Sacred Awakenings Series: Chunyi Lin

Produced by The Shift Network, hosted by Stephen Dinan
Many thanks and blessings to our volunteer transcriber, Lynn Jennings
To listen to the full audio, register at http://www.sacredawakeningseries.com

 

Stephen Dinan: It is my distinct pleasure tonight to introduce our guest, Chunyi Lin, who is a certified international qigong master and the founder and creator of Spring Forest Qigong. He is fluent in a number of Chinese dialects and it’s allowed him to study with many of the most respected masters in his native China. He has been teaching qigong and using qigong techniques for more than twenty-five years. He has helped more than 120,000 people learn about the healing benefits of qigong. He is also skilled in Tai Chi, Chinese herbal medicine and acupuncture. So he’s a very versatile leader.  He has been a college professor and has a master’s degree in Human Development and is co-author of the Amazon.com #1 bestseller called “Born a Healer”. Welcome to the call this evening.

Chunyi Lin: Thank you so much, Stephen, for having me.

Stephen Dinan: It’s wonderful to have you. It’s nice to start with a bit of personal context or your journey to become a spiritual teacher and work as a healer.

Chunyi Lin: I grew up in China. I was born in China so I am a real Chinese guy. (laughs) When I grew up it was the period of time of the Cultural Revolution. My family went through a lot of hardship during that time. The story I really got through in my life was at the age of eight or nine. My father was put into jail and my mother ran for her life so us four kids were left behind in the house so we went through a lot of hardship after that. When the Cultural Revolution was over the spiritual world inside my heart was just upside-down. Things that the government said were good turned out not that good. The things that the government said were bad turned out to be not that bad. So I was very depressed with all the experiences I went through. After my graduation from high school I was forced to work on a farm like most of the young kids my age. After five years working on the farm I had a lot of injuries in my body and later on I played basketball and got even more injuries in my body. When the Cultural Revolution was over I got a chance to go to university and became a college student. After my graduation from university I became a teacher. I played a lot of basketball again in a division team and many games left me with aches and pains but in one game I badly damaged the cartilage in my knees. I tried everything and the doctor said that surgery might help but not really. I tried everything - acupuncture, injections, anything you can name, and nothing could help.

Eventually I went to a qigong master by sitting in on his seminar for 7 1/2 hours and 80% of the pain went away and the swelling in my knees was completely gone.  The pain was very, very terrible before I went to the workshop. Sometimes the pain was so severe that I wanted to cut my legs off. It was very painful but after that only one sitting meditation with this master together with thousands of people in the soccer field. Then my pain went away. After another two months of practice it completely went away. That really hooked me up to qigong practice. After that I practiced qigong every day and went to different masters and meditated in a cave and through many years of practice and study I found out that qigong is very powerful, it is very simple. I found out that qigong is very, very simple and everybody is born with this gift, this gift of helping yourself and helping others to heal, too. Later on I developed Spring Forest Qigong, a form of qigong that is very simple but very powerful. I’ve been teaching qigong in the United States for 16 years. My message for people is, “Everybody was born a healer. Everybody was born with this beautiful gift that you can help yourself to heal and you can help others heal, too” My mission is: A healer in every family and a world without pain. So, that is about me. (laughs)

Stephen Dinan: It’s a very inspiring message. You say if everyone has a healer inside them and qigong is one of the methods that we can use to unlock our own inner healer, what are some of the core things, the first teachings that people need to know about healing themselves?

Chunyi Lin: Qigong has three basic parts. The first part is breathing. The second part is your mind, and the last part is simple movements with your hands and body. So that’s the three parts. The breathing is the key to connect the mind, the body, and the heart together. So generally speaking, when we breathe every day, we only change 60% of the air in the lungs. 40% of the air in the lungs is stale air. So if you slow down your breathing and take long gentle deep breaths you change 100% of air in the lungs. With each breath you have more oxygen intake then every cell in the body will have more energy and the body will have enough energy and every part of the body will be functioning so well. That is the first thing I teach – so slow down your breathing, that is the key.

Stephen Dinan: A quick question about that. Often times we hear about the oxygen saturation and the energy. What is the relationship, as you do the deeper breathing – you’re bringing more oxygen in and you’re bring in more chi. What is the relationship between these two?

Chunyi Lin: Very good question. Chi has more meaning that oxygen. Chi includes the energy inside, the blood flow, the heat, and everything inside the body. Oxygen is, when you breathe in you take the oxygen in to help to activate those energy centers in the body so that those centers will have more energy, together with this oxygen then they will kick into use to help the body to function better. It’s a combination of all the elements of energy so oxygen is just like the body field to activate that energy and the different types of energy in the body.

Stephen Dinan: So the breathing is the key to start opening those energy doorways and you said mind is the second part?

Chunyi Lin: Yeah, the mind is the second part. The mind is very, very powerful. Never underestimate the power of the mind. Do you mind if I tell you about a game? A Finger-Growing game? If you think in a positive way, positive things are going to happen and if you think in a negative way, negative things are going to happen in the body, too, right? So here is one game I’d like you to try. You look at your hand, your palm. At the bottom of your hand there is a line. You find the first line at the bottom of the palm and then you find the line on the other hand and put these two lines together. Then you put your hands close together, just like making a prayer. Holding that posture, see which hand has fingers that are longer or shorter. Usually one hand’s fingers are a little bit longer than the other side and if that happens to you, pick up the shorter hand, the shorter fingers. Then you repeat in your mind, “My fingers are growing longer, longer, longer, longer, longer. My fingers are growing longer, longer, longer, longer, longer.” And repeat that one more time, “My fingers are growing longer, longer, longer, longer, longer.” Alright, now you compare your hands again. Put the hands together. Match the two lines together and then compare your fingers again.

Stephen Dinan: They look more like the same size now.

Chunyi Lin: Yes, that’s the power of your mind. When you say, “My fingers are growing longer, longer, longer”, you drive more energy towards that part of the body and so the channels are more open and you have more energy flow. That’s why the channels open and the fingers grow longer. So this is the power of your mind and if you use your mind properly by using a positive attitude, a positive message, you can help to bring more joy into your heart. When you tap into your heart that’s the moment when you feel even more powerful. Chinese medicine has taught a lot about the emotions, how the emotions affect the different organs. Over-excitement will cause damage to the heart energy. Anger, frustration – those emotions will cause damage to the liver. Depression and stress will make damage to the lung energy. Fears and worries will damage the kidney energy, the vitality of the body. Too much brain work, thinking and worrying will cause damage to the pancreas and the stomach. So that’s the power of the mind. So if we hold a positive attitude, like happiness and joy, feeling good about yourself, focus on the good things that you are doing. Every day is a good day, feel loved and feel loving and if you do so you have more positive energy in the body and the body channels open faster and they stay open so you can enjoy your health all the time. That’s the power of the mind.

Stephen Dinan: It seems like Western medicine is just starting to catch up with this philosophy which has been thousands of years in the making in China which is seeing the body as being much more integrated emotionally and energetically. It’s not just that we have emotions in our mind, every part of our body is affected in a deep way. Organs are connected to each of those emotions. It’s different than what traditional Western medicine has seen.

Chuny Lin: Absolutely.

Stephen Dinan: And so the third thing is that you add in the component of simple movements to focus the mind and the breath and circulate chi?

Chunyi Lin: Sure, the third thing is simple movements with your hands and fingers. Now, I’d like you to try one movement with me. I want you to take one deep breath and see how much your sinuses open in your nose. Just take a deep breath. That’s good. And so, what I want you to do in this moment is open your left arm with the hand facing up and use your right hand to pat the inside part of your arm for five seconds for me. Just hit it – can you hear what I’m doing? Change hands and open your right hand with the hand facing up and use the left hand to pat the inside part of your arm for five seconds. Now I want you to take another deep breath and see how much your sinuses open.

Stephen Dinan: Yeah, it’s much bigger.

Chunyi Lin: It’s much bigger – you have more room for the lungs, huh? You know, the skin has a direct connection to the breathing system. When you pat your skin, especially when you pat the inside part of the arms which have more channels connecting to the chest and lungs, you help yourself to open up your lungs much faster. A long time ago I had a student called Esther Trejo. She had been on oxygen for six and a half years, for 24 hours a day, diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic that she needed a double lung transplant but she didn’t want to do that. She came to the class, she practiced the exercise - the part that I just taught you – very often. Four weeks later she stopped using oxygen. Eight weeks later she completely got rid of the oxygen. This was documented in the Mayo Clinic. They called this a miracle healing. Even the lung scar tissue disappeared. She didn’t need a double lung transplant and now it has been 17 years. She has been breathing with her own lungs – perfect lungs. If you open up these channels and plus one more thing, if you do the exercise, do the gentle movements (the movements that I teach in the classes) and by putting a smile on your face, that will make it even better. The channels can open even faster. So smile – do you know what smile, S-M-I-L-E stands for? It stands for Start My Internal Love Engine (laughs). That’s what I teach in my classes. The smile is the symbol of healing. The smile is the symbol of caring and anything beautiful from inside-out and outside-in. Plus, when you put a smile on your face the body sends a message to the brain and the brain gets the message and automatically the brain and the body produce endorphins for you which can help you to have a fabulous feeling, a good feeling in your system.

Stephen Dinan: So how much time of practice in a day before people start to get a noticeable benefit from qigong?

Chunyi Lin: That depends. It depends on how serious the challenge is that you’re having now. For instance, if you have aches and pains in the body, in the joints, the elbows or the back – if you use a scale of 1 – 10 and if the scale is at 4 or 5, give yourself 15 minutes a day, a couple times a day to practice. Within one week you should notice a good difference. Many of my students with just one or two sessions feel a big difference.

Stephen Dinan: A lot of what happens in the west is that we’re not really taught these tools from a young age so we have stagnant breath and bad habits on a mind level. We don’t really stimulate our skin and circulate our energy and so many people show up at Chinese doctors and acupuncturists and we’re just really depleted energetically.

Chunyi Lin: So everything is energy. It’s what the Chinese ancestors talk about and Einstein discovered that energy cannot be created. It has always been. Energy cannot be destroyed. It will always be. But energy can be transformed. Literally everything is in the process of transforming. About the forms of energy, from a star to a rock to a tree to every cell in the body and every part, including aches and pains – they are all different forms of energy. So certainly, this energy can be transformed. I’m talking about the health of the body. If we can put our mind, our body and our heart together, our breathing, our movements, all these things together you can help yourself transform all these aches and pains into something beautiful, into something healing. And something that’s already good you can transform into something even better. So that is the unique thing about qigong.

Stephen Dinan: It seems that part of one of the gifts to other traditions is the sophistication about how to work with bodily energies in a way that’s very simple and easy to practice. I’m not aware of other traditions that have that kind of sophistication around body energy.

Chunyi Lin: There are thousands of different kinds of qigong out there in China and Spring Forest Qigong is one of those forms. Those modalities can help people to heal and help people to open their hearts and open the channels. Spring Forest Qigong is willing to work with any modalities of healing in the world to bring people more joy, more peace, and more healing and love.

Stephen Dinan: Having done this work with helping to empower people in their healing what are your reflections about our current time? What are some of the messages that we need to bring our society back into balance and to help encourage transformation on a wider scale?

Chunyi Lin: I think it is love. That is the amazing part. Love from your heart. Love energy is the most powerful energy in the entire universe. Like what Gandhi said, “ It is the simplest but the most powerful.” If we focus on how we can help ourselves to open our hearts and allow the unconditional love energy to come out and serve us and serve the world, I think this world will be a much better place for everybody to enjoy. In qigong teaching I emphasize to each class that as a healer if you don’t have the true love in your heart you can never become a true healer. If you want to heal others but don’t allow your true love to come out and serve you and serve others then you cannot help others to heal completely either. If you don’t know how to love yourself, love your heart, love your organs, love your spirit, then you will never help yourself to balance completely. So that is the power of love. From Buddha to Lao Tzu to Jesus to Confucius, all of these powerful masters of the past already told us that the most powerful healing energy in the Universe is love, unconditional love. So now we need to pay attention, pay great attention to our hearts, to that unconditional love in our hearts. And we have a way to activate that energy.

Stephen Dinan: What practices from qigong are particularly good at opening the lung energy and the heart?

Chunyi Lin: So the first thing is the breathing. So that’s why I say that breathing is key. So first of all, put a smile on your face. Like what I said, a smile is the key to help us unlock the beautiful energy from our heart. Smile stands for Start My Internal Love Engine. And the second thing is, slow down your breathing. When you slow down your breathing, you have more oxygen intake then the clearing of the mind will come and every cell in the body will have enough energy to function. The most important thing, when you slow down your breathing you feel peace in your heart. Love energy can only be found when your heart is at peace. So when you slow down your breathing, that’s the moment that you’ve tapped into your heart. And once you slow down your breathing you can connect yourself to the Infinite Source, to the Universe, or to your God. Your might say, “I am in the Universe. The Universe is in my body. The Universe and I combine together.” Or, “I am in God. God is in me. God and I are one.” No matter what language you want to use – that doesn’t matter – use the language with which you can help yourself to connect to the Infinite Source.

Then you visualize your God or your Master or the Unconditional Love of the Universe as a brilliant sun shining in the Universe and this sun is sending you beams of light into your heart making the light in your heart even brighter. So once you’ve made the connection you continue to receive this energy. And the last one is to allow yourself to become a “love radiator”. A “love radiator”, remember that. And every place you go your body is bubbling, is vibrating with this love energy. And this love energy is so powerful that even if you don’t feel love or loving, this love energy exists within you. Even if you don’t see this love in others, this love exists within them, too. So this is the reason why we are living here – we all need joy, we all want a beautiful life. We all want good health and good luck with everything. So, just open your heart and send your energy out to help others, blessing the world and blessing your family and seeing your whole family and the whole world in this light, in this light of love.

And then you can send a message, whatever message you want to while you are blessing the world, blessing your family, blessing yourself in this light. You can say, “All the channels are open, all the aches and pains in my body will be gone. I will be completely healed.” Or if you are blessing the world you can say, “This world is in the light of love and in this love all species of life will live in harmony.” And make a prayer like that in this light and that alone will give such great love to the world and contribute peace and beauty to the world.

Stephen Dinan: As you speak I can feel my heart warm and you’re a very good “love radiator” yourself.

Chunyi Lin: Well, thank you. In my classes I tell people there are so many things I don’t know really. People call me a qigong master and I say, “Ah, you know, comparing to the history of China and qigong, I am only a pupil.” One thing I do know in my heart is that I really love people. I really love people from the bottom of my heart and because my personal experiences taught me and through a lot of weakness of the practices of my students I know it from my heart that the most powerful healing energy in the entire Universe is love. Love is the answer to any, any conflict.

Participant Question: I’m a practitioner of qigong for about 15 years and I was just wondering about your Spring Forest Qigong. Is that a type of qigong that you created yourself? And then if you could give us a little background about that and let us know how you created this type of qigong.

Chuny Lin: Mainly I created Spring Forest Qigong myself, through my years of studying with my masters and the teaching I received from my masters and from the books I read. After a lot of research and study I found out that qigong is very simple and everybody should know about it. The qigong forms I practiced before were very complicated and very time consuming so I decided to create something very simple and powerful according to my experiences. The difference between Spring Forest Qigong and many other forms of qigong is: Number One, I focus on the heart. The unconditional love in the heart. Like what I’ve been talking about – the most powerful healing energy in the entire universe, is love, the love from your heart. Secondly, I focus on empowering people themselves. Everybody was born a healer, everybody was born with this beautiful gift that you can help yourself heal and you can help others heal, too. And another message is that everybody was born a healer -  “ A healer in every family and a world without pain.” So from the first level I tell people that only through doing some simple movements and slow down your breathing and putting a positive attitude in your practice you can help yourself to bring a good balance to your body like many, many other qigong forms doing the same thing. And one more thing that is very special in Spring Forest Qigong is that we learn how to send our energy from the very beginning to help others to heal. Just within minutes you are able to learn how to send out energy to help others to balance their aches and pains. Literally, you can do it right after my class. You can do it right there – send energy to help others to heal, to heal any, any aches and pains in the body so that’s what I do.

Participant Question: Thank you so much for all of your wisdom. Your philosophy is wonderful and something that I completely agree with. I’m a healer myself. I do energy healing. I was curious, with regard to qigong, how do you handle cancer patients? Cancer is an epidemic in this countr,y more so than diabetes. How do you incorporate the qigong movements and all of the things that you do with cancer patients?

Chunyi Lin: Every day in my healing center I see, together with other healers, I see a lot of cancer patients. The first thing I do is to help people understand the power of love. Number two is to help people to understand that they were born a healer. They were born with this beautiful healing energy, healing gift that can help them to heal. Number three is, cancer is only a form of energy and as a form of energy, you can transform it. You can transform it through positive attitude, positive thinking, gentle movements in your body and slow breathing. You can do that. And the last thing is, help them to change their life perception and change the attitude to their life. We find out that most of these cancer clients have either an emotional disorder, an eating disorder, or a lifestyle disorder. For example, if people have cancer and at 11 o’clock the are still staying up and watching TV, drinking coffee, or doing all these kind of things. Well, you know what, from 11 o’clock to 3 o’clock, these hours are just so critical. The body is detoxifying from the liver and the gallbladder channels. If these people are missing these four hours to sleep they end up having more toxins in the body. So, what I teach people is to slow down your breathing and when you feel tired, just go to bed. At 11 o’clock in the evening you’ve got to go to bed. The exercise I teach people especially – one is the Butterfly Meditation and the Cancer Meditation. One more thing is the Small Universe, a sitting, guided meditation. Small Universe is connecting the front channel and the back channel together so the body can have more energy to flow and to help the body to heal. It is a very important exercise that we teach people.

Participant Question: Hello, what a thrill! Master Lin, I’m a big fan of yours. I’ve been to your seminars, I have your CDs and I’ve spoken to you many times personally on the telephone. Here is my question and I’ve been following you for many years. I am one of those people whose mind never quiets down and guess what, I have stomach problems among other things. I have tried off and on over a number of years to sit quietly and develop a habit of meditation and I have many times returned to your CDs to try and get into a routine of doing your wonderful qigong. My mind will just not cooperate with me. Other than sheer willpower, can you tell me something that I could use to be able to develop this discipline and stay with it in a way that’s peaceful and joyful instead of constricting like, “I must do this, but my mind is racing.”

Chunyi Lin: Well, to tell you the truth, you’re not the only one. I would say that 90% of people are just like you at the beginning of the practice so don’t feel so bad for yourself. At the very beginning of my practice I went through the same thing. Now how to bring your mind back to the body and the focus so you can feel the flow of the energy in the body so you can help yourself to heal faster. One thing, remember, when your mind wanders around don’t berate yourself. That’s very natural. You just smile and say, “Ah, cool, my mind wants to go out and have fun. Okay, now it’s time that we come back and we will have fun later.” And the other thing is we know that love energy is very powerful in your healing. It is in your heart. You can try this – instead of focusing on the light, focus on the breathing and you focus on loving the internal organs. How about that? For instance, if you’ve got pain in your lower back then you just see this beautiful light in your lower back and you say, “Ah, I love you.” And you feel that part of the body, the lower back, is a being, and this being is just so happy, feeling so happy inside there like receiving a beautiful gift from Grandma at Christmas time. Now open the box and say, “Ah, that’s the exact gift I want to have.” And you are so happy just like a little child, smiling. You feel your lower back is smiling. You feel your stomach is smiling. And if you don’t know how to feel this, just put a smile on your face and see how happy you are and then you can take that feeling to your stomach and feel how happy your stomach is feeling. If you do that kind of imagination, even for a few seconds you will feel a good difference right there.

Stephen Dinan: I wonder if there is anything you would like to share or reflect upon as we’re moving into the last minutes here.

Chunyi Lin: Thank you so much for having me here. Just now I listened to the conversations about the power of love and here’s what I’ve found and what many, many people have said, “Yes, I have love in my heart but I don’t know how to activate this love to help others.” The other thing is, people ask me this very often, “When you send energy to others to help them to heal, will that deplete my energy? At the end of the day when I do acupuncture or massage I just feel so tired that I need somebody else to work on me.”

So how do you activate the love energy in your heart? Number one – you put a smile on your face and you see the light in your heart. Light is a very powerful vehicle to help us reach this beautiful love in your heart and to help others. As a healer, when you help others to heal, put a smile on your face and then focus on your heart and take long gentle deep breaths. And one more thing that I want you to know is a trick. You drop your shoulders, remember you drop your shoulders. When you drop your shoulders you allow the energy from your head to sink into your heart and that’s the moment that you feel so grounded, so peaceful. And then you send a beam of light either through your hands or your heart or any part of your body into the person who you are working on at this moment, to that particular part, and then you say a healing message together with this light. So you’re telling the light what you want it to do for you. For instance, if that person has arthritis say, “Your arthritis is gone, you’re completely healed.”

If the person has cancer you say, “The cancer is gone, you’re completely healed.” That is the technique. It is very simple but it is very powerful. People have a concern if they send energy to others then, “How about myself?” So this is the philosophy in Spring Forest Qigong. The more you help others, the more love you give to others, the more energy will come back to you. You don’t deplete your energy. You receive more energy from the Universe because of what you are doing. Open your heart, don’t worry about that and send your love energy out and the universe will help you with more energy. And breathing is very important in your practice so when you breathe in you are collecting the energy from the Universe, through every part of the body and through the skin. Put it in your lower dantien which is deep in behind the navel. When you exhale, you send out your love energy to help others. If not just send out the extra energy like tiredness, stress, worries, or concerns. And this energy is not bad and not good. It’s just extra or too much in your body and you want to return it back to the Universe. You visualize all these different forms of energy that you don’t need in your body transforming into light, into smoke, shooting out of your body from every part to the ends of the Universe. Using this kind of visualization you can help yourself with more energy. Many times you will find it is even more amazing. While you are helping others to heal if you have some aches and pains at the moment then you heal yourself at the same time. So the bottom line is to open your heart. Allow your love energy to come out to serve you and serve others

Stephen Dinan: I just want to thank you and appreciate you for the depth of your teaching and also just the very heartfelt and practical way that you share them. It’s obvious that you’re very sincere and put into practice in your own life exactly what you’re teaching. You’re clearly a man who radiates a lot of love and is very empowering to others. I thank you for the empowerment you’ve offered to us on the phone here tonight.

Chunyi Lin: Thank you very much for having me here tonight. I really enjoy you.