I suppose as it is with anything, there's a maximum you reach for a certain stage of your skill level and I think in the system I'm in and my circumstances, that was it. Now I usually tell people that reading about so and so teacher who achieved X,Y,Z is real, but that's rare for those who even dedicate to daily practice. Two or three hours a day for years is how you get into a system of knowledge in order to just see what's what.

[Michael]

I had severe, chronic headaches and had no clue as to the reason, but about four years of changing everything in my life began to reveal how to deal with them at the technique level, meaning that I learned the etiology, physical and other triggers, and some ways to prevent and also stop them. Some more years were needed in order to understand the root cause. Now I think that in order to get close to actually solving chronic health problems, you have to make major changes to your life. That's what the chronic health problem is telling you, that there are are significant areas of your reality that you can not see, see poorly, and/or completely misunderstand.

For me it also involved helping heal other people with the qigong, which I do not recommend to anyone unless they can make an informed decision, get their toes wet as safely as possible, etc. with IMA and qigong system that are as complete as possible is the well-balanced way to go, but the bottom line is you gotta make massive changes in order to understand chronic health problems. Everybody has an intuition that will guide them, almost no matter how fucked up you are.

[stma]

I had a serious case of colitis when I was in college. I was prescribed azulfadine for it and told I would be taking it for the rest of my life. I finally weaned myself off of it. My success I attribute to the relaxation exercises and whole body awareness I got from practicing Taiji.

[yeniseri]

It cured me of boredom.

Green tea, ma fren!

[mrtoes]

15 years ago I was out of work for nearly a year with work induced RSI. My body was totally locked up with tension, felt like my arms were on fire with shooting nerve pain. Expensive private medical care was pretty much useless and was more concerned with bouncing me around as many specialists as possible in order to rinse my insurance. I was a mess.

Like many that time I read BK Frantzis's book and found a local teacher, and a month after taking up qigong, tai-chi and bagua I was healed enough to get back to work, and I told my physicians I didn't need them any more. I didn't stay with that system for long but it was what I needed at the time.

I now see that RSI was the best thing that ever happened to me - A year later I'd packed in my well paid job and went travelling around the world, where I met my now girlfriend, and we're 14 months into my third world trip now (I'm working remotely in a cafe in Guatemala right now). I haven't had a hint of RSI for over a decade and have no intention of that changing - I train every day.

Matthew

[greytowhite]

Prepare for a TL;DR post y'all.

In 2008, at the age of 22, I was in a phase 3 federal drug trial for an antidepressant called agomelatine. Damned good dope and I had the most vivid dreams as it's based on melatonin instead of serotonin regulation. Worked a magic bullet on my depression too. It's now known one should never combine agomelatine with alcohol, it can cause liver issues for people who live healthily and worse for those with unhealthy lifestyles and genetic susceptibility.

About a year into the trial my granddad died and I started hitting the liquor hard after almost two years of sobriety and had a minor heart attack. It caused a "permanent" arrhythmia. About six months after that I started having horrible migraines that I came to find out later were probably TIAs. Partial, temporary paralysis and aphasia from migraines. I finally had a full on stroke in February 2009 while at work. I went home on public transportation as always. When I was making my bus transfer that day I tried to thank the driver but all that came out were goat sounds. I couldn't speak and smart phones weren't really a thing back then.

I took my transfer bus home and got online. I Googled "text to speech" and wrote out a whole paragraph about what was going on. I dialed 911 and put the phone next to the computer speaker. When the EMTs showed up I could only communicate via typing, at the time my wpm was about 120 thanks to my legal clerk experience - they were convinced nothing was wrong with me and that I was having an allergic reaction to Aleve. A Benadryl shot and a short ambulance ride later I was at the hospital getting slowly pulled into a tube for imaging. Approximately 8 hours after I was admitted to the hospital I was able to speak English again. Never occurred to myself or the doctors that I was hexalingual and to check the others, just bits and pieces now of those languages now. Without insurance they wouldn't keep me for observation so I was given a prescription for seizure meds and advice to stay hydrated.

I had no family in state and they wouldn't have been able to do much anyway considering we're not exactly wealthy and don't really get along for the most part. The whole left side of my body went to shit. Aphasia was frustrating and people often thought I had Tourette's because of the blue streak I cursed after aphasic incidents. I'm still trying to stop mourning my formerly eidetic memory. I was diagnosed with degenerative disc disease and "spiral" scoliosis where the lateral curve wasn't very large but the vertebrae had spun in place while still being largely in vertical alignment. I blew out both my knees, both hips and shoulders still pop out semi-regularly and both my hands used to lock up for a days at a time. Incontinence was a daily struggle - I couldn't crawl, pull myself across the floor, or hobble from my bed to the toilet quickly enough. Impotence at such a young age was even more frustrating. I also lost 4" of height with my spine issues. Sciatica plagued me daily and I wasn't able to feel much from the hips down other than tingling, cold, needles, shocks, and throbbing pain in both legs.

A friend of mine lit a fire under my ass and started teaching me a combination of Chen taiji, Ip Man Wing Chun, and some various qigong stuff. He would show me something one week, ask me where I had been feeling pain or was most useless and give me a new exercise or change the focus of an already taught exercise. The corrections were minute and painstaking every time. Luckily we had a very relaxed training environment (his cigar factory) and could sit back and enjoy the finer things (a cigar older than myself, a bit of xtabentun or aged rum, and some telenovelas) after he'd kick my ass for as long as I could handle it. I generally spent 4-6 hours in private lessons a night, excluding the telenovela/rum/cigar break. I think I put in about 9 months of training like that with him.

At home I'd practice, often falling over after a minute or two then had to crawl to the nearest piece of furniture pulling myself up with only one hand. As I got better it hurt, a LOT. Were it not for stillness meditation (often started from the fetal position) I don't think I could have handled the pain. I contemplated how much time I spent on the ground and started practicing Feldenkrais stuff - that was really helpful. I had to train myself to become ambidextrous and do most everything with a single hand because I never knew which hand would work from day to day. One would curl up for a day or two at a time, then the other. Sometimes my feet would curl up too, my big toe was almost magnetically drawn to K1 point. That was far worse than my hands. Were it not for my grandfather's example of remaining mostly independently functional with such severe rheumatoid arthritis I would have given up and committed suicide.

I did some research into the whole Macriobiotic Diet, raw foods, and a whole buncha other stuff. I strictly limited my alcohol and tobacco intake and concocted this ridiculous diet that is stupid expensive. The only reason it was feasible at the time was because of my position at an Internet startup. I had a lot of access to vendors for different things and my review blog enabled me to get free samples of all kinds of things. I bought a ridiculous blender because I couldn't think of a way to chew that many veggies in a day. With all the the plant enzymes and fiber introduced as well as cutting out inflammatory foods and foods I was previously allergic to my pain levels dropped considerably.

About three weeks into practicing I started doing abdominal breathing and seated silk reeling. One night my lumbar spine popped so hard I thought my box spring had collapsed. My abdomen started twitching like crazy and then my xyphoid process ripped out and my rib cage looked like it was 4x more massive than my abdomen for a while. After that I could feel my feet better and it was the first morning I actually walked to the bathroom instead of pulling myself across the floor until I could get to the door. It finally "clicked" back in a few months later but I'm still working on decompressing my ribs.

After the initial 100 days of collapsing, crying, crawling, and intense practice I was finally able to set my cane down for a little while and walk unassisted for short distances. I strapped on some knee braces and decided it was time to walk farther. I normally wouldn't go more than 2 miles one way, I usually got at least 3 miles in every day. At this point I was able to start learning some basic forms as I finally had enough leg strength to stand for more than a couple of minutes. If I had to completely reprogram myself just to move I was determined to move with power.

Medical marijuana hadn't passed yet in Arizona but I was getting mine from California. It helped more than anything else for pain, appetite, and the various other things like twitching etc. A John Barnes trained myofascial release therapist really helped out a lot. She pretty much solved my hands locking up.

In 2010, the founder of the startup for which I was an ops manager, sold the company out from under me and screwed me on my severance. I should have known something was up when he started calling me "my friend" after so many sentences. I had no savings as all of my funds were going to rehab and paying medical bills. I had to move back in with my mother in Northern California. The first job I got that paid something almost close to a living wage was phone marketing to IT admins. Combine living with my mother, a shit job, and having no wider social group led to some serious stress. I was still trying my best with a greatly reduced budget to eat well. I was going to a chiropractor weekly who used a combination of Tom Myers' Anatomy Trains, ART, and Graston to help. He said my pelvis had become dislocated and that pop was quite loud and hurt like hell.

In the beginning of 2011 I fucked up pretty good on the neidan and had to deal with zou huo ru mo for months - they locked me away for 3 weeks in a mental ward. I don't know if it's "true" or not but I "healed" a lot of people with external qi emissions and trips to the astral to do battle with entities while I was there. It was interesting and once I left against medical advice (the drugs just made me feel nasty and I didn't want to take them after two weeks) the people that I helped were all willing to let me stay with them. I spent months being homeless, running around town, hoboing the train, and doing wild shit - it was the most fun I'd had in years. Some good friends coordinated something with my sister to get me back to Phoenix. I'm legally insane now and occasionally take a voluntary admittance vacation in the mental hospital to remind myself I'm not really that crazy, eat that I'm not mildly allergic to with every meal, and to get a break from society.

It's been a while since and my health is still improving, knees are much better than they were, my back is in much less pain. Still kinda crazy. Most can't tell I've been through such and think I'm just telling a story. As a spoken word performance artist most think I give fiction instead of telling an autobiographical story. That is, until they see me reconnect with someone who hadn't seen me since that time or who was around and can say, "Yeah dude, it was inspiring watching someone pick themself up from a crippled meat puddle." I'm still practicing neijia and neidan - I wouldn't take the journey back it's been a hell of a ride.

[everything]

grey, that is one hell of a story. I read every word. sorry for your pain. to what do you most attribute your continued healing? is it mostly your vegetable diet? what kind of neijia and neidan are you doing? any idea how you were "healing" your friends? tried to learn more about it?

thanks for everyone's stories. please keep em coming.

[greytowhite]

grey, that is one hell of a story. I read every word. sorry for your pain. to what do you most attribute your continued healing? is it mostly your vegetable diet? what kind of neijia and neidan are you doing? any idea how you were "healing" your friends? tried to learn more about it?

thanks for everyone's stories. please keep em coming.

Mmm... well... pain has been a constant in my life. That experience is something I'm kinda thankful for with some perspective.

As a hyperlexic Aspie that grew up in the ghetto of Stockton, California I had a less-than-traditional American upbringing. My father left when I was really young because my mother is an incorrigible bitch. That left the only male role models in my life as my uncles, grandfather, and great grandfather. My whole family watched my mom's younger brother die of AIDS in the late '80s and he finally passed a few months before I was 5, I still remember his funeral. He was a really kind gay man who was probably one of the best people in our family. My other uncle was a former CIA satellite communications technician and had PTSD from his childhood, looking back I wonder just how much of the fun and spontaneous stuff we did was fueled by his cocaine habit. My grandfather was severely disabled but was still well known in Northern California as a breeder of fighting cocks. I saw a lot of Angel Cabales' Eskrima at work in those circles, really nasty stuff. My racist grandfather loved to give the Filipinos a buncha shit as they had pretty much taken over much of the cock fighting rings in Northern California at the time. Having to fight abuse from my mother (kempo blackbelt), my step-father (massive dude, huge asshole), a couple of my babysitters, and the other kids at school and the neighborhood every day really turned me into a cold bastard. The worst of it was when my step-father fractured my head from just below the hairline above my left eye across the brow ridge, and then down to the right cheek. He picked me up like a battering ram by my collar and the back of my pants then slammed me face first into the soap holder in the shower. Of course he claimed that I "fell" and I received no medical attention for it. Meanwhile, I was doling out abuse to my sister, friends, and other random kids.

Health issues really fucked with my social life growing up. The bizarre autistic "piano" tapping, hand waving, and inability to control the volume of my voice were often looked at by other children as too weird. I had chronic asthma and allergies - I had medical exceptions for almost every school activity. Couldn't play outside when it was too cold, too windy, or whatever. I spent months in the hospital occasionally and usually visiting the ER on a weekly. My mother had this Munchausen by proxy thing going on, wouldn't follow the advice of the doctors and kept feeding me stuff I that I had severe allergy. Each time I got sick people at the church invariably gathered around my mother and gifted her material things that she could not buy for us because she had replaced her speed addiction with shopping.

The cult-like upbringing I had within a Jesus Camp-style church was traumatic and while I've largely processed this my poor sister is still struggling. I was socially isolated at school, home, and church. The standards of the church and its restrictive lifestyle were unrealistic and hypocrisy was rampant but condemnation was generous. They tried grooming me to be a theologian but gave me such ridiculous and patently false bullshit that I was constantly afflicted with cognitive dissonance. We'd have Ron Carlson and Ken Ham give seminars on how to bully someone into bullshit. My innate lexical intelligence and eidetic memory often intimidated adults who did not expect to talk to a child who could read the same material as graduate students and therefore refused to submit to something silly. Although the church plays were probably the saving grace, I learned how to better modulate and control the volume from acting.

In high school I was exiled to Arizona because I was failing school largely due to boredom and no actual reward mechanism in childhood. What good is working hard for something when you're always rewarded with a beating? I was given a choice of going to military school or help start a church - either way I was going to the desert. So I helped start a church in Gilbert, Arizona but wish I had gone to middle school. The church treated me like their slave. I was in charge of setting up and maintaining computer equipment, running the PowerPoint presentations for the sermons, and I was a "youth leader" whatever the fuck that meant. I tried to fit in at church and school but I went from one of the most culturally diverse regions in the nation to something rather opposite. I started having chronic migraines and a good 2.5 years were mostly lost thanks to it. One of the few things from school that I actually enjoyed and excelled in was the vocational training for IT network administration.

My career after school was also rather unhealthy. When I got my GED I had already been certified in CompTIA A+ and had classes in Net+ and MCSA 2000. I started doing tech support for SBC Global router manufacturer 2Wire. I worked as a contractor without benefits. My schedule varied with most shifts between 3pm and 2am. I then worked a series of other tech support jobs trying to find something permanent with health benefits, paid time off, sick days, etc. but it never materialized. I started the clinical drug trial about the same time I left tech support to try my hand at commercial/industrial low voltage electrical work. After trying my hand at electrical and getting laid off I went back to tech support. At one point I was an "escalations" agent for AT&T U-Verse Tier 2 when it was new. That job had a minimum of 10 hours a week of overtime and once again no benefits. The hourly was good though. After less than a year the contract we had signed had pretty much been thrown out the window when I saw people not being given the "real boy" treatment and transferred into proper AT&T employees in the contractually specified timeframe. I tried to involve the union to no avail as Arizona is a right to work state and the former SBC Global, once again AT&T executives were not interested in paying those employees an additional $11/hour along with benefits. When I was at last fed up with it I was offered a job at an online cigar eCommerce startup.

I was pretty much on track to a prison sentence as certain serial killer thought tendencies were starting to pop up in my early 20s. Like most assholes, I didn't really feel inclined to help my fellow man until some heavy shit fell upon my shoulders and I had an emotional connection to my own pain first. I had no true affection for anyone except my cigar shop buddies. The older guys had entertaining stories but many of the younger guys were in the pickup artist community. I started reading their material but just couldn't see a woman as an enemy to be conquered. Dating was always a miserable failure and I had no long term relationships until my late 20s. I built friends groups just to practice NLP techniques on them. I weaved in lies, stories, deceptions, etc. just to see what the effects were on the group dynamic.

After my boss at the startup betrayed me and fucked me on my severance package I began to analyze my actions and discussions with him. I came to find that he was looking for a friend more than an effective employee and I was definitely not that toward him. I'm guessing he felt disillusioned thinking that he had a friend at first and then realized over the long run that I gave no shits about him as a person. Granted, much of this was because he tried to perpetuate the jock flavor of interaction he was used to in high school and college into his adult life. My best friend and I beat those assholes into pulp in school for treating me as inferior for being nerdy and sick but now this was my boss so I wasn't particularly fond of him. He gave me multiple opportunities to work on his new ventures and I had no interest, only a desire to get money and leave the state.

Immediately previous to my first mental hospital visit I was practicing some qigong it occurred to me that I had everything in my kitchen to make a powerful entheogenic cocktail. I then did just that and went back to practicing qigong to my own peril. Something I had been researching and trying to lay the foundation for was killing myself via meditation as I was too OCD to leave much of a mess behind from slitting my wrists or submit to my greatest fear of suffocation. I had visual and audio hallucinations (really awesome considering I'm color blind, THAT'S WHAT PURPLE LOOKS LIKE!) for three days straight, felt empathy and compassion for the first time ever, and was broken open like an egg.

I mentally built an upside Mayan down pyramid with the smallest layers at the bottom that then transformed into an equilateral triangle. Some serpent type beings offered me disembodiment and the opportunity to build the universe as a spirit engineer. I kinda equate them to McKenna's machine elves. Then arose a great chorus of feminine voices and a healing song that contained an invitation to continued embodied life. In no uncertain terms the feminine voices rejected disembodiment and created a circle that then encased the triangle. The second poem describes it.

http://thewordsfromthegreyspace.blogspo ... ocess.html

I couldn't really process how much of an asshole I had been up to that point and this new, overwhelming sense of connection not only to my fellow man but to the whole universe felt like the greatest burden. Instead of masticating this I went full on ego driven manic (my name means gift of god from the birch tree valley of the pastor's family... so - I'm a magical shepherd of the people blah blah blah) and started posting stuff about pseudo-science, actual science, meditation, medicine, mythology, and martial arts on multiple online communities. I rearranged the house to flow with my energy, I was committed a couple of days after this in particularly interesting fit of mania.

The drugs were of little help and all of my alchemical training made it pretty easy to process them even though they made me feel like shit. The therapists were of even less help, there is very much a game they expect you to play. I figured out the rules pretty quickly and got sent home after the first week of observation. Of course, that didn't last long with my fundie Christian mother as my landlord - she tried exorcising demons from me with prayer and was distraught that her little boy with so much potential did not meet her expectations. I went full hobo for about a week until I visited my sister at the mall where she worked so I could get some lunch and next thing I know the police are there responding to a "missing person" report and I was taken back to the psych ward. I mentioned some of what happened already.

I contribute my continued healing to awareness, work, and willpower and a dedication to being grounded in reality. I've also stopped tobacco and alcohol intake daily, just on occasion now. I can't afford that diet any more, I'm a bit too poor for that and have mainly been eating a traditional Northern Mexican diet of late thanks to my girlfriend and her family. I started IMA with Chen taijiquan and some Spring Forest Qigong. Then I got a little instruction in XPQ's Lion and Bear bagua and Mantak Chia's Healing Tao as well as Frantzis' dissolving. Now I'm doing Kenny Gong's xingyibagua and it's really helped me free up the ribs. My current meditation practice is a mix of Kumar Frantzis' dissolving and the Sedona Method thanks to Peacedog's recommendation via e-mail a while ago. As to how I was healing my friends... well it always seemed like I was something of a weaver.

A lot of it had to do with not negating someone's experiences wholesale and working within context of what they told me. Sometimes it was like people were balloons and their strings often just needed to be pulled back down and coiled up inside their bodies. Or sometimes something was frayed and needed a patch. One lady, I cut a string to her dead mother's ghost that was rising out of her crown. One fellow had a speech impediment except when he rapped. He was almost solely rapping the whole time he was in there. Being a hyperlexic performance poet I figured I had to have a greater vocabulary than he did. We had a battle rap for a good two days until he unexpectedly was speaking normally. He flipped out when that happened and the impediment was instantly back. I told him to just rap slowly when he spoke and he was fine after that. One East Indian guy dressed like a cowboy was manic and speaking in tongues. He claimed the stars woke him at night to speak in different languages and it was overwhelming. For him I circle walked with him at the center and turned the strings from all the stars into a rope so it was not coming from so many directions. He was still awakened regularly but it didn't overwhelm him.

Honestly, I don't really practice any qigong healing or astral travel stuff any longer and try to act as a cautionary agent when I find out friends and family are exploring such. I have a baby on the way now and I'm trying my best to conform to a householder's lifestyle. It's a huge change and it will take work time.

[everything]

somehow you need to put these passages into your book. it's horrifying what you've been through, but it is impossible to stop reading your writing.

[mrtoes]

I agree. That was seriously compulsive reading! I'm glad you're more on a level now (by the sounds of it)

[Peacedog]

Many examples of these.

One student after studying Hermetics for about a three years now tests negative for tuberculosis, despite having contracted the disease as a child and testing positive for it every year from his early teens to mid-thirties. After doing the practices for about a year, he said he was practicing in a park near his home and suddenly coughed up a large mass of black material. He said the sensation was of great relief even though it hurt. He went to the hospital for imagery and they ran labs. He tested negative. And he has continued to do so for the last 2 years.

A friend uses the releasing techniques to control a case of late onset asthma.

Another student recovered from severe anxiety using these techniques as well. Her story and the one at the end of this post are the reasons why I still teach.

I've personally found the releasing techniques extraordinarily effective for controlling the pain from burns.

And while this isn't disease related, it is a pretty cool story. One of my students was accidently locked into an unventilated safe at a bank over a weekend. This was a very modern high security unit located at altitude. He had been in the back working on high security computer systems and the bank staff forgot he was there. Knowing that he was likely to die of asphyxiation, he immediately sat down and went into meditation. Monday morning they found him collapsed inside the safe. He was taken to a local hospital and spent about a week there for treatment and testing. He completely recovered with no brain damage or other permanent physical harm. He credits the techniques he learned for saving his life. The manufacturer of the unit he was in couldn't believe he survived let alone without permanent damage. Three months later he sent me a picture of him climbing an 18,000 foot mountain peak.