Tai Chi Arts

Qigong Tuina - Energy Bodywork for Life

In ancient China, a sophisticated medical system called qigong tui na or “energy bodywork,” was developed to address almost every form of medical ailment, from relatively minor aches and pains to life-threatening diseases such as cancer. The grandparent of all Oriental bodywork, qigong tui na is a lesser-known branch of Chinese medicine in the West. Classically its foundation is acquired through knowledge and practice of qigong itself.

Your ‘chi’ or subtle energy determines the state of your health. If it is flowing freely in a balanced manner throughout the body, you have good health. If the body becomes injured or diseased, the chi will become blocked, stagnant or out of balance and illness will follow. Ordinary tui na bodywork focuses on healing and massage using the hands. ‘Tui’ means to push in Chinese and ‘na’ to grab or pull. Qigong tui na is a powerful energetic variation, a seamless combination moving fluidly between physical and energetic techniques to unblock, free and balance chi in others.

As with any branch of Chinese medicine, qigong tui na has a wide range and vast depth of information. It has two essential branches and ideally both are learned as one interdependent whole. However, each can be learned and practised separately.

 The first branch is a complete hands-on bodywork healing system. Depending on the varying needs of a client/patient, the healer/physician may focus for defined time periods exclusively on energetic or physical mechanical issues. Most commonly, a seamless shift back and forth between each is applied. For example, working on a person’s physical tissues will make it easier to open up their blocked energetic patterns. Or, vice versa, opening up the client/patient’s blocked energetic patterns will make it significantly easier and more possible to shift their distorted bodily tissues. Regarding the physical and energetic, the ability to feel and unbind distorted energetic patterns usually requires a greater level and different kind of sensitivity, strength and precision than that needed to make effective physical mechanical and structural changes.

 The second branch of qigong tui na takes place after energetic diagnosis is done, and concerns prescribing and then teaching the client/patient specific qigong exercises with different physical and energetic components that the therapist adjusts and changes as the patient gets better or worse. This is similar to how herbalists create herbal formulas with specific ingredients and dosages then adjust formulas and dosages as the needs/condition of the patient shift over the course of treatments.

The 200 Hand Techniques

Qigong tui na has a large body of knowledge and practical implications, which in China is often called the 200 hand techniques. The specific meaning in China is possibly different from the West where the term usually applies to each specific variation or method to affect a hand or elbow stroke, or press a point where each different elbow technique or way of pressing might have a different name. To get a clearer idea of what constitutes a hand technique in qigong tui na, three examples of the 200 are:

• Every way you could activate acupuncture pressure points both physically and energetically, as well as the points to be activated for specific reasons; the entirety of acupressure is one hand technique.
• Every way you could use an elbow—strokes, pressing and rolling.
• Every way you could open and close (pulse) all useful places in your body (see neigong component #7); these might include muscles, ligaments, joints, internal organs, blood vessels, fluids (blood, lymph, synovial, cerebrospinal, interstitial), nerves and spinal vertebrae.

Also included within these hand techniques would be specific techniques and training programs for:

• Protecting yourself against your client/patient’s negative chi or giving too much of your own chi, to prevent depleting yourself or causing burnout.
• Practicing qigong to regenerate yourself.
• Feeling for relevant physical and energetic information critical to effective treatment, such as how to track real time ongoing chi movements both in your client/patient’s body as well as to monitoring what is happening in your own body.
• Shifting energetic frequencies inside yourself and the person you are working on.
• Absorbing, projecting and transforming chi.

To conclude, qigong tui na provides potent healing tools that are not random but rather the result of training to accurately feel and work in very specific ways with the energies of the client or patient. Compared with Western therapeutic massage, which is often a more generalised treatment, tui na and qigong tui na techniques can focus on and resolve very specific problems. Skilled practitioners keep alive the ancient wisdom of this powerful Taoist healing system and those who teach can bring valuable techniques to complement the work of many healing professionals.

Bruce rarely teaches the Tui Na techniques discussed in this article, so a great opportunity to learn from a Master is not to be missed in October 2010 in Brighton, Sussex. Click here for more information.