Cynthia Li

The yoga class for new mothers had dissolved into full cacophony -- every baby crying at once, every mother off her mat, nursing, bouncing. Then: "All mamas, Tree Pose." Put the babies on the mat. Go still. How cold, she thought. How insensitive. But in desperation, you follow orders. The mothers went still. Within seconds, the wails subsided. Cynthia's daughter lay calm on the mat. One word entered her mind -- How? -- and faded. She was a physician. It would take her own body failing twice, and twenty years of searching the roots of healing, to understand what that room already knew. She now calls it The Medicine of Flow.

Today, Cynthia is an integrative medicine physician in Berkeley, California. She grew up in Texas, the sensitive daughter of Chinese immigrant parents who had fled war -- and founded Austin's first Chinese evangelical church. A pre-dawn morgue visit in medical school settled it: "To become a doctor wasn't a choice for me. It was a calling." She took that calling to the margins -- HIV/AIDS clinics, a free clinic for refugees and people experiencing homelessness, Doctors Without Borders in rural China -- before her own body became the patient she couldn't treat.

After her first daughter was born, Hashimoto's disease deepened into chronic fatigue syndrome that left her housebound for two years -- normal by every lab measure, invisible to the system she'd given her career to. She had spent her career skeptical of such conditions -- unmeasurable, therefore not quite real. Now she was living inside one. What followed was a decade of rigorous healing: functional medicine, gut healing, treating hidden infections, and practices that reached what protocols could not. She returned to practice asking not what is wrong, but why. She wrote it as Brave New Medicine (the theme of her first Awakin Call). That felt, at the time, like the whole story.

In 2017, finishing the memoir's last pages, her body gave way again -- the same bone-deep fatigue, the same vertigo -- while everything around her was stacking up: toxic mold in the walls, her daughter's concussion, California wildfires turning the sky orange. "Healing was to me a strategic campaign that happened by skillful calculation and sheer force of will," she would write. But that willpower-based healing had reached its ceiling. This time, she had no choice but to surrender. She deepened into her practice of qigong, an ancient mind-body practice from China, and dropped into an embodied flow state. What followed was something she couldn't have imagined: she was well within months, not years. And as if effortlessly.

In one of the pulling chi sessions, Cynthia found herself reaching for a childhood Bible she hadn't opened in twenty years. She had grown up at the center of that faith -- and yet she has always felt that "God, who was supposedly Love", had eluded her, "like an invisible cloud in the sky." Now, reading scripture through the lens of qigong, it came alive in ways it never had as a child. Jesus touching the leper she read as "tremendous power to harmonize energy." Her qi-ball became the "Qi-Christ ball." Chanting the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic, she felt it vibrate "in my chest, like different versions of essence sounds." She reflects in her book: "My natal religion enlivened my qigong practice as much as qigong enlivened my natal religion...Qigong and Christ consciousness dance together as a pair, and science makes three."

Cynthia is a member of the American Board of Internal Medicine and the Institute for Functional Medicine, and taught at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times and Psychology Today. Her memoir was praised by Pulitzer Prize-winning physician Siddhartha Mukherjee as writing that "cuts like a knife"; Mark Hyman, MD, writes of her follow-up that Cynthia "doesn't offer another protocol -- she offers a portal."

With her husband and two daughters, Cynthia loves tending the 50,000 honeybees in their backyard, and plays piano and ukulele. "What the medicine of flow doesn't promise," she writes, "is how healing will manifest. What it does promise: the primary healing -- what transpires within." Join us in conversation with this physician-healer who discovered that the body's deepest medicine was never outside the skin.

In Conversation With

Interviewer Michael Lerner Founder of Commonweal, pioneer in integrative cancer healing, and Cynthia's longtime mentor

Host Rahul Brown Long-time Awakin Calls volunteer, serial entrepreneur and film-maker.