What if healing isn’t something that happens to you, but something you are always doing for yourself?

In a world where we are bombarded with advertisements for prescription medications, health apps and weight loss programs while also being inundated with information about holistic practices, methods, therapies, and treatments, it’s not hard to understand why we all are looking for the clear diagnosis and the quick fix for whatever ails us. When my own pain and symptoms were most severe, I felt desperate for a medical professional or health expert to tell me what was going on in my body and to offer me some form of healing – and fast.

I did eventually experience healing, but that relief didn’t come through allopathic medicine or homeopathic remedies either. Healing also didn’t come quickly, and I didn’t ever get a clear answer on what was the true source of my physical symptoms. Even so, I can honestly say that I no longer suffer from the physical and emotional issues that ruled my life for many years.

My healing was the cumulative result of many experiences and practices: physical care, breathwork, meditation, movement, emotional healing, and eventually a daily Qigong practice. I can’t say that a single method fixed me, but Qigong became the practice that brought many of those elements together and gave me a way to keep participating in my healing every day.

Qigong is the tool that has made healing an ongoing relationship with my body and a way of life.

I’m writing this article to offer a clear, grounded understanding of what is Qi and Qigong, and to share a real-life example of how Qigong as a consistent practice just might be the key to accessing your own healing, too.

What is Qigong?

At first glance, Qigong just looks like slow movement and stretching. But the movement is only the visible part of the practice.

Qigong (pronounced chee-gong) is an Ancient Chinese practice combining gentle movement, synchronized breath, specific postures, attention, and intention.

To break down the definition literally, “Qi” translates to life force or vital energy. “Gong” means cultivation, skill, or practice developed over time. So Qigong can be understood as the cultivation of Qi through consistent practice.

What is Qi?

Truthfully, it can be a bit hard to explain something that we don’t have an everyday reference to, so oftentimes you will hear Qi defined simply as “energy”. This is correct, but still too vague and mystical for most of the Western culture. Defining Qi is more nuanced than a simple word translation.

My personal opinion is that we cannot really understand Qi with our mind; it’s something we must allow ourselves to feel. Qigong is how we learn to feel Qi and cultivate an internal understanding of what it is, what it is doing, and how we can work with this life force that exists within and around all of us.

Qi Definitions from the Phenomena Podcast

In a fascinating Phenomena Podcast episode called Healing as a Way of Life: Qigong, Meridians, and the Science of Qi at Harvard, three different people from different backgrounds came to similar conclusions about what Qi actually is.

When asked “what is Qi?”, Qigong teacher in the Netherlands, Anne Hering, describes Qi as “matter plus energy plus information.” The host of the podcast, Ivy Ross, clearly summarized Anne’s full response to this:

When your information, what you carry, what you believe, what you hold in your body from the past, is aligned with your life as it is right now, Qi flows. When it isn’t, it stagnates, and stagnation, or what many healers call getting stuck, that’s where illness can start.

Harvard researcher, Peter Wayne says Qi may be understood as “information that shapes the system.” He shares an example of how when a finger is being shaped in the womb, there’s some intelligence in the body that directs it to “put a fingernail here, not a nose hair.” He explains how the body’s intelligence knows to adjust and respond according to the information being transmitted. He speaks further to how this information (Qi) keeps us healthy when it’s moving in the right direction and the right amount, and how it shapes our emotions, physicality, blood flow, and bio-electricity of the body.

Another Harvard scientist, Andrew Ahn connects Qi with how the body allocates and uses its resources. He explains that Qi is how we use our potential or the resources such as our genetic makeup (DNA, fluids, the physical body) to do things.

So to distill this down more simply from Anne’s definition combined with the scientific perspective:

Qi is communication and intelligence moving through the body, which includes how the physical body, emotions, nervous system, beliefs, and lived experience interact with each other.

So, if Qi is communication and intelligence moving through the body, then Qigong is the practice of tending to and optimizing that communication. It’s through movement synched with breath supported through attention that we become more aware of what is happening within the body. With this cultivated awareness, we are able to create conditions that may support more balance and flow of the Qi.

Qigong’s Healing Power is Cumulative

This is why Qigong is more than a movement practice. It becomes a way of participating in our own healing by listening and responding to the body again and again. The key part is this “again and again” part. The human mind and body adapt by learning patterns, and in the case of a body in pain or dis-ease, it is asking us to change the repeating inputs.

That’s why we can enter into an active role for our healing by sending repeated signals of safety, breath, gentleness, and attention to our nervous system. The messages don’t have to be precise or perfect, they just need to be steady and consistent. Meaningful change may be subtle because the healing potential of Qigong is not unusual or mystical, it’s simply a cumulative effect of a healthy daily practice.

I found that as I learned and practiced Qigong for about 10 minutes daily, I was also slowly learning how to attune to the messages coming from within. I was learning this new language that allowed an intuitive communication to flow between my thinking mind and my physical body. Like any relationship with improved communication, my relationship with my body began to gradually shift into more ease and understanding.

My Personal Healing Journey with Qigong

I suffered from severe muscle tension for many years in one form or another – even in my twenties I “threw my back out,” experienced constant neck tension and headaches, and frequently injured myself. The frozen shoulder I was experiencing in my forties before I discovered Qigong had been plaguing me for nearly a year.

My frozen shoulder did not heal because of one practice. Its gradual release coincided with some of the more traditional methods such as physical therapy and chiropractic care, as well as meditation, stretching, and breathwork that helped me explore the emotional tension I was carrying in my body. By the time I began practicing Qigong consistently, healing was already underway.

But what Qigong gave me was a way to maintain an honest conversation with my body every day. Movement, breath, attention, and intention were no longer separate tools I reached for only when something hurt. They became one integrated practice.

Within about five months of beginning a consistent Qigong practice, my daily journal notes shifted from tracking pain and mobility issues to labeling it as the “last 3% of healing” – and then I stopped recording that lingering issue altogether. I’ve still had moments of physical pain from time to time, and am working to increase mobility in my shoulder since then, but the chronic issues quieted down significantly.

Qigong Begins with Awareness

An honest conversation with the body begins the same way any honest conversation does: by listening. A Qigong practice may begin with movement such as Knocking on the Door of Life, or shaking our bodies, but learning to work with our Qi must begin with noticing.

Qigong is about calming the mind and accepting what is present. This kind of awareness doesn’t require someone else to interpret for us. Qigong gives us a way to become more attuned with our own internal experience.

Qigong asks us to notice where our breath is in the body, where we feel tension, and to acknowledge any and all emotions we may be feeling. These observations may seem small, but cultivating this awareness gives us the opportunity to respond differently. When we meet the body without judgement, correction, or the impulse to swiftly override it, we can begin to understand what it is communicating, and develop a more compassionate relationship with our body.

Qigong offers us agency – an accessible tool to help us work with our body’s natural healing capabilities.

Qigong Changes the Conditions for Healing

I’ve personally found Qigong to support my own healing, but I want to emphasize that I’m not claiming that Qigong miraculously heals all that ails us. What I’m saying is that Qigong is a powerful tool to help us change the conditions the body is living in, optimizing our chances for greater health and vitality. Through cultivated awareness, we’re able to notice the state of the body. Then, Qigong gives us a way to work with that state instead of fighting against it.

Returning back to the Phenomena podcast, Peter Wayne offers a metaphor that helped me understand this more clearly. Imagine a block of ice with particles of soot trapped inside of it. You could try to remove the particles with a pickaxe, or you could change the state of the ice itself. As the ice melts into water, what was trapped becomes free to move and reorganize.

Looking for diagnoses and solutions for my locked up shoulder or unwanted emotions and behaviors was like using the pickaxe to try and extract problems individually. But Qigong helped me understand the relationships between the various concerns and address everything systematically. I used my breath, movement, attention, and overall relaxation to change my internal environment. The practice alters our state, giving the body more coherence to break up the patterns that got us stuck, and to allow Qi to flow for overall health and vitality.

This whole-system perspective is also part of what makes current Qigong research so fascinating. The podcast shares scientific research exploring connective tissue, bioelectrical communication, and possible relationships to meridian pathways that Traditional Chinese Medicine has described for thousands of years.

The science is still emerging, and I want to avoid trying to force this ancient practice into a oversimplified Western explanation. But the research does invite us to become curious about what practitioners have been observing through direct experience of the body for centuries.

This is also why consistency matters. One practice may change our internal state for only a few minutes, then we go back to our busy, modern lives. But each time we return, we give the body another experience of nervous system regulation, gentle movement, full and slow breaths, and noticing our bodily sensations without judgment.

What Does Qigong Feel Like?

All of this may still sound a bit abstract until we experience it for ourselves. So what does Qigong actually feel like?

Truthfully, the experience is different for everyone and it can even be different from one practice session to another. Oftentimes, new Qigong practitioners are seeking a particular feeling because we’re just programmed to think that something is only working if we can feel it instantly. But nothing dramatic has to happen for the practice to be meaningful.

A great way to begin a Qigong practice is simply by noticing your feet on the ground and drawing your attention to the feeling of your weight being supported by the ground beneath you. Next, you might notice how your breath feels – releasing the impulse to judge it as good or bad or to change it. Just notice what your body is doing.

• Are your shoulders reaching for your ears?
• Is your jaw flexed or are your teeth clinched?
• Is your belly soft or bracing?

The true beginning of a state change lies in this moment of noticing. You may not feel anything physically change, but noticing where you are holding yourself tightly – and acknowledging that your body is just doing its job to protect you – can be meaningful progress on your healing journey.

The first few (or many more!) times that you practice Qigong, you may only notice that you feel more relaxed than you did before you started.

But as you keep practicing – moving slowly, synchronizing your breath, and drawing your attention inward – you may begin to notice a warmth or tingling in your hands. Further, you may experience a sensation of spaciousness within your body, or notice that fewer breaths are needed. You may yawn – one of the ways our body naturally purges stagnant air or physical tension.

Qi Sensations Are Not Goals or Proof

Even though many practitioners report these experiences, it’s important to note that these sensations are not goals or proof that Qi is flowing correctly. We all have different levels of sensitivity to Qi, even with hours and hours of consistent practice, so avoid viewing these sensations as the only indicators that something meaningful is happening.

Our emotional shifts can also be quite subtle. We may feel less hurried inside, more present, or less compelled to immediately react to every thought running through our monkey minds. An emotion that had been hidden beneath tension may become easier to recognize. During a couple of my own Qigong sessions, tears began to roll down my cheeks. I wasn’t mentally connected to an emotion of grief, but my body was feeling it and reacted.

Which brings me to another important note: Qigong does not always make us feel peaceful. Sometimes becoming more aware means noticing fatigue, grief, frustration, or discomfort that was already present. We may be used to pushing those feelings down, but the practice gives us a gentle way to remain with that experience rather than immediately overriding it.

When I teach, I often see people arriving with frenetic energy. Their attention is scattered, their shoulders are tight, and they are “in their head.” But after a few minutes of movement and breath, their external expressions settle. By the end of the practice when I ask how they feel, they nearly always report feeling more centered and grounded. There’s a notable calmness in each person, including me. (Co-regulation is powerful!)

The shifts are usually quite subtle, but that doesn’t mean insignificant. These gentle shifts are the point of the practice.

What Qigong Is – and Is Not

So, if Qigong is not a performance to perfect, a sensation to seek, or a promise of an instant cure, then what exactly are we practicing? I believe Qigong can be a powerful part of our healing process, especially when combined with other practices like breathwork, journaling, meditation, or therapy.

Qigong is not meant to be a prescriptive cure (although in some Asian countries and in Traditional Chinese Medicine or TCM, Qigong is often prescribed alongside herbs, acupuncture and Western treatments), nor is it a replacement for appropriate medical or mental-health care. My own healing included physical therapy, chiropractic care, breathwork, meditation, and other forms of support. Qigong became part of that larger process rather than a substitute for it. This practice gave me a way to tune into the signals of my body and offer myself a gentle, accessible regulation technique while also supporting my mental, spiritual, and physical wellbeing over time.

Remember, difficult feelings that come up are not indications of failure. If something comes up, get curious about it. The practice is the willingness to remain attentive to what is true in that moment.

And despite the word “practice,” Qigong does not need to become another self-improvement project. We do not earn greater healing by forcing ourselves through longer sessions, performing every movement perfectly, or keeping a streak. We don’t need to prove our discipline. Just keep returning again and again.

Healing as a Daily Practice

Each time we return to the practice, we have another opportunity to listen to our body. We notice what has changed, what feels stuck, and what our body may be asking for. We offer ourselves another experience of moving gently, breathing fully, and responding with attention and care.

Over time, these small moments of attention become something greater. This is how Qigong became more than just an exercise for me –it has become an essential part of my daily life. It helps me stay attuned to my body whether I am experiencing pain or feeling well. Instead of ignoring my body until it yells at me, I have committed to caring for myself through the ordinary rhythms of daily life.

Healing as a way of life does not mean that we will never experience pain, illness, grief, or stress. It means we have a practice that helps us meet those experiences with greater awareness, compassion, and agency. We may not be able to control every condition affecting our health, but we can keep creating small moments that support balance, communication, and flow.

Healing doesn’t have to only be something we seek from an expert, a treatment, or some kind of dramatic breakthrough. I believe it is something we can practice – one session at a time.

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If this resonates, I share a weekly note called Fresh Qi — stories from my own life and practice, a short guided movement video, and something worth thinking about on focus, steady presence, and doing good work without losing yourself. Sign up here for emails on Tuesdays.