Before my accident and even in the first couple of years following I was very athletic. When I was about fifteen years old the pain got so bad in my back that I had quit all sports. I began taking Martial Arts because I felt weak in my body and felt that I needed to learn to defend myself. More importantly I felt that I needed to learn to use the power of my own mind to conquer this health and life challenge. I learned a lot of great wisdom from both of my teachers. I also began to study western psychology and quantum physics and writings from other Martial Arts Masters and Oriental Masters in order to better understand the innate power of the mind. I was not just interested in the philosophies I very devoted to practicing these practices in order to heal myself. So I turned my pain into a great motivational force.
Over the first ten years of my practice the treatments I received we’re more physical in nature, like massage, chiropractic and other forms of body work. This mirrored my Martial Arts practice which began in the early years with “Hard Style” practices. As the years went on both the treatments I received and my own practices became more and more subtle, more internally focused. For those who are familiar with the terms hard style and soft style I began with hard style, practiced soft style and landed so to speak somewhere in the middle of the two.
Many people ask me who I have trained with and what is my “style.” I have trained with too many Masters at this point to list and “my style” is a synthesis of concepts, techniques and methods that I felt were the most effective of all that I was exposed to. In the beginning of my journey I was the experiment and I successfully healed myself. Through my practices, I caused this Universal Life Force called Chi to steadily build in my body until one day it surged. In its surging my spine was completely healed.
Although I will always be my own experiment I now share these healing secrets with many others with the intention that they too experience this type of healing power in their minds, their bodies and their lives. As a teacher I can only really teach what I know from my own experience. In my experience I believe in order to be a great healer or physician (even a good one) you have to prepare the vessel, the body, for healing energy to pass through. You can know all kinds of theory about Chi for example but as several of my teachers have said to me “what can you show?” So my emphasis is not on filling people’s heads with intellectual knowledge although there is certainly some of that, but it is rather to educate people in the art of doing. First we have to train the vessel, the vehicle, namely the body for the healing currents to pass through. Our bodies are made up of a nervous system that can be easily likened to the electrical wires in our house. Each of us has a certain resistance to the flow of current through our body- being. That current is the Healer. The resistance we have within our body and in our energy field causes the current flowing through us to slow down. This resistance of mental, emotional and physical debris must be worn down and dissolved in order to become more of a clear vessel for healing.
To me practice leads to a clearer vessel and therefore makes us more powerful healers. The Source, the Tao, the Great River, the Flow, the Universal Life Force, the Chi, the Energy, divine intelligence (all names for the same phenomena) is The Healer, with a capital H. As we learn to connect ourselves to that flow of that Great River and then allow it to flow through us we wear away resistances in the form of blockages, dams and other accumulated debris. The more that we practice Qigong the more clear we become. The more, clear we are, the greater the current and the energy is that runs through us. So Qigong practice then is essential to knowing experientially both personal healing and being a facilitator of healing for others. Again the Great River is The Healer and so whether we seek to heal ourselves or another being we must tap into that Source of Universal Energy and run it through our own being. Overtime our own bodies will be able to run higher and higher currents of energy for longer lengths of time. The body though needs to be developed and with practice it absolutely can be.
By David J. Coon
March 2014 Issue
