HealthyGamerGG - Trying to Understand QiGong with @HoldenQiGong ​

Episode Date: February 16, 2026

In this episode, Dr. K is joined by Qigong Master Lee Holden to explore how ancient energy practices can be used to treat modern mental health struggles like burnout, anxiety, and distraction,. They bridge the gap between Eastern concepts of "Chi" and Western medical science, debating whether "aliveness" is a mystical force or simply advanced physiology and bio-electricity,,,. What to expect in this episode: • The Power-Up Sequence: A guided five-minute practice designed to clear stagnant energy and provide an immediate boost for those feeling sluggish or physically stuck after sitting too long,,. • Building Emotional Immunity: Dr. K and Lee discuss "heart chi deficiency" and demonstrate a routine to protect sensitive individuals from absorbing the stress and negativity of the world around them,,. • The Earth Center for Focus: A deep dive into "student syndrome" and how to use grounding movements to overcome brain fog, rumination, and the constant pull of digital distractions,,,. • The Science of Sleep: An analysis of why it takes significant energy to fall asleep and how balancing your internal "Yin and Yang" throughout the day determines the quality of your rest,,,. • Systemic Fixes vs. Behavioral Change: A candid discussion on why modern institutions—from schools to big pharma—often reward quick-fix results like grades or medication over the deeper, more effective path of learning and habit change.HG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3SztHG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, chat. Welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Alok Knoja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in. Welcome to another Healthy Gamer Gigi stream. My name is Dr. Aalu Kanoja. Just a reminder that everything we discuss on stream today is intended to be taken for educational and entertainment purposes only. If you all have a medical concern or question, please go see a licensed professional. We are not going to be dispensing anything akin to medical advice today, and nothing we discuss is medical advice. So welcome everybody. Okay, so today we've got something super cool.

And I want to tell you all a quick story. So today we're going to be doing some chie gong with a chie gong master who's been practicing for 38 years, a guy named Lee Holden. So why are we doing this before we hop in with Lee? The first is that, you know, when I started streaming, we used to do a lot more stuff. So during the pandemic, I did a yoga boot camp. We used to meditate at the end of every stream. So things, we used to do a lot more interviews. So like I think over time, our content has evolved in a particular direction.

That seems like it helps people a lot. But there is also a basic limitation to talking about stuff. Right? So we can talk about, like, you know, last Friday when we streamed, we talked about, found a super cool paper on an action crisis, right? So what is an action crisis? Why do they happen? This is sort of like analysis paralysis when you get stuck. Should you do something? Should you keep going? Should you quit? And how to reduce action crises, right? So we talked about like factors that lead to sustained goal effort, goal accomplishment, etc. So I think a big part of this channel is equipping you with the playbook for yourself. Right? It's like how does your mind work?

Where do your desires come from? How do you have more energy? All this kind of stuff. But there's another element which we've sort of leaned back on, which we're trying to bring back today, which is actually practice, right? So like, what do you do? And so I want to introduce your. all to Lee Holden. Let me see if I can find, let's see if Lee is around. There's Lee. Awesome. Okay. Welcome everybody. I'm here. This is Lee. So a couple things I want to tell you all about Lee, just how we met, and then I'll give Lee a chance to introduce himself. So we were both speakers at a conference in November of last year. And so I've done a lot of yoga. I've done a lot of Bron I am. I've done a lot of

a fair amount of Tai Chi, I've done a little bit of Qi Gong. The first lab that I was doing research in at Harvard was actually a lab on Tai Chi, so pretty familiar with the practices. And so I've seen like a lot of people who teach this stuff. And I was really impressed with how effective of a teacher Li is. So like I was, you know, a participant in his session. And what I love about Chi-Gong is how quickly you feel in effect. So I was thrilled to meet Lee and Lee honestly, because I think as we were explaining earlier, so I think like a lot of the stuff that I teach has a learning curve. So I teach a lot of meditation, but like you have to learn how to meditate in order to get the benefits of meditation. I'm sure that's true of Chi-Gong as well. But what I think

Lee you were particularly good at is doing a short sequence with people in which they feel like an immediate effect. So I think we live in a society where if y'all are watching this stream today, I'm going to explain one or two things. We're going to talk about the theory of Qigong, how that stuff works. We're going to hear from Lee about how he explains things. But today is going to be a little bit different because I want y'all to practice with us. So Lee has been kind enough to, he's got a couple of different sequences of practice.

They're going to be somewhere between five and 15 minutes each. So please, please, please, if y'all are in chat. If you guys want to understand the value of Chi Gong, get up and do the practice with us that Lee will lead us through. I will be doing them as well. So this is back to like chat as participants. So welcome Lee. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. It's so good to see you. We had so much fun in Dubai. And I became a big fan of yours as well. So this goes this goes both ways, my friend. Awesome, dude. So a couple of quick questions. Can you just tell us a little bit about how you got into Qigong? Absolutely. I was a collegiate soccer player. Way back in the day,

I was playing soccer, 19 years old. I jumped up in the air to hit the ball with my head. It was my second game of starting for UC Berkeley. So I was thrilled to be on the team. And another player came up and took out my legs. I landed on my tailbone. And exactly. And being like a 19 year old, I was like, I think I'm fine. And I ran all over the field again hobbling around for the rest of the game. And I woke up the next morning and I stepped out of bed. My back hurt so much. My leg collapsed. I fell into the floor. I couldn't walk. Somehow I got myself over to the team doctor. They gave me some cortisone shots. They told me I was really going to be out for the rest of the season. So I was bummed.

It was like the first time I felt depression. I was like, oh my God, I finally got made the team and now I can't play. So for the next three, yeah, go ahead. I mean, it sounds like you had like a sacral fracture with some like nerve involvement at the bottom of your spine. That sounds super scary, man. Yeah, it was very scary. I had some tailbone issues that created some muscle spasms and nerve irritation and the lower lumbar. The shots helped a little bit for a short amount of time, but not for any extended period of time.

So it was just, like I felt a little better for a couple hours, and then it came right back, and I took some painkillers and felt a little better, and then it came right back, and also the painkillers gave me some digestive issues and stomach pain. You know, and I studied martial arts as a kid. So as a 10-year-old, I was taking karate, and in the karate classes, they were showing Tai Chi, And they had a Chi Gong master come and do a demonstration. He was showing the power of chi. And he broke like a stack of bricks that was like maybe 15 bricks.

And it just like, bam, all these bricks broke. And I was like, how did you do that? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm a bit curious about that. So when you say the power of chi and you're able to break bricks, what, how do you know that it is chi that allows you to break the bricks? as opposed to something that is purely physiologic,

like strength or technique. Yeah, and they all come in together. They all come to play because chi really is our physiology and it's how you move the body with a particular technique, maybe with breath, maybe with power. So, Chi really means energy. So how much energy can you generate in your body either physiologically with power, with breath,

with focus, with intention? So this is a concept that is been used in martial arts for many, many years. Some of these chigong masters are very small. And like this guy, he wasn't a big guy. And if you asked a big guy to just hit it with all his might, he would probably hurt his hands. So there was a lot of technique. There's a lot of training that goes into the martial side of chigong, which interestingly enough, Tai Chi Qi is a form of chigong that was more focused on martial arts and became famous. And we can get into that a little bit later. So, but needless to say, at 10 years old, I was impressed. I was like,

wow, I want some of that. I want to learn how to do it. And so I asked him, I said, you know, how do we, how do you, how do you, how do you, I want to learn about the power of chi? And he said, he grabbed me by my, my ghee and he just pulled me closer to me. He said, chi is not for hurting people. It's for healing. And I was like, oh, okay, okay. But, you know, was just like this fleeting little thing. And I pretty much forgot about the whole experience until I was hobbling around. And then like three weeks in it, I was like,

what about that guy who did the thing with the bricks? Maybe I'm gonna go see him because he was in my hometown. So I drove back about an hour and a half south from Berkeley. And I asked him about healing. And he did acupuncture. So he showed me some acupuncture. He did some acupuncture on me. And he showed me Qigong exercise

that specifically were geared to the low we're back. And I kid you not, yeah, after the first session, I was maybe 60% better. The next day I went back to them, I was 75% better. I stayed, I stayed out away from school for about a week. I did four treatments and I was 95% better when I returned to school, able to play soccer. And so I was doing all these exercises before practice and I was showing my teammates and I was like, you know, the thought that came to me at that time was why aren't more people

doing this. And that became my mission in life. Awesome. So yeah. So, so I mean, you know, I think like I said, I really appreciate how quickly you feel in effect. So I think like before we talk more about Chi or theory or whatever, like let's jump into a practice. So if you guys are ready, will you ready? I'm ready. Let's jump into a practice. I'm noticing, let's change cameras. Let's see if this gets fixed. Okay, so we're having a problem because the desktop audio is being picked up by the mic, but does that make sense? So in order for me to hear him, we can move this, we'll see if this works. Okay, Lee, let's get started. Let's get started. All right, guys. So, Chi Gong means Chi energy gong work. So we're doing some energy work in the same way we're doing

breath work. We're doing certain kind of work, whether it's exercise, lifting weights, whatever it is, cardiovascular. Chi gong is a particular form of movement that generates energy. And that's what I want to show you guys in a very short practice to feel your energy. So first, just notice how your body feels. Notice where you're holding tension, tightness. we get a good place to start from. It's kind of like we're here on the map and where we want to go is more energy, less stress. So just get a sense, tune in, how's my mind, how's my body,

do I feel any energy? Do I not even know what that concept is? And let's have an experience to give us a reference point to understand this practice. So go ahead and take a deep breath, sense and feel. Wonderful. Now, one of the things that make up chi is breath. So breath work is a form of Qigong. It's energy cultivation. It's just one way to do it. So how to breathe. Let's put our hands on our center, just right over the navel. And we want to move the diaphragm to improve our breathing.

So when you inhale, allow the diaphragm to expand. And so the belly expands as you inhale, and then the belly goes back towards the spine. And we'll just put it. bring a little more energy into our system with the breath. Now you breathe about 20,000 times each and every day. 20,000 times, but not all breaths are equal. Some signal the mind to be in a stress mode or fight or flight. Others signal the mind and the nervous system to be in a more relaxed, more calm state. So when you're breathing slowly and breathing deeply, you're going to find equanimity within. time. Nice slow deep breath. Good. Let's do an exercise that loosens up the lower back. The lower back and the lower spine. So go ahead and bend your knees and we're going to

turn from the center. We're going to turn from the hips and the waist right here, this movement here. And then we're going to let the hands knock across the lower back. Now with the joints, if we don't move and move the joints in all their various directions, they're going to get stiff and tight. It doesn't matter what a you are. So when you sit too long the low back often will get tight and stiff. So this one's going to relieve lower back tension and we're going to do a little energy activation with the knocking. The name of the movement knocking on the door of life and the door of life is an acupressure point right in the lower

back area that we're knocking across and it's designed to give you more energy. It's designed to wake up the body's energy. So again take one of those deep breaths Turn from your hips and your waist. Knock across the lower back and right through the rib cage. And this is a great exercise when you need a little boost. Or if you've been sitting too long to stand up, do two minutes of knocking on the door of life. Get those spinal joints nice and loose. I'm not.

Take a nice deep breath. Oh, you're not. Well, that's because it's muted right now. Good. And then just go ahead and slow it down, slow it down and relax. relax. Good. Let's do the energy enlivening sequence. This one's going to be good for clearing stress and activating energy. These pressure points right in the sternum are good for better breathing and clearing emotional stress. So we're going to tap right here. Just go up and down on that sternum.

Good. And then take a nice deep breath. Now when you feel stress, anxiety, emotional tension, often this area gets tight. So we're tapping here. This is also good for for immune function. It's also good for breathing and the respiratory system. So take a nice deep breath and then come over just below the collarbone on one side and we're going to activate the meridian lines. And meridian is simply a pathway of energy where acupressure points exist. So slap down the inside of your arm and slap up the outside of the arm. And after this five minute routine or so, I want you to notice how you feel and See if you feel the Chi activated.

We're going to do that twice. Up the outside to the neck and shoulders. And then back to the center. Good, and let's do it again. Down the inside of the arm, just give it a slap. Wake up the energy. Wake up these meridians. Up the outside to the neck and shoulders.

And slap down the inside of the arm. We'll do it one more time. Up the outside. Does anybody hold a little tension in the neck and shoulders? Slap those points. get some circulation there, back to the chest. And then one last thing before we sit down and talk,

let's activate the meridians and the fingertips. Go back and forth like this. Just rub the fingernails back and forth vigorously, take a deep breath. We've only been doing a short little practice and we're gonna put our hands down to the sides and I want you to feel the power activated inside of you. We all have tremendous potential,

tremendous energy, within us and in Qigong we say that energy just needs to be activated. So hands to the sides, close your eyes and now notice how your body feels. See if you feel a little tingling, a buzzing, an electricity. You have so much energy and power within you. It's often just in a potential state and then when we activate it, it becomes usable. It becomes part of who you are. So take a nice deep breath, feel it.

Very nice, everybody. Dr. K, did you feel it? Yeah, so this is, oh, hold on a second, let me fix this. Okay, hold it down. Yeah, oh no, well, here we go. Okay, so, okay. So hopefully I'm gonna just check in with chat real quick.

So, right, so like, this is the thing. So if you guys pay attention in chat, that, right, so this is what I like was truly impressed by with Lee is for those of y'all that are like too cool to do this and get up and do it, like you will be, and for those of y'all that did it, you'll notice like you feel energized, like you feel energized like immediately. And when like everyone's like sluggish in the world we live in today, right? People are like exhausted. They're burnt out. You just don't feel like doing anything. And then we go to all of these like really complicated solutions like, okay, I'm going to improve. like the quality of my sleep and I'm going to take these supplements and like I have to do this and like I have to take NAD for this reason and this reason and this reason. And what stuns me about Chi-Gong and specifically the Chi-Gong that Lee teaches because I've been to, you know, I've learned Qigong from other people before and I think Lee you're an excellent teacher. But you guys feel it.

Like you just feel like even I feel like more awake, alive, energized and it's like so fast. So hopefully y'all actually did it. Right? I didn't want to do it at first, but now I want more. Yeah, so I was too late. I should have joined. I'm a slug, yes. Okay. So y'all can go back in the Vaughan if you want to watch, you can.

I normally struggle with cold hands and feet, and somehow that's all gone. So, right? So great. So I think people are like feeling a lot, Lee. So let's talk a little bit. So we're going to have, I think, a couple of other sequences that you're going to put us through. But before we get to that, let's chat a little bit. So tell us what just happened.

What just happened? And you know, it is a bit of a mystery because these practices are some four or five thousand years old. You know, the ancient Chinese masters as well as the ancient Indian masters, they had this concept of chi. Most ancient cultures have this concept of chi, life force energy. There's some force within you that keeps you alive. And we take this for granted. We are alive. We can all agree upon that. You know, sometimes I'm talking to people and they're like, I don't believe in chi.

And I was like, you don't have to believe in it. Just, you know, are you alive or aren't you alive? Yes, I'm alive. Okay, what do you want to call it? We don't have to say chi. We don't have to say prana. We could just say aliveness or bioelectricity or there's some mysterious force that makes your heartbeat, that stimulates your nervous system, that moves your body,

that creates the digestive function. this is the term that they meant by chi. You're alive. Chi, life force energy. Gong means to work, work with that life force energy. It also connotates a skill or an expertise. In fact, the word gong is the same word as gong fu. Gongfu means you're an expert, and it just became an expert at martial arts.

But you could say, I'm a gong fu chef. I'm a gong fu tea ceremony person. I'm a gong fu, whatever it is, your expertise is. So, Chi-Gong, an expert at working with life-force energy. Life-force energy moves through your body. It's physiological, but it's also emotions. It's what makes us human. It's thoughts.

These are all parts of your energy system. Now, when we say skill, are you working with that energy system in a skillful way or not? Are you stressed out? Are you sick? Are you in pain? Are you anxious? You know, that shows us where we can improve our skill. to make the chi flow better in that area, emotions, mind, or body.

And then we zero in on that. So, Lee, can you explain to us what the sequence, like, how does the sequence that you just taught us? Like, how does it work? So you were explaining a little bit about, you know, the different regions and stuff. But I remember when, you know, the last time you were, like, talking about specifics. Can you get into a little bit more detail on the theory of the practice that we just did? Sure. there's energy within you so I mentioned while we were doing it potential so energy is often in a state of potential it's not activated

meaning that there's things within us that we can activate to tune in to certain let's say frequencies this is technology really I mean our cell phones our radios our zoom links and everything as long as we have the right station we push the right buttons all of a sudden we get the right frequency and information. The same is true with your system. You're having a very advanced system of energy. Your consciousness, your mind, your body has tremendous potential, but it's only in potential form unless it's activated. So what we did is just activated what was already inside of you and got it to circulate. So when we do something like this, you're activating the energy there. Let's use a musical instrument. You have a guitar. It's in a potential. It's in a potential.

state until you start strumming it. Now, how much gong does that player have? Right? So how much skill do they have in playing those strings? Then there's vibration that comes out and they're like, oh, wow, that sounds good. Or if you hand that guitar to my five-year-old and she starts playing it, you're like, oh, wow, that is a cacophony of irritation. So in a similar way, when our energy isn't being played right, or if that instrument is out of tune, even if you're a good guitar player, if it's out of tune, it's not going to sound right. So there's two things. One, we want to increase the skill of us playing the instrument of our mind,

bodies, and spirits. And we also want to make sure this thing is in tune. So when we do play it, it's harmonious. And so that's kind of what we're doing when we're doing all these exercises. Yeah, so let me just make sure I kind of understand. So I'm not hearing. So I know you're using the word energy, but I'm not. it's not clear to me what you mean by that, which is okay, because I think what I'm sort of hearing you say is that, okay, look, it's not about, there's clearly some kind of intervention that you can do, like you can do something, right? And then you will feel different. And whether that is real, I hesitate to use the word real, but like you're saying, I mean, obviously that there are ways where, you know, there's a day where my body is functioning, well, my mind is functioning well, arguably my spirit is functioning well, you're just like more focused, you get more done, you are more energetic. There is something about, and every day you are theoretically capable of that, right?

So like the difference between someone who has a productive day and someone who has an unproductive day, I think you can make a very clear argument that there is like a potential difference. And getting up to that potential involves the activation of you in some way. and we use the word energy to loosely describe that whole constellation of thoughts, emotions, physical, like the tendency to move, like just how sluggish you feel, how slouched over you are, how excited you are mentally. But I'm kind of curious about this. Like, do you think this stuff is quote unquote real? Like, do you think that we actually have some?

as of yet scientifically undetected, energetic, whatever, that can be, like, directly manipulated? Or do you think that it's just, like, just physiology that we don't understand yet? I don't even know if that's right. But does that kind of make sense? Like, is this stuff real? Like, even if it makes us feel a certain way, do you think it's like she is a real thing? Is a real thing or not? I mean, I think we could break it down because one thing we were saying, we all.

agree we're alive and so now as soon as we say that we run into something mysterious because we don't understand like the heart for example the heart is beating there's an electrical impulse there's definitely electricity and bioelectricity in the in the body but it's different in the electricity that we might say or the energy that we know let's say to be scientifically true let's say gravity or electromagnetism or strong force or weak force those are the four you know forms of energy that's described in science, but there's something else that the, that we can all

agree upon which is aliveness. So your heartbeat starts some, what is it, nine weeks in utero? And we don't quite understand why it starts beating. I mean, I talked to a scientist. They said it was like a match that learned how to light itself. And I was like, oh, that's an interesting phenomena. Okay. You understand this more, but like, how did the heartbeat start? How did the, yeah. So, all, these physiological functions. It's mysterious. You know, I think I'm going to push back. So I'm going to push back against something you're saying.

I don't think it invalidates. I have my own understanding of chi and prana and studying medical physiology. But I think right now the way that we understand the body is that actually it is explainable. So we have these things called pacemaker cells in the heart. And we actually know exactly what kind of electrical activity we have in the heart. So you have these things called action potentials, which are chemical gradients. So the gradient between how many positively charged ions we have inside the cell,

and positively charged ions we have outside of the cell. I don't know if this makes sense, but if I have 100 units of positive charge outside the cell, then there is a chemical, electrochemical gradient. And when those usually sodium ions travel from one side to the other, it shifts the chemical gradient and then we get something called an action potential. And there are these cells in the heart that are called pacemaker cells, which basically have like this, you know, like the Zen water tipping bamboo thing where it like fills up with water and then it tips and then it fills up with water and then it tips.

That's basically how our cardiac physiology works. It kind of triggers and then there's something called a refractory period, which is also true in sexual physiology for dudes, and then you can't trigger right away again. And so we sort of know some of that. Maybe with Qigong, you can. Okay, cool. Maybe a demonstration for a different day,

but we talk about it. For a different day, you know, yeah. And, you know, I don't mean to say that just because we understand what happens in the heart, and I think even from like a life perspective, right, We can trace back life to particular physiologic mechanisms. So, for example, there's like brain death, right, where, like, the physiology is still functioning.

We also know that there are things like cardiac arrhythmias. So, like, cardiac arrhythmias are when the electrical activity in the heart makes it so that the heart can no longer effectively pump. And then once the heart is no longer able to effectively pump, it reduces its own circulation and reduces the circulation to the other parts of the body. I'm not trying to say that you're wrong. I mean, I agree with you, but I think that... No, I love what you're saying.

No, this is... And it's so important. I'm just getting to the behind all of that and all that physiological explanation, which is beautiful. And also so incredible. Like, that physiological function is so amazing. And the way you described it, beautiful. It's like poetry. And then that heartbeat and the blood needs to work with the lungs and the oxygen.

There's something in time. working within us that's way beyond what we could do consciously. And I don't know if you agree with this, but way beyond what we could, what we understand. I think there's some mystery about the why behind all of that. And then where did that that impetus for life start? Yeah. So this is, I hope, I think there's a good argument against that. And this is not to say, this is why, this is why like I know, you know, and if that,

that's okay for me to say, Lee. Oh, please. No, I love, we're trying to get to, the more, you know, the more that I've studied this, because like I said, I've been studying for 38 years, the more we start to understand that the east, eastern perspective and the Western perspective are complementary.

There's, they're lining up more and more and more and more, and we're understanding more and more and more. Only thing I'm saying is that life is mysterious, like how we came into this world, you know, We run into the mystery at some point. And Chi is just a way to say that there's energy in the body that's different than the energy that's, say, powering your appliances in your room. Okay.

We can't just plug a body in and say, put some electricity into a dead body and make it come back to life. It's a different current. And it's something mysterious about that energy that is bioelectricity. Okay. I mean, I think, so I'm asking you for your, point of view, I'm really glad you're sharing it. I think at the end of the day, I agree with sort of where you end up. But I think the mechanisms, it just, I mean, you're a Qigong master, right?

So you're not like a medical physiologist or something. So I think this is where the way that I would understand it. So two or three things. The first is the reason I wanted to start with a practice I'm just curious about your take on the theory, but I think that the practices work. Okay? I'll tell you from a Chinese medicine perspective. You know, from Chinese medicine perspective, I mean, the Western perspective,

the Chinese medicine perspective, maybe the Ayurvedic perspective are different paradig perspective are different paradig. We're talking about, like, for example, in Chinese medicine, they're going to measure how strong your heart chi is, how strong your lung chi is. So they'll look at sickness and illness,

depending on the strength or what is the chi in the body doing. So those different ways in which they read the energy. You take the pulse, you look at the tongue, you ask about sleep, you ask about emotions. And then because we're talking about the heart, let's say the heart chi is deficient. Often somebody with heart chi deficiency, they don't have enough energy to sleep well, for example. So heart chi deficiency is going to create insomnia or weird dreams. or anxiety and all of a sudden when your heart energy is stronger, you breathe better, your perspective on life shifts.

So when somebody comes to me with like, I have insomnia or I have anxiety, I always look at, let's look at how strong or how weak is the heart energy. And then we also look in terms of how is everything related. So energetic paradigm is going to say your mind and your body are related. how much stress you are holding will create a physiological impact in your body. What's your posture like? For example, when you're moving more, you're going to emotionally feel better because you're circulating energy and energy doesn't get stagnant.

So, for example, if somebody sits too long, we say that's going to create stagnant chi in the system. If things are stagnant, you're going to feel stiff, tight pain. and, you know, a new study that I read was called sitting is the new smoking, meaning that if you sit too long, it's detrimental to your physiology. So all of these things sort of start to line up as we study stress and our perception of stress and the state of our thoughts, which, you know, thoughts again to me are energy. It's the energy of the mind, and that has a big impact on our physiology.

So mind-body connection is something that we've talked about in energy medicine for thousands of years. And it seems to be a newer concept in Western medicine. I appreciate that explanation. So, like, I think, you know, my take on it is that, so what I think is really fascinating is you can look at studies on Tai Chi compared to exercise. And if it is just reducible to the body, then you would expect those studies to have the same.

clinical effects. The kind of counterpoint to this is there was actually recently a meta-analysis on yoga that showed that a bunch of studies on yoga compared to exercise, actually yoga is not more effective. So there's actually some conflicting evidence that, you know, physical stuff is fine. I, is just as good. And I just want to share like a story. I haven't really told this story before.

But so what was really interesting is when I went to, when I got my first research job at Harvard, my, my PI was, like the person who's running the lab that I was in, was actually like a humanities PhD. And she's like one of these people that was like diagnosed with cancer was in treatment, went to a Tai Chi thing, had this like weird healing experience where she felt like chief, like a reign of divine chi or something flow through her body. And then like her cancer went into remission. And so she was in treatment, right? But her treatment response. was not what was expected. So she's someone who's a very intelligent person, but not a scientist, actually.

And so her, and then she had this experience, and she was like, what the hell happened? So she made a hard career pivot into studying the science behind what the hell happened to her. So I'm not quite sure. So kind of where I am now is that, first of all, I think it's a cool point that people who are into like chi, prana, yoga, whatever, the mind-body connection has been much more. It's been known that these two things are connected and there's a whole circuit in this stuff

way more than like what we consider scientific allopathic Western medicine. That's a relatively recent discovery for us as medical doctors. So I think they were on to something. And then I think the second thing is that, you know, there are plenty of trials that show that these practices

are effective. So I think the tricky thing is that I don't know if the underlying theory is precisely what you're describing. But I think that there's decent evidence that there is something going on with mind-body practices that we are not fully able to account for. But I don't know that it's a mystical force. I do think it's a mystical force, for the record. But I don't know that you can kind of say that in a logical or scientific way.

I think there are certain things, the effect size of Chi Gong, Browniam, Tai Chi, and yoga is greater than what we would be able to calculate from our understanding of physiology, in my opinion. Right. So there's some missing element. And what I'm really curious about is like, so you mentioned this like heart chi deficiency, right? So when our heart energy is weak, what is that? Can you tell us more about that? And do you, can we do a practice around that for people? who are anxious have insomnia.

Right. Right. And so also with heart chi deficiency, the interesting thing is that emotionally, we would say in Chinese medicine that you are more susceptible to other people's emotions. So you're in a room or somebody else is agitated and all of a sudden you feel agitated. Or somebody says something to you and maybe it's a little bit personal but it's no big deal but it has a big impact on you. Or you just in a space that has nothing to do with you and people are

arguing and then you feel it or you read the news and you get depressed. We say that's your heart chee is deficient. It's almost like an emotional immune system. Like people have different levels of sensitivity. We might call it highly sensitive people or not, but we would describe that as a heart chie phenomenon. I want to take a hard pivot for a second. So there was a post on our subreddit about all of this information about the Epstein files is really messing with. my mental. So can you tell us what, so what are the, like, so you mentioned, okay, so emotional susceptibility, what are the features that indicate and how do you know if someone has a deficient heart, chi, she, yeah, right. Yeah, and it also relates interestingly enough to the paracardium.

Paracardium is what we call heart protector, but they're both connected. And paracardium's job energetically is to keep you protected from other people's emotions so as a let's say psychologist you listen to people's problems all day me as an acupuncturist people come in and tell me their problems all day if my heart chi and paracardium chi are weak all of a sudden i feel either really off balance or i actually take on their problems myself physiologically so some people that i was training in chigong they're like oh my gosh i'm a psychologist but i've talked to people with with depression, I start to feel depressed. Or I'm treating somebody with back pain,

my back feels a little weird after I treat him. There's that kind of thing happening that you can use to strengthen your heart sheet to not take it on. So people can think about this for themselves. When do I get, maybe my call it be triggered? I read the Epstein files and now I get this, this was the trigger, now I feel anxious,

I feel depressed, the state of the world. You know, I read about some environmental thing and I feel, oh my God, I'm feel angry. And now what can we do to move and circulate that energy? Because really nobody wants to wake up in the morning and say, you know, I want to feel fatigued, depressed, anxious, and low energy today. But unfortunately, a lot of people do. Can I ask a couple questions about that? So you said when people have, so totally makes sort of sense about the paracardium, right? So the paracardium for people who don't know is a,

basically a sack of, it's like a container for your heart. So it's like a pretty tough layer around the heart that protects your heart. So you said that people who have weak heart chi will have more susceptibility to other people's emotions. How does that connect to insomnia and some of the other things? What are the other features of deficient heart-chey energy? Right. Let's talk about insomnia because it's an interesting one. Because in Chinese medicine, we say you need energy to sleep.

If you don't have enough energy, you won't sleep well. Now, what kind of energy? There's many different kinds of energy. So there's, let's just break it down to yin and yang. So when we think of energy, we think of like, I have a cup of coffee, I'm ready to go, energy. There might be difference between being depressed and angry energy. So there's different qualities to the energy, often showing up in our emotions. Insomnia, for example, we say you don't have enough chi to sleep, meaning you don't have enough yin energy.

You are wired and tired. So you might be tired. The chi is sort of imbalanced. And when you're sleeping, we say you need chi to sleep because when you're sleeping, you're breathing deep, you're often snoring, you're dreaming, you're processing, you're doing all these interesting, physiological, emotional things. That's a fascinating perspective. Isn't it? Yes. And then you need energy to do all of those things. So if you don't have enough

to sleep, you'll wake up at in the morning, you'll wake up at 3 a.m. and I'm still tired, or you wake up tired. Or you can't go to sleep because the energy, when you can't go to sleep, usually the energy is imbalanced and often it's deficient. You're just like, you're just out of balance. Like too many thoughts, even though I'm tired. And the key sign is when you wake up in the morning, are you tired when you wake up? Did you sleep and rest? Because when you rest well, like if you look at children, I have a good example. I have a five-year-old. She goes to sleep. She goes to sleep almost immediately. And she sleeps like 10 hours and she wakes up charged. fully charge at like, you know, 6 a.m., way too much energy for most adults,

because she wants to immediately like laugh and play and giggle and wrestle. And you're just like, let me have my cup of coffee, right? So that just shows us a little bit about the heart chi. Now, we have all the different organs. We have the lung chi, we have the liver chi, we have the kidney chi. There'll be different manifestations depending on the organ. That's what you study in Chinese medicine. What does kidney chi deficiency look like?

What does lung chi deficiency look like? So that's a little bit of what we do. This is what I like about the conversation. So I'm sorry if I push back against some of the theory. I'm really curious about that. But this is where I can absolutely support what you're saying with like medical science. So there was something really interesting I realized with my kids. And then I sort of like, you know, I made a video about it.

But I think a lot of people don't realize how much energy it takes to fall asleep. So what I realized with my kids and this has to do with frontal lobe. exhaustion, but sitting in bed and controlling your impulses requires a certain degree of willpower or frontal lobe function. That's the part of our brain that suppresses impulses. So what I saw with my kids is if they get too tired, they cannot stay in bed. They cannot force themselves to calm down. They start responding to all their impulses. They're getting up. Now they need to drink of water now. So it's like, if you miss this window where they get so fatigued that they can no longer put themselves to bed. And I see this with patients with insomnia too, right?

So where it's like kind of like, actually the scary thing is not patients with insomnia. I see this with everyone, which is if you miss your sleep window, if you are so tired that your brain is no longer able to restrain your impulses, the likelihood that you pull out your phone and scroll at 1130 at night because you can't restrain that impulse, you can't tolerate the boredom skyrockets. What I'm kind of curious about, and the other really interesting things about, you know, this is what I think is really interesting about these Eastern systems of medicine is that they overlap with kind of like you were saying. They kind of converge with like Western science.

So one of the most specific features of major depressive disorder is something called early morning awakening. So if we look at depression, you can be sad or have a low mood. if you've got cancer, if you're going through a breakup, if you have grief. But one of the very specific features of a mood disorder is literally early morning awakening. So one of the things I was taught is, you know, if you're trying to figure out if someone has a depression or if they're just adjusting to life circumstances, ask them, do you wake up

super early in the morning with like oftentimes a head full of thoughts? And that is specific to a mood disorder. So what I'm kind of curious about is how does the heart, how does the heart, how, How does the deficiency in heart chi, is there like a mechanistic explanation for why that causes insomnia? I mean, the why is often lifestyle. You know, we can see lifestyle or the other kind of chi that we describe is prenatal chi, the energy you're born with from your parents. And postnatal chi is basically lifestyle.

How are you breathing? Are you exercising? How's your relationships? What are you eating? So then we modulate all of that. I guess I was asking a slightly different question. How does Hart Chee connect with sleep theoretically? Mainly through emotion.

Through emotion. So that is the media, right? So it's like, okay. So nightmares, you know, too much emotional energy at night, we're not able to kind of calm it down. Okay. So I was just curious about that. And so it's basically.

It can be during the day. It could be just like, that's just your kind of baseline state. You're just, I'm anxious. and then you go to sleep. So anxiety is a heart chi function where depression would be considered lung chi. Interesting. So lung chi, for example,

and you can look at like the physiological body posture of depression is a sunken chest. So they say, oh, the chi of the lungs is deflated. So like, hey, how are you doing? And you're like, you can tell by my posture. If I'm like this, you might say, oh, their energy is displaying something totally different than depression.

So if I'm like smiling and I'm up and I say, hey, I'm so depressed. How are you? You're like, what you're saying doesn't match your physiology. So the chi is like wind through the trees. The tree's not moving. Just in the same way, maybe let's say your body is moving in response to this invisible energy. So the tree, you see it moving, but it's not moving itself. So the same, we'd say that the wind, the energy, which is invisible, moves you.

the emotion in Chinese medicine, the energy in motion creates feelings, which creates body position as well. Interesting. Yeah. So like, if I'm smiling, I'm like, you can tell what I'm feeling usually, right? So depression and wind is moving us like this. Inspiration, we're going to be like this. And they go vice versa. So sometimes what we would do for somebody experiencing depression or anxiety is when we start moving their body in different.

ways and that energy starts to circulate and then the feelings and the emotions start to move in a different way. Great. So can we do, I mean, are you able to teach us? I'm super curious about this, like, highly sensitive person, absorbing the emotions of what's going on in the world, you know, protecting our emotional paracardium. Love that term. Yeah. So can you teach us a short sequence of that boosts our heart, chi? Is that doable? You got it. You got it right there. Okay. This boost the heart sheet and strengthen the paracardium so our emotional immune system is stronger.

Love it. Okay. Let's do it. Okay. Let's do it. Okay, guys. So once again, y'all, y'all got to get up. Okay? All right. And if you don't get up, just do it in your chair. But it's way better if you get up. So we were talking to the heart she here, to free it up, let's go

back to this. Let's just tap here. These are great points. So if you're feeling anxious, if you're feeling nervous tension or just feeling kind of down, we do this little routine and we'll shift the energy. So one great way to test this out is do it for yourself. Try it. So we're going to go up and down like this. Now we're going to take a nice deep breath. We're going to do a different breathing exercise. We're going to inhale through the nose. And I want you to exhale with the heart sound, which is ha. H-A-A-A. A. A. So we're going to take a nice deep breath. We're going to do a different breathing exercise. We're going to do a So you're gonna, yeah, excellent, do it again. One more time.

And that release, that breath clears anxiety. Good, relax. Now we'll do a movement. This is called spinal cord breathing. And spinal cord breathing, we're gonna breathe slow and deep and move the spine, and it's helpful for the nervous system. And back tension.

So hands here, knees slightly bent. We're gonna inhale and look up and exhale and round the back. chin goes down towards your chest and inhale nice deep breath and we're moving all the joints in the spine and if you're familiar with yoga practice this is very similar to cat cow but we're doing it standing and deep breath pour the breath in and then as you exhale round the back and we squeeze the breath out inhale open the chest

Bring a little mindfulness into this movement. Feel the way your spine articulates. Feel the movement of the joints in your spine. Just put your attention into the movement and the breath. Inhale, open the chest. Exhale, round the back. And we're gonna do it one more time. Relax.

Excellent. Now with knocking on the door of life, that twisting one and the spinal cord breathing, you can get some air. energy to flow and move all the joints in the spine takes three to five minutes and then come back to sitting. Do that. Take a few chi breaks during your day. All right, one of the best ways in chigong practice to clear emotional stress and anxiety is to shake. Now, you'll see shaking done in professional athletes to get rid of anxiety. I'm watching the Winter Olympics and before

an event, they're doing pretty much what we're doing. They're shaking and they're They're breathing, right? So it helps people to get into peak performance by clearing emotional stress. So you shake the wrist, and in Qigong, the way we do it, we bounce into the legs. We're going to bounce and we're going to release the shoulders. And now go ahead instead of just shaking, the hands just pump the wrist. Pump the wrist, bounce into the leg, and now do some of that breathing that we were doing. Inhale through the nose.

Exhale with that long sigh, that heart sound. Excellent. And relax right at the back of the neck as well. Take a deep breath. This episode is brought to you by CarMax. Want to buy a car the easy way? Start at CarMax. Want to browse with confidence? Get pre-qualified with no impact on your credit score and shop within your budget. From luxury to family rides, CarMax has options for almost every price range, including over 25,000 cars under $25,000. Want to get started? Head to CarMax.com for detail. and get pre-qualified today. Want to drive? CarMax.

Good, slow it down. Check in with yourself. Notice how your body feels. Is there a little buzzing, a tingling? In Qigong terms, it would say that activated the Chi. There's more energy moving in the meridian lines. There's more blood flow. In Chinese medicine, they say,

Qi is the commander of blood. So when Qi moves, the circulation follows. Just have an experience of what that's like for yourself. Now, bend your knees. And we're going to do one that is going to protect your emotional heart space so that there's your energy and then there's the world around you so that we're empathetic and sensitive, but we're not taking on the world's energy into ourselves.

Though this one is for the heart and the paracardium, we're going to cross the wrist like this. We're protected. Now, when I do it, my wrists aren't touching. So, and it doesn't matter necessarily which hand is in front. And we brush right across the chest and we float the hands down. Now these chigong movements are done slowly with relaxation. Those two key principles are very important in energy cultivation.

Slow and relax. When you relax, your energy system expands. The channels dilate. So we're going to inhale, wrist cross, and exhale. Relax the muscles in your upper back neck and shoulders. Inhale and exhale nice and soft and slow. Take this as an opportunity not to have to rush

or be anywhere other than where you are. No hurry. Take this as a moment to be mindful, to drop into relaxation, to cultivate a little inner peace and tranquility within yourself. And it won't take long, but it will change your inner state in a very profound way.

Inhale, the hands float up. Exhale, the hands float down. We're just going to do this a few more times. Inhale, soft neck, shoulders, upper back. Soft hands, soft arms. In essence, we're moving the body like water. Good. And now we're going to hold this position, just hands in front of the chest,

wrist cross, we're like this, so not too close, expand your energy, that hands and wrists aren't touching, and we're in fact in front of the paracardiome points that's called the heart protector. And so I want you to just do a little standing visualization with me, close your eyes, hold this position, imagine golden light surrounding your body in front, sides, and behind you, And this golden light is like a shield or a filter. It allows positive energy in, allows us to still be sensitive, but we're not taking on the energy of the world around us.

And when we can do this, we've become more powerful within ourselves. Your energy isn't dictated by the world around you or the people around you. You are empowered from within. Relax, bring the hands down. Now let's do one. This is called coming home to the heart. We're going to just take the hands out like this, back of the hands towards each other. Spiral in right to your chest and inhale here. Let your heart expand and then exhale, float the hands out, back of the hands towards each other.

Inhale, spiral in. I want you to feel like you're swimming in water. Nice and slow. Your arms are buoyant and you're connecting to this flow state. exhale the arms float out back in the hands towards each other and then inhale come in expand your chest a little bit nice slow movement exhale float the hands out inhale expand and open now I want you to just hold some attention to how you want to feel whether it's joy peace present, inspired, and I want you to just draw that energy in into your heart center. Move slowly to enter the flow.

Go slow to enter the flow. We all want to feel this flow state. The flow state the characteristics is an increase in energy, a deeper connection to the present moment, and more of a oneness between what you're doing in your life with your your intentions. Inhale as you come in. Exhale, float the hands out. Simple movements but are very effective. Now bring the hands in and I want you to just hold this ball of energy right in front of your chest and see if you can feel the energy in your hands. The hands aren't touching but just feel the

power, the chi in the hands and also feel the chi in the center. of your chest. So go ahead, close your eyes, slow deep breaths. Feel your own inner power, your own inner lights and radiance. You are powerful. You have strength, light, and energy within yourself. And when we do these movements, it becomes more activated. Relax hands down and then let's just float the hands up, up over the head. We call this pulling down the sky and it helps to shift our perspective. Pull in an expanded perspective. And just again, tune in what kind of energy do I need and let it shower through you.

We're always tuned in to a particular kind of energy and it shows up in the quality of our thoughts and the quality of our feelings. Realign to what it is you want. Inhale slowly, exhale slowly. And just bring in some mental clarity, some present moment, a warm, awareness. Let yourself be filled up with chi with life force energy. Inhale, float the arms up, nice and slow. Exhale, float them down with relaxation. Waves of relaxation moving through you. Good. Bring the hands down back over the lower abdomen like we did and just take a few slow deep breaths.

Nice and slow through the nose. See if you can make your breath now about five seconds on the inhale in about five seconds on the exhale. And then sense and feel. How do I feel? Nice slow breathing. Five second inhale, five second exhale. Let this state of relaxation, inner peace, mental clarity, just stay with you. We anchor it in.

That's why we put the hands here on the belly. We call this the center. Do that one more time. Nice slow inhale, nice slow exhale. Wonderful. Nice little short practice. That one for the heart, paracardium, and a few other things that we brought in as well. All right, let's talk again.

Great. Okay. I have so, oh, okay, this is right. All right. I have, first of all, Lee, thank you. I'm going to just check in with chat real quick. did you guys do that? Okay, cool.

So I think this is great. So I think this is when I was, we've been trying to get Lee on stream for a little while now. That's just as much on us as it is on him. But I just want to explain this to y'all. Like this is why we have Lee here because, see, like when people ask me questions like, oh, how do I deal with the stress of the Epstein files?

It's like, okay, there's a bunch of stuff. there's a bunch of scientific papers, like whatever. But I think at the end of the day, like, there's, we have, we have certain practices that are available to us. I don't know what the science behind them is. I've tried really hard to figure out the science behind them. And I think I have a bunch of theories. That's a conversation for a different day, maybe.

But I think that, like, the efficacy of the practice, I think is great. One or two thoughts that I had, that I realized not to, when I, teach this stuff, Lee, I think there's one or two things that I want to kind of cloop people in on. The first is, so I don't think Lee said this explicitly, but one thing that I would strongly recommend y'all do is when you do this practice, pay attention to what you feel, right? So I think, you know, Lee will walk us through these motions, and I realized something that I was doing as a student was, I was trying to mimic the precision of your hand movements, which we'll get to in a second. But I think even just feeling, so when you close your eyes and you do the practice, there's a certain element, I'm sure, of doing it right.

But then there's also an element of like, pay attention to what you feel. So I thought especially the fact that, so just to be blunt, so I was thinking about proprioception, which is people think we have five senses. actually have way more than five senses. We have a sense called proprioception, which is our ability to determine where our body is in space, right? I'm not actually touching something, but I can tell my arms are up or my arms are down or whatever. You know, what I think is really fascinating. I was in a neuroscience lab for the somatosensory cortex, is when we move our bodies in certain ways, it creates feelings, and I think this is what they meant by Chi. You feel something that is not there usually in your body. And the better you get it tuning into yourself, I think the more that

you feel it. For me, it was quite profound with this. If you touch them, the feeling that you get is completely different from if there's a gap. And you know, there were many times where I felt like certain things, like it's weird. Like there was a particular thing that you did. So with this one and then this one, there were certain things where you, like you, I felt like a pipe. Like, I don't know how else to describe it. Like, there's like a pipe that goes from the center of my chest, like, outward. The other really interesting thing that I felt, I don't know if anyone else, you said visualize a gold shield. And I think this is something weird as going on in my somatosensory cortex. I wasn't visualizing. I felt something. I felt like a barrier, which, which is really interesting from, there's a lot of cool science around visualization and how that works.

stuff like that. But I strongly encourage you all to tap into your own experience of these things. And, you know, I think visualized, but I love this because there's like actually, I'm sure that my brain is being activated in certain ways. And I think what people did is when their brain got activated. Maybe it's real chi. Maybe our brain is detecting chi. But I think sometimes, like, we don't actually say this, but I think you can feel your chi, like literally. And You did a great job of explaining that right at the beginning when we were doing this and stuff like that. You feel tingling. But my experience of it, and this happens to a lot of people in our community, we'll do certain practices.

There's one called charging the laser beam, where you also have like a sensation of like a laser beam shooting out of your third eye. It's really cool. Something weird going on in the brain. But it's a conserved experience amongst people. But I think, you know, it's great, Lee. Like this is exactly what I was hoping we can share with people. So thank you for sharing it. My pleasure.

If you have other stuff that you want to add about this practice, otherwise we can talk about one or two other things. Like is there any other explanation or anything that you want to offer about this? This is specific to, let's say, hearts and anxiety and the chest, but it does other things too because everything's connected. And I love it too just to be able to get that tangible sensation of what we're talking about. because having an experience is it just changes the conversation because we could talk about it all day long until you have the experience you're just like okay cool you have to relate it to an experience so I love that we were able to do that and stand up and do a full practice um not a full practice a full practice really is like an hour long so just imagine when you do all these activations and do

this stuff for like an hour you feel for me you just feel so good you just feel I don't know quite how to describe it, but it's something very tangibly shifts in a short amount of time and then continues to stay with you if you do a consistent practice. And that's what I love about it. That's why I've been doing it for 38 years. And that's why that question way back when, why aren't more people doing it? That's been my mission to just give people tools and resources that they normally wouldn't otherwise have. Awesome, man. That's such a great mission. Yeah, I think, yeah, thank you so much. for sharing that. I was curious. So I know we talked, so we've done a sequence for, I guess,

just generally getting out of your chair and energizing some. What was, how would you describe the first sequence that we did? Yeah, maybe like a power up sequence. Okay. Just power up your energy. A power up sequence. And then we, the one that we just did was for heart chi, but is also for like emotional protection. Exactly. Right. So your emotional immune system, that's awesome. Also potentially helps with things like anxiety or having difficulty falling asleep gives you restful sleep. Right. So does that cultivate your yin? That does. The yin is the slow movement. So when you're doing slow movements in general, it's going to cultivate that relaxation in yourself. And we can talk about it in the nervous

system too. You know, the fight or flight would be more young. And then the yin is more the rest and digest or the parasympathetic. A yin and yong always is in comparison to something. So we always compare you could be different people night and day the sunny side of a hill the shady side and the interesting thing is that they always start to change they need to cycle through so in terms of sleep when you when you have good yin energy it will convert to good young energy and then if you have a lot of young energy you move through the day with more excitement and inspiration you again will move with more activity during the day which will then change to good yin energy

So I do like the analogy of kids, because they do, they express this very easily. Yeah. So, so it's so interesting because I, I, so the reason I got into this stuff, Lee, this stuff, I mean, so, you know, I, I learned all this stuff in India. And then I was like, so I had some experiences. And those were like insane. And I was like, okay, yeah, I got to figure out what the hell is actually going on because like you have this experience. And then you're like, I don't know what this is. Like, am I insane?

Like, literally is this hallucination. And then I wound up with this PI, right? So she had the same experience. I think that's part of the reason I got the job there is I had a terrible GPA and stuff. And she was interviewing me. And then so, you know, I didn't find out about this until later. But I was telling her, I was like, I want to understand what the hell happened to me. Mm-hmm.

And the really interesting thing is when you describe things in this way, it's fascinating how much research I can think of that kind of backs this up. So, so what's, what's really interesting is when I work with people who have insomnia, a big part, or have difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, whatever, a big part that I try to explain to them is your ability to go to sleep at night. Everyone is like bedtime routine, bedtime routine, bedtime routine. There's a lot of data to support that, but I think it is woefully incomplete. The most natural way that you go to sleep depends on how you spent the whole of your day. So if you, and you, we know this, right?

You've had some days like, I went hiking in Colorado many years ago. And then it's like going to sleep isn't a problem. Falling asleep is determined first and foremost, not about your bedtime routine, but how did you spend the hours of your day? Yeah. Right? Then we get into problems sometimes with insomnia disorders and stuff because they will have a full day and they still have difficulty falling asleep.

Sure. But I think that I love this idea of like good, young, precedes healthy yin and healthy yin will automatically create good yong I think we're a society that way too much focuses on like maximizing and optimizing our young

without sort of realizing that we can just, it'll come naturally if your yin is healthy right right? Right. And even the things that we want like hey we want efficiency we want productivity. If you have good yin it will help like

I don't know if I told you what Dr. Kaye, I wrote a book Ready Set Slow this year. And this yin is slow. But when you do things slowly, often you become more efficient because you're more mindful. You're more in tune with your priorities. You're more productive. And often when we rush around, we make mistakes. We're scattered. We have to redo things.

I did some research on slow weightlifting, for example. And if you just do slow lifting, you've got. get good results and you don't have to work as long. You don't have to do as many times in the gym. So it's actually much more efficient and there's so many things about that. We did a slow breathing. Four seconds, five seconds, inhale, five seconds exhale. That's actually an ideal breath. And so when you slow things down, you're going to get the things that you want. And you want, you get those things that you want, not at some later day, but you get to create more moments in your day of elevated positive energy because of that yen.

That's so fascinating. I think we're seeking that yen. Yeah. Yeah. So if I can shift gears for a second, as I'm thinking about yin and speeding up, and I'm sort of, my mind is going to attention, ADHD, things like that. Do you have, I know we talked about a couple of different practices. Did we already cover sort of attention focus in one of the practices you talked about,

or is that something we can talk about more explicitly? Let's let's talk about it more explicitly and let's do a little routine for that. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. So explain to me when someone has difficulty focusing, when they're overly distracted, you know, what is the, how do you understand that in the system of Chinese medicine? Right.

Now, we're going to talk about a different element because the heart, for example, is the fire element. What we're talking about now is the earth element. Okay. And the earth element has to do with, in physiological Chinese medicine, would be more digestion. Okay. But so when we're centered, you have this is the earth center. We also say that this the when your energy is centered, you're more present and your mind is clearer and more focused and more open. So every element has sort of this relational energy with a system of physiology

and emotions and thought. So focus will be an earth element issue. Now we call it a earth chi deficiency would be also a student syndrome. So for example, students have lots of stress and they're reading a lot and they're focusing a lot. All of a sudden the energy gets deficient. The energy can get deficient in the earth element, we call it spleen chi or stomach chi deficiency will create a lack of rooting. Like the tree isn't grounded. So your attention just goes here, there, everywhere. Like a lot of us have the our attention is is also being trained by society now with smartphones and all the apps and everything so we have to actually really

counter what's going on around us to be able to hold some focused attention and to be more present so I think mindfulness and all these practices do a really good job of showcasing the benefit and we just feel better when we're more present with attention deficit we want to to come to our center. So one of the things we could do is work with our breathing, work with our center. We could work with being more mindful. And for Qigong practitioners, the mindfulness, we put it to motion so that it's embodied, so that it's more tangible, and so we become more empowered. So there's a whole series of movements that we could do for that earth element

that keeps us grounded and more open-minded rather than so scattered in our attention. So how do we, what, how does studying too much or student syndrome, help me understand, like, how does that, so I get that, okay, grounding. Distraction is the opposite of grounding. Right. Grounding feels like an earthy thing, hence the word grounding. Grounding, yeah. Right. So there's like this, this stability element, it's sort of in our torso, right? So a lot of our stability comes from our, you know, our trunk region, our abdominal muscles, our core, provides a lot of that stability.

So I can sort of see how from like a broad strokes, abstract kind of sense, how like ground, middle of my body, distraction, how those things can kind of fit together. But what happens when someone studies too much? How do those things connect? Right. And I think we can all think about when you are studying a lot or you're focusing a lot, what that does to your energy. Maybe we're sitting and reading, all of a sudden you get kind of brain fog after a certain amount of time.

So I think some of the studies that I've read, say, to do your studies or your work in shorter bursts, where instead of just like just drone on and on and on for two or three hours, study or focus or work for 25 to 45 minutes, take a movement break. 10 minute movement break, come back and focus again. And that is one of the most efficient ways to concentrate or remember or to learn is not in these long four or five hour blocks. And I think unfortunately, just nobody in our education

is really doing what maximizes learning for students. And I think there's a whole thing about how to be efficient learners rather than just parrots and repeating and regurgitating information so that we get good grades. We're not learning how to become good learners. We're trying to get good grades in school from a very early age. And then, you know, we're not maximizing our energy systems nor our brain nor our nervous system. And I think it's just unfortunate. So some of these energy techniques will help us with that. Now, when we when we come to our center, let's just say this, the navel is the center because this is where we, everything started. The energy that she came from our mom and we physiologically expanded from here.

It's also like you were saying, sort of the center of the upper body and the lower body. So we call this the center and it's related to being centered, which means that we're stabilized. We're more, maybe the mindset would be more present. Yes, we can still think about the future and yes, we can think about the past, but there's a stability in the center where we're not being pulled off our center by the thoughts of the future. So often we are thinking about the future. We're gonna think about something we're worried about and we'll bring that stress of that future projection

into the present moment and we can actually have a response in our nervous system that signals, my life is threatened, I'm in stress mode. And we get chronic stress that way. So one of the good things about this energy work is that the mind becomes more clear, we're stable, we're not creating stressful scenarios in our minds as strongly and so we'll have less stress moving in our system in each of our present moments that's the

sign of the center a sign of off-balanced center or energy deficient earth element excessive worry obsessive compulsive thinking too many thoughts too frequently where thoughts just can't settle in we can't focus clearly, scattered attention. Those would all be signs of earth element and balance. That's so interesting because I think, you know, when you said that the heart, heart energy stuff is anxiety. Some of the things you're describing now, I think we would lump together with anxiety. But part of what I think is fascinating about Chinese medicine and Indian medicine is how the diagnostic

conceptions we have in the West, there's like overlaps, but they're not really one to one. Right. And so, and it's really interesting because there's, you know, each of the things that you describe is neurologically a little bit different.

So rumination is different from catastrophizing, right? And so sometimes we can ruminate about catastrophizing, but that's kind of my point, is that you can have one without the other. You can ruminate about catastrophizing. These are actually discrete things.

And part of what we try to do on the channel is help people understand that like rumination, anxiety, catastrophizing, perfectionism, even though they're all kind of lumped together, they're actually different things. Obsessional thinking, right? Not being able to let something go. So I think it's also interesting

because when you say that, you know, distractability and obsessional thinking, because if you're ungrounded, you're more distracted, right? Yes, exactly. And some things cause others, like the lack of center creates lots of thinking, and all of a sudden, some of those thoughts then create anxiety. But it wasn't, there are two different frequencies, like two different stations, two different feelings that we delineate.

There's a lot more like, what do I do with it energetically, as opposed to just, oh, that's just anxiety. Yep. Yeah. The root cause is different. I think it's interesting how much, so it's two or three thoughts. One is that one of the key features that people sort of underappreciate about ADHD is that, you know, it's a disorder of focus, which means sometimes you hyperfocus. You do become more obsessional, right?

You can get really lost in something for a long period of time. And then other times you have difficulty focusing, so it's a distractibility. So I think is really fascinating about the Eastern system. and I trained in all kinds of stuff. The reason that I leaned towards these systems is because I thought, I think they're the better than the other ones. I think they're very interesting because they're like experientially based, right? So I think like someone was sitting there and thinking about, okay, why do I feel this way?

Like, what's going on in my head? They were very precise in defining what's happening in their head. What do they feel in their body? And then how can we make changes in either the head or, or the body or our diet or other things that will alleviate what I'm experiencing. So they're very like subjectively experience oriented, which is kind of what I get from this stuff. I don't know if that kind of makes sense.

So what, you want to jump straight to a practice or you want to talk a little bit more about it or what do you feel like doing? Why don't we jump to it? When we do a practice? And then we can kind of talk about the practice that we just had for. focus and attention and maybe wrap it all up together and maybe go you know big view and then because right now we can get into these really like granular things with how do i use energy work and chigong or medicine or movement for particular things and then we could go big picture great sounds awesome

so i'm going to shift to my standing up let's do it all right chat off your seats big boys and girls and everything in between. It's tax season, and at LifeLock, we know you're tired of numbers. But here's a big one you need to hear. Billions. That's the amount of money and refunds the IRS has flagged for possible identity fraud. Now here's another big number. 100 million.

That's how many data points LifeLock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, we'll fix it guaranteed. One last big number. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com slash podcast for the threats you can. can't control terms apply. Okay. Let's get a little bit more rooted in the earth,

in the earth energy. I think it's important to notice that we are in the earth energy field. We call this gravity. We can't see it. It's invisible energy. And it has a direct impact on our body. So in Qigong, we would say there's two main sources of energy

or life force energy or Chi. One is the earth, earth energy, and one is the sky, the universe energy and the sky is the yang, the earth is the end. The gravity pulls things together and then that electromagnetism projects things out. Combining the gravity and electromagnetism, what we get is a spiral-like energy. So spirals are always done in chigong movements as a way to activate this natural life force energy. So let's come back to this movement here, this breathing, slow deep into the center. Whenever you feel like there's too much, much energy, too many thoughts, too much energy in the head, we can first start the process

of grounding by breathing into the center. And what we say in Qigong, in order to be centered, we need energy at the center. And where the breath goes, the energy follows. So let's breathe here. So when you inhale, let the abdomen expand. And when you exhale, the belly goes back towards the spine, slow breathing into the belly. And we want this area to be opened up. You know, this was considered a wisdom center in Qigong. The wisdom of the lower center was your kinesthetic awareness. And there's a lot of science behind this, the second brain, the brain in the gut.

And there's a lot of neurological activity here. There's an actual physiological response to that statement of like the wisdom of your body. So let's breathe into it and tune into the wisdom of the body. Let's get the wisdom of the head and the wisdom of the body connected and have a harmonious relationship within these two systems because they're both you. So breathing here can help us to ground. Feel your feet on the ground as you take another couple of deep breaths

and then relax. Now if you can, let's just step out a little wider. And we'll do a version of knocking on the door of life that's a little bit more grounding with the weight shift. So we're going to shift the weight left and right and then knock like this. And this shifting of the weight, we say it's pumping the energy of the earth into the legs. So it's going to strengthen your legs. It's going to help you be a little more grounded and it's also going to activate the cheat.

So a little variation, a little shift of the weight. When I shift the weight to the right, I'm knocking to the right and I'm leaning to the right. So whatever way you're shifting, that's the way you lean. And then we're knocking. Getting grounded. And we'll slow it down. Relax. Now let's do a fun one.

I was talking about spiraling energy. So this one is called the teacup exercise. You're going to put one hand, go ahead and put your right hand on your hip and your left palm face up. And you're holding a cup of tea. And what you don't want to do is spill the tea. So this is good for all the joints as well as a grounding exercise. going to spiral. We're going to shift the weight. Come across. Keep that palm face up and spiral underneath.

And shift. And then come across the face and then over the head and we're back to where we started. Did you guys spill your tea? It's okay if you did. You're learning. So shift the weight, trying to keep that palm face up. And it's going to be extremely good and beneficial for the shoulder joints and the upper back and neck. And we're strong. strengthening the legs and creating that spiral which opens the energy in the body. Oh, quick. Now. Cross the face over the head.

Okay, so palms face up. Let's try it again. Are you spilling? I wasn't feeling that I didn't do the motion. I was just thinking about I'm going to do this with my kids and I'm actually going to give them a cup of tea. I think that's, I think this perfect. They're going to love it. So it goes across and then like this.

right and then underneath and then above now cross the face and then back to serve then over the head gotcha yeah and weight shift and then around and around and try to extend through the fingers especially here across the face feel all the tendons stretching in the upper body great and then keep those knees bent with the weight shift and then back across Cross. Exactly. And then... Looking good.

And then... Gotcha. You really impressed your family and friends when you conserve tea like this. We... Let's do the other side. What's up? Excellent. Okay.

I-ch-gong. I-chigong, too. Okay, this side, right? Right hand. Palm face up. Now, we're going to the same thing. Shift the weight. Come across.

Spiral. Spiral under the arm, shift the weight, and then come across the face and then over the head. A spiral is a great representation of yin and yam. Because yin is a circle, yong is a line, and when you put them together, you get a spiral. And yin and yong always represent chi. Spiral movements and you'll see a lot of these movements in martial art training. They're the warm-ups of the martial artists. We do them in Tai Chi practices as a way to get the butt.

to get the body prepared to move more energy. Good. This one with the weight shift. And a spiral. Cross the face over the head. Let's do it one more time. Good. Walking in. Now what we're going to do, let's do a little tapping,

a little chi massage. So I'm going right over the navel. We would use these things for helping people with digestive issues. of issues. So instead of being out to the sides go one hand and then the other over a point, a specific energy center. So just below the navel or right over the navel is fine and then we just knock. Good. Now these acupressure points are for digestion and they're also for energizing the center. Now come up to the solar plexes. Solar plex is also where we can store a

lot of emotional energy. So solar plexes, what I mean by that is more below the ribcage, between the ribcage and the navel, often a little bit tender. And then just open this forward front line to the pubic bone, to the solar plexes, up and down this meridian line. And this helps us to stay more centered when this is open. Very good. And relax. Another one for grounding. and also to just disperse whatever's weighing heavy in the head or the mind is a clearing exercise. So imagine that what we're doing is getting rid of old energy or energy that feels heavy in the body, and we're composting it like a gardener. So we're going to come up like this, holding a light loose fist, come up onto your toes,

and then knock your heels into the ground. Yes, and we inhale and whew. So this is a move you can do when you feel heavy energy, mental stress, and you just want to clear it out. It should only take about a minute. So we go, one after the other, and knock the heels into the ground to create that vibration in your body.

And you don't have to lean too far forward, just knock and throw down. So imagine something that's weighing heavy in your mind, just now then next imagine it. composting down to the earth. And like compost, you can utilize that energy to grow what it is you want. Three more. Beautiful. Nice work. And now, we've primed ourselves to move the energy. So whenever we're doing flowing movements, which means slow and relaxed, that is pulling in the energy that we want. So often, in the first part of a class or Qigong practice, we're clearing the stress that's held within the system. Emotional stress, physical stress, clear it out.

Now tune in to what we want. We're talking about being centered, focused, and clear-minded. So we're going to do something that pulls energy to the center. This is called pebble in the pond. So I want you to imagine that your arms are following the ripples. If a pebble got dropped into still water, they ripple out. in a circular direction. We're going to exhale and bend the knees, float the arms out, nice and relaxed. And inhale, bring that energy back to your center. And exhale, float the arms out. Circle around.

Inhale. And exhale, float the arms out. Shoulders relaxed and feel like you're pulling energy, chi into your belly. Now, the mechanics of the movement is When the arms go out, the weight shifts a little towards the heels and the knees bent. And the hands come in, we stand a little taller and towards the toes. But make it a relaxed movement. Bend the knees, feel the earth underneath you. Hold the energy in, feel centered and grounded. Exhale, the arms float out.

Inhale, the arms come back. Centered and grounded. Load the arms out. Bring it back in. Good. Now let's do another one. This one's called centering. So it's perfect movement to get the mind's energy down towards the belly. When we're more rooted here, the mind is clearer. In Chigong, we say the mind, make it like an observation deck. It should be observing, present, connected to the moment, alert, and then decisions made from the heart, head connection. So a little bit more here and here. Our gut feelings and the wisdom in our hearts. So observation and clarity of heart, clarity of the center. And that's what we've done today. We've done both heart and belly now. So centering is going to go like this. Circle arm around, down from the head to the belly. And then the hand here at the belly is like a cup to receive the energy. So we inhale, circle around, and then exhale.

So I always do centering this movement if I have an important task to do, or I'm going to give a talk in front of a large audience, and I want to be clear and focused and present with the energy and grounded. Inhale, exhale. The other thing is this exercise helps to bring, bring your energy back to you. We all put a lot of energy into our work, our friends, our families, our relationships. We send a lot of energy out to this moment to bring energy back to you.

Bring it back where your mind is calm, your heart is open, and your belly is full. Mind calm, heart connected to joy, and then the body's energy is full. Reclaim your energy, reclaim your power. Bring it back to yourself. Slow movement, deep breathing. Now bring it down and hold that ball of energy in front of your belly. So just go like this and just have the hands pulse in front of the belly. Get the energy down and also feel the energy that you've generated in your body.

Pulse back and forth. Go slow. together further apart put your mind in the space between your hands you that electromagnetism feel that chi and then just hold your hands without moving maybe three inches apart and just breathe deep and hold some attention in your hands imagine the space between your hands filled with lights golden light and take that light and energy just put it in over the belly and just contain it and imagine that light and energy in your center. Take a couple of deep breaths.

Now notice that your mind is calm and clear. There's energy, vitality, and light in your center. And relax. Very good. Great practices today, guys. Thanks, Dr. Kay. Let's sit down and talk about it. Yeah.

Yeah. All righty. Fantastic. So while Lee's getting set up, what was that like for everybody? someone's having a Chi baby Um Move

I see slush says that they feel like they're flying Hands are so sensitive now loved that that was awesome perfect I feel so good after this perfect This is why we had So I'm telling you guys I know I've said it like three times But I was just like in this conference right

And Lee gets up there and he starts teaching stuff And like I'm doing I'm presenting as well So like Lee I have a practice for You know before I go up on stage and doing my month around and all that kind of stuff. But even just sitting in it,

I mean, Lee's just, you're really good at this, dude. I've studied with a lot of people. There's something about the way that you teach where,

you know, people feel an impact immediately. And that's why we've been trying so hard to make this happen. So first of all, Lee, thank you on behalf of myself

and everybody who's watching. So yeah, tie it together for us. You were sort of saying like we can kind of talk a little bit about bringing everything together. So,

so what? what do you have to share with respect to that? I mean, I love the history of this practice too. I mean, it came about from men and women just being very observant of nature and life around them and thinking, wow, the tree is moving, but it's the wind moving. What's that invisible energy? Oh, there's something going on inside of me. There's some invisible energy.

What if I move my body more like the trees in the wind? And then these practices started to be created and crafted based on observing nature and our place within nature and how we're going to be. we could be in harmony with nature. And so I feel like these ancient practices are very relevant to modern life, both in terms of we're not in harmony with nature, we're destroying environments and not in harmony.

We're not in harmony with our own inner nature. Our circadian rhythms are disrupted with too much technology. Technology tends to scatter our chi where these practices can help to gather back together. So I feel like it's a wonderful remedy, not necessarily in place of all modern life and all of its wonderful things, but in harmony with to create that balance.

And that we put so much time and energy right on our social media, our finances, watching the stock market, but we put very little time and attention on our own life force energy. How is your life force energy being invested? So when we were doing this, we were just talking about what am I investing my life force energy into? I mean, it's so much more valuable for me anyways. than finances? And am I tending to it?

Am I watching? What am I investing my energy in? This relationship, this work, this thing, this, can I create a practice that will reward me with energetic dividends? And that's what I think Chi Gong is. The more you do it, the more energy you have. And you start off with a lot of energy,

like Dr. Kay and I've been talking about children. They have a lot of energy, a lot of life force. And then we go through life and we do all these things that society tells us to do and it disperses, depletes, does all kinds of things to our chi. We make choices that influence our chi. So now we gotta do some tending to our internal energy systems. And one of the things where this practice came from

as it turned into medicine, Chinese medicine, the way the medicine was practiced, I think it's quite brilliant in that people paid their healthcare practitioners and providers while they're healthy. And then when they got sick, They stopped paying. So you pay like a monthly fee, let's call it, a monthly stipend, and you listen to the pulse,

talk about stress levels, where those little aches and pains are. We'd fine tune your acupuncture, your chie-gong exercise, and make sure your energy stays up. And then all of a sudden if a real health problem happens, they felt like the healthcare practitioner, the relationship between the two wasn't working in the right way. So they make adjustments. They say, okay, wait, let's stop paying. until we get you back on track because health was never seen as a destination.

It was always a journey. And that's how the medicine was worked in certain areas through Asia. And I think what you focus on tends to grow. And right now we have incredible technology of medicine, but we have lots of issues, lots of problems with the system, because it's overly emphasizing the profitability of sickness rather than the profitability of health.

And so we've got to come back to some of these ancient practices to harmonize ourselves with with what's going on in modern life. And I think it has a lot to offer. And you got a little appetizer of it today. And yeah, I hope to see a lot more of you guys. Yeah, absolutely, man. So you mentioned ready, set slow. So what who would, and you just wrote that, right? Yeah, I just wrote that. It came out this, well, it came out in 2025. Okay. So who would that book before. It's for everybody. It's for a mainstream audience. Just if you want more energy, less stress, some nice tips and tricks that, from a Qigong perspective, that integrate into modern life. It's not a full-blown Qigong practice or an energy practice, but it just helps

you to integrate all this mindfulness into modern day life, whether it's food and eating, whether it's working out, whether it's breathing, whether I want to have more energy, I want to sleep better, or I want to have more harmony in my relationships. These are some tips and tricks about slowing down that help to balance modern life. Awesome, man. So thank you so much, Lee. Lee has a YouTube channel as well, right? Is that primarily where people can find your practices? We do have a YouTube channel, and we have a website. The website is great because I have all kinds of information. And I have things on specific programs on anxiety, sleep, depression, neck pain, digestive issues. And that's Holden-Chigong. Okay, awesome.com. Thanks a lot, Lee.

Have a good day. Thank you. You too. Thanks so much. Take care. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and leave this meeting. Okay. How was that, y'all? So, you know, there's, there's, I always liked that anecdote, too, by the way, of it's so interesting because, like Lee said, so, you know, we used to incentivize health care practitioners to help their clients become healthy, not just treat illness. The downside is that there's a very insidious version of that system. So human beings can game any system. The downside of incentivizing a health-based system is that the people who are very sick,

right, if I'm chronically ill, who would want to take me as a patient if they only get paid when I'm healthy? That's kind of the challenge. But I really do think that it's a huge problem. We see us all the time, you know, everyone taking Ozempic and GLP1 agonists. We incentivize a lot of bad things. I think the thing to remember is that oftentimes the reason we're, we're going to remember is that oftentimes the reason we incentivize medicine is the way it's incentivized is because other types, other incentive structures or sometimes create problems as well.

Does this open your third eye? I don't know. But we teach plenty about that. Yeah, so, he are, I don't know how, hey, Ari is saying it sucks that people can't see the life-changing benefits of this. Yeah. So, I mean, I think, you know, Lee had an injury.

And, you know, he started on this journey, and I think it's really potent. I strongly encourage you all to give this stuff a shot. Decalcalsify your pineal gland. Okay. Science Chads and science Stacey's in the audience. GLP ones are amazing. For the right.

group of people. There's some evidence that GLP-1s induce a rapidity of cellular aging because they put you in a state of starvation, right? I think the outcomes are absolutely amazing for people who are struggling with obesity and have health-related risk factors. And they're being taken by a lot of people because they help us control our cravings and we just don't feel hungry. And I think that's amazing, right? So what we're doing is we have a medication now. It's so hard to control your hunger, so hard to control your impulses. We have a medication now that you can take and will make your impulses and hunger go away. And so what do we see with people who take GLPs when they stop taking them, the weight comes back? And so I think this is a really good example of both the

success and the amazing success and catastrophic failure of drugs like, Ozempic and GLP-1s. Since you have trouble controlling your behaviors, we're going to inject you with something that makes it so that you no longer have to control yourself. Self-control becomes a lot less important because your cravings go way down. There's good evidence of GLPs actually helping people who have trouble with, well, not good evidence, preliminary evidence, people who have alcohol problems, people drink less on it.

So that's a good thing, right? I think sometimes what we do is we focus on winning a battle, and then the overall trajectory of our health care results in losing the war. Because instead of teaching people how to control their impulses, instead of teaching them how to restrain their desires, instead of teaching them how to craft meals that are rewarding and healthy, instead of inducing behavioral change, we are going to give someone a medication so that they never have to control themselves. This is the trend that we are seeing in society. Another great example of this is AI. AI improves academic performance and impedes our ability to learn. What does that mean it improves academic performance? It means that if you have chat GPT or another AI, write an essay for you, that essay will get graded well.

But we don't learn. So this is what's really tricky. This is what's so hard about health care. This is the balance. do I give my patient a blood pressure medication? Do I give them an SSRI? Do I give them a GLP1? Or do I help them behaviorally change, right?

Do I help them get to the gym? Do I help them cut back on their sodium intake? Do I help them reduce their desire, increase their control over their desire? And it's not mutually exclusive, right? That's what everyone's going to say. Well, you can do both. Well, the basic problem is that people don't do both. They use one as a substitute for the other. I think the best case that I make for an SSRI

when a patient walks into my office is, look, evidence shows that cognitive behavioral therapy or psychotherapy is equally efficacious to treating depression, major depressive disorder, or generalized anxiety disorder as an SSRI, right? You can do psychotherapy or you can take a medication. You can also add diet, you can add exercise, you can add mindfulness to it. You can do all these things and get an effect size of improvement in your depression that is even beyond what medication can give you. The question is, do you have the time, the energy, or the inclination to do those things? So this is what's really like scary and amazing about medicine. So we live in a world where like, you know, it's so easy to become obese. It's so easy

to eat unhealthy. We have billion, multi-billion dollar corporations who are designed to try to make us eat food that is not good for us, right? That's what their profit is based on. Instead of addressing some of these root causes, we come up with a medicine. And before you all start demonizing big pharma or doctors for trying to, you know, keep people sick to make a buck, the question that you'll really need to ask yourself is, how many people on the planet would prefer to exercise every day, eat healthy, meditate and go to therapy for 16 weeks in a row, or they would rather take a pill. So I know we love to blame the system, but it's like, this comes down to humans and their choices. And it's really scary because the moment that you start taking a GLP1, all the other stuff

becomes way less important because the GLP1 is doing it for you. I think it's an amazing medication with excellent outcomes. And it moves people, some people, in the wrong. direction. I would say most people. You're not taking it for the, this is the other thing, right? There are all these like clinics popping up that are giving, offering a reduced price for GLP1 agonists because insurance won't cover it. And the reason insurance won't cover it is, oh my God, insurance is evil. That can sometimes be the case. But the other thing is that there really isn't a medical indication. Liking the way that you look in the mirror is not a medical indication for a GLP1. Now you can make an argument that the medical indication should be expanded,

that if you have alcohol use or you have other kinds of things like blood pressure or things like that, it doesn't have to be for more than the obese people or people with obesity, you can make all those arguments. But the society we live in is full of people who want their problems solved for them in a very, very, very easy way. That's how human beings are. and the more that we have, the more that we give answers, the more that we offer solutions as a substitute for work or effort, the worse this is going to get. Anyway, I wasn't trying to be depressing after this stream. Hopefully you guys enjoyed it. Lee's great.

And I think this is the kind of stuff where, like, you know, I encourage y'all to try this stuff for a couple days in a row. what I really like about Lee's stuff is that it's basically short sequences. So even with yoga, I find that teaching yoga and learning yoga requires far more of an investment than Qigong. I think Qigong is awesome that way. So thank you guys for coming today. I hope you all enjoyed it. And, you know, let us know, chat, if you guys want more like this. this, domer K.

Right, let us know what kind of content you want us to make. What is the most helpful for you? And, oh, the irony. I saw, you know, we uploaded a video about less than 24 hours ago that had, is doing very well about how to not watch YouTube. And so you guys let us know what you need from us. we're going to do our level best to provide it. So happy Monday, everybody.

Hope you all are doing well. And we'll catch y'all. I don't know when we're streaming next, but we'll catch you later. Is there anything else? Okay, don't stop yet. Okay. Oh, okay.

I've just been told, based on people's reactions. Oh, he literally just sent me a message like 60 seconds ago. Interested in learning more about Qigong, join the wait list to be notified of future HG collaborations with Lee Holden. Okay, great. So if you guys want more of Lee, join the wait list because we'll let you all know. And by the way, when I say let us know what you guys want, this is how, right? So if you guys want this, you have to sign up for the wait list because that's how we know.

If like six people sign up, we're like, okay, chat says, yeah, they like it, but then there's like no people aren't going to show up, right? So if you guys are interested in actually learning this stuff, we will get Lee back on here. Like, I love Lee. I think he's great. I've been telling you guys. Like, I've been trying to make this work for months. I met this guy like three months ago. And so if you guys want more content like this, you need to let us know.

Okay? For everyone who's complaining about the clickbait titles and clickbait thumbnails and oh my God, like Dr. Kay doesn't do this. Dr. Kay doesn't do this. Dr. Kay doesn't do this. That's because when I do what y'all ask for, the performance is terrible. sometimes, not always, sometimes it's great. But like, you all have to demonstrate activity in order for us to do stuff.

Because what we're doing, right, we're like a company now, not just a guy, hence all of this, and this looks great. Someone built this set. And what people are doing is they're looking at analytics. And they're looking at what people click and what people engage with. And the one thing that I've been very, very, very, like, you know, focused on to represent this is we're not just looking at analytics. We're also looking at things like client outcomes for our coaching program. We are measuring various things. If you signed up for resource packs or things like that, if you use Dr. Kay's guide, not with the guide, but we're going to start implementing.

We're building more measurement tools so that we can actually tell it's not just what people want. want what actually helps. And so far, the only place that we've been able to really collect good data on that is in coaching because when people make a commitment for coaching, you know, we ask them to fill out questionnaires and stuff like that so they can track their progress. We can see which coaches are successful, which coaches aren't, which coaches do right by their clients, right? So we tend to, so that you all have a uniform experience.

So we need y'all to like, you know, give us data as not like, we're not like, you know, measuring your zip code and we don't know whether you're pregnant or not, like, not that kind of thing. But literally, you all have to demonstrate what you guys want us to do, right? And if you guys do that, then we'll do it. Like, if a bunch of people sign up, then it's been like, awesomely, let's do a series on a bunch of these things. Let's have a conversation about someone asked about Agnachukra and third eye opening. What I was really, I was, can I tell you guys something kind of interesting? What I was stunned by is so I'm wearing a Mala right now.

So what I thought was really interesting is you know how Lee was like doing this stuff? So when I was doing this, this Rudraksh is poking into my chest all along this track. And I don't know if you guys have a, I've worn a Mala, right? But like the Mala hangs perfectly along all the lines that he was doing. The other really interesting thing is a standard 108 bead Mala go the back basically down. down along either side of the sternum, past the solar plexus, and hangs right by the navel. Which was like really weird, right? So I don't know what to make of that.

I don't know if it's significant or not. All I know is that I was poking the rudderaction to my chest the whole time I was doing this. So I think what's interesting, right, is that when he's talking about emotional strength, it's an ahat chakra, which sort of makes sense. when he's talking about attention, focus, obsessiveness, right? Not being able to let things go. It's Manipura Chakra, which is interesting. So this is why, like, I think this stuff is cool.

There's a lot to explore here. But, and then there's the physiologic side, which, you know, I can comment on. I know that stuff too. But I'm really curious. So check out the landing page. I'm going to show you guys real quick. Sign up. Noobs.

Okay. Interested in learning more about Lee Holden. Sign up. Chat Lords. Okay, this is all wonky. Let's try this. There we go. This works better.

Okay, so sign up if you guys want more of Lee. All right, y'all. Have a good day. Thanks for coming. Hopefully you all feel energized. and we are going to try to figure out how to help you all with whatever you'll need. I'm working on a super special secret project

and really excited about it. So we're building a lot of stuff here at HG. So I'm very grateful for all the support you all provide and we've got some cool stuff coming down the pipeline. So if you've already gotten Dr. K's guide or done coaching or things like that, we have taken those resources that you've given us. We've got something that we're working on pretty heavily

that we should be able to release in Q2, Q3 of this year. So thank you guys so much. Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life. If you enjoyed the conversation, be sure to subscribe. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.