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One of Chinese medicine’s many boons is its awareness of the interconnectedness and interdependence of the human body and mind.
Although sussing out physical versus emotional etiology canbe useful within the medicine, it’s considered incomplete (bordering on incompetent) not to involve both the body and mind in treatment and healing.
Chinese medicine uses multiple modalities and tools to accomplish this — including acupuncture and associated techniques, tui na (Chinese massage), herbal medicine, food therapy, meditation, and daoyin. Some of these modalities, like acupuncture, can happen only in the clinic. Others, like meditation and daoyin, are ultra portable and can be practiced at home, while on a walk, during work breaks, or many other places besides.
Today we’re going to focus on daoyin: its roots, its function, and its modern-day applications. We may not cover everything you need to know… but it’s a solid start.
Daoyin: aka Qigong & Chinese ‘Yoga’
As ever, fearless readers, we must define some terms before we go much further. Daoyin is, essentially, a style of physical exercise that goes by many names.
If you haven’t heard of daoyin, you may have heard of qigong. If not qigong, then perhaps you’re familiar with taichi. If not taichi, then definitely martial arts.
Film depictions of martial arts are so fascinating and copious that many of us can imagine these types of movements in our heads. Slow martial arts way down, and you have an idea of qigong. Take that slowed down martial arts, bring it to a mat on the floor, and you have an idea of daoyin as we learned it.
Daoyin is sometimes described as Chinese yoga. Though I found conflicting information online, a credible-seeming source reports that daoyin found its way from India to China sometime in or before the 2nd century BCE.
Old texts refer to daoyin exercises as Indian massage or Brahmanic calisthenics.1 This jibes with what we were taught in Chinese medicine school by Master Jeffrey Yuen, the Daoist priest whose transmission of classical Chinese medicine in the West is based in an oral tradition. (Master Yuen isn’t passing out handouts or Dropboxing slide decks into the class folder. In other words, it’s legit, but he’s not writing it down.)
The following picture is a reconstructed daoyin chart, found in a Chinese tomb from the 2nd century BCE. It shows different exercises for health and the treatment of pain. For those listening to me read this essay, allow me to assure you of these people’s flexibility. They look limber, lithe, and embodied.
Reconstructed daoyin chart from Mawangdui tomb, found in 1974.2
What Daoyin / Qigong Does
The question we must ask ourselves next is, who cares? The answer is, Lots of people, it turns out. Even the NIH.
Daoyin (aka, Qigong, according to the NIH) isn’t some outdated, uninteresting, disproved, esoteric nonsense. It can help all kinds of people — you, if you want — deal with all kinds of problems. Healing from injury, building strength, improving balance, and resolving disembodiment are all benefits of daoyin.
A truly fabulous 2019 paper, Dao Yin (a.k.a. Qigong), delves into the origin, development, potential mechanisms, and clinical applications of this ancient exercise therapy. If you want more in-depth and scholarly info than I’m capable of providing here, I recommend you check it out. It’s excellent. What I want to focus on is the paper’s description of the mechanisms at work in daoyin.
Something lovely this paper does is lay this out in both Chinese medicine terms and biomedical terms. Let’s take a look at how the authors account for what they call the neuropsychological and immunological benefits of daoyin, or qigong. They posit that “daoyin may modulate health through three key mechanisms,” which are:
- Creating brain changes, such as enhancing interoception, regulating cognitive control, and modulating emotion processing
- Modifying stress responses through “attenuating” the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis
- Modulating the immune system and enhancing anti-inflammation
The authors then add, “It is worth noting that the three mechanisms may not function independently but rather interact with each other.” That’s hot.
I’d like to add another virtue to this list. One of daoyin’s strengths is its adaptability for every body. It can be done in a chair, standing up, lying down, or hanging from a trapeze. It’s wildly accommodating.
Daoyin, Qigong in Modern Times
Daoyin has, at its core, a belief that there is a natural state of humanity, and that natural state is to heal. This natural state is not to be confused with purity culture, the need to incessantly cleanse oneself of toxins in order to be holy, good, or worthy. It’s way lower key, less perfectionistic, and less patriarchal than that.
The idea, instead, is that we are so surrounded by artificial things that we can forget our own nature. Daoyin, through its embodiment chops, by virtue of the aforementioned brain changes, stress modifications, and anti-inflammation mechanisms, helps us to shed our artificial rigidities and reconnect with our natural state.
If that sounds abstract or like a load of airy-fairy donkey dung, let’s take it to a concrete example. Let’s take it to Aristotle.3
In Aristotle’s Physics, he writes about the nature of things. He talks about a thought experiment to help people imagine what their natural state might be. He gives an example of imagining a certain medium, let’s call it a magic garden, that returns something to its most natural state. In his example, he says if you bury a bed it would sprout not a bed, not even the wood the bed was made from, but a tree.
And if things have a nature, people certainly do. If you, a modern human being, were to lie down in the healing soil of this magic garden bed, you’d be relieved of all the unnatural crusty bits heaved upon you by modernity: the way you’re scrunching your neck up over your phone right now, or the frazzled feeling in your brain thanks to the constant attention-grabs, or maybe the gastric symptoms due to whatever was in your convenience food. Stuff like that.
Daoyin, then, is a medium we can cozy up into in order to become closer to the selves we know — or maybe only suspect — we are.
Where to Learn Daoyin, Qigong
Unless you live in Chinatown, this form of exercise isn’t the kind of thing you can find at the local community center, although larger US cities do have more prevalence of daoyin than rural areas.
If you’re local to Huwe Acupuncture and interested in daoyin, I suggest you come to one of our daoyin classes. (That link is for current clients only. If you want to become a client, click here.)
If you’re not local to us, check out Master Zhou Xuan Yun’s online resources.
by Mary Beth Huwe
These writings are an exploration of what it means to be human – to be sick, to be well, and to heal – viewed through the lens of classical Chinese medicine. My words aren’t medical advice, and these essays don’t constitute a practitioner-client relationship. They also aren’t meant to be the final word on… well, anything. Rather, I hope they are the beginning of a conversation you have with someone in your life. Thanks for reading!
Footnotes:
- STEAVU, Dominic. Is There Such a Thing as Chinese Yoga?. Journal of Yoga Studies, [S.l.], v. 4, pp. 375–412, apr. 2023. ISSN 2664-1739. Available at: <https://journalofyogastudies.org/index.php/JoYS/article/view/JoYS.2023.V4.11>. Date accessed: 12 Feb. 2024 ↩︎
- Reconstruction of a Guiding and Pulling Chart, excavated from the Mawangdui Tomb 3 (sealed in 168BC) in the former kingdom of Changsha. The original is in the Hunan Provincial Museum, Changsha, China. Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Source: Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/rrb7c7cm ↩︎
- Fun fact: The other Huwe of Huwe Acupuncture, Brian, studied Western classics at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, and it warped his mind in the most delightful way. I have known said human since 2007, and I am still learning interesting things about mythology, phenomenology, science, and Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. It’s very handy and saves me lots of time and reading. I hope it does for you, too. ↩︎