My Family Tradition of Healing
By FaXiang Hou
Since I was a boy in the northwestern province of Gansu, not far from the Mongolian border along the ancient Silk Road trade route, I have practiced the ancient, natural Chinese way of healing oneself and others known as qigong (pronounced chee-goon).
Qigong in China has a 2,000-year history, based on observations by our ancestors about the natural world and the way human beings interact with it. In the simplest terms, qigong refers to the movement of vital energy to clear blockages that cause illness, pain, and discomfort within the body. Qi means energy or air, and gong means success, knowledge, good practice, or skill. This energy movement can be accomplished with health-enhancing foods; a beautiful, flowing series of meditative, low-impact exercises; and the occasional use of plant-based remedies, as well as hands-on treatment from a skilled master of qigong acupressure and acupuncture such as myself.
I was taught the art and science of reading people’s bodies, sensing their blockages, and healing their complaints by my father, who learned from his father, who learned from my great-grandfather and his father before him. I am the fifth generation in a direct line of qigong healers, and have dedicated my life to the practice of restoring the body’s balance through energy-based acupressure, acupuncture, and exercise. Like my ancestors, I also educate those I treat about the healing benefits of certain foods and herbs. I believe that many common physical complaints can be cured by eating the right foods and avoiding the wrong ones. My way is to try to prevent problems before they start by teaching my patients about the importance of holistic, healthy living.
My family, like everyone in our community, had always used traditional Chinese medicine for our health needs, and much of my work today is based directly on the tenets of this 2,000-year-old health system. However, I tend to favor a more proactive approach to healing the body than many of my fellow traditional Chinese medicine practitioners do; my approach emphasizes detoxifying the body rather than tonifying qi, or administering tonics that work gradually. In other words, if someone has weak lungs or bad digestion, I don’t believe in immediately administering tonics, or remedies, intended to treat the condition. Instead, my first line of defense is to detoxify the corresponding organ and get rid of as much bad energy as possible. Otherwise, how can the organ be clear enough to accept a medicine? I explain that it’s like a dirty room in a house: no matter how much nice furniture you put into it, the room won’t be inviting until it’s been cleaned. I believe in preventive medicine, and working to get rid of negative, harmful vital energy as soon as it is identified.
As a child in the People’s Republic of China, I watched my father treat women, men, children, the elderly, and the gravely ill. I listened to him advising sick people about beneficial herbs and foods that promote healing, and watched him using his hands or his acupuncture needles to address a great variety of ailments. Life was difficult, and some of those he treated were very poor. He graciously accepted whatever they offered in payment: a few coins, an apple, once even a small bowl of noodles. He never turned anyone away and was always on call in case of emergency. Our family observed both Buddhism and Taoism, and he taught us about karma, using the Sanskrit term. “If someone cheats you, just walk away,” he would say, explaining that the cheaters would get their just rewards in time and there was no need to inflict retribution myself.
Our father taught my brother and me—and no one else—a unique and powerful family form of healing qigong. Called ching loong san dian xue mi gong fa, which roughly translates to “green dragon,” our technique is based on isolating several additional—and secret—acupressure points in addition to the ones typically utilized in traditional Chinese healing. My father concocted plant-based medicines and was also a feng shui master skilled in the arts of observation, intuition, and placement, all of which he passed on to us. My brother was especially gifted in feng shui: He could meet you for the first time, study your face, and tell you, accurately, how many siblings you had and whether they were brothers or sisters. However, he did not choose to make qigong healing his way of life. I alone chose to follow the family path of being a dedicated healer. Or perhaps I should say that the path chose me.
In my teenage years, having learned much from my father, I went in search of other teachers. In all, I studied with seventeen different qigong masters in China, each with a different specialty. In the process I gained a full medical education as well the ability to heal with energy. As part of my healing qigong training, my father even sent me to study with a local pork butcher to help me form a realistic understanding of anatomy, because pig organs most closely resembled those of humans. Still, after all this training and experience, I did not think qigong was my future. In fact, I only studied it because I had no choice; at that time, it was customary to do what one’s parents said, and my father expected one of us to continue the family tradition. In China, in a society where the doctor earned less than the local barber, qigong didn’t seem like such a lucrative career to me.
After finishing school at the age of eighteen, I was fortunate to be accepted into the army. The alternative was a difficult life of agricultural work, while in the military there was ample food, clothing, housing, and even, as I was to discover, opportunity. I realized that I possessed the confidence and knowledge to diagnose and heal those around me, including my superiors: my father’s teachings and my years of apprenticeships were about to pay off in an unexpected way. These people paid me well for the energy treatments and healing massages I performed, and recommended me to others. After completing my military service, I began working for the foreign minister’s office, and in 1987 was lucky enough to be posted to the Chinese embassy in Washington, DC, while my colleagues were being sent to Yugoslavia and countries in Africa. At the embassy, I joined a staff that took care of diplomats and political leaders from many countries. I was appointed by the foreign minister to be the director of sports and qigong medicine for the embassy’s staff.
In the course of my job, I was exposed to fine hotels and restaurants. I went into professional Chinese kitchens and watched top chefs as they prepared banquets for distinguished guests. I already knew all the basics about foods that heal and foods that make us ill—but now I was learning firsthand how to combine flavors and textures to make pleasing and delicious dishes that could also support good health.
In the early 1980s, through one of the qigong organizations in Beijing that had certified my healing abilities, I began to occasionally present lectures and demonstrations to the Chinese community in Lower Manhattan. Then, in Washington, I happened to treat several American women, one of whose husband, two sons, and brother were all medical doctors. When I met her, this woman had such bad knees that she couldn’t walk downstairs to her basement or upstairs to her bedroom. After I healed her, she was so grateful that she invited me to live in a spare room in her home, and she and her husband taught me English, including medical English. On weekends, I used her husband’s office to administer qigong treatments to some of his patients. One of this woman’s sons was an oncologist in Los Angeles, and when the AIDS epidemic began, he joined a large, privately funded HIV/AIDS treatment practice in Southern California. On his visits to the East Coast to see his family, he was impressed by my ability to heal people, including his mother, and he eventually invited me to work with him. I moved to LA and lived there for several years, treating AIDS patients with qigong, and had very good results. I also participated in a research project on remote healing, in which I was given photos of AIDS patients who were not in the vicinity to focus on as I summoned my qigong healing energy. Through the political connections of that organization’s financial sponsor, I was able to obtain a visa to bring my wife and ten-year-old daughter to the United States, and to remain in the country indefinitely.
Today, five days a week, in New York and suburban Philadelphia, my office is busy as I perform medical qigong on people who come to me for treatment, whether it be for a backache, cancer recovery, injuries, menopause symptoms, migraine, or a host of other complaints. In a single day, I might treat a child with alopecia, a young athlete suffering from a herniated disc, a teenager with an acute peanut allergy, a man with prostate cancer, and women seeking relief from fibromyalgia, infertility, sore knees, sore lower back, and endometriosis. The healing that I perform in my office through acupressure or, if necessary, acupuncture has no side effects. It is most effective when my patients make a commitment to eat the right foods and, in some cases, to perform the therapeutic qigong exercises I recommend. These movements in particular are an extension of my treatments, and everyone can experience their benefits. I have treated politicians, film and television stars, rock musicians, fashion designers, and other famous names. I have had patients with acute conditions fly me to Europe and elsewhere to treat them, and I regularly return to China to teach, demonstrate, and heal. But most of my patients are ordinary people who have found their way to me through word of mouth because they were looking for an effective alternative, or complement, to Western medicine.
Now, more than ever before, women have many options to help them through their reproductive years and beyond. They have access to modern medical advances and corrective medicine. Most of my patients with serious illnesses also consult Western doctors, and I often concur with the diagnoses of those medical practitioners and work with them. Let me be very clear about this: I have great respect for Western medicine and have participated in research studies at Johns Hopkins University and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). I believe that qigong healing can increase effectiveness when combined with certain conventional therapies, and often mitigate the side effects of more invasive treatments. As an example, I have helped many chemotherapy patients manage the symptoms caused by their poisonous, but necessary, treatments.
I do feel, however, that many sick people are misdiagnosed today; others may be correctly diagnosed but end up taking the wrong medicine, which may not be effective and in some cases may actually worsen their condition. (Of course, incorrect advice can just as easily come from a practitioner of alternative or Eastern medicine as from a doctor of conventional medicine.)
Here’s an example: when someone “catches a cold,” they may end up with a lung infection. A Western doctor might prescribe antibiotics and recommend lots of fresh orange juice for vitamin C. In Eastern medicine, we believe that this is often not a case for antibiotics. We also believe that there are two types of cold, based on the evidence of the mucus produced by the person who’s sick. When the mucus that comes out of the nose or throat is yellow, that person is too yang (pronounced “yon”), or hot. When the mucus is clear, her condition is too yin, or cool. To me, each condition calls for a slightly different treatment, based on the way individual fruits, and indeed all foods, are categorized in traditional Chinese medicine. Every food has the power to exert positive or negative changes in the body, and they have been categorized in that way.
First I would make a cup of ginger tea for anyone who had a cold. Then I would assess the nature of that particular person’s chest cold. If her mucus was yellow, I would sweeten her tea with honey or white sugar because, according to the way all foods in traditional Chinese medicine are assigned a value of yin or yang (or, in some cases, neutral), those sweeteners are yin and cooling. And orange juice would definitely not be the right choice because oranges are yang, or hot, and they stimulate mucus production. Orange juice will only give this person more mucus and congestion. Instead, I would recommend grapefruit juice, because grapefruits are more yin and cooling. On the other hand, the sick person whose mucus runs clear would benefit from orange juice, because it brings heat, and her ginger tea should be sweetened with dark brown sugar, which is yang.
The human body, male or female, is a complex universe of organs, arteries, veins, muscles, and ligaments held together by the perfect balance of yin and yang. Like men, women may seek treatment for infections or irregularities, but it is undeniable that women’s bodies are more complicated. Women menstruate, go through menopause, and face many possible issues affecting their reproductive organs, including cysts or infertility. Women get pregnant, give birth, and breastfeed, caring for their children on a biological level in ways that men’s bodies can never match.
Many of my father’s patients were female, and I observed through his work that women bring health back to the home. In other words, they tend to be the seekers and keepers of information about their own complex bodies, as well as the health of those who share their lives. In many cases, they bring home not only the healthful, healing food, but also any medicine that might be required. It makes sense that a large part of qigong treatment would be focused on women, as I have done in this book.
I will never forget the Buddhist monk—an extraordinary woman named Ci Yu—who taught me about meditation and the power of directing energy. Ci Yu was from Mount Emei, one of the four sacred Buddhist mountains of China. An area rich with plant and animal life, its forests are full of Tibetan macaques, indigenous monkeys who will steal food right out of your hand.
Ci Yu—ci means kindness, grace, or benevolence, and yu means rain—lived in the mountains, but twice a year she traveled to the Xi’an area to teach qigong and meditation. When I was a teenager, I enrolled in her forty-day class, and after that I studied with her whenever she visited. I was one of her special students, the ones who stayed with her the entire forty days at a big local building. It was chilly and spartan, with cold showers, but after meditating in a room with Ci Yu and the other students, following her instructions as the qi moved from the top of my head to my feet, my entire body would feel warm, loose, and limber. To this day, even though I take a hot shower, I still wash my face with cold water first thing in the morning as I learned to do from her.
Ci Yu was amazing, and I do not use that word lightly. She embodied the meaning of her Buddhist name—her spirit was generous and she shared everything with others, including her wisdom. I clearly remember that she never lay down to sleep; instead, she slept sitting up, in the lotus position. While studying meditation with her, my fellow students and I slept alongside her, all of us sitting upright all night long. In order to maintain her heightened state of concentration, she was always fasting—I think she ate one banana a day. Even in the coldest weather, she never wore a coat because she was able to concentrate and adjust her own body temperature. In winter, you would enter the room where she was meditating and it would be warm, and in summer, the room would be pleasantly cool even if other rooms in the building were hot. It was a powerful manifestation of energy work that I have called upon every day in my practice.
Once I had been given the gifts of enhanced intuition and healing knowledge, I felt compelled to use them to help people, and I have been gratified to do so for many years now. I also am committed to passing on what I know, so I am always teaching a dozen or so students the simple, purposeful qigong exercises I myself perform several times a day. Some of these students have been with me for decades. The qigong movements function as a sort of internal therapeutic massage for the body’s organs and are essential to maintaining the desired state of energy balance, where yin and yang coexist in healthful harmony. Once my advanced qigong students learn about the connection between mind, body, and breath, they begin to devote themselves more fully to the movements, practicing them until they are able to heal themselves and, in some cases, other people. In almost every instance, they tell me they also feel invigorated emotionally, spiritually, and physically in daily life. The results vary depending on the individual: the most stressed of them are able to better cope and balance their emotions, while those who tend to procrastinate and lack direction are able to focus and plan more effectively.
My family form of medical qigong has been part of clinical research projects in China, while my own medical qigong work has been recognized by the NIH, Johns Hopkins University, and Thomas Jefferson University. I have undergone rigorous clinical testing of my healing ability in China, and was recognized as a certified master in the elite International Qigong Science Association, as well as numerous other Chinese qigong associations, thanks to my success in treating a wide variety of chronic and acute pain and disease with positive results. In the United States, I have performed external qigong therapy in various research projects at the NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (now the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health) that focused on childhood asthma, prostate cancer, and osteoarthritis of the knee. One of my special areas of interest is allergies. Whether to food, drugs, or animals, allergies are largely the result of a compromised immune system, and I have helped many people overcome them, no matter how severe.
In 1992, I founded the QiGong Research Society (QRS), an organization dedicated to preserving the ancient, natural healing tradition of qigong through teaching and training and by supporting clinical research. Through study and practice, I hope that my students will experience benefits that include improvement in physical fitness and mental well-being, relief of pain and other physical issues, increased immunity, and a feeling of calm, comfort, and balance.
Someday I would like to create a proper school to teach qigong, and from there open schools across the United States and beyond. I would train other people to teach qigong healing, the Chinese meridian system, and how to incorporate fresh, nutritious, and simple meals into healing protocols, while other instructors would teach Western medical techniques. Within just a few years, we would have trained enough people to be able to go out and practice qigong in rehab centers and nursing homes around the country, relieving aches, pains, and simple complaints without medicine. That is my dream.
Until then, I travel the world teaching my family’s specific form of medical qigong to students who want to learn how to heal themselves and others, and our own unique qigong exercises or moving meditations to anyone who wants to improve their health and well-being. The exercises are easy to learn, produce positive results, and promote a strong awareness of qi with the power to stimulate positive changes in someone’s life. With this book, I am pleased to have an opportunity to share not only these exercises but also my family’s long-held knowledge and wisdom about how all people, and especially women, can heal themselves and others through diet, meditation, and these life-enhancing qigong body movements that anyone can do.