Deep Healing, Holland, 2014 – Audio Download

What is the most important thing in my life that I want to heal?

It could be physical, emotional, mental, sexual, spiritual.  Maybe something else, some other category you have. And come up with three words.  You have to just get the essence of it, okay?  Think of, I need to heal and then what are the three things? The three ideas, the three aspects of yourself that you would put the top of your list. Okay, take a minute.

Everybody think of this? Close eyes, go inside and ask the question, what are the three things I most need to heal in my life?

(bell chimes)

And now we’re going to go around the room and I’m going to ask you to share those three things with the group. And I know that sometimes these are very personal, very private. But the first step in healing is just to be able to say it, to feel, “What do I want to heal?” And so I think it’s therapeutic just to be able to express it. And let’s have an agreement here that anything that is shared in this very personal cauldron space of healing is to be kept private and not to be shared outside this group. I’m going to assume that all of you are in agreement with that so that we have a feeling, a space of healing, where people feel safe. They can talk about things.  So as we are learning this form, the deep healing Qigong, we can make it apply to our own issues and see, you know, what the applications are.  So you can hear the wide variety of things that people wish to heal.  But human beings are very complex.  Just to have a physical body operating in harmony itself is a miracle. And Then you add in the layers of emotion, thinking, which would be like inner critic, the emotion, self -love, spiritual questions of identity, relationship to the whole, to being on earth.  It’s enormous. Just like, you see like, “Wow, it’s a big job to be a human being.”  And none of us should feel that the job is too big. We are here actually to do this job.  This is our spiritual work.  And we are given a task of coming in from the spirit into a body in order to explore that relationship between the spirit and matter, and it’s not that there’s anything wrong, the fact that we’re having challenges, that we’re suffering, that we have pain, that we have limitation, that is the job. And so I commend all of you, I compliment you for having the courage to work on that job more deeply, to come here and find out how can I get some tools to speed up that process and to go deeper into my healing. And what’s important to know is that when you complete your healing, any level of it, it’s just a process, day by day, month by month, year by year, you are serving the whole. You come out of the collective, the souls come into earth from a larger field of awareness. You’re given specific tasks, specific mission, come into a specific bloodline, family, specific culture, and When you take on that task and you work on healing yourself the transmission goes back to the whole It’s not you’re not alone, ok.

That’s what the message I’m trying to say here is that you’re here you’re working as part of the collective even though your problems seem unique To you, your challenges, You’re not alone.  And the most important thing I have found in working on for many decades as an energy healer both helping other people heal or just teaching them how to heal themselves.  Number one thing is ask for help from the collective because you’re working for the collective so You may need to make alignment with the collective and let that support come in. Create a pathway where it can come in.  And when that alignment is proper, you’ll start to hear kind of a whistling sound.  And then, once it’s complete, it goes away. [laughter.  Editor’s note:  some type of whistling alarm had begun moments before outside, so Michael is making joke here]  So, in this form, this qigong form that we’re going to learn in the next two days, one of the most important things is about alignment.

So there’s six parts to this form, the first part is going to be about aligning, okay? First just standing in our own being and opening up our energy body, aligning with heaven and earth and our own heart and the heart of humanity, and then aligning to the directions.  So that opens up pathways of support. You’re not alone.  Just don’t make this your personal struggle. You’re working for the whole, and the whole wants you to succeed. It wants you to heal. It wants you to feel complete, it wants you to feel healthy, harmony.  And it also knows that unless you have a little bit of pain, a little bit of suffering, maybe you will not be motivated to work.

So you need to understand this, for most people, a little bit of suffering actually gets them to change, gets them to look deeper. It’s a positive thing… for myself –  that’s why I started my whole spiritual journey. I was in Africa working as a war correspondent. I got hepatitis, very sick, very weak. I have no support. I’m thrown in jail in the middle of a revolution and a civil war in the jail is what a little room with a courtyard… 50 people – all sleeping in that same room and no food they don’t give you any food there you expected to have relatives come and bring you some food and my relatives were 10 ,000 miles away.  So here I have hepatitis. I’m thrown in jail. I have no support. I’m going through major suffering. And what did I find out?  Oh, support came to me. Everybody there fed me.  The guy charged with a jail.  Every time he comes by me and I opened my eyes to him, my yellow eyes, the hepatitis and I said “I’m going to die in your prison” and they’re going to arrest you for killing a foreigner and making a big mess and finally after one week he couldn’t take it and let me go.  You know out of the suffering I got A great story as a journalist.  I got the money to put a down payment on a building that made me a lot of money later on.  I learned a lot of valuable lessons about love, about how in the middle of this civil war, all the suffering, people killing each other. There was this pocket of love inside the prison, where everybody was taking care of everybody else, is actually the safest place I found in the entire country was inside the prison.  So I’m just trying to give you a dramatic illustration of how there’s a polarity.  Things look terrible on the outside, and they may feel terrible, but there’s good things that come out of it.

So your suffering is the same way. Everybody’s suffering. The polarity of suffering is joy.  Out of suffering, the opposite is born. The joy of healing, the joy of discovering that you have the power to heal. The joy of realizing that you are greater than your suffering.  It’s important to understand you’re not stuck.  There’s always a dynamic and sometimes it’s slow it is frustrating how long it takes to do the healing.  That can be very frustrating and you can say I’m tired of this pattern of this pain or this inability, these failed relationships or whatever it is and you just need to realize that all of those symptoms of your struggle, your pain, your suffering are just made out of energy; they’re energetic patterns. And energy is completely changeable.

So that’s the second thing. First thing is alignment and asking for help. The second thing is shifting from a very tightly contracted physical body into a more expanded energetic sense of yourself realizing oh, even though this body feels very solid very you know kind of real…it’s only vibrating energy and we begin to look at it as energy rather than a solid object then it becomes ten times a hundred times more easy to change the patterns But you have to shift out of this kind of I’m this little Fixed body, and I’m kind of a victim of my situation in my family my culture my health my ancestors – No, you’re just part of this flow of cosmic energy and you’re learning how to manage it. You’re learning how to change it faster. You’re not stuck in any tiny little body. Yes, if you have a genetic illness, ancestral patterns, maybe that’s going to take longer to change, but you still have a free will. You can still modify how you respond to it, how you change.  But everything, every illness, every form of suffering is just energy, and it can be changed. Because that is the gift we have been given, as a being who come in here.  It’s not determined, oh, you’re going to suffer for this whole life, oh, that’s it, you’ve got a bad karma, you’re screwed, just suffer.  There are some cultures that believe that. You go to India, you’re going to find a lot of deterministic thinking. “Oh, I’m an untouchable. Oh, I had a bad past life.  I’m just like a piece of shit now, and I’m supposed to live like a piece of shit.”  And that’s built into this kind of cultural thinking. “Oh, some people are the Brahmans, and some people are the Untouchables,” and that’s very deterministic.  So I don’t accept that.  I know it’s not true.  Yes of course there are a lot of forces that are shaping us that are defining what is my challenge you know and that’s a good thing.  Having a challenge just means I have a boundary. I have something to work with. It’s not a bad thing. Just like I say, suffering is not a bad thing. It’s just an opportunity to convert it into joy, into peace, into harmony, into something that gives us a feeling I have accomplished my mission here.

So, in learning how to do this, okay, first to align – shift into an energy body and then begin to systematically work on the different levels of blockages.  That’s where the form comes into play, opening up different energy channels, affirmations to love yourself.  This is the key thing here:  self-love.  You can say when you have self -love your chi flows easily and in balance and harmony so we could make a general statement all suffering all challenges all pain comes down to an issue of self -love how much do i love myself because where does self -love come from? What does it mean? Why is it so important?  This is a question I’ve explored very, very deeply. And what I concluded is that the whole notion of self, where does that come from?  Now there’s some paths, they’re going to tell you there’s no self. That’s an illusion. Okay? Certain schools of Buddhism will tell you that. Oh, there’s no self.  I disagree. There is a self, but we need to be careful about the meaning of the word. It’s not an object. The self is not a thing. It’s not the body. The self is a process.  It’s a consciousness.  It’s a soul that has a certain vibration and it’s going through a process on behalf of the larger self, the macro cosmos.  We can call it the great self. The reason we have a sense of our little self is because there is a big self. There is a sense of wholeness in the cosmos. So we could say that the notion of self comes from the wholeness of the cosmos.  That is the self. That’s the larger self. And it gives birth to little baby selves, like little cells that contain, each seed contains the whole, the possibilities of the whole. And so we have that sense of self that we get from the whole cosmos, from its sense of wholeness. And we carry that seed inside of us as a little self.  But we need to grow the seed. We need to let it flower. And it’s a dynamic process that’s not determined what the outcome is.

The universe doesn’t know what it’s going to grow into. It just plants the seeds. And then the seeds grow. And it goes, “Oh, that’s who I am. Oh, okay.” And human seeds are just part of that process. There’s planetary seeds, there’s star seeds, there’s like many, many different levels that the cosmos is constantly birthing. Whether it’s a black hole, you know, or a white hole in galactic levels, you know, birthing new galaxies, or whether it’s individual souls. Okay? It’s this cosmic process, the larger self giving birth to many, many different levels of its smaller self, its micro -cosmic self. And then seeing, oh, what do they grow? You know, giving them some boundaries and saying, okay, what can you do with the challenge of coming into the body? How can you grow beyond the limitations…your ancestors, what came before you… How can you improve on that? How can we grow a new self essentially is what the challenge is for this cosmos?  So the challenge facing the whole of nature the whole of the cosmos is the same challenge that we feel individually.  Oh, how do I grow a new self?  But we have that challenge because we are given that challenge by the larger cosmos

It’s not that we’re a failure. Oh my god, I have so many problems after this. You know, why do I have all these problems? Why isn’t my life just so nice and easy? Well, just because the life of the cosmos is not so nice and easy. It has a lot of challenges and it wants all these little seed children, it wants them to grow and heal the whole and create a new whole.  So this is the next important idea, okay? We have setting up the alignment.  We have shifting into, from our physical body into our energy body.  We have the notion of self -love.  And then we have the notion of how, what is the most direct path to healing and this is something I talked about at the talk last night, how many of you were here at the talk last night? Only a few.  So, important idea here, which is don’t try and fix the broken parts of yourself.  But instead, grow a whole new body, grow a whole new self.  We are designed to constantly rebirth ourselves. That is actually the structure of manifestation.  We need to get rid of the linear thinking. The physical plane is designed to have a past, a present and a future, to have a sense of flow so that we can learn cause and effect, the consequences of our actions. Oh, this causes pain. Oh, this causes disease. No, I don’t want to go that way. This does not give me happiness or love. No. Okay, go this way. I’ll try that. It’s everything in here slowed down compared to the realm of spirit where It’s all very simultaneous, OK? So there’s a good purpose in coming to this plane, to slow things down, to study them in detail. Now, that can feel very frustrating when you have a challenge, you have an illness, you have problems, and you say, oh, this is so slow. Why can’t I change this? But the fact that it’s slow lets you study it deeply. It gives you time to go inside of it. That’s the purpose of the physical plane. But we need to undo some of this story that gets us trapped.

What is the story? I used to be a spirit. Then my mommy and daddy made love and I came in as a little baby and I got a body. Now I’m in a body and I’m going to grow up and at the end I’m going to die and I’m going to go back to spirit.  That’s the story.  Have y’all heard that story?  And there’s a heaven waiting for some people at the end – only for a few chosen ones, they’re going to go back to heaven.  And some of them might go to some bad place, we don’t know, but there’s a lot of candles lighting up in that bad place, a lot of candle power designed to hook up your impurities.

So this story traps us in the limitation of our body and separates us from spirit.  [We say] oh, spirit is on the other side of life.  I’m here in the body, I have the mind, but spiritual realm is somewhere else. It’s like an invisible veil between other spiritual world and the ancestors and sometimes the channels and the psychics talk to the spirits and come and tell you some helpful things here. And the idea is that we’re stuck here in this physical plane in the spirit plane of somewhere else. This is a false story. If you want to heal yourself quickly, you want to change yourself, I recommend you let go of this story. This is not a helpful story. Why? What’s wrong with the story? What makes it false?  What makes the story false is that there’s no separation between the spirit and the body it’s not a linear story I was spirit and I became a body now I die I’m going to go back to spirit – that is not the way it happens spirit and matter is just the same thing vibrating back and forth in the present moment.  So your body right now is being created in the present moment by spirit converting yourself into matter, into body.

So the other story is oh my parents created me. Yeah that was at that moment that was what happened.  But let me ask you a question, are your parents creating you right now?  Are they having to give you permission to continue to exist?  Does anybody here believe that? That you would die if your parents suddenly something say,  “Okay, I’m done with you.” Stop.  Would you die? No.  That’s not a true story, your parents are not creating you now.  This collective field of energies is vibrating and each moment is creating each of us. We are created in the moment.  You produce a new body every moment.

Think about that.  Every moment, every nanosecond, you’re creating a brand new body.  The personality has the illusion that it looks like the same body continuously and slightly getting older, slightly aging, slightly changing. That’s the illusion from the physical plane.  That is not the energetic reality.  That is the illusion.  Because the mind is slowed down to be in the physical plane and polarized until left brain and right brain. In order to see physical plane, it has to be polarized, it has to be slowed down – it’s not a bad thing, it’s a necessary thing that we kind of live in this illusion of cause and effect so that we can study it okay – it’s a good thing – however we don’t need to be stuck in the illusion; we can we can work within the slowness okay of change and still see the truth of how it’s being created. How is the whole illusion being created? It’s being vibrated in each moment.  And what it is, is the life force is scanning each of us. It’s scanning the planets, it’s scanning the stars, it’s scanning everything. And it’s saying, “Okay, what do you need in the next moment? Who are you?” And then it gives it the energy, the life force, the chi to create itself.  All of life is self arising from the source.  We are being created from the source in each moment.  So at the moment we were born, yes, the elements that were present were the influences from each of our parents, okay?  And the climate that was there, the planet Earth, it was contributing to part of our creation, the sun, the moon, the configuration of the stars, that was all there at that moment, okay? And now it’s a different moment. There are different forces coming in.  The wild card here is called free will.  We get to tell the life force hey this is who I am this is who I want to be this is what I want to create right now so the challenge is actually to get the life force to hear us to listen to us so that when we say this is what I want to man this is the body I want to create right now …that [is what it] creates. Because the body’s being copied each second, each nanosecond and that or something and it’s scanning and the problem is is that we’re stuck in our patterns in our pains in our suffering and that’s actually what we’re requesting again and again and again each moment. Oh, I am this person suffering with this problem and so life force scans you and it goes oh okay that’s who you are, you have those problems good we’ll recreate them so you can work on them no problem.  It’s accommodating us – it loves us! It’s here to serve us – the life force is here to serve us!

So we have to learn how to speak to the life force. That is what qigong is.  Gong mean skill and Chi means subtle breath skill.  Skill with using a subtle breath. The subtle breath comes from the universe. That’s the yin yang movement of the universe, the chi breathing in and out. We need to learn how to speak the language of chi to talk to the chi field. When we can talk to the chi field, then we can give it instructions and we can tell it, “Oh, this is the body I want to create, the life, the psyche I want to create.” Then it can respond to us.  Otherwise, we’re kind of like on an auto -program, an auto -replicate program that runs out eventually, what we call death.

Student: – Michael?

Michael:  Yes?

Student: – Question here…  Does that mean that it would be worth changing the question from what I want to heal to what I want?

Michael:  Well, there are a lot of ways to the languages which we’ll get into but you can say who do I want to be?   Okay…  But the question of what do I want to heal gives it focus so that you know those are the elements that I need to change that are the fixed program the fixed patterns that I keep asking for so that gives you a focus so you know oh Why am I, why do I keep reproducing those problems? Like a broken record.  Some of you remember when they used to have records? They went around, okay? They don’t have broken…[indecipherable]  So the question is designed to give you a focus in saying, because those are the things that are gonna motivate you to change the whole being, because you’re feeling suffering from them you think and say this is intolerable… if you didn’t have suffering what would happen, if we eliminated suffering on planet earth we would become, according to … we’ll say… channeled information, we’d become like all these other dead alien civilizations that have reached their end. They programmed, they got rid of emotions, they got rid of, they learned to genetically control themselves. They created this collective societies where there’s no suffering. And what happened?

There’s no creativity. There’s no joy in that existence. And now they’re coming back to earth to learn from us. Crude, little human beings, not very advanced technologically, but still free, very creative. Because why? Because we’re solving the problems, the challenges of our suffering.  So the goal is not to eliminate suffering, is to reduce it so that we’re not stuck in it for a long time.

And this is why it’s so many beings want to come to Earth.  The story is, and we don’t know… it’s just a story, we don’t know if it’s true or not, but it’s like there’s a backlog of souls kind of wanting to come in and incarnate here because this is like the Wild West, okay?  This is where the excitement’s happening.  You get your own body, you have free will, get get to have sex. It’s like, oh my god, all these other places you incarnate, it’s like on Cloud Nine, the music’s playing, but after a while, it’s like, hey, you know what? I’ve heard that music for 1 ,000 years. Like, try something different. Can you turn on the jazz channel? Or can we do like pop?  No, they get tired of just listening to the angels with the harps because it gets boring and then of course you get down here and you go oh my shit this is heavy well how the hell am I gonna deal with all this stuff you know like you know where am I supposed to do with this where’s the operating manual you know how do I get out of here you know there’s all kinds of responses we have to it. And then of course you have all the holy priests. Hey, sign up right here. We’ll get your ticket out of here. You know, just pay your dues for to our church. And we’re going to get you out of here as fast as you can. We have cloud nine. We have a room booked for you on cloud nine. It’s all nice. And you’re going to have, you know, all the sex you want and all the food and you know, whatever blah blah blah blah in heaven and you’re going to be making love with God.  So…

Student:  – Let me ask you a question because what is the concept when you have the east of enlightenment that is to be free from enlightenment but in the east tradition … you’re totally free from from suffering how do you see that I see that…?

Michael:  I see that… you’re asking me, it’s not my position to make any judgment about any other path. I have no judgments about them, I see, I try and see them clearly for what they are.  So when you’re talking, it’s very important not to clump together all the eastern traditions, the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Taoists, they’re very different, okay, and even within the Taoists there’s many different types okay, so first of all let’s just say there’s no generalizations are very tricky okay but let’s just deal with the generalization of you know let’s just take I think what you’re talking about is the four noble truths of Buddhism which is life is about suffering you know… and our goal was basically to eliminate all suffering.

So number one, I’m going to say that I think it’s a false premise, okay?  Unless you put it in the full context, which is, you know, at one point I said I’m going to create my own religion, it’s called joyism, which says life is about joy and suffering is the motive and the path to it. So it’s not that, Yes, there is suffering here, and you have to acknowledge it, but you have to put it in the context to see it more accurately. And I think that Buddhism was created at a time of intense suffering. And Buddha was a very compassionate individual.  And he’s saying, oh my god, how can we help these people? They need a shortcut out of here. Well, let me just tell them once they die, they’re not going to have this body anymore, and they’re going to be free. So let me just tell them, Hey, forget the illusion of this personal self, and your suffering is going to go away. It will be completely eliminated.  And that gives people who are suffering some hope that they could change and they would not be stuck here forever. So I believe the intent was completely pure, wonderful, and loving behind this. But that the message and the way it gets institutionalized is not very functional today. And here’s the reason why.  And this has to do with the Taoist understanding of Qi. Okay?

Here’s an immense Qi field, infinite, multidimensional.  We’re like an artist. The chi field is our palette. Oh, here’s red, blue, green. Take the different colors and I’m gonna paint with it, right? I’m gonna draw from the chi field.

There’s a Daoist saying, “Where the mind goes, the chi flows.” Yi Dao, Chi Dao in Chinese.  Yi Dao. Yi is the intent. It’s the earth element. Dao means the way.  Where the mind finds its way, Qi Dao. The Qi will follow. It will go there.  This is just a statement of our free will. We can guide, we can direct the Qi.  When you focus on suffering, where does your Qi go? It goes to the suffering.  You grow your sense of suffering.  So if you have a belief – life is about suffering all your chi starts to go to make up that belief story.  Is that healthy?  No, I don’t think so.  If you want to heal yourself from suffering, focus on joy… life is about I want my chi to go to joy, to creating joy.  It’s so simple, okay? There’s not a complicated theological discussion.  You just look at the truth of that. Yi Dao, Chi Dao.  Chi flows where the mind goes. So you want to focus on what you want to create, not what happened in the past. If you focus on the suffering of the past, your chi goes to the past and you stay trapped there.  The second point of this is like … this idea of suffering and the only way to cure it is to get off the wheel of incarnation.  Another, from my point of view impossible and false teaching.  You cannot get off the wheel, okay.

How many Buddhists have achieved enlightenment? They’ve gotten off the wheel. Did the world stop?  Did the suffering of the world stop because they got enlightened?  I don’t think so.  I think it’s illusion.  It’s a whole. You can’t get out of the whole. The whole is whole. There’s many different dimensions to it. But let’s just say you shifted into the world of spirit.  What is the spirit world going to do? It’s going to keep incarnating back into here. That’s its cycle. That’s what is growing, growing. This is how it’s learning, where it’s learning edge. It’s not going to stop creation.  So this is, the idea is that creation will stop. If I get off here somehow, this will all stop. This is, again, just offering desperate hope to suffering individuals.  Oh, there’s a way off. Out of the suffering, let’s get off this wheel. It’s an illusion. It’s not the truth of nature. The truth of nature is whole.  Spirit and matter are one. You cannot get off of one good and go to the other. Anyone in the spirit can say, oh, I want to get out of spirit. I want to escape spirit. I want to get into a body. And then it comes here [and is like] I want to escape back the other way. No, they’re one. It’s like two sides of the same coin.  They’re just constantly flowing back and forth.  There’s no escaping. When you’re one, when you’re whole, you cannot escape that.  You just have to learn to harmonize the polarity, to learn to grow up and deal with it.  And so this is why when I challenge my Buddhist friends about this, they say, “Well, in fact, you know, I’ve taken these vows to stay here until all sentient beings achieve enlightenment and it’s yeah how long is that well maybe it’s 10 ,000 lives oh so you’re not really leaving and what after 10 ,000 lives is it if there’s still some suffering going on here you’re still gonna stay right yeah okay so maybe you’re actually staying here forever because the suffering is part of creation it’s part of the creative process.  So it’s a completely false projection from my point of view.  This is just my own personal point of view.  From looking at it deeply. And you can say, well, you’re just one guy.  But that is a whole big religion. Yeah, that’s exactly right.

But I’m interested in the truth, not in what’s big and what got institutionalized.  You can just think about it for yourself and choose.  And you know, all religious communities are wonderful because they create some bond.  And you know, people get very you know, Christian or Buddhist or Islamic or Jewish. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.  They’re supplying comfort and a feeling of, oh, hey, we’re all in this together and we’re going to help each other. That’s beautiful. But you don’t need to hold false ideas. You can still have those communities and you can still grow in your real enlightenment.

So the problem with this “get off the wheel of incarnation” is it acts as a kind of denial of embodiment. We cannot have heaven on earth, we have to have heaven somewhere else. I don’t buy that. I take the Daoist point of view, this is just another heaven. The physical plane is what they call “later heaven.” This is another heaven.  And when you shift into that thinking, then now it’s like, oh, OK. There are three heavens:  primordial heaven, early heaven, the formless heaven, and now the form heaven. Well, and there’s no hell. This is an invention of the Buddhist, OK, the hell realms. And they brought it into China. The early Taoists, Lao Tzu, there’s no concept of hell. It’s like, why– who’s bringing up this negative thought form here?  Hell is just a projection of people’s suffering.  So I know I’m spending a lot of time on all this because it’s important we have so many unconscious assumptions about ourselves and about our suffering that I want to challenge them so that you start to see you’re not stuck just because some religion, Christian or Buddhist or anything has a whole set of judgments and story which we have taken in and they contribute to our suffering and to our feeling stuck because now we get stuck in their religious story.  So my goal is to free us from all those stories and to get us into direct relationship with the chief field and to see our power that we’re getting our chi not from Buddha not from Jesus not from Muhammad or Allah but from the chi field itself.  We have a direct connection that’s coming in – we’re creating ourselves from the chi field so we don’t need the intermediaries… they can be friends, we can ask them to be allies they can support us –  great – but don’t give your power away to them because you’re going to get stuck in their story and their stories are filled with suffering then you’re just going to create more suffering. Do you see the problem?  Any more questions about this deep topic before we actually get into some practice?

Student:  Well, I have a question about diseases, and it seems that you can, if you’re not concentrating on the disease itself, let’s say, a very good friend of mine has an auto immune sickness, And of course, you try everything from medicine to to heal it, but in your words, and that’s what I think sometimes it’s just the thinking of putting the energy on the positive things and not the disease could heal her?

Michael: Okay, so what your real question is, how much skill does it take in energetic skill to focus and change the pattern, okay? And that’s the question that’s unique to each individual, okay? And I want to be clear here, I am open to anything that works for anybody.  As I was talking last night at the lecture, my father was a heart surgeon. I grew up with western medicine.  And my point I made there was that, you know, they have all these diseases, they try to develop special magic bullet, a pill, a drug for each disease. And that the Chinese view is just the opposite. You just need one thing, which is to get healthy, harmonious, chi flow. And then the system will heal itself. So instead of having thousands of magic bullets and special drugs for each of the thousands of diseases, you get very strong, very clear about getting the chi flow.  Now, even with that being said, it is quite possible those drugs may help you buy time while you’re building up your skill level, while you’re doing chi-kung… you’re getting stronger, they may help you. Assuming the benefits are greater than the side effects.

So some of you may not know, I’m just gonna give statistics on the United States.  The number two killer is what?  Number one killer heart disease. Which is really another Another way of saying, lack of self -love. All those hearts are dying because they don’t love themselves.  The heart is not nourished enough. So it gets stressed and finally doesn’t want to be here. That’s the number one killer, heart disease. They can lead to stroke and other things. The number two killer, side effects from prescription drugs.  All those magic bullets had those side effects. And, of course, the medicine defended it. They said, “Well, those people were going to die anyway. You know, we got them a little time, and then they’ll die.” The drugs didn’t really cause it. My point is, well, if those people were doing something and taking responsibility for themselves and trying to get their chi flowing, their immune systems actually might have a chance then.

But once you overload too many drugs in your system, then it gets harder and harder. It’s like heavy sludge, mud inside your system, all the heavy drugs in your liver and everything, … toxins. And then it’s hard for you to get the chi flowing to actually heal yourself.  So, of course, it’s that your fears come up. I’ve seen this so many times, oh, have to take the drug. You know, I need the fast solution, this is what they know. And I don’t know about the alternative healing and taking care of myself. That’s up to each person, I can’t say.  Maybe there’s a benefit of the drug for a while, but you need to have some awareness that a lot of studies have been done in China. I’ve been to all the Chinese medical chi-kung clinics, the major ones, not all, but many of them. The big ones in Beijing, I’ve been to all of them.  I’ve talked to doctors, I’ve talked to the patients, I’ve seen what they’re doing, okay?  And what they found out is that, you know, the way the system works in China, just so you understand it, you get sick, you go to the hospital, they say, “Do you have acute illness or do you have chronic illness?” Acute, they say, “Western medicine.” Chronic, they say, “You get Chinese medicine.” Then you get acupuncture and herbs. And if those don’t work, then they say, “Okay, we’re not getting good results here. We’ll send you over to the Qigong department. Those guys are the only ones who can help you.” So what happens at the Qigong departments?  They get the worst of the worst. The people who are nearly dead or had the worst diseases and just like at the end, and everybody sends them to the Qigong family. That’s the last hope. Okay, the drugs the herbs acupuncture that didn’t work, we’re going to send you to the qigong guys.  You know, what happens when they get there?  So there’s two types of qigong healing.  One is the healer does chi transmission and the other is self-practice.  You do the the qigong, you generate the qi – and you heal yourself.  It’s going to be one of those two things and sometimes it’s a combination.  They’ll maybe do some qi healing to get you started but then they give you qigong prescriptions. It’s like a doctor would say here take these drugs, they say do this qigong form. Okay, that’s your medical prescription to get well.

So what I found out, like I talked to this one guy, he said he was in a group of 10 patients.  They had all had heart disease and they’re told, you know, this is bad.  You guys are heading, you know, you’re at risk for dying.  Out of the 10, he is the only one who chose the qigong.  And he told me, he said, the other nine are dead.  I’m alive, OK?  And they have long -term studies in China, 30 -year studies showing that people reduce stroke and mortality from heart disease by 50 % by doing qigong. Now, that statistic is mostly about self -practice qigong.  It’s not about going to high level magical powered chi healers who’ve got the mojo who’ve got the chi and they’re going to do it for you. No, it’s about people who practice themselves.  And I believe that is the most powerful form of medicine is self -practice qigong.  It doesn’t mean you can’t get help that’s good. Sometimes you have a healer, somebody that can speed it up. But why is self-practice qigong for healing, why is it so much more powerful?  …than going to someone who’s got special magical abilities… powerful chi, can change around your chi very quickly… take out your tumor… It’s because of the wild card factor –  The free will. When you use your own will and you say I want to heal this … I want to love myself!  That is what is powerful.  Nothing is more powerful than your own free will… nothing!  The free will of another Qi healer can be very helpful, but it’s not as powerful as your own will, because you are using your will to create this body.  You’re allowing this to come in, so you’re in charge of it – not somebody else.

So if you take that responsibility and you empower yourself with the qigong skill, that is the most powerful tool you can have.  And it doesn’t mean other things can’t still support it, but they’re secondary, the herbs, acupuncture, western drugs, whatever. They can all be great, they can all be good support, but nothing can replace your choosing, your free will to heal yourself, to love yourself, to open up your chi channels, to activate your natural system and grow, most importantly, grow a new body, grow a new self.  What you’re doing anyway, what you could do better. You could make a better copy, okay? Instead of a fuzzy copy, filled with all your unconscious resistances and patterns that you keep saying, “Okay, yeah, please make a copy of my suffering please make another copy of my suffering please make a fifth copy of my suffering yeah now it’s trying to get weaker and weaker but I’m also getting weaker I’m getting old all good now it’s over I’m dead.  I got rid of my suffering.  I’m off the wheel of incarnation I was successful.  As opposed to making sharper and sharper copies cleaning out the resistance, the ancestral patterns, everything, and saying, “Okay, this is actually what I want to create.”  Nothing can replace that.

Now, maybe you do it through prayer, but what is the problem with most prayer?  See, I call qigong a form of whole-body prayer.  The problem with most religious prayer that I have found it’s outward directed, so they’re giving all the power to an external God – you’re saying God please heal me.  Well where is that God?  That God is the chi field and it’s right inside of us so I just think they’re praying the wrong way.  Their faith is powerful, it’s good, and some of them get healed, because eventually they kind of identify with God and they say, “Well, you know, that’s actually me.” But this is the whole point, is that the life force is the God, and that’s actually what does the healing.  There’s not some entity, there’s no guy up there with a white beard, okay?  That’s a story, okay?  All the deities, all the gods and goddesses, They’re like just energy patterns within the collective.  They’re other human stories around … trying to inspire us.  But the truth is ultimately that the life force is flowing in through our ming men, the gate of destiny between our two kidneys, and then it’s converting itself into our body through the different channels and different organ spirits. And we are creating, we are born from within.  It even says that in the Bible.  Spirit is born from within.

But they don’t give you a map.  What does that mean? Where is it born? How do I get in touch with it? That’s what the Taoists have. That’s why I finally gravitated with all these other paths and And they’re all great … have good things in them, but in China, if you’re a Buddhist and you get sick, do you go to a Buddhist doctor? No, you go to a Taoist.  You want to get healed? Oh, the Taoists – they know how to do that.  Enough said.  Any last questions?

Student:  Well, just because this course sounds very miraculous but it also sounds like people are stupid in a way because if the story about these 10 people and 9 people are then choosing something which is wrong for themselves, I just do not understand if I follow your story … Yeah, it sounds like all these people we are all making all these wrong choices…

Michael: Well, let’s not call it right or wrong. Okay. They’re just choices and they lead… – Life is about learning to accept the consequences of choices.  That’s cause and effect.  You’re learning… I have a free will, I choose this, and I get this effect.  So nine of those people chose drugs, and the effect was death.  That’s just a choice, not a bad choice. It just means that they didn’t want to live longer. They wanted to get out. They thought they were going to get on, but they didn’t. And it’s not a bad thing, because now we have a story about it that says, hey, one guy chose this and now that can act as a hope for the next 10 people who come along and they can say what happened to the last 10, hmm, maybe I will do the qigong also, okay. The other thing they found with cancer patients in these clinics, the amount of chemotherapy and drugs, people on qigong cut in half – they got the same effect from the drug. They didn’t need as much drug, though. And they didn’t have as much side effect. So they have a lot of people who are doing both. But they found, see, these drugs are overpowering your system. They’re not calibrated for the individual. This is the big cutting edge in medicine now. They’re like, now I’m going to try and say, hey, wait a minute… we need to individualize the dose for each person….Okay, so that’s going to come in the future and even … – the real advanced medicine, you know, the Westerners are now getting into this, they’re trying to get into the RNA and how the cells create and they’re trying to get into the, actually just making the system work better, not attacking it with drugs and trying to attack the disease. They’re now, they’re starting to get smart. They’re starting to figure out, oh, there’s a better way to do this, where we can heal all the diseases by simply having the RNA and the DNA actually function well.  Well, that’s just the same as what the Taoists are doing. Already they’re saying, “Hey, you just need the energy to make the system function well, and it does perfectly good at healing itself.”

So, Weston medicine is going to converge with this eventually, okay, and they’re trying to do ways to stimulate it from the outside, but again, it’s same problem of free will let’s say they have fantastic advances in Western medicine, which I believe are coming – by the way – and now you can live longer and healthier. …Okay, cancer is no longer the big killer now. They can start to eliminate heart disease. – Let’s just say let’s just assume all this is coming – What is the next crisis going to be?  What’s the problem going to be? Why are people going to die?  They’re going to die from lack of meaning in their life.  They don’t have a destiny. They don’t have a purpose. They’re not aligned. They’re not connected to their source, to their mission here. They’re not being creative.  They’re just kind of passing time.  So what if you don’t have disease then you’re just going to a spiritual disease.  You eliminate the physical level of disease you get spiritual disease then if you don’t align and you don’t have some mission. You don’t have some love for yourself.  Which then becomes love for the whole.  It’s the same problem. Even if you eliminate the physical suffering.  Do you see that?  So, it’s not about right or wrong judgments or right judgments, they’re just choices with effects.

And everybody who makes the choice lives with the consequence. And it’s not a bad thing that people die. Everybody’s going to die, everyone’s going to leave here anyway.  So, some people are making choices where they get out early. That’s their choice.  Does nature care?  No.  It doesn’t care.  It gave you free will. You choose. You want a little long time? Great. You make the choices. Live a long time. I will get more out of you. You, on the other hand, are miserable and you’re unhappy. You’re not making very many good choices and we’re not getting a lot of benefit back, but we’ll learn something from your suffering, maybe.  Fine. you’re out.  Recycled.  You have to look at it from the big whole, okay?  It has infinite powers of regeneration, and so –  whatever – a few human beings die from wrong decisions, it’s not a big deal.  It’s described – all this –  in the Tao Te Ching, okay?  It says heaven and earth treat humans like straw dogs. Okay, this is a ritual thing. They burn them up and like in an effigy. They burn up in a ritual.  Lives go. I mean, there’s a big tsunami. Quarter of a million people die, you know, and in a half an hour, whatever. Doesn’t nature care now? It’s like, great, that opened up some heart. People who suffered here now got all mushy and tried to help their other fellow human. Oh, that was good.  You have to look at the perspective, as you can say, of heaven and earth are different than that of the individual human.