Interview with a genuine Chinese Qigong Master
by Anna Prim       

To come in contact with the invisible powers within us and become more whole, we have to learn to relax. Relaxation is the key to reaching a deeper state, Chinese physician and Qigong Master  Shi Yin Lan says. It’s her eyes that make you think that she knows what she is talking about. They have an unfathomable expression, as if they were gazing both outside and inside at the same time. You feel that she takes in each detail of your outer physiognomy and simultaneously she also secretly seems to be in contact with the invisible emotions and thoughts within you.

 Shi Yin Lan also shows through her movements exactly what she means by “whole”. When she is walking, shopping at the supermarket or instructing her students about the details of qigong, you feel that it isn’t only a middle-aged woman’s body that is moving through the room or doing her things. In each step, in each gesture there is something more, an invisible presence that seems to be backed up by the great life force or qi, as it’s called in China, and that says: I exist, I am. Maybe this is what it means to be a Qigong Master. To be able to balance in the midst of everyday life, fully present and conscious about the depth and strength of life itself.

In the traditional Chinese medicine there is knowledge thousands of years about the subtle energy centers and power channels that are considered to be behind the physical body and its organs. These channels and centers are very important for our health and wellbeing and they open, according to  Shi Yin Lan, like flowers during deep relaxation. This adds more life force to our organism, the circulation of the life force increases, which may correct possible imbalances.

If you want to increase your life force you have to become aware of the invisible existence,  Shi Yin Lan points out. You need to develop your heart powers, your inside, and your soul. Strive for living in love and equality, in harmony with nature. The highest ethics, ”de”, in the traditional Chinese medicine doesn’t mean in the first place living according to some static rules but refer to a state where you are in balance with the life force, participates in the natural flow of events without putting a break on or hurrying up things. It doesn’t matter how skillfully you perform the qigong movements for instance, how much concentration you have, if you don’t try to become a good person you can’t, in a radical way anyway, build up your qi - life force - and realize your full potential.

You need to learn to balance the different phases and expressions of the life force, both on the physical and the mental plane. Become more aware of your environment, of what you are eating, your relationship to other beings. Learn to lap the extrovert activities with moments of stillness, when you are resting in your middle.

 Shi Yin Lan has from early childhood on been raised to manage the invisible powers in the human nature. The invisible power flows under the surface of the concrete existence is the real work field of the traditional Chinese Qigong Master and physician. In China no one bats an eyelid when someone is talking about “blocks” in the energy field. To the contrary, if such a thing is diagnosed, you do everything to try to resolve it, from practicing qigong and undergoing the subtle needle torture of acupuncture, to learning to think out of the box, becoming less greedy or speaking up when your are trampled on. The world of invisible energy is for  Shi Yin Lan the real world, the world from which she gathers valuable knowledge both about how she can help her patients and students and how she has to live her own life.

It was  Shi Yin Lan’s grandmother and great grandfather, both physicians and Qigong Masters, who in her childhood home in northern China initiated her in the secrets of the life force. While the other children played out in the fields she learned to empty her mind of all impressions and rest in the stillness at the middle of existence. Her grandmother also trained her in the art of qigong, where it’s all about putting one’s person with all its expectations, ambitions and fears to the side to allow the really great, impersonal powers behind it to emerge. She taught her all that she herself had learnt in her life about healing herbs and showed her how the life force through medical qigong could serve the healing process.

 Shi Yin Lan grew up in China during the breakthrough of communism and the seizure of power of Mao – a time when the material existence was emphasized as the only important one and the old knowledge about the invisible life force was rejected. Qigong was only practiced behind the locked doors of the house and  Shi Yin Lan had to keep her interest a secret in at school. She trained to be a preschool teacher, eventually got married to a mathematician and had two children.

The conditions in China were difficult. The daily survival required all attention and the heritage from the grandmother might have been lost if  Shi Yin Lan hadn't had a serious blood condition in her thirties. When the doctors couldn't do anything and explained that she was dying  Shi Yin Lan decided to try to heal herself with qigong. She practiced intensely for seven days according to the methods she had learned from her grandmother.

At one occasion, after a two-hour practice of still qigong, she got a strong and clear intuitive feeling that the illness turned around. She saw her grandmother in front of her inner eyes and felt her presence strongly. “I felt the subtle energy channels opening up very quickly and that my whole being was pervaded with power”, she writes.

When  Shi Yin Lan had new tests taken at the hospital all her counts were normal.

- The experience became a turning point.

- I felt as if I had been reborn, she says. When I looked back on my life I thought that everything that had happened to me perhaps had been necessary to lead me to this awakening, that it was the qi force form the previous generations of my family, from my grandmother and great grandfather that had guided me.

- If there had ever been any division in  Shi Yin Lan concerning the spiritual and the material, the invisible and the visible, it disappeared now. She had access to all parts of her being.

- I had suddenly such an enormously clear vision, both for the diagnosis of and the cures for illnesses. This knowledge I didn’t get by conscious thinking or conscious efforts but on the contrary by contemplation, where I shut off the reflecting part of my consciousness, she explains.

After her recovery she returned to the preschool where she had been working. But her life had been fundamentally transformed. She could feel powerful energy flows with masses of offshoots run through her body. She perceived people’s thought patterns through direct communication beyond language.

Now a great job stared to test, to anchor the inner knowledge that was gushing forth in the concrete reality. She sought at received instruction from masters of the Chinese Zen Buddhism and qigong tradition, among others the abbot of the Shaolin temple, who became her teacher.

Eventually she retrained to become a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, with medical qigong as her specialty. She felt that as she had regained her life she had a mission to help other people.

-It wasn’t my ego, not my self that wanted it. It was the life force that flowed forth within me, she explains. I was truly a different person. Before, I had first and foremost been thinking of my children and my family and the things that were closest to me. Now that wasn’t as important anymore. It was as if I had come out of the nest.

In the 1980s qigong was rehabilitated in China and developed very fast.  Shi Yin Lan moved with her family to Beijing where she developed her own qigong method and founded a health farm for the elderly. There she has since then rehabilitated thousands of former miners, textile and construction workers whose health had been broken down in the industry. Many of the patients were restored, and  Shi Yin Lan’s qigong method was acknowledged in medical circles.
- We strive for balance, but our thoughts are like wild, hungry horses, she says. They just want more and more. By directing the concentration inwards the harmony is restored. Not until balance is reached one can raise oneself to a higher level of life and get a new understanding of the wholeness.

- Another important key to our invisible treasures is, according to  Shi Yin Lan, that we learn to love ourselves - not our ego, but our true being.

- If you don’t love yourself, how can others love you? By loving yourself you give yourself a lot of strength. You need to remind yourself of how amazing your being is – both physically and mentally. And learn to consciously appreciate its possibilities, she says. Other people’s love is uncertain; they can tire or desert you. The only love that you can always count on is the love you have for yourself.

 

Shi Yin Lan’s recipe:

Like this you help yourself relax. Relaxation is the indispensable beginning of every practice session.

Say to your head: I am going to relax now; I don’t want to be disturbed by any thoughts. Say to your heart, now I’m going to give myself a lot of love and care. Take three slow, deep breaths, visualize that your inner being is opening like a flower. Enter that feeling and give yourself over to this experience.

Then direct your attention toward Hui Yin, an energy center between the anus and the sexual organ, where the two important energy channels Ren Mai and Du Mai, the king of yang and the queen of yin, converge. By resolving possible tensions in and relaxing the Hui Yin area these are balanced, which creates harmony in the body. Try to bring about a warm pulsating feeling in the Hui Yin area. The relaxation is facilitated by having a smile on your lips or finding your inner smile. In the Shi Yin Lan´s method you learn to consciously direct love toward different aspect of your being. Love enhances the life force. And it helps us to relax. After a qigong practice, when you massage or pat the body and its parts, or visualize its inner organs, you don’t do it mechanically but with love and attention. Another help to relax, which however ought to happen naturally, is to put the tongue against the roof of he palate. In this way important energy channels are connected to each other.

Imagine that you are in a place of great natural beauty. Behind you there are high mountains and woods. Above is a dome of clear blue sky. Under your feet there is a soft carpet of grass and flower. In front of you a quiet and clear bay is opening. Visualize yourself as young and beautiful; it also gives important signals to the body.

Direct your loving attention toward, and wait for the relaxation, the different parts of the body. Go first through the front of the body, the forehead, the nose, the mouth, and the front of the neck, the chest, and the stomach, the front of the thighs, the shins, and the top of the feet. Then, in the same slow and loving way the back of the body: the back of the head, the neck, the back etc. Then the sides of the body. And finally the inner organs of the body: the brain, the inside of the throat, the lungs, and the heart. The abdomen and its organs, the lower abdomen and the genitals.