The Power of Qigong and the Healer Within with Dr. Roger Jahnke

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another edition of the Wellness Talk podcast.
I am George Batiste, your host, and as always, your wellness advocate.
Of course, Wellness Talk is a show that goes over the latest in health, healing, nutrition, fitness, and this show is brought to you by Wellness Talk.
is the last show for 2023 really excited for the new year to come along and let me tell you we're going to end 2023 with a very powerful show okay because we're going to be discussing the healing powers of the human body we're going to be talking about qigong tai chi the healing powers of breath and anything that has to do with the body's ability
to heal and you know you guys know how i feel about taking responsibility for your health and we're going to be discussing that with an amazing guest today today we have dr roger jonka with us he's a world-renowned expert in these subjects a little bit about dr jonka he has dedicated his professional life to sharing the ancient holistic empowerment and healing traditions of china distilled for contemporary times
as the director and chief instructor of the institute of integral qigong and tai chi in santa barbara california dr jonka and his colleagues have trained over 3 000 tai chi and qigong teachers and practice leaders internationally he is the author
of the book The Healer Within, Using Traditional Chinese Techniques to Release Your Body's Own Medicine, as well as the author of The Healing Promise of Qi, Creating Extraordinary Wellness Through Qigong and Tai Chi.
With more than 35 years of clinical practice as a physician of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, Dr. Janka has emerged as a key spokesperson for
and the master teacher of tai chi qigong and mind body practice and it is my honor to have him on this program dr jonka thank you so much for joining us today wow george what a pleasure excited about it and i like this idea of wrapping up 2023 as we go into the winter solstice uh that season of like
personal transformation and the infusion of spiritual light and the lengthening of the days and getting excited about the spring and the summer and making a plan like having a holistic plan yes yes for our coming year uh very excited to be with you sir and really appreciating all you do
Thank you.
Thank you.
This is going to be a great discussion.
And, you know, going into the new year, you know, a lot of people make resolutions and that type of thing.
And, you know, obviously not only we as human beings, but the planet right now can really use healing.
you know, in many, many different ways.
And, you know, I want to have that healing together with you and everyone in this space who can really just, you know, affect everyone else.
And, you know, that butterfly effect, if we can send that message out and really have a healing, that's really what hopefully we can do.
So I'm excited about this.
I want to talk a little bit about
your beginnings, because I know that you started out actually pre-med, if I'm correct, and you kind of were going into that, uh, the conventional model of medicine.
And for those who are not familiar with you, talk a little bit about that and then kind of how you made that transition into Chinese medicine and, and kind of those healing practices.
Yeah, it's an interesting story, George.
Um, I had the, um,
weighty experience of having my father pass away when I was what I was, I wasn't even 10 years old.
And previously that I'm from a place called Cincinnati, Ohio.
And so when people would say to me, you know, when I was a little kid, what are you going to do when you grow up?
I would say, well, I'm going to be on the baseball team of the Cincinnati Reds.
Right.
And following the passing of my dad, and I didn't really notice this until later, but I started answering that same question with, I'm going to be a doctor.
And so what was interesting about that is that when I got to pre-medical school and I
was from a family that the tradition was that you would do a mentorship with someone who does something like you are inclined to do.
And so I started looking for a mentor.
And so I was asking around, and the question was basically, who in this medical school is the sort of the guru of disease prevention?
And I got this kind of, I'm paraphrasing because many people said the same thing in different ways, was something like, well, we don't know much about that because we're doctors.
And doctors don't do that.
If you want to learn how to do that, you have to study in home economics or something like that.
Study the things that your mom would be interested in because doctors only diagnose and treat disease.
That's our expertise.
And I found that so depressing that I quit.
and studied world literature.
And one of the first books that we read in world literature was this little text from China from 2,500 years ago.
You may be familiar with it.
It's called the Tao Te Ching.
Tao Te Ching being a small text with some short, shall we say,
sutras or poems or whatever you want to call that regarding the nature of our lives.
And so I was actually, I was the kind of weird character who would go to the library, but instead of staying in the part where all the
main books are I would go into this place that's called the stacks and stacks are behind closed doors and it's like miles and miles of shelves and you know you'd have to pull a string and a light would come on you know you can see the books like from here to there and I found a manuscript uh that was a handwritten translation of the Dao De Ching into English
from what appeared to be a Jesuit missionary.
And the version of the Tao Te Ching that we were reading in the class was very scholarly.
And the version that I found hidden away was very like, it was obvious that the person who did the translation was intent
upon making the concepts from the Chinese language into language that a person like an average person in America or in English speaking country could read.
And I actually shouted, like out loud, I was just I was struck by this.
I shouted out loud.
I'm going to be a doctor of
this.
And so, you know, then I got into Chinese medicine.
And it's a very long story.
And it's all really interesting.
But that's the basics.
Wow.
Interesting.
You know, it's you're right, because when you look at those texts, the Tao Te Ching and other texts that are similar to that, you can get lost a little bit.
You know, if you're, you know, you really have to kind of look at that information.
I used to, you know, even with me when I was
uh when i first got into yoga the yoga sutras and and you know trying to trying to decipher them and saying okay and how do how do they apply to your life and and these types of things so but uh i always say you you know when you're following this path and you know the especially the healing path you do have to be a little bit weird you know because
Because there are a lot of people that are going to look at you weird.
When you left medicine and you went down that path, did you have people saying, what are you doing?
Why would you do that?
Did you get that?
Well, my poor mom.
Yeah, exactly.
So my mom says, my son's studying medicine.
Then my mom says, my son just dropped out of medical school and he's studying medicine.
you know, the poetry of the philosophers and, you know, it just doesn't sound anywhere near as reasonable in terms of like generating a livelihood and, you know, all that stuff.
So, yeah, it was a pretty big deal.
And I apologized to my mom for years.
And she actually at one point said,
Would you kindly stop apologizing?"
And I did, and it was good because we had a kind of a healing.
I'm from Cincinnati.
In 1967,
Uh, it was called the summer of love.
And, uh, there was a song that came onto the radio, uh, when myself and my best friend, you know, every Saturday morning they would give the statistics on the top 10 and all that stuff.
And one of the top songs, it might've been the top song that week was, uh, if you're going to San Francisco, where flowers in your hair.
And so my buddy and I, we looked at each other and said, let's do it.
And so we actually literally hitchhiked from Cincinnati to San Francisco.
Our moms were at the front door waving by and saying, I'm never gonna see the son that I now know again.
And it was so true.
When I got back after being in San Francisco and Berkeley in 1967,
for a period uh it was it was it was um my third year in college and uh so when i got back for my um when i get back for the third year of college i would definitely not the same person who left home and um it was great for me i mean i love where i am now i get to do i'm sure that we share this by the way george is
You know, what is the entrepreneurial dream?
And the entrepreneurial dream is to do something that's associated with your life purpose and generate livelihood.
Absolutely.
And blessed to have had the experience of actually doing that.
And I'm just like, you know, we are always thankful on Thanksgiving, but I'm thankful every day for...
just the trajectory of my life and where i've ended up and this incredibly rich body of information that is sort of like my gig yeah and i'm sure we probably have shared uh appreciation in that regard
Definitely, definitely, absolutely.
When you're doing your passion and you feel it and you wake up every morning and you're like, I wake up in the morning and I'm like, oh, I'm excited.
And even I'm doing this show and a lot of people would get burned out doing this type of stuff.
I get excited like, what's the next topic?
Who am I gonna talk to next?
Who's my next guest?
It fuels me.
The only other thing I would say that fueled me, not only health fuels me in general, just health and healing, the only other thing that fueled me was music.
was, again, as a musician as well, getting up and practicing.
I still practice to this day.
It just gives you a feeling.
And you kind of leave yourself.
You leave your body when you do that also, especially when you're so focused on it.
And you know how that is.
One of the concepts you talked about, I've heard you talk about in the past,
is the concept of self-determinism.
And you address it in a very powerful way.
And this is something that I've kind of addressed on this show as well.
And I love the way you address it.
So talk a little bit about self-determinism in terms of healing and what the concept for the average person is.
Wow, George, what a...
Beautiful question.
Um, you know, I've done a lot of podcasts and nobody has asked me that question and I have to kind of like, you know, push it in.
So here comes from George.
I love that.
So, uh, self determinism, number one, you know, what do we think about, uh, who we are?
Um, if we're from any kind of, uh, uh, shall we say family based, um,
shall we say, spiritual tradition, we say in our own way, whether it doesn't matter what the tradition is, whether it's an Asian tradition or a European tradition, we always say that a person is an expression of the love of whatever we think we would call God.
And so right away, we're like a manifestation of a beautiful macrocosmic ideal, meaning a universal ideal that is then compressed and composed through the marvel of however the world works to be a person.
So then the question is always right there.
and that is like who is in charge and uh the the you know the religions would say you have a you have a direct relationship with god and so it is your direct relationship with god that is your uh highest guidance and and and so that's right away that is compromised or tested by the fact that as an infant you don't even know what to make a decision about
And so one of the things that's really interesting is that it's pretty classic for children, once they get into their 13, 14, 15 era, to begin to argue against the parents, you know, pretty much like no matter what.
I know.
And then, you know, why?
Because we did that and then we had children who did that.
Yeah.
Then we go to this beautiful document that basically created the the place where we live for all of its shortcomings in the beginning, which is to basically eliminate an entire culture and take over their land.
So we'll leave that aside.
I have, I have, you know, I'll just say, I don't want to use the word blame or guilt.
But I have a very deep awareness of how ridiculous and inappropriate that was.
But here we are.
So we'll just, you know, I study with these people, I bow to them, I, you know,
I've gone to reservations.
I've really done as much as a citizen of the United States can do to honor the First Nation people.
But then going on to the Declaration of Independence, which was labored over by a group of individuals
males, uh, but you know, many of them were married and I'm sure that they were getting advice from their wives and so forth to create the declaration of independence, which basically says right at the beginning that we have these inalienable personal rights.
And so that personal, that primary personal right, uh, you know, which has to do with being able to say what you want to say, which ends up into the, in the, in the constitution.
and the invitation to pursue happiness.
Well, you know, how can you possibly be happy if you're in pain or not feeling well?
And so the implication is that the framers of the original ideal of the democratic ideal on which the Declaration of Independence is based,
is this whole idea of know thyself and determine thy next step through your orientation.
And so how do I get oriented?
Well, I read, I do a lot of reading, and I put myself in relationships with people like you who are thoughtful, and then we
we debate things or we reach agreement on things.
And we know from that process that not everybody has the same biases, but that everybody does, shares their favorite bias in a way that allows for the fact that somebody else is listening and that I will be listening when they're sharing their bias.
And then I'm not going to get into the business of, I mean, if they've got a question or if we want to talk about a topic and even sort of do some debating on it and go to the research literature and all that stuff, I love that stuff.
So I'm fine with that.
So then the final kind of thing to say about this is that we are invited by the fact that we take on this body and this personality
And then allow the personality to be, to some extent, crafted by the people that we live with, both through the good things that they do and the traumas that they instill upon us.
And then we free ourselves.
And in that freedom is our political freedom, our speech freedom, our health freedom, and our invitation to be a...
energized vital contributor to a diverse and robust society absolutely and then you know then we one last thing is that then we look at the industrial complexes so does the medical industrial complex uh foster self-determinism no no
Does the military-industrial complex foster peace?
No.
And so, you know, when a person who is awake enough to see what's going on, the contrast between being invited to be a self-determining individual by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and then having that invitation being neutralized and canceled
by the industrial complexes, which include the educational industrial complex, the agricultural industrial complex, and everything else that's been corporatized and sort of homogenized and sort of takes, kind of assumes that people are just going to go along.
And I'm not going along.
I don't think you're going along.
And my kids are more going along than I am.
And I'm kind of sad about it, but it's out of my hands at this point.
Yeah.
And it's really the issue because...
When you're young, just exactly what you said, when you're young, children are curious about everything.
They're curious.
My daughter was curious.
She tried to get into everything.
She wanted to know everything.
She asked questions about everything.
And that's a natural curiosity, right?
And then as we get into those later years,
This is where schooling comes in and what do they do?
They kind of just kind of want to pigeonhole you into, okay, now you have to follow.
Now you have to memorize.
Now you have to get into society.
Now you have to do this and be a good student and eventually a good worker and that type of thing.
And that's kind of the flow, the way it goes and what I did.
knowing that because I follow, you know, I was kind of I, you know, I was not as curious as I wanted to be when I was younger.
But I told my daughter because, you know, I kind of got awakened
to in more of the health space, but in general, just with life as well.
And I said to myself, if I ever had kids, I want to make sure that my child is already awake as possible.
And I'm going to teach her as much as possible to be as self-determined as possible.
Yeah.
And, you know, obviously you have parental guidelines and all these types of things.
You got to make sure that the kid doesn't run into traffic and all that.
That's of course, but at the same time,
I want my kid to understand that I want her to question things.
Does it make sense?
I want her to have that.
And now at 17 years old, she does that.
And she kind of understands where I'm coming from with these types of stuff.
And then this is where you're talking about taking responsibility, right?
and if we look at it from a health uh you know determining our own health okay health freedom this is what we want right and this is what you you know folks like you and folks like me try to teach people listen you know be curious not only curious about yourself but curious about your health and and have that childlike curiosity that you used to have when you were a child
and ask questions and if it doesn't make sense find out get educated and this is what i try to do on this show and i think this is what we need more of you know and i you know obviously the last few years we've we've dealt with a lot of stuff but i think there is an awakening happening well actually an awakening happening
in a lot of people because of the last few years.
Correct.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And this is what gives me hope on the health side of things, because I think we're going to start to see people question stuff.
And really, and maybe, because, and I've always said on the show that we've been conditioned as a society in general for the last hundred years to think that big pharma and all that, that is health.
That's really what is health.
That's what our conditioning has been.
And, you know, I'm here to say, no, you have more control.
You have more control over your health than you you can even possibly imagine.
Yes.
You know, and and this is the message.
Right.
And this is to me, as even in the health space, self-determinism, being able to, you know, being able to use your power of of critical thinking to say that doesn't make sense.
I know what's good for me in my body and this is what I wanted.
Well, now check out a couple of cool little things that I can say very briefly about this.
First one is I'm stunned and, shall we say, called to attention by this experience that I had as a kid playing football.
with a helmet with a face guard.
The chin strap busted off and it broke my tooth in half.
Wow.
And so we went to the dentist and dentist said, Oh, you know, like this is we shouldn't try to do anything about this now.
Let's just see what happens.
And I didn't know
what that meant you know because my idea was be like just put my tooth back on right right and um and and so then my grandmother said um you know god will grow that tooth god is going to put that tooth right back in its right place and um within about six or seven months that tooth on its own
grew back out to the proper length to be even with my other front tooth and so talk about a uh a call to attention i mean at the time i thought well grandma said you know and then it did and um and then and she didn't say like i'm going to ask god to grow that tooth she just said god is going to do it that's it
And so I thought that was really cool.
Okay, second one is a little more mundane, but you're aware, of course, over the years about different states going through legislative processes to possibly make vitamins illegal as food and to make them into prescriptive pharmaceuticals.
You know, there's your medical industrial or your pharmaceutical industrial complex.
So I went to a hearing.
I was working at a clinic in Columbus, Ohio in 1978 or something like that.
And so I went as a representative of this particular clinic.
I was trained as a doctor of Chinese medicine, acupuncture, herbal medicine, et cetera, at the time.
and all the people at kind of a very holistic clinic, you know, all the way back in the 70s.
And I was elected to go and hang out at this hearing and then make a statement.
Well, the two people ahead of me was a kind of a hipster type character who said, you know, I grow my vegetables, but the
But mostly the vegetables that we get at the store, you know, don't have enough vitamins and, and, and vitamins are not drugs there, you know?
So it was a very left leaning, shall we say sort of character?
Well, the next person who was in front of me, walked up to the podium and announced.
that he was a member of something called the John Birch Society.
Well, the John Birch Society, it turns out, is like a very, very hard, right-leaning
organization, super conservative.
You know, we would we would think of it as the first person was kind of a little bit like a Democrat, but a far left Democrat.
And the second person was a far right Republican.
And both of those individuals basically used the same language about personal freedom
and the ability to be able to take care of their own family.
And so why I'm saying this is that there's a lot of people who are struggling right now around the whole concept of who's who and who's the bad guys, who's the good guys and who will I vote for and all that kind of stuff.
But what we know is that no matter whether you lean
to the progressive side, or if you lean to the conservative side, that health is a trans-partisan issue.
And it invites us, although right now people are very separated.
And so if you're into psychedelics, you're probably a Democrat.
And if you're into the
Having a farm in Arkansas and raising pigs, you'd probably be a Republican.
So health has become politicized, but people are conflicted because of the fact that you can't just say that this or that part of health is really a political issue.
A Republican might say, well, but I want to grow a garden too.
Or a Democrat might say, well, I want to raise fish on my whatever they call those, what is that where you have everything is in one place and it's kind of farming.
Anyway, so the point is that health freedom
the base of the rights that we have is a transpartisan issue.
And there's a huge population of people who are realizing that.
And I think it's really exciting.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree.
I'm very excited.
And again, I'm optimistic and I'm hopeful for what's coming down the pike.
So we'll see.
I want to talk to you a little bit about, I want to get into a little bit about
the Qigong and the power of Qigong.
And for folks that don't know, I mean, there's a lot of folks that don't know about it, right?
They may see it or they may see a video on it and that type of thing.
So talk to me a little bit about how you got involved in Qigong and then the power of it.
to be such a healing modality for people?
And you can bring in the breath in that as well.
Sure.
So let's go to cultures.
And if we go back in history a ways, what we find is that humans, let's go back 5,000 years.
There's a robust human activity in China.
There's robust human activity in India.
There's robust human activity in the Middle Eastern, you know, the Tigris and Euphrates and all of that.
Africa, Europe, North and South America are robust and very active with the original people of those nations.
And so if we ask the question, what is the medical system that was developed by all of them?
We would say that it would be something like shamanic medicine.
meaning the medicine previous to the ultra-civilization of the region.
So before China worked its way through all of the fiddle-faddle that had to happen to create a large China.
And even until very recently, Europe was just a bunch of different countries
And they all had their shamanic roots that go back to the Vikings and the Celts and so forth, and the Druids and all that, North and South America, all that.
They all have a medical system based on the same idea.
And that is that the body is in a relationship.
with nature.
It's an expression of nature.
It's in a relationship with nature.
And of course, one of the things that nature is doing all the time is giving us a show.
It's a solar show, and it's a lunar show.
And the solar show basically gets divided into seasons.
I'm going to answer your question.
But I think it's really important for people to understand that these prehistoric, if we say history starts around 5,000, then these people who were 10,000, 30,000, 100,000 years ago, they were all having the same experience of, wow, these days are really getting long.
And then later,
wow, these days are really getting short.
And then there's a place in between the longing and the shorting that we call the equinox.
And these days are kind of the same length.
The night and the day is around the same length.
And so we ascribe seasons to those four conditions, short days, long days, and then two rounds of even days coming in and going out of the winter or the summer.
So four seasons, then you have full moons.
Well, there's 12, typically 12 full moons in a year.
If you divide things up in certain way and use a certain kind of esoteric counting, you can get that.
There were 13 new, there were 13 full moons in a year.
And often there are,
Um, and, but that's not where we're going right now.
Right now we're looking at is, well, what is the pattern of the moon?
Because we would say to ourselves, uh, when should we do this?
And then instead of looking at our iPhone and, um, looking at something called December in January, we would look at the moon and say, uh, okay, this looks like we're probably in the new moon right before the beginning of spring.
And so that's good because what's going to happen is things are going to start thawing out.
We're going to see green stuff coming out on the trees and so forth.
And we're going to celebrate that.
And we'll celebrate that somewhere right around the time when the day and the night are the same length because that's what happens on the spring equinox.
And so we can say, you know, I'll meet you.
at the hot spring at the foot of the largest mountain that we both can see on the new moon that is as close to the equinox as possible.
So it gave us a calendar for planning things.
So the fact that the human system is in the same environment as, let's say, the tree that loses its leaves, then gets flowers on it, then makes fruit,
And then we can eat that fruit.
Well, we happen to be in the same region.
We're experiencing the same old things and new moments.
We're experiencing the same long days and short days.
So in the mind of original people, we are nature and an expression of nature.
Whether you want to spiritualize that and put it into something called God,
Or if you want to just say God is nature.
And so then the whole idea would naturally be that if we live in accord with nature, we're probably going to be fit.
And of course, you know, 10,000 years ago, everybody was exercising.
Hunters were exercising.
Warriors were exercising.
Women were carrying water.
You know, to any women who are sensitive to this, please know that I am a feminist.
I don't say that women carry water because of the fact that men should have been doing that.
You know, there's nothing about that here.
And let's just stay with it.
Everybody was exercising.
And everybody was celebrating these seasons.
And everybody was dancing.
and moving around in celebration and rituals to celebrate births, deaths, graduations, coming of age, marriage, and all of that stuff.
So there's a lot of, we can say there's a lot of partying going on.
And these parties are, you know,
stay up, not everyone, but some of these parties you stay up all night and you dance yourself into a frenzy and you have downloads of intuition to guide you for the next steps that you're going to make.
And then because you've lived in this environment for some time, you know what that plant is and what that plant is and what that plant is because your grandmother told you.
And
And so this whole idea of the foundation of the medical system is not medical at all.
It's the health.
It's a health care system where people care for their health.
And of course, you've noticed that we don't spell health care with space between the two words anymore.
We only put the word health and care together, which is really
not a health care system at all it's a financing system for the medical industrial complex so now to your question is like how what happens when a culture has been around the human gene is 3 million years and the ability for humans to build a fire is over 1 million years and
the people who were previous to humans, which we call monkeys, apes, chimpanzees, and so forth, did they or did they not communicate with each other?
Well, of course they communicated with each other.
So since the beginning of the human gene, we have been communicating with each other.
At what point did we develop esoteric language?
And what I mean by esoteric is formulated language with nuance.
so that a person could say, I have a headache and I know that it's not because of the fact that, um, I worked hard yesterday because I have headaches on a regular basis.
So what should I do?
And then the doctor doesn't say, you know, well, I'm going to write this down.
You go and get this drug from your pharmacy.
What the doctor says is, um,
know let's track this down let's see what's going on let me feel your pulse let me look at your tongue let me look into your eyes and check your you know your uh shall we say dexterity and coordination and that's one of the great things about that we hear early in our study of chinese medicine is that the doctor diagnoses the person without asking them what's bothering
And so when we go to the, I as a doctor did this for 35 years, I would greet the person in the waiting room, invite them into my office, have them walk in front of me so that I could see their energy and their gait and the level of pep or absence of pep that they have.
When they get into my office,
don't ask them, I don't say like, why are you here?
And what's your problem?
I say, you know, what's your favorite thing?
You know, what, what, what's your, what are you excited about these days?
And then I get to hear the sound of their voice and the pace of their words and the, the, the extent of their vocabulary.
And I can even lean forward while they're talking and watch
when their mouth opens to formulate certain words to see their tongue because chinese doctors look at people's tongues and the color of their skin and the the sound of their voice you know is it a is it a um is it like a singing sound or is it more like a sighing sound and there's just all of this incredible information that can be gathered about a person's uh shall we say constitutional
makeup and so then what does the doctor do uh probably reminds the person about some basic things like getting enough rest and hydrating i'm drinking golden golden monkey tea from china and um you know how are you getting along with your family and is there somebody that needs to say something to somebody to be able
where you feel comfortable about being in the family and having things work out.
So then all of those societies have circles and people sit in circles and they are invited in the presence of other people to share their feelings.
And so they have a kind of a natural tendency to a kind of homespun, grandma-driven psychotherapy
which can bring a person who's getting isolated and frustrated back into a connection with some, you know, dialogues that help with all of that stuff.
Okay, so what about what else?
Well, you know, you can do well if you could quiet down.
So now we're talking about meditation.
And then you say, oh, I've been so worried.
You know,
My kids, you know, the other tribes are looking like they're going to, you know, be angry at our tribe or whatever.
I'm worried about what's going to happen.
And then the doctor says, well, yeah, that's true.
But, you know, in the presence of that, we know that when that bad thing isn't happening, that it's a good time.
to prepare for that bad thing, not by worrying, but by cultivating the capacity to keep yourself steady and vital and resilient and capable and ready for anything.
And so then the person says, Oh, but I don't have time.
You know, like we say that all the time these days, um, apparently we
do have less time than ancient people.
There's lots of information about that.
And we were supposed to have more time.
Automation was supposed to make our lives into leisure, which could be happening, by the way, with AI.
But the point there is that the doctor or the shaman or the high priestess or the medicine woman or
whoever it was that this person was consulting to be able to maximize their wellbeing would say, well, okay.
So the easiest thing is right before you go to do a bunch of breath breaths and rub your body, just tap on points and rub your body.
So that is a time that every human being isn't doing something else.
they're just getting ready to fall asleep.
And it's the same with the next day in the morning, uh, the, uh, you know, who jumps right up.
And, you know, so we usually wake up and then we, you know, we kind of, uh, something, something, and then we get up.
And usually there's something, something that we're worrying about, you know, the things that we should have done and things that we have to do.
And, and, and so then they say, uh,
well, could I just take a little time to do some breath practice and some tapping on these energy points before I get up?
And so then the person says, well, of course I could do that.
So there's no drugs.
There's no surgical procedures.
There's just this beautiful sharing about the things that a person might have forgotten to do.
And the final point is that Qigong,
puts breath practice and body posture and movement and mind clearing, call that meditation, and self-applied massage into a little package called Qi Gong.
So Qi Gong is basically a part of this health maximization process that was invented by the Chinese, but then
the people in India, they invented it.
They call it yoga and different people in different cultures call it, you know, in the, in the native American and so forth, they have the medicine wheel and the peace pipe and you know, all that stuff, right.
Declarations and communicating with God.
And, um, so what I'm saying is that the, there's an archetypal, um,
model of medicine and it's not based on disease it's based on mobilizing internal functional resources and if we ask the question what is chi then the best answer is that chi describes the optimal presence of functional capacity
in any system.
So if we talk about the solar system, harmonious chi in the solar system is that the earth continues to go around the sun in the pattern that it has been, you know, plus or minus a little something for a really long time.
And, and, and, and so what about the chi of a tree?
Well, you know, the chi of a tree is that it raises nutrients from the ground and expresses it
leaves, the leaves gather the sun.
And then, you know, they, they put out, they put out oxygen by the way, they take in carbon dioxide and they put out oxygen.
And, and so that is the Chi of a tree.
Well, what is the Chi of my brain?
Well, the Chi of my brain is the level of function of my brain.
So if my brain is functioning pretty well, then I would say that my brain Chi is, is robust and harmonious.
And so qigong means to work with and develop the skill to work with the qi, which is really a way of saying we could use the language in the Western world of saying the capacity, developing the capacity, developing the skill to work with the optimization of functional
capacity.
And so Qigong is any kind of functional optimization process
Wow.
That is some explanation for it, but it's so true.
It is absolutely true.
Is that gorgeous or what?
It's amazing.
I've never heard it described in that way.
It's incredible.
And you're right.
You're so right.
And I've often said, when you look at nature and you look at, like you talked about the solar system, right?
Everything is moving forward.
as it's supposed to be.
Everything is coordinated, just like your body is coordinated, just like we talked about before, right?
You didn't have to ask to grow the tooth.
The tooth just grew on its own, right?
The solar system has cycles.
The Earth has cycles.
The body has cycles.
Everything is cyclical.
Everything goes through its, you know, and it all works in perfect harmony.
You know, it's design.
And this is, again, what I always say, what we have to get back to understanding.
And I think you had a beautiful way of putting that.
Because it's not, you know, people look at Qigong and Tai Chi and these types of things and they just see the movement.
Because we're so focused on...
the external the exercise the aesthetics you know i need to go to the gym i need to lift weights i need to do this and and they'll look at something like qigong and they're like well that's too slow for me oh that's you know that's i can't be still i can't breathe i can't do you know i need to be fast any and that's our society is kind of like that and
And those folks are kind of missing the point of the whole thing.
Because we really, at the end of the day,
That understanding and what you've talked about in working with the chi and that type of thing, really at the end of the day, that's health, in my opinion.
That is health at its fundamental level.
Well, we say the most profound medicine is produced within the human body
for free yes yes it's it it's it's its own you know has a pharmacy I I like to say the human body grew itself all by itself it knows how to heal itself right amen absolutely and another thing that um that you talk about a lot and what I found in my life doing years of yoga was the power of the breath
And I've talked about yoga because I got addicted to it at some point because not necessarily doing the practice itself.
It was after the practice.
I got addicted to the feeling that I had.
And it's really...
I mean, it was like a drug almost for me because I would do the practice and I would sit there going, wow, the amazing feel.
But what I didn't realize was that all that breath that I was taking in and that practice, that's the medicine.
That feeling that you have, that's the medicine.
That's it.
That's the medicine.
It took me a while to understand that concept.
Talk a little bit about your concept of breath and why it's so powerful.
Yeah.
And on our way in, let's just say or reiterate or confirm that turning on the medicine within, which is the most profound medicine, has no cost.
Yeah.
And when you do it,
you can't feel it.
So you've got confirmation.
It's not like, Oh, some Yogi, something, something, or, you know, somebody who is smoking it, something, something.
It's like, I am feeling something.
And what I've heard is that basically this is my functional capacity operating at a more optimal level.
And why wouldn't I do it?
I can do that actually lying in bed.
or I can do that while I'm sitting on the toilet and I can do it while I'm texting and I can do it while I'm driving.
And I probably don't do it very well when I'm tense.
So then when I'm tense, if I know, if my, if I know myself well enough, when I'm tense, I can actually, I can actually recognize that I'm tense and then
I can ask myself the question, do I want to do something to neutralize that state of stress and tension?
And then I can actually listen to myself, say, no, I'm too tense to take care of myself.
And then it's like, know thyself.
We said before, now I know.
that I'm kind of dumb sometimes when I talk myself out of managing my personological, my characterological, my ego, whatever you want to call it, self.
So probably we could say, okay, so now I need to relax.
What am I going to do?
Well, I could just look at the idea of relaxing.
Maybe that'll relax me.
Well, maybe it will, or maybe it won't, but you can relax yourself.
You can make a change in your blood pressure and the level of the presence of neurotransmitters in the human system that are reflective of the parasympathetic recovery, the rest and recovery aspect, as opposed to the hysterical get her done aspect, the adrenaline aspect or the Coleen aspect.
And you can shift into choline-based neurotransmitters basically being dumped into the system from the brain and the gut and all the parts that are involved in these things in less than a minute.
In less than a minute.
In one of my books, which is called The Healer Within, we have what's called the 10-second method.
then you have the one minute method then you have the 10 minute method it takes one time for most people one time of taking one deep breath and then letting it out very slowly just once to realize wow i'm already feeling a little different maybe i could do that again so now it's another 10 seconds
And pretty soon you've only spent like one half of one minute and you can start to feel the medicine within.
Yes.
And you said earlier, and I really want to come back to it because I think it's one of the most important things that anybody who's on a quest for personal empowerment to, to really reflect on seriously.
And that is when we put our children in school,
And they are now corralled into doing what everybody else is doing when everybody else is doing it.
And so that's early training when children are very young to kind of get in line.
So then here comes George and he says, you can, you are a self-determining sovereign individual, and you're allowed to do this.
And then the person says,
But everybody else isn't doing that.
And so I can't do that either.
And so the educational industrial complex, my kids went to Waldorf schools, which are associated with Rudolf Steiner.
I can't declare that they are different citizens than they would have been if they went to a public school.
But the system of education that I wanted my kids to be in was a self-determining educational system.
And self-determining educational systems are out there.
So anyway, I really want everybody that's listening that George said this thing.
that really makes it clear.
Like when we think, Oh, I can't do that.
What are we saying?
Oh, I don't have time for breath practice or, or, or I'm not, I, I, you know, I think it's kind of dangerous.
It doesn't feel right.
People, nobody does this, this whole thing of being self-aware.
but people aren't self-aware.
I can't be self-aware.
I'm not allowed to be self-aware.
I've never been self-aware.
I was taught not to be self-aware.
And, and, and so now we have to live with the consequences of that.
And when we look at our society, not even, you don't even look at the healthcare system, which is a hysterical mess.
Um, just look at how people are perceiving each other.
Yeah.
It's, um,
tragic.
Okay, but the question was breath practice.
So how do we, the big secret is to transform an average citizen into a self-determining individual who understands what they have come to understand and feels invited to have that understanding.
So that's what we're looking for.
So now how do we take this educated person who has been sort of, I don't know, can I say brainwashed?
Me too.
You know, fortunately I was able to find my way to Berkeley in 1967, have a few different experiences that sort of uneducated me.
And it was one of the most important things that ever happened in my life.
But what can we do?
Well, we can teach people too.
do breath practice and i'll just say two things about breath practice that almost nobody knows one and and there's a lot of things about breath practice that everybody knows like if you slow your breath down it has a positive effect on your parasympathetic nervous system and so forth but here's two things that people don't know one is that carbon dioxide
which is the waste product of the work of the cell.
So in other words, you put glucose and oxygen into the body in the presence of a lot of enzymes and other features, and then you get what's called work from the cell.
And when the cell has basically digested the nutrients, it expels waste.
And so the waste products of the work of the cell metabolism essentially are carbon dioxide and water, which is pretty cool.
Pure H2O is a byproduct of cellular work.
So when you work your cells through exercise or
thinking or anything like that you're actually expelling pure h2o into your system everywhere so that's kind of cool but that wasn't the point the point is that we perceive co2 as a waste product but if you hold your breath in your body's metabolism metabolizing and then um what happens is that the availability of oxygen is shrinking
And the presence of CO2 is raising.
And so you get an inordinate or unusual amount of CO2 in the system.
So we would say, oh my gosh, that's bad.
That's the accumulation of a waste product.
But there's this thing called hormesis.
Hormesis is basically very simply described as creating stresses
that actually make us stronger.
So training, when we lift weights or run distances, these are all stresses on the system that help us to become more resilient, stronger.
Taking cold showers is a kind of hormesis.
Doing those ice bath plunges, that's a kind of hormesis.
Using your left hand to brush your teeth if you're right-handed.
And I put my mouse on the left side of my computer instead of on the right side of my computer because I just want to do whatever I can to stress myself into a higher level of function.
And so the presence of an accumulation of CO2 in the system causes a cascade of internal mechanisms to come online.
it has to do with survival right and so if you expose yourself to an increased amount of co2 on a regular basis as a kind of training what happens is that you end up with a wider what is called a wider homeostatic capacity
And as you know, homeostasis is when the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic are operating in harmony and they're kind of ping-ponging and they're doing what they do and they're both very resilient and very capable of doing what they need to do.
And so if you stress them, then they can get back to homeostatic, to homeostasis more quickly, which means that you can tolerate greater stresses and
more unusual kind of edgy circumstances.
Right.
So holding our breath in for a length of time, and it doesn't even have to be a big deal.
We can just hold our breath for, you know, 30 seconds or I like to see how long I can hold my breath, you know, getting close to two minutes when you were a kid and you go to the pool and then have races with people to see how far
who could hold their breath longest and all that stuff.
So that's the first one is that breath holding, holding in causes us to build up CO2 to a high enough level that it triggers internal responsiveness that has to do with survival.
And therefore we come out stronger.
The second one,
that most people don't know about is nitric oxide.
It turns out that you go to YouTube and put in, you know, health benefits of nitric oxide and wow, here it comes.
It's just like amazing how important nitric oxide is to the human system.
Where do we get it?
And one of the easiest ways to get nitric oxide is to simply just breathe in through your nose.
That's right.
And so here's the thing that people will really find interesting.
And I think most people don't know too much about it.
And that is that if you hold your breath out, what's happening is that the nasal passages have a natural function
of introducing nitric oxide, a gas, into the nasal passages.
And so when you breathe in through your nose, you're taking in nitric oxide on a regular basis.
And nitric oxide is very important for the flexibility of the vascular system.
So in other words, an inflexible vascular system could have a high level of pressure and cause a problem.
and a flexible vascular system through
a lot of different features, including nitric oxide, but also including healthy vascular tissue, which has to do with collagen and endothelial cells and all that stuff.
The combination of flexibility through tissue flexibility and the introduction of nitric oxide, which creates another, shall we say, input on vascular flexibility.
gives you, well, it's even kind of a cure for heart disease because if people are at risk for heart disease, they have high blood pressure and they learn how to manage their diet so that they're not damaging their blood vessels quite as much.
They're using collagen through their foods and through supplementation if they want to.
And then they're raising the magnitude
of infusion of nitric oxide by holding the breath out because when you hold your breath out nitric oxide is being produced and circulated into the nasal passages and then when you breathe in you get this
massive super dose of nitric oxide.
That's right.
And there's so much more that we can say, like, for instance, there's the whole question of should I breathe out through the nose?
Or should I breathe out through the mouth and different teachers tell you different things.
But there's, there's two things that we know about this whole process.
One is that if you breathe in and out through the nose, slowly,
it re it releases the medicine, the recovery medicine in the form of calling based neurotransmitters into the system.
That's very powerful.
But if you breathe out through the mouth and then in through the nose, what's happening is that while you're breathing out from the mouth, the nitric oxide is building up in the nasal cavity.
so that when you do breathe in through the nose, you get a bigger dose than you would if you were breathing out through your nose.
It's this beautiful logic for how and et cetera to breathe in and out through the different parts of our body.
And science is just unpacking all this stuff.
It's just amazing.
Wow.
That is what I call a masterclass in breath.
And it's so true.
It's so true.
And, you know, again, you're absolutely right.
Again, we have to do that as a society.
We have to breathe more.
We're just so, you know, we're running around, we're doing all these things where our breaths are so shallow.
And we're just not paying attention.
And it, you know...
it breeds awareness when you do it, when you just awareness of yourself, awareness of your surroundings, awareness of even just how you feel.
I call it checking in, checking in on yourself.
It's such a great thing that we definitely need to do.
And again, at the end of the day, for healing.
We all need to do that for healing all around the planet.
I wanted to mention really quick that I know you have –
some amazing trainings that you do on your website, right?
So you actually teach folks and you train people.
You've trained so many people around the world at this point, right?
Yep.
So let's just start with teaching people to practice Qigong and Tai Chi.
So I've been doing that since 1977 or so.
And, um, somewhere around, uh, when I was becoming frustrated, I didn't tell this part of the story, but I'll say it now is that being a doctor of Chinese medicine was amazing and I loved it.
And Chinese medicine is very, very powerful for all the reasons that we've just described, because it's not based on taking something from outside and putting it in or taking something like an organ from within and just ripping it out.
It's all about how to be able to
cultivate the functional capacity within the system using herbal medicine, massage, acupuncture, and then Qigong and all that.
So this whole question of what does the Institute of Integral Qigong and Tai Chi deliver?
And so first we deliver to the citizens.
Um, I teach classes and all the people that we've trained, which is the second level.
So now we're training people to be teachers, to take Qigong and Tai Chi to the citizens.
So, uh, we have, you know, work with the people, then we've got work with, uh, Training people to be teachers.
And then above that, we have training people that we've made into teachers to be trainers.
So our whole concept is to go exponential to a massive scale.
So we've trained 3,000 people as what we call teachers or practice leaders.
And there's a difference between the two and, you know, people can, I noticed that you put up the web address.
So if people will check into that, they'll see, you know, where are there going to be classes for citizens who want to learn how to practice and then where are there going to be trainings
for individuals who want to become a teacher of qigong and tai chi and then from the cream of the crop we actually leverage graduates who are articulate and team players and you know have an interesting capacity for being a trainer so that they can lead trainings of teachers who take it
to the citizens of their communities.
So it's pretty thorough and it's very exciting.
And then I'm also associated with a nonprofit, which is called the Healer Within Foundation.
And the Healer Within Foundation actually takes those trainers and then directs the training
to agencies and institutions that are facing disenfranchised communities or under-resourced communities, drugs, alcohol, family violence, you know, you name it, first responders, nurses, hospital wellness programs, YMCA, Veterans Administration.
So, you know, we're,
we're excited and we're with humility.
We have like a massive amount of pride in the fact that these ideas that we've been talking about can then be compressed into Qigong.
Because once a person has had the feeling of the medicine within, then they're going to ask the question,
What else can I do?
And then it's gonna be breath practice while I'm falling asleep, reading labels when I go to the grocery store, considering the possibility of eliminating all my snacks.
And by the way, let me say a little something about that.
As a doctor, I've done a lot of research on all these diets.
And so I have my own predisposition to,
what feels right to me, and I'm self-aware, so I can actually track that.
Most people aren't.
But everybody can become self-aware.
But here's the interesting thing.
When they did research on the paleo and the keto diets, and when they do research on the vegetarian and the vegan diets, the one thing that everybody who goes
participates in those research trials has to do is they have to promise to not snack.
They have to promise to be on the diet.
So it's either a keto diet or it's a vegan diet.
And so if you compare the statistical analysis of the well-being
of the people who are either on a kind of vegetarian vegan or a paleo keto, the improvement that people in the research trials usually experience is pretty much the same.
In other words, vegan gives you the same benefit as keto.
Okay.
Well, what is the one thing that everybody did?
They stopped snacking.
So actually, it doesn't matter whether you do keto or vegan.
It only matters are you smart enough to get it that processed foods are the problem.
Yes.
yep you're absolutely right and you're right yeah and i've talked about that on this show snacking is one of the things that i i've said you know i'm completely against and on this show we don't promote any specific diet like keto or vegan or whatever sure listen and you're absolutely right i've said no snacking just don't snack you know
You can eat in harmony with – because when you – even when you leave space between your meals and some people eat two meals a day.
Some people eat three meals.
I mean I eat three meals a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner like I did as a kid but I don't snack in between.
I leave five or six hours between meals to let my body process, to let my hormones get back into balance and all these types of things.
Really that's kind of just a –
I call it kind of a lifestyle of eating.
I don't necessarily like the diet term.
I just say it's good.
And, of course, not eating before you go to bed because to me that's a no-no.
But, yeah, I completely agree.
And it makes so much sense.
Well, it's like a secret.
Yeah.
It's the secret thing.
It's like everybody's debating, oh, you know, la, la, la, and la, la, la.
But right in the middle there –
is this one thing that we absolutely know from all the research is the problem yeah yeah you're absolutely right you're you're you're you're spot on on that so back to the trainings and stuff um you know we right now we're getting ready for a level one of so uh our uh teacher training is a 200 hour training it happens in three levels we're getting we just finished a level two we're getting ready to do a level one
The Healer Within Foundation.
People can look that up.
It's healerwithinfoundation.org.
Very pretty much easy.
All the words.
We know how to spell all those words.
And I'll just mention one other thing that we do here at headquarters.
So headquarters is called Health Action Synergies, and under Health Action Synergies is the IIQTC, mind-body practices, et cetera.
But then there's another division of Health Action Synergies, which is called the Circle of Life.
And the Circle of Life is a holistic life planning program.
And so, you know, I've got my email address up with myself, I think it might be.
And you'll probably give it to people in the notes and so forth.
And so if you're interested in something like holistic life planning, well, what does that mean?
Well, it's a whole other discussion.
Maybe we could get together again sometime and just look at the circle of life.
It's an amazing...
program.
And we've trained a lot of people that are called coaches or facilitators, who also work in the YMCA is in the in the hospitals and the school systems and so forth, about this whole idea of making a life plan a holistic, thoughtful life plan.
And so when you get to the beginning of a new year, there's this thing called New Year's resolution.
Well, people make a New Year's resolution,
They don't tell anybody and then they don't do it.
And then that's that.
And with the holistic life plan, what happens is that you
Make your resolution not as something like, I have to do this because people will like me better.
It's I have to do this because it's in alignment with my essence.
Right.
And there's a process that goes that a person needs to go through to get from their socialized opinion of what they should do next.
And a more, shall we say, essence based or or or purpose based
uh resolution that then you actually share with other people so they they know that you're working on it and then instead of just not doing it and not telling anybody we have a whole process for working with other people who have shared values and it's really an amazing process
Beautiful.
That's beautiful.
And I'm really excited for your programs, and I'm excited for folks in my audience to make sure that they check it out.
Again, the website is iiqtc.org.
It's also going to be in the show notes.
It's also going to be on the website as well.
Dr. Jonka is going to be on the website as well.
All his information is going to be there so everybody can check it out.
And I really, I thank you not only for being on the program with us, but for just, you know, just simplifying these amazing concepts and giving a masterclass just on healing energy, qigong, breath and everything.
It has been an absolute honor.
And thank you so much.
Thank you.
Yeah, what a pleasure.
many blessings to you and everyone who is listening and george thank you so much for your commitment to um you know what are we doing here i think we are in the process of inviting people into a self-deterministic world that's it yep from you know that ruinous education right
That we've all had, you know, it leveraged some things, of course, but we're, you know, a person over 24 is basically invited to recover their natural self.
I agree.
Thanks for helping out with that.
Oh, thank you, sir.
Thank you.
All right.
Okay.
Wish you well.
I'll be back.
Wow, folks, that was absolutely powerful.
And that was a fantastic way to end 2023.
So, yeah, it's great.
I think you guys are going to enjoy it.
And make sure you check out his website.
Check out all the information.
He's got some great, great information on there.
And, you know, for those of you who want to make a resolution, go for it.
And this is a great way to do that and get started on the healing process and the self-determination process because I think you will not regret it moving forward.
So I want to wish everyone the very happy, healthy, and safe holiday season and a great new year.
And...
i will uh see you guys next year don't forget make sure you take care of yourselves make sure you take care of each other and don't forget control your health have a great day