Lee Holden

Back from years of Taoist training in Thailand, Lee Holden came home with one practical question: "How do I teach this to people working in Silicon Valley?" Thirty-five years later, that is still the work. He is a doctor of Chinese medicine who has made an esoteric practice ordinary enough to do at a desk, in seven minutes, without believing anything in particular.

What he teaches runs against how most of us were taught to get stronger. "We feel like we need to really pulverize our body in the gym, or beat it into the pavement with a run," he says. Qi gong asks for the opposite: slow movement, soft attention, breath. "Relaxation is a much higher level of skill than responding with stress."

He learned that at nineteen, flat on his back. A collegiate soccer player at UC Berkeley, he landed on his tailbone going up for a ball and ruptured discs; the team doctors told him his season was over. What healed him was a childhood martial arts teacher who had once told him qi was for healing people, not hurting them. Three treatments later he was playing again.

"Why don't more people know about this?" he remembers thinking. Looking for an answer took him to northern Thailand, where he spent years as ghostwriter to the Taoist master Mantak Chia, training at his teacher's house each morning and travelling out to study with masters in China, Japan and Indonesia.

Bringing it home meant refusing to make it strange. He filmed his first DVDs in the Santa Cruz redwoods, funded by a corporate gig that paid ten dollars a head, and an acupuncture patient passed the tapes to a public television distributor. Less Stress, More Energy and Your Fountain of Youth have since reached more than fifty million households.

The promise stays small on purpose. "You only need seven minutes for a shift and a change in your energy system." What opens at the other end is not small: qi gong, he says, is "like direct training into flow state, which I love so much." His image for it is a tree in wind. The wind moves through the tree. The tree doesn't brace.

He is the best-selling author of Ready, Set, Slow, and producer and host of the docuseries The Superhuman Experience. These days most of his attention goes to training other teachers through Holden QiGong. "My teachers lit a candle in me," he writes. "A candle loses nothing by lighting another."

At home in Santa Cruz he practices in the gaps of an ordinary day -- four daughters in the house, a mountain bike in the hills, a few movements while dinner cooks.

Join us in conversation with this teacher of effortless power, who gives an old practice away seven minutes at a time.