Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. Cynthia Li on Intuitive Healing Using Qigong and Ecosystem Medicine EP 228

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

Dr. Cynthia Li is a leading expert in ecosystem medicine, Qigong, efficient healing, and intuition, and in this episode, she shares with you the journey to optimal health. Dr. Li takes you on a guided tour of the many facets of optimal health, from food and lifestyle choices to physical and emotional health.  Purchase Brave New Medicine: https://amzn.to/3UX3G55 (Amazon Link) What I Discuss with Dr. Cynthia Li About Intuitive Healing Are you looking for an alternative to traditional medical treatments? Do you want to explore more holistic approaches to health and well-being? If so, you'll want to listen to this interview. Dr. Cynthia Li received her medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. She’s practiced as an internist in many settings, including Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, San Francisco General Hospital, and St. Anthony Medical Clinic serving the homeless. She currently has a private practice in Berkeley, CA, and recently published her first book, Brave New Medicine: A Doctor’s Unconventional Path to Healing Her Autoimmune Illness. Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/dr-cynthia-li-on-intuitive-healing-using-qigong/  Brought to you by MasterClass, Omaha Steaks, and POM Wonderful. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/kQp6Phdoh1c  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Did you miss my interview with NYU Stern School marketing professor Scott Galloway? Listen to episode 218 on why America is adrift and how to fix it. ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Gear: https://www.zazzle.com/store/passion_sruck_podcast Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/ 

Coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast. When I hit my dead end, it took me about two years of pretty intense suffering to actually try something new. It wasn't even in my awareness that there was another way. Desperation can really not just open doors, but open your mind to try differently because after a while, I was like, oh, trying harder, trying harder, trying harder. I'm trying, gosh, I'm trying as hard as I can and I have no energy. And then at some point, I was like, oh, wait a minute.

I'm not trying harder. I gotta try differently. Welcome to PassionStruck. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.

Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guest ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 228 of PassionStruck. Incidentally rated by Apple is one of the top five alternative health podcasts. And thank you to all of you who come back weekly to listen and learn how to live better,

be better, and impact the world. If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here. Or you would simply like to introduce this to a friend or family member, and we so appreciate it when you do that. We now have episode starter packs, which are our fans' favorite episodes that we organize into convenient topics, and give any new listener a great way to get acquainted to everything we do here on the show. Just go to passionstart.com, slash starter packs, or Spotify, to get started. And in case you missed my interview from

earlier in the week, it was with Dr. Jonah Berger, who's a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and an internationally best-selling author of the book, Adelist How You Change People's Minds. I also wanted to thank you so much for your ratings and reviews. They go such a long way in helping promote the popularity of the show, but more importantly, increasing the passion for our community and providing inspiration to so many people who need meaning, hope, and connection in their lives. Now, let's talk about today's episode.

Imagine that you're a doctor who contracts a disabling autoimmune illness. That makes you question your internal medical training and leads you to embracing principles of integrative and functional medicine that ends up unlocking your body's innate potential to heal. Through that process, you become a scientist, studying ancient healing arts, the power of intuition, Chi Young, and cutting-edge sciences that will help other sufferers find the wisdom

and the heart to begin their own healing journey and transform from disease to wellness. This is the truly amazing story of Dr. Cynthia Lee, who is a medical doctor and author whose personal journey through autoimmune illness. He took her from public health and underserved communities to integrative and functional medicine. She has studied with functional medicine experts, environmental health scientists, alternative

healers, she young masters, and has served on the faculty for Rachel Remens healers art program at the University of California of San Francisco School of Medicine. She is the author of the brand new best-selling memoir, Brave New Medicine. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.

Now, let that journey begin. I am ecstatic today to have Dr. Cynthia Lee on the Passion Struct Podcast. Welcome, Cynthia. Thank you so much, John, for having me. What's so nice for you to be here, and I like to use the beginning of the podcast to allow the audience to get to know the guests that we have on. And a question I like to ask, and I'll ask you, is in a little bit different way, is we all have defining moments or seasons in our life.

But you had a really interesting one. You are a medical doctor, but you fundamentally changed the way you were looking at medicine because of a patient. And I was hoping that for the audience, you can describe the events and why that transformation happened. Absolutely. So this patient appeared to me,

came into my life when I was a few years out of my residency training. And I had trained in internal medicine, which is the specialty of chronic diseases of adults. So here was this patient who was a young mother and her baby was about three months old and she was not sleeping. Her energy was down. She was losing weight. She had all the classical signs and symptoms of thyroid disease. And she was diagnosed quickly as that. We did the regular treatments, which initially in the overactive stage, we waited and watched. And then she went underactive hypo thyroid. We gave her supplements and to support her thyroid. And everything went according to textbook. About a year later,

her numbers resolved and she tapered off the medication, but she still wasn't feeling well. And she was still tired. She was still not sleeping. She still wasn't able to put on weight. And now she was dizzy, actually. And she was having a shortness of breath on exertion. And just things were actually escalating. And then we tested her not just thyroid, but a whole bunch of other screening labs and everything came back normal. Then a year or two later, as she presented actually newly pregnant the second time around and was quite debilitated

at that point, she was housebound. She could hardly get out of bed. So really persistent dizziness in the form of vertigo as well as light-headedness, wanting to pass out, just really debilitating fatigue, what she described as she just felt like she had the chronic flu. And nowadays we have post-COVID syndrome, so we know it's a lot more in people's awareness of what those kinds of conditions can be like. And so the defining moment for me was that patient was me. And I had run into the limitations of the very paradigm that I had trained in. What an amazing background to start this podcast off and an incredible discovery for you

that all these things that you had been taught were not working to solve the issues that you had. And I myself, as we were talking about before, we came on today's podcast, experienced much of the same, but in a different way. I had inflammation in the form of sore joints all throughout my body. I was getting consistent migraines, probably 13, 14 times a month. I also had vertigo just tons of things. And I had these longstanding Achilles injuries that would just not go away. I probably felt like you do it hurt every single step that I took

and every moment that I made. And when you reach that state, you're willing to do just about anything to try to find ways to get that pain, to alleviate. But what was interesting to me is, as I was going through this and being treated both by civilian doctors and in the VA, everywhere I went, I was treated by basically one protocol after another. So people would look at this small silo of what was going on, but there was no one looking at me holistically.

And it's interesting because I had Seth Godin on the podcast a few weeks ago when we were talking about climate change. And during that interview, he said, the biggest issue we're facing is that we need to look at climate change through an entire system and we need to change the system. And I always felt as I was going through this,

looking back that the same thing needed to apply to me as a human, but they weren't looking at the overall system. They were trying to look at small components with no one coordinating across all of them to figure out what was at the root cause of causing all these mismatch of symptoms that I was having. Is that something that was similar to you?

Absolutely. I mean, I would say that I was inside that silo, though, there wasn't just the way that I had been trained. It was really the foundation of the truth of my life. This is the way that, yeah, that I learned medicine. And the reason I went into medicine was because this was my belief. This was my world view of how things worked, and this was a way that I learned to bring order, some kind of systematic, you know, tag-mett systems, it was a systematic approach that, as I understood it, as a young adult, that, oh, okay, we can bring a little bit of definition, we can bring a little bit of system to what feels very chaotic and mysterious, which is the human body.

So how do we do that? And what is useful and limiting is the reduction of science, right? We've wanted to dissect things down to the minutia, the different parts of the cell, the different parts of even subcellular components and what's going on. And then, okay, how do we target that? Because that protein or that particular response is creating inflammation and therefore pain or vertigo, whatever the symptom is.

So it can be useful to understand things. But if we don't step back and apply it as you're saying to the whole body as an ecosystem that's really dynamic and that you and I are ecosystems living within other ecosystems around us and then we have ecosystems inside of us, right? And our gut on our skin and our oral fairings that we're in constant dynamic exchange with. So it's really extrapolating the reduction of science that we've known, and then applying it to

something that's much larger. And so that applying it to something much larger was not in my mental framework. And so I don't know what your actually situation was when you hit that dead end, but when I hit my dead end, it took me about two years of pretty intense suffering to actually try something new because it wasn't even in my awareness that there was another way. And as you said, I mean, desperation can really open, not just open doors, but open your mind to try differently. Because after a while, I was like, oh, trying harder. I'm trying, gosh, I'm trying as hard as I can. And I have no energy. And then at some point, I was like, oh, wait a minute.

I'm not trying harder. I got to try it differently. So the point that I was at, and I will say the reason also why as someone trained in Western medicine, I'll be referring back and forth to this metaphor of a tree, right, in terms of the different paradigms and also our bodies. But so if we're looking at the tree of life or the tree of our body or even the tree of medicine, the way it's framed is we're really working at the level of the leaves, right. So the symptoms and the conditions and the diagnosis we have, working at the level of the leaves, right? So the symptoms and the conditions and the diagnosis we have, there are the expressions of something that's been happening for a long, long time down at the level of the roots or down at the level of the trunk or even the branches, but finally, we can see something and measure something, it's at the level of the leaves. And so you have a long,

a long problem or symptom over here, you have migraines, a neurology over here, you've got heart disease. So it's very complicated to try to weave together all these different leaves that are manifesting in such different ways. So if we go down into the level of the roots, down into the level of the trunk, things are simpler.

Because if we address that, whatever's manifesting up on the top can really heal and concert. Yeah, and I think too many of us are living our lives as if we're sitting on a stool with one support. And that support is autopilot and that's how we're sitting on a stool with one support, and that support is autopilot, and that's how we're living our lives, and we're not balancing ourselves

by looking at mind, body, spirit, emotion in this well-rounded way, which is a lot about what we're going to talk about today. And it's one of the major things, I think, that makes alternative health and functional medicine different from other forms of medicine that are out there. And I thought it was interesting.

You have a best-selling memoir called Brave New Medicine. And as I was reading the prologue, you said that the journey towards optimal health isn't a simple one. And I just wanted to use your own case as an example of why is that? And what should the listeners realize about this? So I would have an addendum to that too. So it is true. And there's an addendum that I've learned since the memoir came out. And I'll talk about both. But so it's not simple in the sense of the reduction of science piece.

So many patients come in to, whichever doctor they come to me as well, but who have really compromised quality of life and yet they're tested normal, or sometimes they're out of the reference range or what we call normal, but we don't really know what to do with it. So we just follow it. How often is the white blood cell count a little bit low, and there's nothing really to do about it, we just follow it. And then if it reaches a certain critical range, you get referred to the hematologist. And so it's, we do a lot of waiting and surveillance in Western medicine because we don't actually

know what to do with it. And then we open up into this whole new paradigm of ecosystem medicine, right? And so it's all of a sudden, when I opened up my world to, oh my god, you know what? Like my health is related to what it is that I'm eating. My health is related to how it is That I move my body. I need to learn what nutrients I'm deficient in to help my body operate functionally and not just functionally, but optimally and so Starting with diet for example, suddenly I went from very little to no options to an infinite number of options.

Right, so that's in that sense, it's not simple. It's very complex. So suddenly we are, we're going from the leaves, which are complex, complicated, right? We go into the trunk and we're going down into the roots, but if we look at all the different elements of what's going into the roots, and we're trying to manage that as well, it can get really complex very quickly. And it's like, what do I put in? What do I need?

And you talk to one expert, and they recommend one thing, and another one recommends another thing. And then even the labs in functional medicine can be really nuanced and gray. And so it's, again, always looking at the whole person and looking at the clinical picture, what's working and what's not.

And then there's another level below, this is how I conceive of it anyways, and how I have experienced it through my own life and my own health journey is then below the complexity level we go back to simple but instead of reduction in science we're actually really looking at the essence level, the essential level and then that goes into the question which is the I don't know 10 billion dollar question is, who am I? Who am I really? And people can go down the spiritual route,

they can go down the genealogy, they're ancestral route. I mean, there's a lot of ways to explore that. And I as a doctor, I just go really simply into the body. It's like, okay, my body is, and I as a doctor, I just go really simply into the body. Okay, my body is 60 to 70% water. Why do I experience myself as solid?

If I'm mostly water, bones which we think of as really solid, perhaps the most solid parts of our body, they're 30, some 30% water. So then we go down further into the essence level is we are made up of atoms, right? If you look at atoms, they're 99.99% empty space. But now we know that's not nothing, that it's actually subtle energy. So it's, oh, I'm an energy body. And this is actually an energy universe. And why is it that I experienced myself as solid? And the reason that's important is because, and I know your work is really about perception

and choice and awareness and all that, but something happens when we connect to ourselves at that essence level, because energy actually transforms and healing is transformation, right? We want to change patterns that are dysfunctional, that are not helping, that are inflammatory. We want to change that, but somehow when we connect our minds to our bodies as energy, things move much more quickly. So I as a doctor, I'm just very pragmatic about it. I'm interested in

efficient healing, right? So whether I'm working with a patient who's only seen Western doctors or other patients who come to me because they've seen five different functional medicine doctors, I take them also to the essence level as well. And so none of them are better than the other. We have to move through all of the different dimensions because that's actually who we are. We're multi-dimensional ecosystems and beings. And so it's to me, it's not even esoteric and it's not spiritual. It is just deeply organic just deeply organic to who we are. So it is, and then I'll just close that beautiful question that you asked with just saying that simple does not equal easy. Simple as simple. And then what we need to do is, okay, how do we align with all these different parts of ourselves and the world?

And that is the journey of what we call life. Yes, well, I'll just add a couple of figures in here. I had Katie Melkman, who's a professor of behavioral science at the University of Pennsylvania on earlier in the year. And in her book, she quoted something that at the time just blew me away. And that is that 40% of premature death is caused by the choices that we make in lifestyle, diet, et cetera.

And then after her I had on Dr. Cara Fitzgerald, who is really an expert in epigenetics and DNA methylation. And what she pointed out in her book, Younger You, was that the World Health Organization has found that globally 85% of all people spent 20% of their time in chronic illness. And I just wanted to ask you, what is causing that and what is actually causing most of the Western world, our life expectancy to go down when we have all this modern medicine

and everything else at our disposal that you would think it would be doing the exact opposite. Yeah, so we can distill it down actually to, like in functional medicine, one way to look at things is, so we have this complex tree, right, tree of life. But we can also just be a little bit dualistic, right, to simplify things for us to understand, but also for us to use and to apply to our patients or maybe to ourselves.

Healing is balancing, right? So things are out of balance and that's why we experienced chronic disease. So if we continue to stay in that state, we continue to stay imbalanced. So a lot of the medicines that we use are they're trying to help alleviate some symptoms. Some of them are actually going into the root causes, for example, antibiotics, right? If you have an bacterial infection, it's a direct treating the root treatment. But a lot of the other medications,

and even a lot of the supplements are supporting the body so the body can cope. So the deeper healing, the radical remissions that people want to experience are limited, because we have a lot of options actually to help us maintain our lives as they are. So one of the questions I often ask my patients is I can give you a really fancy cocktail

to support you and not only feeling better, but in hopefully helping you to improve your quality of life. But the deeper question is about change because we're talking about healing is change, right? They're coming if you're not well, then the body is saying something needs to change, whether it's in your life, the context of your life, or within your body, and only one in the same. But it's helpful to look at one as outer, one as inner, and they only one in the same, but it's helpful to look at one as outer, one as inner, and generally the more changes that you're willing to make, the faster the results that we see. So let's just say one side is sort of the health promoting factors and then other side is like the

disease promoting factors, right? So when people come in, they're like this, right? So what we want to do is either raise the health promoting factors or lower, remove the disease causing factors as much as we can and really bring things into balance. And so on the side of what causes disease, we can break it down into five different sort of categories. And there's allergens, there's pollutants, there's infection, and some of these are health infections. So it's not overt infections like COVID-19 virus or the flu. I can be like literally like some people having a parasite in their gut. That's just enough to cause chronic inflammation, but not enough to present as a overt disease. And then there's stress. That's a huge one emotional emotional, mental, physical, stress being

traumas. But that's a huge one. And then inflammatory foods. So inflammatory foods, again, can be a big general statement. And that's where the complexity is. Well, what's in the end of the inflammatory food? And some of the allergens, actually, are these stealth allergens. And a gluten is a big example of that. Some of it, of course, is a fad response. But if we dissect through that, and we're just working on a personalized level,

and we're looking also at what's happening at the level of the gut and the cells, is that oftentimes some people are, and I'm one of them, I was having an autoimmune reaction against my thyroid that was in part triggered by gluten, right? So my body genetically was, and with a combination of all the other causes of disease, probably stressed being one of them, and pollutants and infections, and not knowing how to sort of detoxify my body,

then gluten became a problem at some point. And when my body would respond to that, then my body would also attack my thyroid. But I couldn't even identify it as an allergen because I was ingesting it all the time. So it was just so ubiquitous, I couldn't even feel what it felt like not to have it until it was removed for a period of time. So those are examples of the categories of what we would say cause disease. And then there's seven factors for optimal health. And that would be nutrient dense foods, right? So low inflammatory nutrient dense foods.

And then a clean environment. So we're looking at the air, the water, the homes that we live in. What is the quality, right? Of that mold is concluded in that as a really big factor right now. In an exercise hormone balance, and some of this in functional medicine,

we can do a lot of, there's a lot of herbs or even bioidentical hormones that we can really do to rebalance that, but it also really relates to healing our emotions. Emotions and hormones are so closely related and then they're sleep, so not just the quantity, but the quality and then relaxation and pleasure and community-loven purpose. So, community-loven purpose and relaxation and pleasure are really going down actually to that level of what I call the essence level of simplicity

is going back to our true natures, which are directly related to those last two that I just mentioned. Yeah, Sen, I think you and I had something similar that we both were exposed to, and that was I had heard on another we both were exposed to, and that was, I had heard on another podcast, you were exposed to some environmental toxins.

I think it was when you were in Asia. And for me, I have suffered from Gulf War syndrome and all the common things because of the burn pits and other things that we were exposed to. And I don't think people think about their environments and What's around them as much as they possibly should and I'm not even saying Smog that I've seen in Beijing or Shanghai etc when I've been over there or what I was exposed to but these environmental toxins are everywhere around us from soaps and shampoos and

other things that we wash our clothes with to, as you were saying, the water we drink and the air that we breathe. Why should people who are listening to this podcast really be aware of that factor because I think it is so often overlooked? Yeah, it's an important factor and I want to actually just talk about it twofold because again, my life guiding how it is that I guide my patients and I do a lot of work now in with workshops and public speaking. So just really making sure that the message about this is balanced because it's similar to infections, the external, right? So when we're feeling vulnerable, when we're not well and in balance, basically what we're lacking is resilience, any kind of scent, like I was so hypersensitive

to my environment that my world became smaller and smaller. And that's what happens. And that's a response of the limbic system, which is our, the part inside our, the middle of our brains, which is automatic. It is where PTSD occurs, right, because memories get stored. But what that part of the brain is really helping us do is trying to help us survive. But over time, if we are, our world gets smaller and smaller, because the world is really dangerous, and we're not well enough to respond to it without being reactive, then it becomes actually a vicious cycle. It perpetuates inflammation, and then our

world gets smaller. And we need less stimuli to trigger the same inflammatory response. So what's really important is recognizing yes, that we are actually one with our environments. We're constantly exchanging with our environments. We have a responsibility as a human species and as individuals to make choices into what it is that we put into the environment, right? If we litter in the environment, we're littering our environment. And that that's actually also going to affect us. The other piece is that, so just you brought up like, yeah, chemicals in a lot of our personal care products. There are some really simple and great consumer resources, like the one that I like to give is www.ewg.org, and environmentalworkinggroup.org, and they have all sorts of resources on which kinds of

produce have less pesticide residue or herbicide residue, And they just rank them. You can enter your favorite brands and see they have an incredible database where they just rate chemicals on what the data is available on those. How harmful do they seem to be based on the body of evidence that's out there? And so just give a simple rating system. Okay, I forget what the scale is. If 10 is harmful, you really want to go for a one or two, right? If you can. And so I have two teenage daughters. I'm trying to teach them that. And at the same time, and this is what I wanted to bring out in terms of the balances, it can when we're not well, and if we're in this limbic system loop, it can make our world really small because when we start identifying all the potential harmful chemicals and infections and whatnot around us, it can be really overwhelming.

So the other piece is at the same time that we start making choices about healthier living, right? One simple thing also is like gas stoves. In California, we all have gas stoves for most of us do and there's an effort to switch to electric stoves, but there's a lot of indoor air pollution that's generated by that. So a really simple thing is you know what you always just turn on the vent when you're cooking a rare gas stove, and it just really sucks out a lot of that of the harmful chemicals that can just linger, the gases that can linger in the home.

At the same time, we need to recognize that we can rebuild our bodies' natural resilience. So the two big ways are to detoxify, right? So the chemicals that you were exposed to, let's just say there were a clone of you in the same environment for the same amount of time, but slightly different genes in the liver. One of you would detoxify more optimally than the other one. So we're actually genetically very different in how we process the same chemicals that

we're exposed to. And chemicals, foods, alcohol, you name it. We just have different genetic expressions of that. So that said, there are ways that we can help jumpstart and give an oil change, if you will, to our liver and our detox systems. And really simple things. Like doing like a little lemon juice cleanse or there are some supplements that can really help boost that and be complex is a huge one

just to help the liver be able to detoxify our bodies better so that the same chemicals that were exposed to don't build up and affect us in the same way. And then the other piece, which we touched on very briefly, just before our call, was the gut, right? So the gut and actually our skin are very closely related. And so their primary defenses, so they are semi-permeable membranes. And so what we really want them to do is when they're fully intact and they're healthy and they're strong Stuff is getting absorbed, but the stuff that you know doesn't belong in our bodies is Being eliminated and passed out. Same thing with our skin, right? So if we have a breakdown in our skin. We have eczema, you get a sunburn, whatever it is

That we're sensitive because that barrier is breached. So healing the gut is really primary in functional medicine to increasing our resilience because literally we're fortifying our walls again. This is the Pass and Struck Podcast with our guest, Dr. Cynthia Lee. We'll be right back. This episode is also brought to you by Masterclass. With Masterclass, you can learn from the world's best minds. Anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace,

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struck today. That's M-A-S-T-E-R-C-L-A-S-S dot com slash passion struck term supply. Thank you so much for listening to the show. I love hearing from all of you. And I love the fact that you all have been great to our sponsors because they're the ones that keep the show going as well. You can check out all the sponsors at passionstruck.com slash deals. You'll find all the codes in URLs. All those things are there. So please consider supporting those who support the show. Now, back to my interview with Dr. Cynthia Lee. Well, I think it's important that you brought up all those things because your healing process was called a radical remission that

defied all medical explanation. And it was because of those steps that you just outlined to the audience that you took. I just wanted to give another example of this. I've talked about her before, but my sister, a few years ago was out of the blue diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

And it started out at stage one. And at that point, she did a couple different things that I think really ended up leading to her being alive here today. One was she's a Buddhist and she doubled down on her mindfulness practice. And I want to explore more of this with you in the next segment. I'm getting into that. But in addition to that, she hired a natural path who specialized in cancer patients and what foods they should eat or not eat. And he prescribed her a specialized diet that she's been on ever since. And then lastly, I introduced her to a pharmacologist here in the Tampa Bay area, who also has been trained in Eastern medicine and She treats people through homeopathic means and so the first thing she did was put her on a very intensive Detop with with liquid drops

She made her start going on a heavy intake of alkalines to stop manifesting of the growth and then had her do a number of other supplements along with that. And her story is miraculous like, here, she actually went to stage 4b, was told she had months to live. And then about six months later, the liver portion of the cancer just suddenly disappeared. They were able to do the whipple surgery and she's been fine ever since. And I realized both Empty Anderson said they've never seen in their life anything like it, but I think it was because she got rid of the stress. She started finding ways to work on her mental health and her oneness with herself, the tree. She changed her diet. She continued doing exercise, she continued doing the movements that she was already doing,

and then she really doubled down on these other areas to make sure that she was getting the right supplements, doing that detox, and trying to then reset her whole system. I just point that out only because people might be thinking, this sounds like it's so hard, but you just need to have a choice of a starting point and then build from there. Yes, absolutely.

That's an incredible story. How long ago was your sister, was she diagnosed with the 4B? I think it's been two and a half years now. Wow, that's incredible. It's incredible. I want to say it is hard. There were a couple of legs to my journey.

So the part that yeah, like really going into the root causes and understanding functional medicine and all that was really foundational to my healing when I was really at my low. So I basically I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome and then something called this autonomia. It's more commonly known as pots, postural, orthostatic, tachycardia syndrome. So the autonomic nervous system of the body that controls things that we don't even think about, breathing, digestion, heart rate, blood pressure,

to everything that it is that we do, it's just responding automatically, was not synchronous. It's very common, that's very widespread. It's very debilitating because your internal world feels equally as unpredictable as the outer world. That the first leg of my journey, I would say, when I came to that moment of, oh my god, there's limitations of my world, of my entire truth. I need to break out of that. It was a real opening of my mind. And then what happened was as I was finishing Brave New Medicine, I actually had a second

health crisis. And this was after about 10 years of really steadily making them down, but overall just, okay, I'm on this path of healing. And at this point, the first time I was just a few years out of residency, I knew that there was a lot I didn't know. And so this time though, 10 years later, I was already functional medicine doctor. I was still, I integrated with internal medicine, integrative medicine, and the other piece that we haven't really touched on was I was also had gone into intuitive medicine because I wanted to learn how to have some

inner guidance on, well, what food does my body want? How do I tap into my intuition and help me narrow down the complexity of choices, right? And into something that's just simpler. So I was at that place. And then I had my second health crisis. And I was flat out on the bed again. And in a really, I would say for about three months on the edge of life. And I realized, oh my god, like, hey, I could never do that again the last 10 years. There was a lot of willpower and a lot of the, okay, what is my will to live kind of thing? And I actually didn't have that the second time. I can't do this. And I dropped into this place of complete simplicity and surrender.

And I had already been practicing a mind similar to your sister who went deep into her practice. I had been practicing something called Qi Gong, which is the foundation of martial arts and Tai Chi, which more people have heard of, but it's a moving meditation. It's a mind-body spirit integration practice. And again, connected to that, as another spoke on the wheel of integrative medicine,

of healing, but really to rehabilitate my nervous system. And at the second health crisis, I just dropped really deep into that. I had nothing else to go on. And so I realized that, whoa, the first journey was an opening of the mind. The second one was an opening of the heart, the spirit, down into that level of essence. And I hadn't quite understood that as I was going through it. Like I was still, it was really grit that got me through the first leg. So for a lot of people that works incredibly well, for me, because I just didn't have a lot of

reserve in terms of energy, and just because of my constitution, whatever it was, like life was like this, you haven't learned this yet. You need to do this. So an example of how it changed even like my relationship to food, I'm still gluten and dairy free. After a year, right? I still am, but it feels much more like a choice that I'm making to sound, I don't even mean for it, this to sound any kind of woo-woo or spiritual, it's just true. It's like I hadn't actually learned how to love myself. And that, oh, you know what, I'm actually choosing these things because I love myself. And that's why I'm doing it as opposed to, I have to do this because it's the right thing

and by a galley, I'm going to prove to people that I as a doctor, who's a patient, I'm doing it as opposed to, I have to do this because it's the right thing. And by a gully, I'm going to prove to people that I as a doctor, who's a patient, I'm going to solve my problems. And it's completely shifted, not just my way of being with myself and in the world. I realized, speaking of energy and climate change and all this, there was such a waste. I was being very inefficient with my energy because so much of it was going into controlling and managing, like doing things right. So suddenly now it's like, oh, I'm just choosing this

because this is a loving expression for me. And it's easy and it doesn't take a lot of energy. In fact, it gives me energy. So it's self-generating in its energy. And so that's been the biggest lesson. And when I work with patients and when I do writing or teaching, is how do I bring these lessons in so that people can don't have to go through sort of the grueling journey that I did? How do we go through that journey but with a lot of self-compassion? And connection to who we are. Yeah, we just brought up a number of extremely important parts and thank you for being so vulnerable

in the way that you did it because I think ultimately a lot of this starts with self-love and it starts with looking in the mirror and deciding that you're going to approach your life differently. And I think for the same reasons you just brought up are the reasons that I started passion struck in this podcast and trying to talk to people because I've been there and been completely burnt out. I have been emotionally numb. I have had my body completely inflamed and in constant pain.

I have been there and I wouldn't wish these things on anyone. And I think there are billions of people out there right now who are experiencing chronic states of loneliness, hopelessness, and helplessness. And they don't know how to dig themselves out of the stuck point. And so what I'm trying to do by bringing on guests like you is to show people how they can have hope, how they can create connection, how they can have meaning, and use those things to turn their situations around for the better. And in your case, I really wanted to explore Chee Bong a bit more because some of the audience have probably heard of Tai Chi,

because some of the audience have probably heard of Tai Chi, maybe not Chi Bong. And I understand if I have this correct that there are eight pieces of brocade that are part of this that help with organ energy circulation and the improvement of health. Do I have that correctly? Yeah, so just really going back to basics, like Chi is what basically just think of it as life energy

So as I was talking earlier about our bodies being 99.99% subtle energy and actually what we call form what we call solid and matter is actually that that same subtle energy But really condensed and so this is what these wisdom teachers in the Chi Gong lineage have been teaching and living and knowing through direct experience in their bodies for millennia, but modern science is now being able to sort of explain and corroborate that. It's a way that anybody, you don't have to be a special student or disciple or a wisdom teacher or a healer Like it's accessible to anybody because we have the language and the technology to Right to be able to relate to that in our daily lives She is just is that energy that and we can call life force. We can call vitality whatever you want to call that Then gong means work or effort. Chi Gong is a very interesting practice because it is effort,

but the effort goes into connecting to yourself as your true nature of being an energy body and a conscious energy body as opposed to effort in doing things. In fact, one of the foundational principles of Chi Gong is actually based on thou lowest teachings of which is effortless action. A lot of people know that through IKIDO is that you don't use your energy, you use your opponents energy, you turn that energy back towards that person.

So Wu Wei is really, how do we move at the flow of life? How do we move at the flow of life? Now one of the things in healing is that often, we think at least I did, and when I work with patients, they have very similar ideas, concepts, is that we think of healing as climbing this mountain, and it is, but what we want to do is we want to stay in flow, so if we're just climbing, this is a flat line. So flat line in medicine, flat line,

if you're a heart rate, if you're a heart rhythm, flat lines, you have no life. So what we want to do is actually, we want to bring coherence. So we have to actually go down in order to go up. Even if the overall trajectory, if you think of it as up. So oftentimes we don't want to go down.

Now what's interesting about passion struck is, right? We think of passion as, we're passionate about something that we love. The passion, the root of it in Latin is suffering, right? It's to suffer something. So, we actually, we go down, and just like our bodies, we have to detox if we're always eating, but we're not eliminating, we're not pooping and peeing,

we just because this one is big loaded, being we're not healthy. So we have eliminating is letting go. And so with healing we have to actually also let go. We have to go into the places that we might associate with suffering, right? The parts that scare us, the shadows, the traumas in our lives. But because we're gradually building our resilience, we can go step wise. If you're really at a low, to go into areas or to work with traumas can be really traumatic.

You know, we don't have that reserve. So that as we continue to build resilience, then we have more capacity to go down. We go up when we go down. We go up when we go down. A lot of what the Qi Gong practice for me has allowed me to do is in my body to understand what it feels like to not be attached. So don't be attached. That's the whole paradox of healing. Don't be attached to the outcome of health or no pain or balance. You just connect to yourself. And the more you do that, the less we're attached to the outcome, the more inflow things happen. And so if we're really in a state of flow, or which is basically Chivong,

is that healing happens really quickly. So that's where the radical remission for me happened. That second health crisis, not only did I heal within a few months, but I had a freedom in my body that I had not experienced the first time around. The first time around was still really highly managed. And yeah, but I couldn't get there just by concept.

I had to actually experience that in my body. And so for me, Chigong gave me that framework and it's just a practice, it's a method. So the April Cades that you brought up is actually, there are, I think there are hundreds of lineages of Chigong. And just like there are different yoga practices and whatnot. So I'm not personally familiar with the April Cades,

but I know that's a really popular one. And it's a great place to start. And people can just enter that in on YouTube and there's a bunch of practices. The lineage that I've trained in is called Sinin Chigong, which translates into wisdom healing Chigong. And it's really much more about experiencing the body as oneness. There's also like Yin Yang and there's medical

Chigong. There's a whole bunch of different miniages. And for me, because this is what I needed to learn. And I also wanted to go to that level of essence and simplicity was I need to think less. I need less paradigms about what's going on in my body. And this and simplicity was, I need to think less. I need less paradigms about what's going on in my body and this and that. I just need to practice and be essence, be simplicity, be in flow. What does that feel like? So it's an integral really resonated for me. What sounds like what you're discussing here is basically how Chigong corresponds with how our bodies store the subconscious, but also how you were tapping into the chief field with your consciousness. Is that kind of a correct way of thinking about it?

That's a great way of summarizing it. Yes. Yes. Yeah, and again, there's science now, which has been useful for me, and I think for a lot of people, just to actually understand it. Heart math is an organization that they just do super cool projects where they're trying to measure things like the fields of our bodies. Like, what is that?

When one of the things that they measured was the EMF field of the brain and the EMF field of the heart. And the EMF field of the heart actually And the EMF field of the heart actually, and this is just the measurable energy. It's not even talking about the subtle energy that we were talking about earlier. But the measurable EMF field of the heart is 7 to 8 feet out. Right? So when one person is just in a state of compassion,

openness, love, the heart waves are, again, they're what we call coherent. They're smooth, they're sine we call coherent, they're smooth, they're sign waves like, and they're just moving like the waves on the ocean. And then the other person, let's say they're in a really frustrated state or whatever, if the person who's in this coherent state can maintain that, and that's where the consciousness piece comes in, they're stabilizing that, they've practiced to stay in that state. They can bring this person's heart waves into coherence without even doing anything.

They've studied this. They've done blinded studies on this. And same thing, though, if we're in a really agitated state, not only is that affecting our healing, but we can also bring others who are in the field into the incoherent state. So that in that sense, it does also matter. that we can also bring others who are in the field into the incoherent state. So that in that sense, it does also matter

the environments and the people that we choose, right? To spend time with. We all have people in our lives, family, friends, neighbors, that may be a little bit less coherent, but that's where the internal practice comes in as well. It's like, how do we build that resilience? It's a way of fortifying, just like I was talking about the gut and the skin, is another way of fortifying our own resilience so that it doesn't actually matter what enters our

field because we can respond to it with coherence. There are a lot of different ways to do that, so for me it was Chigong, Hart Math for example, they have sort of biofeedback technologies where people can learn how to do that and they can watch on a monitor. Oh, I'm in coherence now, in a new practice and practice. That's what's really fun about this moment in time is where we have these technologies that are available that people can begin their own healing revolution inside their homes in whatever manner is for them. Whether it's more direct scientific technology

by feedback, whether it's ancient healing practices, whether it's an ancient healing practice that's merged with modern science, which is what my lineage is, it's an integral. It actually brings in a lot of modern science and which is what my lineage is, it's an inchy gong. It actually brings in a lot of modern science and medicine into it, that we can really begin to find our own paths. And that is the beauty of it. It is also the complexity of it. I wanted to follow that out because you brought up modern medicine. How does Chi Gong,

I don't know if the right word is to say correspond with or complement epigenetics and neuroplasticity? Yeah, so I guess a simple way to answer that is that so first off, there are studies now that have looked at people who are practicing Qi Gong and Tai Chi, they usually do those two together, where there are measurable improvements, not just by surveys if they're well-being, but they're looking at markers, for example, of the immune system. And the immune system actually has a measurable improvement after a 30-minute practice of tai chi and chigong, right? So we know that changes are happening quite rapidly in the body

just through a 30-minute practice and that those changes are happening through the mechanisms that you're talking about. So the brain is sending different signals to the body, to ourselves, and the information is also changing the way that our DNA is expressing. Right? So different genes turn on and off based on information that we give it. And the information can come in any of the forms that we talked about earlier. So food is information, right? Our community is information, our environment, and the chemicals are information.

And food, food is a huge one and supplements. So their information and their also energy. So if we just look at that really essential level, that's really what it boils down to. What information are we feeding our bodies? So that yeah, absolutely, oh, in movement, movement also was another one. So Qi Gong actually is all of the above, right? It's a movement,

it's a conscious practice, it changes the way we relate to our communities. It is multi-pronged if we're looking at it from that level. We know that those things already affect epigenetics or the turning on and off of different genes so that that's where I understand, okay, Cheagong is working at that level because Cheagong's already doing all of those things. And then at another level, I think it's just beyond measure. So the benefit is actually, yeah, something that we are not yet able to measure or explain. Okay, and if someone in the audience wants to know more about your specific practice of Chigong, what would be the best way for them to find out about it? I do have a page on my website,

so my website is just Cynthia Lee MD dot com. C-Y-N-T-H-I-A-L-I-M-D dot com and there's a page on there that says Chigong and it just talks about I have there's three different teachers in the same lineage and just they offer different things they're set up in very different ways there's a lot of community support and interaction as well so you're not just doing it by yourself and individual yeah kind of resonance and fit is really important as well okay and I thought the last thing I wanted to end on is you talked about intuition earlier on and you have this fascinating story that a number of years ago you had a couple

over to your house. I think he was a climate physiologist and she was clairvoyant but she ends up doing something throughout your house and then telling you that she could teach you how to do intuition which most people would be like, how in the heck do you learn intuition? So I thought it would be valuable for the audience just to hear about this experience and where it has led you. Yeah, absolutely. This was when I was still really at my low and had learned about functional medicine but

it was overwhelmed by what do I do? What is it that I do? And what do I eat? How do I move my body, all those things? And so Pia Aiken was her name. She got me started and then I actually took some formal training with a very gifted medical intuitive named Martine Blokeo. But with Pia, yeah, it just started. My daughter was two at the time and having night terrors. Again, night terrors is one of those things we actually took her to the pediatrician after a while because we were at her withsend and it was really affecting my health as well, but my daughter was very terrorized by him. And the pediatrician said, you don't really know what causes it and just got to wait it out. It's a stage.

But it just kept going on and on. And we happened to have our friends over. They're both since passed away. But he was a leading physicist in climate. And she was a green architect, but also was clairvoyant. And she basically, she saw that there were energies in the house. And I'm just prefacing by saying, I didn't believe any of this stuff. I mean it was kind of, but it was also spoofing me out.

And she said there's a dark energy in the house and your daughter is actually responding to that. And she said, oh, but there's something really simple we can do to clear. And so she went and got some smudge sticks, which is dried sage. And she went around smudge the house. But also I realized later she's using her consciousness, which is very coherent. And this is what's so interesting. She was creating this coherent field.

She was detoxing the house basically with energy and bringing it into coherence. And so literally from that night on, my daughter slept and hasn't had any night to her since. I mean, she's 14 now. But it was really eye-opening for me. And I said to her, actually, if you can lift the heaviness in this house, can you help me restore some energy?

And she said, well, she said, I could be kind of short-lived. If it's not something that you can maintain, I can do something better. I can teach you how to develop intuition. So intuition I learned is it's like any other art, like music or creative arts, where some of us are born really gifted and some of us are tone deaf. We have no basic skills, foundational skills, but that it doesn't matter where we start

on the spectrum that we can all develop it. And so a lot of it, and this is again, it's simple, but it doesn't mean it's easy, and it's not easy because of the way our lives are organized, and the way that our minds are used to condition to think. So I think the hardest part for me, and for a lot of people, is we have to learn how to quiet our thinking minds. And so for me, actually, that's where Qi Gong was so powerful was suddenly there's a movement that my mind can it gives my mind something to do right but then by giving it something to do it helps my thinking mind quiet down because I think you mind a satiated by the movements and what I need to do and then the intuitive part just completely

opens up so yeah and then things like writing like one simple example would be it's called automatic writing where you have a prompt, it could be anything, but let's just say here at Killie's Hill, it's really bothering you, but you just want to connect to, well, what is at the root of that? Intuitively, what's going on? And so you can just start writing, you can set a timer, but you just start writing about anything that comes up and you cannot stop writing. If you don't know what it is, you just say, I have no idea what I'm right.

Nothing is coming up. You don't correct. So your thinking mind is too fast. Your thinking mind cannot edit. And then again, you have to practice, practice. But over time, just random things will start coming up. Maybe it's like a soccer game you play when you were five or maybe it's your father. you're writing all these things down, you just write it down. And over time, it's like we are giving our intuitive minds a permission to come out. And we're training, we're conditioning that mind to step up and speak out. I use it a lot in my clinical practice, but I use it a lot in my own life. but I use it a lot in my own life. And then now it's not even something that I try to do.

It's just my left and right brains are very balanced. Or I'll say there are a lot more balance than they used to be. But it is, it makes life and I think of a lot more interesting and playful. I'll end with this because I have been actually on a journey with a lot of people who have been developing their intuition. And also with fellow doctors. We have circles where we kind of exchange our experiences, what's coming up for us intuitively and maybe other practices to develop it. In my book, I also outlined just ways to

deepen intuition and to develop it. But the really big challenge with intuition is that when messages arise, The really big challenge with intuition is that when messages arise, do we have the courage to actually follow? Because a lot of times what comes up intuitively is not the place that we would choose to go. That our thinking minds would want to go, because it's into the places that challenge us. Yeah, it's under the uncomfortable places that most of us steer clear of because. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And that's again, that's where Qi Yong has been useful for me because in my body, I can practice surrender. So if something shows up in two and I'm like, oh my god, like, I'm supposed to, oh my god, I'm supposed to talk to John Miles and I, whoa, is that something I would choose to do? And I'm like, oh, I know how to do that because I know the pattern. I've been practicing this every day. So in my body, I know how to do that. In my mind, I can release whatever I might not necessarily choose for myself. what worked for me has been yoga, kind of the same principle of your emotion, but at the same time your mind is freeing up and it allows you to have these thoughts that you typically wouldn't have because you're taking out the daily noise from that moment and it allows things to pop up. So similar concept, I would say. Absolutely, absolutely. And you touched on something earlier about epigenetics and just the way that we tap into the subconscious, which is, right, stored in the body, it's stored in the body. So if we're doing this mind body practice of yoga, and you're moving your body in a way that has been passed on, right, this form has been passed on for a long time.

It's releasing stuff, like maybe there's something stored in your liver, in your pancreas, and it gets activated or released or changed because of these movements. Then suddenly, this is stuff that's been stored in your subconscious for a long time. So what these practices also allow us to do, so yes, there's the uncomfortable part, but they allow us to go below the story. Because often the story has a lot of trauma or a lot of challenging places we don't want to go. So then again, that's at the level of complexity, right? That's the story that we're living in our complex daily lives. You go below to the essence level. You really have to deal with the story and stuff releases from the body, stories that have been stored, released from the body. And we don't even know what's happening. And so that's the stuff that I feel cannot be measured. So when you're asking the question

about what's happening with Chigong and these other movement practices, I don't know, and I don't know if we ever will know. But my experience of it is that we're just diving straight below. It doesn't matter if my shoulder was tight from argument I had with my partner last week or some major trauma when I was a kid or the way I slept last night. It doesn't actually matter. It all releases when we do a certain movement. Well, what a great way to end this interview and I will make sure that I put in the show note to copy of your book, links to how people can reach you. I did want to ask, and she practice in the San Francisco Bay Area, is that the only place that you can treat patients, or can you

treat outside of California as well? I do. COVID changed a lot of things for doctors, and so telemedicine is just so much freer than it used to be. So I actually was all virtual before COVID even because of the nature of the way that I work with patients. So I do work at the functional medicine complex study level as well, but really dive into the essence level so that it's like more like part coaching. But I would say not even coaching because I mostly ask questions. How can I support you today? And literally putting the patient in the driver's seat. Some of them are like they have no idea. I was like well you've been suffering for 10 years. How can I best serve you? And they

don't know. And so it's again, but that is, that that's really at the root of healing is reclaiming that power that you actually always had and not deferring to somebody else. So I can guide you and I can also be in your back and support you. So how do I support you the best and then we play play with attention a little. And then I use intuition as well. So I actually consult with patients all over the world. Okay, well that's great. So the listeners can use your services if they love what they heard today and I will make sure that that's covered as well. As I'll also put some links in there on Chigong as well so that they can have a better understanding of that. Well, Cynthia, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

I know you're not doing very many of these days, so it was really a treat to have you on. Yeah, thank you for having me. It was a real pleasure. Well, that interview with Dr. Cynthia Lee, lightly blew me away. And I wanted to thank Cynthia so much for the honor or privilege of appearing on this podcast because I know she doesn't do that many these days. Links to all things Cynthia will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you buy any of the books from the authors that we feature on the show.

All those proceeds go to supporting the show. Videos are on YouTube at John Armiles and we just launched a brand new Clips channel at PassionStruck Clips. Evertiser deals and discount codes are in one community place at PassionStruck.com. Slash deals. I'm at John Armiles, both on Twitter and Instagram, and you can also find me on LinkedIn. You're about to hear a preview of the PassionStruck podcast interview I did with John Kim, otherwise known as the Angry Therapist and Vanessa Bennett. We discuss their brand new best-selling book, It's Not Me, It's You. Where they analyze their own relationship,

who entangle the common and frustrating barriers that many individuals face on the road who are happy loving and rewarding partnership. So many people come to us as clients and they're like 40s usually and it's like, I'm unhappy, I don't know why. I've checked all the boxes, I've done all the things, quote unquote, right.

Why am I miserable and so often? It's because I've done everything I should do. Yeah, and also I want to say that what you went through. Doesn't stop because when we get into a relationship, it shouldn't stop. We're always growing evolving and exploring self. We change our partner changes. The relationship changes. So it's not like you do all this work when you're single and then you meet someone and then you just stop. Yeah, a lot of people do that. I think that's really drop the ball. Remember we rise by lifting others. So please share this show with those you love. And if you found today's episode useful, please share it with somebody who could use the advice that we shared here on the show. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the shows that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life-assioned star. you