Last Saturday, we had the privilege of hosting Awakin Call with Cynthia Li.  Below are some nuggets from the call, as well as resources regarding qi gong, medical intuition, COVID-19, and other topics that came up.  The call was so rich; the nuggets are necessarily just a tiny taste.  We encourage you to savor the audio now available on our site, as well as the full transcript that will be posted soon.

Cynthia Li, MD, is a physician and author whose decades-long personal healing journey through a disabling autoimmune illness required her to question her medical training. Through extensive experimentation with complementary approaches to Western medicine, she ultimately embraced the principles of integrative and functional medicine and wove together intuition and science toward a brave new medicine which allowed her to unlock her body’s innate potential to heal. In these unique times of pandemic, it has become clear that the primary difference between people who develop serious illness from COVID-19 and those who have mild to no symptoms is the strength of their immune system. Dr. Li's experiences as both doctor and patient through an internal "dark night of the soul" and an external medical/bodily condition affecting her immune system point to tools for building personal immunity and resilience in the face of crises like the current one.

Below are some of the nuggets from the call that stood out for me ...

• I didn't realize that intuition was something that could be developed like music or art.
• Even though I had learned how to love myself, I had learned that I love myself as long as I was slowly getting better. In the second health crisis, I learned to love my life as it is.
• When I deepened my qigong practice and delved deeper into Christian mysticism, my intuition developed as a side-effect.
• When I flip into the ego mind, I want to get things right. That is generally when I shut down the intuitive potential.
• I went into medicine with a deep desire to relieve suffering, but hidden below that was a desire to save my family
• The change happens very quickly; it is solidifying the change that is the piece that we often lose patience with. That requires habituation.
• "We cannot heal something that we're not connected to, and that includes our own bodies. So, I know, at least here in the West and the American West, we're so mind heavy that we don't often recognize how detached, how disconnected the mind and the body are. So really we have to go into these places that feel uncomfortable, feel unmanageable, feel like the great mystery. Being able to connect with that with comfort and with gratitude really triggers this great phrase from when I was going into my Christian mysticism. I don't remember who said it, but the saying was that we humans prefer manageable complexity over unmanageable simplicity."
• "I'm still operating in this dimension of complexity. And patients come to me with complex questions and wanting complex answers in some ways. How do I relate to them and relate to myself and stay connected to this place of pure simplicity?"
• "one piece that I learned in my Qi Gong practice, was that there's nothing wrong with comfort and comfort is great, but there's not a lot of energy moving. So if we're really seeking healing, we do have to go into the discomfort and move through that in order to get to the place of flow. So that practice has been tremendously grounding for me, during this very, very dynamic time."
• "the saving grace about going into these deep embodied practices is that  I don't even have to go into the story. I go, in a way, below the story and I let go of that story. It doesn't matter what the trauma was. It doesn't matter if it was illness-related, pregnancy-related, related to Kurt's death, related to my parents. It's all stored in the same way, in the same patterns. And when you release that pattern, you release and heal all of those at once. And then what we know also, through the science, more on the level of quantum science, is that our genes, our DNA, all of our cells are vibrating at a very, very low frequency. Very subtle. And so when I'm doing these energy practices, I'm kind of just imagining that's probably what they're doing, right? All these ancient healing practices had vibrations and chants as part of their tradition. We've lost that largely in our culture, and even in our Western versions of religions. But through the chants and through the songs and through the vibrations, is that actually what's happening too at the genetic level? We're literally shaking our DNA free of some of these patterns that have not been healthy."
• "in so many different traditions and also when I listen to the wisest people who've emerged from humanity, there's this common phrase that they use; what are you looking for, go home, just go home. And I never really understood what that meant. Like home, what is that? Where is home? I've never felt at home anywhere so where is home? And then I realized like just to your point it's less about wandering and searching outside of ourselves. It's just about going back and finding a sense of home from where we came from and whatever that means to people and then ultimately our home is our bodies and just learning to be at home within ourselves."

Lots of gratitude to all the behind-the-scenes volunteers that made this call happen!  A transcript of the call will be posted soon, and a recording is now available.  Resources mentioned are listed below.

Resources

Below is a list of resources that Cynthia referred to in the call (with hyperlinks):

• Her own website for her functional/integrative medicine practice can be found here.  Information about her memoir, Brave New Medicine, is here, and her free e-book on COVID-19 on "How to Build the Inner Shield of Immunity" can be found here.
• Qigong Teacher and Online Qigong Resources:  Cynthia's teacher is Master Mingtong Gu. He has a strong online presence, and all of his lessons can be found catalogued in stepwise fashion, available on a monthly subscription basis. For those for whom the costs may be hard, he has a lot of free youtube videos on his channel for the practices as well as teachings. They're not in stepwise order, though, on the youtube channel, so while it's much easier and more accessible to get started this way, over time, it might become harder to deepen the practice through the free resources alone.  But a good 20-minute free video to start with for any level is this one. According to Cynthia, "It's important for people to connect either to the teacher or to the practice (there are over 1000 lineages of qigong). Wisdom Healing Qigong, which Master Mingtong teaches, incorporates modern science and is therefore useful for many.  Here's an article I wrote about qigong (transformation vs transaction)." 
• Intuitive Medicine and Developing Intuition:  The medical intuitive healer Cynthia saw (and learned from) was Martine Bloquiaux. "She's quite advanced and can scan the body with great precision. She comes up with an integrative health plan. I know people (myself included) who have deeply benefitted from her unique skills. Some people have had trouble digesting the process, so it may take some conscious preparation." Dr. Judith Orloff is an intuitive psychiatrist. "She's a clairvoyant who studied medicine. So she has a distinct set of skills that she teaches people through books and workshops," Cynthia writes. "I also write in Brave New Medicine about how I learned to develop intuition, and include a few initial steps and resources. Here's a blog from my website."
• Functional Medicine, Grief Work, and Radical Remission.  More about functional medicine can be found here, and more about grief work can be found here (he is a grief therapist who facilitates rituals, whom Cynthia wrote about in Brave New Medicine).  Kelly Turner's Radical Remissions docuseries (Cynthia is featured in episode 9; Michael Lerner is featured as an expert in one of the other episodes; and past Awakin guest Shin Terayama is featured in episode 1) is "chock full of world experts in healthcare who comment on healing beyond scientific measurement; also personal stories of healing".