268. Experience Healing Energy and Inner Harmony with Qigong Secrets - Lee Holden

Kara Goodwin: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Meditation Conversation, the podcast to support your spiritual revolution. I'm your host, Kara Goodwin, and today I'm joined by Lee Holden. Lee is a master of the ancient art of Qigong and the c e o and founder at Holden Qigong. He's a world renowned leader who brought this Chinese practice to the modern world.

He's been featured on eight successful P B S shows with another 13 episodes under Your Fountain of Youth with Lee Holden. He teaches Chiang to improve the energy life force of individuals and professional athletes. 

 This is such a great episode with the Lee. He gives us loads of insights into [00:01:00] how chigong works with our energy, how we have three brains, how the different energies within the body work together to give us perfect health or express as disease when things are not flowing properly. He gives us insight into the ancient history of cheek gong. 

And how it works with every area of our life and health. And at the end, we have an experiential session where you can feel your own sheet and interact with it, which is super cool. So before we get started, I have a couple of things to mention. First is simply that if you find this podcast helpful, please rate and review and tell your friends about it. 

It's a free and easy way to support the show and help it grow. And I so appreciate it very, very much. It means so much to me to read your reviews and to get your feedback and to know that we're connected through this format. And the second thing. Is to quickly invite you to check out all of the partners of the meditation [00:02:00] conversation podcast, which you can get to through the meditation conversation.com. 

Also check out Cara goodwin.com For more resources specific to meditation. Check out the meditation immersion online course to go deeply into your own meditation practice, as well as the healing heart online community, where we meditate together regularly. There's a large meditation library to help your meditation practice and other ways to help your spiritual growth. 

Learn more@caragoodwin.com. Now, enjoy this episode. 

Kara Goodwin: So welcome Lee. I'm so happy you're here.

Lee Holden: So good to be here. Thanks for that lovely introduction.

Kara Goodwin: My pleasure. So in case there's anybody who's not familiar with Qigong, can you just talk about what it is and why it's become so popular?

Lee Holden: Yeah, absolutely. And there's still a lot of people that don't know what Qigong is, especially in the Western world, it's the most widely practiced form of exercise in the world. [00:03:00] I don't think people know that, but there's some 80 million people that practice Qigong each and every day. that said also, Tai chi is a form of Qigong.

So when you see people in the parks doing Tai chi movements, Tai chi, the way they're practicing in modern days is really chiang. So chi means energy, it means life force energy, and gong simply means to work with. So working with life force energy, that could be the energy of your body. That could be the energy of your emotions, could be the energy of your mind.

And when we do Chigong practice, it is for all three. it's a moving meditation, it's physical exercise, it's stretching, and then it's these beautiful flowing movements that helps to circulate life force energy, or chi, as we call it.

Kara Goodwin: Hmm. I was wondering the connection between Qigong and Tai Chi. So Tai Chi is a variation of Chi.

Lee Holden: Yeah. in Qigong there's three distinct. Principles or [00:04:00] styles. and they're, the three categories are martial arts are medical and spiritual. So you're gonna have martial arts practices of Qigong, something like iron shirt, something that the Shain monks practice to build strength and conditioning in their bodies.

And then what happened over time was that these people that practiced Qigong became very healthy. And so a whole branch. Took off of medical Qigong, and that's my specialty because people often will come and say, Hey, I have neck pain, or I have high blood pressure. I have these digestive issues, and what I've done is crafted and created routines that target very specific ailments that people in modern life have.

And so you can target with exercise and movements and meditation. How do we guide and direct healing energy in our own bodies? To these places and create a healing effect. And let me tell you, it works extremely well. And it's a, it's [00:05:00] an empowering practice where people get to take charge of their own health and healing for themselves.

And then the spiritual practice of Chiang is the more meditative. And what I like about it is that it's an embodied meditation practice. Each movement, each flow tells a story, has an intention. And we get to go through a meditative process where mind and body start to connect, mind, body, spirit start to expand, and then we feel connected to this beautiful divine energy that's all around us.

Kara Goodwin: Mm, wow. Now, if you as a master of Chiang, were watching somebody in a park. Would you be able to tell which one of those three that they were practicing, does it look the same on the outside and it's really more about what they're doing inner inwardly, or is it like a noticeably different

Lee Holden: Right.it is both. It is both. So I can definitely tell if somebody's doing Tai Chi, because in Tai Chi you're doing a set and really what now distinguishes Tai Chi from Chiang [00:06:00] is in Tai Chi. You learn a whole sequence of movements. So there's a memorization that needs to happen. So I can tell like somebody's doing a Tai Chi practice.

What people don't know as you're doing Tai Chi, all the movements in Tai Chi have martial application. In fact, the history of Tai Chi is interesting because the, it started with a particular family in China. the Chen family, they had a servant, who was now considered young, Mr. Young. And so there's young style Tai chi and there's Chen style Tai Chi, because the servant would sort of spy on.

Master Chen teaching his sons and his family, Tai Chi and Ma and Master Young became so good because he was just watching and observant and he'd practice and practice and then he took it to his family and young style. Tai Chi became very well known because he and his sons would often challenge other martial artists to sparring matches, and they became very good.

And at that time, the [00:07:00] Chinese. Imperial Guards started using Tai Chi within their,calisthenics to train their guards. But what they didn't do is they didn't teach 'em the secret energy practices behind the movements, which are the Qigong aspects. So the internal energy cultivation is more Qigong and the outward movement.

Yes, it can be Chiang, but also it's Tai Chi and all these other things. when you see people doing, chigong, there's so many different styles, so I categorize 'em into these three, but under those three umbrellas, there are thousands of styles. So according to, according to the history, it's about 3000 styles of Qigong.

So Tai Chi, and then you have five styles that are six styles of Tai chi, and then you have. wild goose. You have swimming dragon, you have five elements. You have all these different styles of Qigong, but they all follow some very similar principles of practice,

Kara Goodwin: Hmm. That's so fascinating. and it uses [00:08:00] the Meridian system, right?

Lee Holden: correct? Yep. Yeah, it's like acupuncture, but you're doing it on yourself. I don't know if, your listeners know about Chinese medicine, but it has a beautiful history behind it. So in, in Chinese medicine, there's five branches, and we have Qigong as one of the main branches for self cultivation, for self-healing.

And then you have acupuncture, you have herbal medicine, you have massage therapy, everybody's favorite branch,

Kara Goodwin: Yeah. All right. And what was the last one?

Lee Holden: Nutrition

Kara Goodwin: Nutrition.

Lee Holden: and so you take these five different A aspects of cultivating health. And the way that medicine used to be practiced was that you would pay your healthcare practitioner.

So if you were my acupuncturist or chigong teacher, or you have maybe, let's say a team, you would pay them as long as you were healthy. As soon as you got sick, you stopped paying. They're like, oh, I got a headache. I got digestive issues. Okay, you guys aren't doing your job. I'm not gonna pay you [00:09:00] this month until I feel better.

So guess what? This is a healthcare system, not a sick care system. Yes, it does treat illness, absolutely. But. It prevents problems. So while you're healthy, the doctors, the Chigong masters would always be fine tuning your energy and like, oh, your energy's a little bit off. Oh, this chi you're getting stressed out.

Be careful because that might cause X, Y, and Z. So they were very preventative in nature. and then you have this very thriving, healthcare system, which is the exact opposite of what we have. we have a great. Technologically advanced medical system, but we have more sickness, more side effects than ever before, and we have a really, I don't know, it's just a really low vibration way of practicing medicine because of this emphasis on sickness and everybody's motivated to keep you sick because nobody gets paid unless there's a lot of [00:10:00] sickness, illness, and disease.

Whereas this system sprung forth. From a completely different paradigm.

Kara Goodwin: Yeah. It's so fascinating. I don't know if you can explain a little bit more about the meridian kind of highways in case there are people who aren't familiar, but that's the foundation of all five branches of Chinese medicine, right.

Lee Holden: That's correct. Absolutely. So the theory in the thinking is that your body is energy and it is energy. and the Chinese medicine system has mapped out meridian lines with acupressure or acupuncture points on it. there's been a lot of western studies on the meridian system because it's a little bit.

it's really operates from a different paradigm and the f focus and the foundation of this medicine is energy that behind the other systems that we focus on in the west, let's say your cardiovascular system, your respiratory system, your digestive system, that there's this energy, this life force that [00:11:00] feeds and powers and animates those systems.

So the chi of the lungs will create movement of breathing. The chi of the heart will create a beating. Right. And so if you look at the heart, what creates the pump? Well, it's electricity. And so this would be the chi of the heart, the mind. For example, you can close your eyes and you can see images right in meditation.

Close your eyes. Imagine yourself, by a beautiful waterfall or sunset. We can all see pictures even though there's no light source in your brain. So this is Chi of the Mind. And, let's just say that Chi is mysterious. It takes us to the precipice of the mystery, and that's why it is called, a mystical practice because it is, it teeters beyond the, what we can explain verbally.

And we always say in Qigong practice, we might fall short in our language and being able to describe it, but we can all [00:12:00] experience it.

Kara Goodwin: Mm-hmm.

Lee Holden: And all medicine does we, if we study the heart deeply enough, in Western medicine, we don't know how the heartbeat started or why, or how it continues to beat.

when I was talking to a doctor, he said, the heart is so mysterious. It's like a match that learned how to light itself. And then it burns down, it regrows and lights itself again. That's how mysterious your heart is. It doesn't operate in the same way. Physics, does We're always on this precipice of the mystical.

Either, whether we look at it from a Western perspective or an Eastern. And so chi was the electricity, the bioelectricity that feeds energy to all the systems in your body. And it's that mysterious life force. So we could call it spiritual, it could be, mystical, and it's what animates and powers things in your body, both voluntarily.

Like if I said, lift your arms up and down, everybody can lift their arms up and down and that involuntary involuntarily, like your heartbeat, [00:13:00] your breath, your cellular activity, there's chi moving through that. And so we'd also call it an. Organizing power. It does something beyond your conscious mind.

Like when you take a deep breath, what makes the oxygen get to all the different cells? Who orchestrates that? Well, we say the Chi does that. The energy, the Life Force does that. Below the level of our conscious mind, and it does all these things for you. And so one of the big problems we ha face in Western society is that we try to do everything when this life force energy is so intelligent that it can orchestrate so many things.

And really to optimize your health. It's about relaxing more and doing less tension in your body, less thinking in your mind, less contraction. And slowing down so that this intelligent energy system can function at its highest level.

Kara Goodwin: That is a fantastic explanation. Thank [00:14:00] you. I do you see like, because you mentioned the different systems within the body, like digestion and cardiovascular and I. I know that like in Western, our western approach tends to be that we see specialists, right? It's, and it's like we look at everything in a microcosm of okay, I am a specialist in, non cardiothoracic.

And But with the Chinese medicine approach, it's much more integrated and holistic is my understanding, where it's really looking at everything as a whole and more holistically. Is that accurate?

Lee Holden: That is so accurate, and it is such a good topic to, to talk about because we, yes, we specialize in the West and there's some benefit to specialization. We got the eye doctor, but the eye doctor doesn't talk to the psychologist, who doesn't talk to, the physiotherapist or the physiotherapist, the [00:15:00] psychologist, Aren talking to the priest or the rabbi, and so we feel.

Very disconnected, and we have all these very specialized energies within us. But at the same time, we are a totality. We are an integrated hole. And so yes, a headache, an eye problem, digestive issues in Chinese medicine, we're gonna say, what's the root cause? And we're gonna say, oh, maybe it's that emotional stress that we're holding.

Maybe it's that we don't wanna see life because it's too painful. And so we'll tie these connections together so that we look at the root problem. And we don't just fix a symptom. somebody comes in with a headache, 10 different people come in with a headache. You're probably gonna be in western medicine.

You're all gonna get painkiller. In Chinese medicine, we're gonna give you 10 different treatments because the root cause one person, it might be overstressed, another person, it might be sitting too long, and a third person, it might be hormone imbalance. And if we can address the root cause, you actually heal a cascade [00:16:00] of potential.

problems rather than just killing a particular pain, which is interesting because pain is actually your body trying to talk to you if you don't listen to our bodies, usually a, a big pain starts out as a small discomfort. Oh, my neck and shoulders are tight. Oh, I'm just gonna push through it.

It's fine. I'm gonna sit on my computer for another eight hours and just go, go, go, go, go. And then that neck tension turns into a mild headache that over, the next six months turns into chronic headaches or something else. So our bodies are trying to talk to us. in a chi young practice, you get very skilled at listening to your body so that you can prevent.

A future problem. And so this is the kinds of things that we would look at in Chinese medicine because when you just treat a symptom, the medication will give you a side effect and you're not addressing the root cause. So then more trouble is on the way because we continue to do the same thing and then we have problems.

Kara Goodwin: [00:17:00] Yes. Yes. That's wonderful. I love it. And you kind of touched on this, but you talk about, like in Qigong you get to, you learn how to listen to your body, and in that way, Qigong is a very mindful practice. Can you give some, maybe some examples or go into that a little bit deeper about how do you develop that ability to listen to the body through

Lee Holden: Yep. Right,and you know what's interesting about this word? Mindful, right? The fullness of the mind. In the present moment. Now your body is always in the present moment, but the mind very frequently is not. It's thinking about something in the future. What do I gotta do? Here's what I'm expecting, here's my to-do list.

Or then it's ruminating about things that happened in the past that was unfair. I can't believe this person did that to me. So we're trying to. Bring the mind into the moment. How do we do it? we get it anchored by something that the body's doing. very often it's breathing, so we pay attention to your breath [00:18:00] because the breath is always in the moment, and now the attentiveness of your mind is on the body.

What we could do that in a. Much deeper and richer way if the body is also engaged. So if we're doing a movement, you can feel the subtleness of, let's say the air moving through your fingers and the breath moving through your nose and the way the joints are articulating in your spine. And so we can keep going deeper, layer by layer to the physical body.

Okay, what's my physical body doing? What's my breath doing? Okay, now I can get into the subtleness of it. And now feel what my energy is doing. And all of a sudden the moment becomes full and rich of deep sensory experience so the mind all of a sudden doesn't wander and do, nor does it want to wander because there's so much sensation to experience inside our bodies as well as the energy that's all around us.

And so we really get [00:19:00] a full, complete immersion into the moment. By doing these practices and these techniques that cultivate energy, because as energy increases, so does sensation, so does the feeling, let's say, of blissfulness or relaxation. And that makes it much easier to, let's say, be mindful. And often what I do is, after a Chigong class we'll do a, a 15 minute.

Meditation and it's really easy to drop right into meditation because the mind is relaxed. The body's already relaxed, and now when you sit and meditate, you're already there, so to speak.

Kara Goodwin: Yeah. This makes me wonder, do you, when you think about what the mind actually is, a lot of people associate the mind with the. Brain, but this has a, such a much fuller, feeling to what the mind actually is. do you differentiate

Lee Holden: Absolutely, and I think this is again where we like to create. Fences [00:20:00] and we think just because there's a fence on the earth isn't continuous and we create these mental fences, this is my mind and that's my body. Which actually there's a continuum. the mind is the body. The body is the mind.

So it's one flow of energy. And we also have the misconception that the brain is the mind. It's part of the mind. Absolutely. But also your body is the mind. And in say we call 'em the three minds, the mind of the belly. And this is where our gut feelings would come from, what we would might call kinesthetic intuition.

Like I just feel something. And now when we look at science, the science is saying you have neurological activity in your gut. Like why is that? Why do you have neurological activity in your gut? The gut is a brain, they call it the term now is a second brain, your gut brain, which is really interesting because there's this way in which your gut is thinking.

And communicating with the rest of the system. Now let's look at the [00:21:00] heart. The heart mind is also another mind that leads you towards joy, that leads you towards happiness. But unfortunately, we're not trained to listen to it, so we often just make our decisions based on our. Upper brain, just our thinking mind, which is very limited and often very tied to our danger response.

So it's gonna make choices not based on happiness, but based on survival. And so that's why we are constantly living in stress because we're not tuned into the energy of the gut or the energy of the heart. And when all three work well together, you have these three wisdom sources that can clearly communicate and be a, like a superpower, a team that really helps you navigate life's demands in the very best way that leads you to health.

That would be your lower gut, as what we call it in Qigong, happiness, your heart, mind, and fulfillment, [00:22:00] which is your upper mind. So the upper mind, a little bit more towards our spiritual cultivation, our purpose, why are we here? And then the heart mind leaning us towards compassion and joy and bliss. And then our lower mind, how do we become vibrant, healthy, and full of vitality?

Kara Goodwin: Hmm. That's beautiful. I think I remember as you're saying that I'm like, I hope I have this correct, but that I, if it's, I think it's from the heart up into the brain, there's actually more pathways, more communication happening from the heart to the brain than from the brain to the heart.

Lee Holden: That's right. is exactly right. So the heart is trying to communicate and it's like as our brain listening or not, it's like a relationship where you know somebody's talking to you, but you've, or you're talking to somebody and they're just like on their phone or they're looking off, they're not paying attention.

And then you're like, did you hear what I said? And they're like, what? that's that's like our mind is so focused on preoccupied on the linguistic [00:23:00] inner dialogue. That the heart is often misunderstood and not paid attention to your heart and your gut don't speak linguistically.

They speak energetically through a felt sense through energy. Really. And now does your brain, does your upper mind speak that language? Are you tuned in to the feelings and the sensations? And so this is now where we can get. Much deeper into the chi of the heart or the body so that we can start to develop this kinesthetic wisdom, or this heart wisdom, which really comes.

Heart Wisdom also comes about with through empathetic intuition where we can feel how other people are feeling. We can sense the energy of a room, we can sense our own heart space to be able to help us, guide us. The heart is really the energy of love, which is the energy of connection. Connection. So we feel love when we are really connected to somebody else, [00:24:00] to our children, to our parents, to our friends.

But we can also feel love for humanity connection. And what has to happen for us to feel into this heart space, into this loving energy is we need to get out of our stress mode. Because survival mode overrides heart mode. Stress will override because when you're under, when you perceive life as threatening, we start to be very self-centric.

We don't feel the connections I need to take care and make sure I'm out of danger. And unfortunately this is the primary driver in our nervous system. So we don't have a, we don't, you won't probably start a podcast teaching people how to worry or how to be stressed out cause they totally have that nailed 

Kara Goodwin: I was just gonna say that we totally have that nailed.

Lee Holden: Yeah, so it's very interesting that we need to train happiness and the first step, get out of stress, learn tools and techniques to calm your nervous system. Then start to invest your precious life force energy [00:25:00] into your heart and into your body, and that is how we live our best lives.

Kara Goodwin: Hmm. Thank you. I have another like very newbie question about Chigong. When you've been talking about this, you've talked about like the chi and the heart and the chi and the gut and the chi in the mind and so forth. How much of it is these sort of a relational, a relationship to the chi that is like the chi of the heart and then a different chi that is in the gut or whatever?

And then is chi gong sort of the, the migration or the merging of these different systems or.

Lee Holden: Right. Super. Great question. I think that this is, now we're getting into some really nuanced energy. So you have your totality of your energy, but the energy of the heart, just like a heart cell, was gonna be different than the energy of a liver or liver cell, right? And so now what's the energy behind the [00:26:00] cellular activity of these very distinct.

Organ systems. And we want that distinction because we want the heart cells to do what they're designed to do and the liver cells to do what they're designed to do as well as everything else. and so we'll say, yes, you have a, your chi and the chi of Cara's gonna be d different than the Chi of Lee, and it's gonna be different.

and then there's the Chi of Nature, let's say. So there's this life force energy that we're all in this sea of chi, which we call nature. And by the way, in Chigong we say it's like fish that don't know they're in water. 

Kara Goodwin: Oh yeah. 

Lee Holden: sea of chi, but we don't know it. So we feel cut off.

And if we can relax, expand, we're gonna be tapped into an abundant source of energy. So unfortunately, in modern Lifewater people, they're too busy, they're too tired, and they're too stressed. And so this ancient practice has so much to offer because it's gonna energize you, it's gonna lower your stress, [00:27:00] and it's gonna increase your energy.

And I think if you ask just about anybody, everybody's gonna say, oh yeah, I want less stress and more energy. And this is the practice to do it. Because that's exactly what it does, is it first and foremost looks at and says, where do human beings hold their stress? Let's get rid of that. And there's an abundant source of energy in nature.

All around us and we just need to tap into it. So that's where this practice springs forth from. And now the ch the chi becomes nuanced. It becomes specialized as it flows through you. So we have heart chi, we have liver chi, we have all the organs have different kind of chi with brain chi. and so then we have emotional energy.

And so in the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Chinese medicine, I'm sure you've read it, I'm sure you've all read that. It's a real page Turner. they describe about 360 different kinds of chi and so, yep. So like [00:28:00] chi of the lungs, chi of the heart, but then the chi of the lungs and the heart. What do they do? They combine. So that is a third chi. So you take these two kinds of chi, heart chi, lung chi, you combine it where blood is infused with oxygen, and that's another.

They call that Tru chi because that's really how the cheese circulates. So these ancient masters had this, way of perceiving what was happening in the body subjectively. That was really intuitive. That was really wise. And then now as we look at more fine tuned Western instruments that we can see, there's so much alignment between objective Western science and subjective.

Eastern mysticism, you're gonna see complimentary medicine arise from that. And it's a really beautiful way to practice cuz we get these two powerful ways of looking at our mind body systems. And then we can start to get nuanced, but understand that it's really about the totality that our emotions affect our bodies.

And and here's the thing, [00:29:00] it wasn't until, 20, 25 years ago that, Maybe it's a little longer now. that we really understood that emotional stress is the root cause of physical problems in the Western medicine. It was just like, no, this is genetic. It has nothing to do with emotions.

You know, a bout of depression has nothing to do with your digestion issues or your headache or anything else. Now we know it's about 90%. 90% of all physical ailments is emotional stress. So I think that's like what, okay. So to prevent problems, we have to clear stress, long-term, chronic stress is really what's causing most issues.

Kara Goodwin: Mm. That's fascinating.

Lee Holden: Yep.

Kara Goodwin: Well, Is there anything that you can share with the audience, and myself about are there any kind of practices that we can integrate that you can share with us now?[00:30:00] 

Lee Holden: Absolutely, let's do it. I think, the only caveat is just don't do these driving.

Kara Goodwin: Okay, that's a good one.

Yeah. 

Lee Holden: do some things with your hands. so let's do two exercises. One to activate our chi so that people can feel what chi feels like in their own bodies. And then, a moving meditation flow. And we'll do these both seated.

And so the first exercise is gonna, Activate the meridian lines in your hands and fingers. And the way we're gonna do this is very simple. It only takes about 30 seconds and you'll feel a lot of chi in your hands, and you're just gonna touch the fingernails of both hands together. And you're gonna rub back and forth, rub the fingernails back and forth.

And these are the ends of the meridian lines. The last or the beginning acupressure points starts in the corners of the fingernails. And so, as you rub back and forth, let's just take a few deep breaths. This, And just rub vigorously back and forth and activate the energy in your hands. And you might notice that first knuckle [00:31:00] just above the fingernails rubbing together as well.

That's good. And then take one or more deep breath. Rub those fingernails and knuckles together vigorously. And then just put your hands in your lap and feel your hands feel the electricity. Activated in your hands. It often feels buzzing or tingling. And this would be called the sensation of chi.

Kara Goodwin: Hmm.

Lee Holden: And as you do chi gong, the sensation gets stronger and it moves through your whole body. So now just take your hands at your size and inhale and just floats your hands up nice and slow.

And exhale, floats your hands down nice and slow. And then imagine that you're moving in water. So the slowness also creates a buoyancy and a relaxation in your shoulders. Synchronize breath with movement. Inhale as you [00:32:00] float the arms up and exhale as you float the arms down. And now as you're moving, feel the air move through your fingers.

Feel the air moving. On the inside area of your arms or in the palms of your hands. So become mindful of the movement, feeling the air move through the fingers like you're caressing the energy and the energy field all around you.

And then pay attention to your breath coming in through the nose and out through the nose. And notice that when you inhale the energy field, nature becomes you. That breath becomes your blood. That breath becomes a thought. [00:33:00] It enters into all the different organs and becomes you. And that exhale when you exhale it out also becomes nature.

So sense and feel the oneness between you and the field of energy all around you. Inhale, take that energy in. Exhale, let that energy move out. This is the dance of life force. Energy comes in, it goes out, it pulses, it has rhythm. And inhale. Float your arms up. Exhale, flow charms down. Just relax your hands into your lap and notice how your body feels.

Feel a lightness, a little tingling, and you have just cultivated chi. Life force energy.

Kara Goodwin: Hmm. [00:34:00] a pronounced fullness with that.

Lee Holden: Absolutely. I loved how you phrased that. A pronounced fullness and that's it will become fuller of life. And where does life take place? It's right here in the moment.

Kara Goodwin: Hmm. Yeah. I really love too, just the that it's beyond just the body, it's the connection. You know? You're really good about Notice, connect to the space around you and feel that, oops, sorry. And feel that like moving through your fingers or the feeling of it against your arms or whatever.

And it is this, it's almost like a whale. It was kind of like what I kept coming into, it was like

Lee Holden: Yeah, it's beautiful. There's like floating in the ocean and like this buoyancy and this, you know, depth. And I think when we're doing these movements, I'm always guiding people. Through a movement in a meditative way. so the movement will tell a story. Each movement's a little bit different. maybe one on as a movement for setting intention for how [00:35:00] you wanna bring forth and cultivate energy into physical reality.

maybe there's one to open your heart. Maybe there's one to strengthen your center feel grounded. All these different kinds of things that we talk about in meditative practices. Now we can put it to a movement. And embody it, and then it becomes more tangible or more manifest in a quicker and efficient way.

Kara Goodwin: Yeah. Well thank you for that. I love that. It's

Lee Holden: My pleasure. So good to be here with you.

Kara Goodwin: Yes. how can people learn more or are there places where they can have deeper experiences with you?

Lee Holden: Absolutely. Well, you know, come to my website, holden chigong.com and we usually have a free week, free two week trial on my video class subscription. That's where you just get to come and take class with me, we have it filmed and so it's live on Zoom or it's always recorded, so it's on demand. And we [00:36:00] always have at least, 12 classes up.

And you can do, what I do is I, when my classes, I always like maybe do something seasonal or specific body part or a particular style of Qigong. And then I also on the website have all these different conditions, specific titles. So if you have neck pain, if you have digestive issues, you need some focused healing work, it's on there as well.

So come see us@holdenchigong.com and we'll get your chief low.

Kara Goodwin: Oh, that's awesome. Well, thank you so much Lee. This has really been enlightening and and fun. I've really enjoyed learning about this.

Lee Holden: Oh, you're a great host and I appreciate the way we can take it into a, a depth through its simplicity and even do a little practice.

Kara Goodwin: Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you so much.

Lee Holden: It's my pleasure. Thanks guys. [00:37:00]