You can be powerful at any Age
At the age of 69, I have more energy and vitality, am more flexible and have greater mobility, and happier than I have ever been in my life, because I finally learned the secrets to living powerfully. After a sedentary job and feeling like a prisoner in my body (I am by no means one of those naturally flexible and athletic people), and more than 30 years of practicing qigong, yoga, meditation and other forms of fitness, I have discovered a formula that I like to think of as "transformational cross-training".
Life today is extremely stressful and unhealthy for most of us. We live in an increasingly polluted world, cut off from nature, and are bombarded by messages that we can be made happier by things that are outside of us. We are disconnected from ourselves and mostly all we do is work. When we aren't working, we need to be entertained, or we need to shop. Practically everything in our world creates stress and according to Traditional Chinese Medicine, "Stress is the cause of 97% of all disease" At the very least, being stressed out takes up a very large amount of our energy, our life-force and we have no healthy antidotes for this in our culture so people turn to unhealthy habits that they think will provide relief.
Energy does not move through stiff muscles and immobile joints, so just releasing the stress is only the beginning. The tension and pain in the body is really just energy that has become either stagnant or toxic. We need to start moving, in order to release the stuck energy and free up the energy pathways in the body and this process does not need to be difficult and painful. In fact, in my personal experience, the difficult and painful ways are extremely ineffective, or they do not work at all.
What I teach is largely based in Qigong because of all the modalities I have studied it seems to have the most to offer our current stressful world, especially as people age. As one of my teachers says "Qigong is a way to transform stress into vitality".
