Healing By Letting Go: The Medicine of Flow
Cynthia Li, in conversation with Michael Lerner — an Awakin Call hosted by ServiceSpace
Dive deeper
Medicine of Flow Pod (Sep 13–19) — apply to join the week-long gifted pod with Cynthia and others
Three Medicines — An immersive Dailygood feature on her journey of 2 health crises and their lessons
Guided practices on Cynthia's website — Short practices and lots more
Cynthia's 1st Awakin Call (2020) — Focusing on healing from her first health crisis
A heartbeat, Cynthia Li says, is an electrical impulse — and every electrical current generates a magnetic field, which means we are, quite literally, an electromagnetic field. A body left unattended, she found, behaves exactly like a house left unattended: pests move in, order breaks down, and healing begins the moment we come back home to it. In the middle of her hardest years of a health crisis, she reached for something she hadn't touched in twenty years — her childhood Bible — and was stunned to read Jesus knowing of someone needing healing by feeling energy go out from him at their touch. What follows are the nuggets from a conversation that moves from hard physics to spiral galaxies to a very old Christian upbringing, and finds the same reality wearing different clothes at the center of it all.
Before any of the conversation began, a video was played with Cynthia leading a short Qigong practice to settle everyone into their bodies. Take the effortless healing sitting posture — relaxed, but activated. Crown lifted toward the sky, feet flat and connected to the earth below. Feel your body as the energy connector and conductor between the sky above and the earth below. Breathing slowly into the dantian, in the core, she invited a simple recognition: know that you are breathing in air and chi. Feel your whole body becoming pure energy — radiating, flowing, and vibrating. The practice ended with a walk around the room, eyes open, noticing the emptiness in the space. Knowing they are teeming with energy fields, teeming with the energy of life. As she put it near the end of the call, distilling the whole practice into a single line: you're a chi body in a chi universe, and yet your feet are fully grounded.
Michael Lerner opened by reading a line from the introduction to Cynthia's new book, The Medicine of Flow: Harmonizing Your Inner State for Effortless Healing, written by the physician Mark Hyman: “In these pages, Cynthia doesn't offer another protocol — she offers a portal. Her medicine is not just a collection of techniques, but a way of being, a reorientation to life itself.” Cynthia later returned to that same idea in her own words, describing what she calls effortless healing:
“It's as if healing isn't something that we do. It's something that happens to us. We can be going to the doctor, we can be receiving treatments, we can be practicing our Qigong — and we're doing it in this way that feels like it's floating, or we're floating through it.”
Asked how she came to experience herself as an energy body rather than a solid one, Cynthia traced it back to something she calls incredibly organic, not esoteric at all: “Something as simple as a heartbeat — every single heartbeat, every single impulse that we have in the brain and the nervous system, where we're conducting electrical impulses. This is Physics 101: with every electrical current, we generate a magnetic field.”
We are 60% water, and the atoms that make up our hundred trillion cells are about 99.99% empty — and that emptiness is not a void. It's teeming with subtle energy fields.
Cynthia described why our consciousness so often leaves the body under stress or early trauma — and why that once-protective habit eventually costs us. “Things get difficult in the home, we leave. We fantasize and go somewhere else. And that's a really, really helpful, useful, even life-saving coping mechanism. But over time, in a chronic pattern, our body begins to really suffer for that. We need to be home, right? A home that is not inhabited, a physical home that is not inhabited, goes to waste — pests take over, things decay, things fall apart. There's a lot of disorder, and the same thing happens actually in our bodies as our home.”
Most of us know fight-or-flight, and most of us know rest-and-digest. Cynthia named a third state that medicine rarely discusses: “There's this third state, which is flow. In physiology we call it coherence... embodied flow, meaning the flow state can come into the body, not just stay psychological in the mind... it's relaxation coupled with an activated energy state.” On an EEG or heart-rhythm tracing, she said, the difference is visible: when we're incoherent, thinking and analyzing and judging, “the pattern of that information is disorganized — it looks like sawtooth patterns. When we're in coherence, it's an organized pattern, so it looks like beautiful sine waves just undulating.” And the effect isn't private — if she's in a coherent, flowing state herself, Cynthia said, “I can bring someone else into the flow state without their even being aware of it.”
Cynthia held up an illustration from her book, drawn by her friend Stefania Cargnello, of the heart's electromagnetic field.
Science has measured the electromagnetic field of the heart to be the largest field in the human body — spanning several feet away from us. If we're sitting near someone, we're sitting in each other's fields, even if we're not touching.
She walked through the illustrations that follow in the book: two people near each other, bathing one another in overlapping fields, drawn from above as a Venn diagram — “which for those familiar with wisdom traditions is also a sacred geometry.” Scale that up to a group, she said, and “this is why groups can heal together, like in your [Michael Lerner's] cancer healing retreats” — the pattern becomes the flower of life. “When we come together as a collective, we're creating this amazing mandala. We're a living mandala.”
For years, Cynthia pictured her own healing as a wheel: herself in the middle, and diet, supplements, and Qigong as spokes supporting her from the outside. That picture changed during a second health crisis, when she had nothing else left to reach for. “It was then that I tapped into the energetics and the consciousness dimensions of Qigong, which is really where the true power and potential lie. I just had not accessed that — I was very much still in control with my thinking mind.” What she realized was that the practice wasn't one more spoke on the wheel at all: “It actually transforms the center — it transforms me, and transforms my state, and therefore it transforms how my body, how my consciousness, how my whole being responds to all the different things that I'm doing.” The result, she said, was a very rapid healing — one that defied her prognosis.
The book's seven foundational steps — pause into stillness, soften your intentions, empty the mind, open the heart, inhabit the body, tap into the collective, personalize the field — don't have to be taken in order, Cynthia said, because flow moves in a spiral, not a line. Each step is its own way in: “If emptying the mind feels really challenging, which it was for me — oh, I'm going to practice opening the heart.” The steps work on each other because of what the word coherence actually means: “cohere means to stick together.” “We have these electrical systems in the body, and so if the heart is in coherence, it can bring the brain, can bring the breath — our whole system can come into one integrated unit. And the same thing: we cohere as individuals. If I'm in coherence, I can help bring someone else into coherence as well.” So, she said, if you're practicing opening the heart, the mind empties much more readily; if you're practicing inhabiting the body, the rest of the system follows along.
Cynthia trained for years with a medical intuitive named Martine, and came to see intuition less as a mystical gift than as a skill like any other. “It's like music, it's like art, it's like any other craft — we can develop it. Some of us may be born more gifted, others might start at a much lower starting point, but no matter where we are, we can begin to develop it.” At first, she approached it the way she approached medicine itself — goal-focused, effortful, “together with analysis.” That changed with her second health crisis. “When I deepened into surrender, into this flow state, I realized that intuition naturally happens. It's a side effect — it's like healing happening to you. Intuition just comes to you.” Her explanation for how it works stays refreshingly ordinary: information is always moving through us as energy, the way a phone call travels through the air, and “intuition is about as ordinary as that — it's just receiving it in a way that's beyond the five senses. It's a direct knowing.”
Asked for a practical exercise anyone could use to bring flow to a stuck place in the body, Cynthia pointed back to the first and simplest step in the book: pause into stillness. “If we can truly, truly do that, and understand the depth of that and the simplicity of that practice, we're done — we don't even have to do all the other ones. They're just ways to help us return to this stillness.” It doesn't require retreating from ordinary life to get there. “As little as ten minutes of these coherence practices, three times a day, can begin to entrain our inner states to have this flow state as the default state. We don't have to go to a mountain and be there for six months, six years, to come into this. We can do it from our daily lives as they are — ten minutes, three times a day.”
Raised evangelical in Texas, in a church her parents co-founded, Cynthia carried a lot of fear from teachings about heaven and hell — fear that, she said, was part of what drew her into medicine in the first place. She left the church and her faith behind in college and didn't miss it. Then, in the middle of her second health crisis, something unexpected happened: “A very strange and unexpected thing happened — I wanted my childhood Bible. It had been over twenty years — I didn't even know where it was. My parents had moved from Texas to Beijing, and I just assumed it was lost. However, my parents had it. So they gave it to me, and I began to read the Bible and Christ's teachings in a very, very different way, having had my experience of Qigong.” Lines she'd never noticed before suddenly read as descriptions of energy work: “Jesus walking through a crowd, and he could feel that somebody who needed healing touched him, because he felt energy go out from him... even his calming the storm — he was harmonizing the chaos of that storm.” She came to understand Christ, distinct from Jesus the person, as “the consciousness piece — the universal heart, this tremendous coherence that was coming through him and in him,” which made her own Qigong practice suddenly personal and intimate rather than abstract. “Trauma gets a really bad rap, because it's really difficult. However, if we open those blockages, tremendous flow happens, because there's a lot of energy stuck — the greater the emotional imprint... it's like opening up a dam.”
“Science, spirituality, and the Qigong practice — for me, they're totally inseparable. They're just different languages for the same thing.”
When Rahul admitted, a little sheepishly, that he still hadn't read Cynthia's book, she turned it into an example of the very thing the book teaches. “One of the things in flow is recognizing ripeness instead of rightness — like, did I do that, is it right for me to read this book? But it's really, is it ripe for me to read it? So we let go of judgment, we let go of expectation, and we trust that the ripe time will come — and if we're not paying attention, life will knock us on the head to let us know that it's ripe.” “I think it's wonderful that you haven't read it yet,” she told him, “and just giving yourself permission to relax into that spaciousness — to the non-doing.”
Asked how the community could best support her work, Cynthia turned the question back on the practice itself. The old model — recharge your own batteries first, then go out and serve — is outdated, she said, “so our technologies are reflecting that as well: now we can plug in, and it can be solar energy, it can be infinite energy.” The same shift is available to us. “Cultivating that connection, to heaven above, to earth below, being an open transmitter, transducer of energy, really serves the whole — by doing that, not doing that in order to do something.” She closed with an invitation rather than a conclusion: “There are a lot of paradigms that are being shifted right now, and if we can step into this new paradigm with our full bodies, hearts, and minds, I think the world would be a much more harmonized place.”
Listen to the complete conversation with Cynthia Li.