AWGH Format 7

A Warrior’s Guide to Healing
Story by Bruce Ching

Illustrations by Adam Talley
Health Advisory
The methods described in this work are not a replacement for

the care, advice, and treatment provided by your physician. You are
advised to consult with your physician before undertaking any course
of physical activity.
Copyright Notice
Copyright © 2012 Bruce Ching

The author, Bruce Ching, holds copyright over this work. The
author reserves all rights regarding this work. No part of this work may
be copied or otherwise reproduced without the written permission of
the author. Thank you.
Contacting Us
The author, Bruce Ching, can be reached at his e-mail address,

bctaiji@gmail.com.
The illustrator, Adam Talley, can be reached at his e-mail
address, phymns@yahoo.com.
1
Contents
Introduction ..................................................................................................... 5
Glossary and Pronunciation Guide ................................................................... 6
Prologue ........................................................................................................... 8
Chapter 1: Class notes (1), compiled by the Guanyin Warriors ...................... 9
Chapter 2: Don’t Strain.................................................................................. 13
Chapter 3: “Relax” ......................................................................................... 15
Chapter 4: Basic Training – the Touch ........................................................... 17
Chapter 5: Kidney Yin and Yang .................................................................... 20
Chapter 6: Martyrdom .................................................................................. 22
Chapter 7: Class notes (2), compiled by the Guanyin Warriors .................... 23
Chapter 8: Burned Fingers............................................................................. 27
Chapter 9: The Past ....................................................................................... 29
Chapter 10: Online Dating Disorder .............................................................. 33
Chapter 11: Class notes (3), compiled by the Guanyin Warriors .................. 36
Chapter 12: Continued Training .................................................................... 37
Chapter 13: Treating Auto-Immune Conditions ............................................ 40
Chapter 15: Internal Striking, Projecting Energy ........................................... 45
Chapter 16: Faith? And Guidance? ............................................................... 50
Chapter 17: Introduction to Cancer Treatment ............................................ 52
Chapter 18: Shaking, Swaying, and Icons ...................................................... 56
Chapter 19: Frequency, Intensity, and Other Matters .................................. 61
Chapter 20: On the Verge.............................................................................. 68
Chapter 21: Idiosyncratic Mentorship........................................................... 69
Chapter 23: Scanning and Seeing .................................................................. 76
Chapter 24: Practice and External Factors .................................................... 82
2
Chapter 25: Meridians ................................................................................... 86
Chapter 27: Distance Healing ........................................................................ 90
Chapter 28: Permission.................................................................................. 94
Chapter 29: Triad ........................................................................................... 98
Chapter 30: Galen’s Gongfu......................................................................... 101
Chapter 31: Sex, Sort Of .............................................................................. 105
Chapter 32: Class notes (7), compiled by the Guanyin Warriors ................ 108
Chapter 33: Eating Bitterness ...................................................................... 110
Chapter 34: Cancer Treatment Continued, and Dealing With Other
Congested Energy ......................................................................................... 114
Chapter 35: Death........................................................................................ 115
Chapter 36: Afterlife .................................................................................... 118
Chapter 37: Great Bright Light ..................................................................... 120
Chapter 38: Translation, Interpretation, Context ........................................ 127
Chapter 39: Standing, Stillness, and Movement ......................................... 135
Chapter 40: Wildly Speculative.................................................................... 139
Chapter 42: A Fracas on Campus ................................................................. 143
Chapter 43: “It’s Become Personal” ............................................................ 147
Chapter 44: Personal Practice ..................................................................... 148
Chapter 45: Showdown ............................................................................... 150
Chapter 46: Calming .................................................................................... 154
Chapter 48: The Sermon in the Apartment ................................................. 157
Chapter 49: Salve Atque Vale ...................................................................... 159
Chapter 50: Icarus Rising ............................................................................. 163
Epilogue ........................................................................................................ 164
3
Selected Bibliography ................................................................................... 165
4
Introduction
Although presented as fiction, this work is an energy-healer’s

training manual, especially for practitioners of the internal martial arts. My
hope is to encourage a more interactive approach to the way teachers
transmit the art to their students, as well as greater emphasis on
fundamental skills that should be in place before students undertake learning
complex sequences of moves. The energy phenomena and training methods
described in the text are true. Some other aspects of the story are not.
Names have been changed to preserve the privacy of the innocent and the
guilty.
I appreciate my students, whose questions prodded me to expand
on explanations of the topic of healing.
I value the moral support of friends and family members. (For
example, after hearing about this project, my mother said, “I hope it’s at
least cathartic.” Thanks, Mom.)
I extend gratitude to my mentors in the martial arts and the healing
arts, both long-term and short-term; those still alive, and those who have
passed on. Their teachings comprise much of the substance presented, and
their encouragement gave me confidence to explore additional aspects of
energy practice.
5
Glossary and Pronunciation Guide
Following is a list of some commonly-used terms involved in the Chinese

martial and healing arts, which is my background for a majority of the
practices described in this story. Transliteration is given in the Pinyin system,
followed by parenthetical transliteration in the Wade-Giles system, followed
by italicized phonetic approximation for speakers of American English. But
redundant representations are omitted.
baihui (pai hui) by hway Literally, “hundred meet.” An acupuncture point

at the top of the head, regarded as the convergence of the body’s yang
energy pathways.
chi ku (ch’ih k’u) chr koo To endure suffering in order to make progress.
dantian (tan t’ien) dawn tee-en Literally, “red field” or “cinnabar field.” The
term refers to a particular energy storage spot in the lower abdomen.
dao (tao) daow Literally, “the path” or “the way.” Daoist philosophy applies
insights from the natural world to human self-cultivation and interaction.
gongfu (kung fu) goong foo Skill, achievement, attained through the
investment of time and effort. In the West, the term has also more
specifically been used to refer to martial arts.
Guanyin (Kuan Yin) gwawn yeen Originally a male disciple of the buddha;
later regarded as a female divinity in folk religion.
huiyin (hui yin) hway yeen Literally, “meet(ing of) yin.” An acupuncture
point at the bottom of the torso, regarded as the convergence of the body’s
yin energy pathways.
jinlong (chin lung) jeen loong Literally, “gold dragon.” The “school name”
given to this story’s protagonist by one of his teachers.
laogong (lao kung) laow goong Literally, “palace of work.” An acupuncture

point near the middle of the palm of the hand.
mingmen The term refers to an acupuncture point on the back, directly

across from the navel.
qi (ch’i) chee Usually translated as “energy” or “breath.”

6
qigong (ch’i kung) chee goong Energy practice. A generic term for exercises
that develop the practitioner’s life energy.
renzhong (jen chung) ren joong An acupuncture point just under the nose,
on the philtrum of the upper lip.
sanyinjiao (san yin chiao) sawn yeen jyaow An acupuncture point on the
medial side of the shin, slightly above the ankle.
taiji (t’ai chi) tie jee Literally, “supreme ultimate.” The term refers to the
philosophical concept of yin and yang joined together.
taijiquan (t’ai chi ch’uan) tie jee choo-en Literally, “supreme ultimate fist.”
The term refers to one of the internal martial arts. Solo training movements
are usually done in slow-motion, although older forms of the art also retain
fast, explosive movements.
yang yawng One of the two primal creative forces; complement to yin.
Yang is variously characterized as bright, hot, male, active, hard, above, etc.
yi (i) ee Intention, although the term is often literally translated as “mind.”
yin yeen One of the two primal creative forces; complement to yang. Yin is
variously characterized as dark, cool, female, receptive, soft, below, etc.
yongquan (yung ch’uan) yoong choo-en Literally, “bubbling spring.” The

term refers to an acupuncture point on the sole of the foot, located just
behind the ball of the foot.
zhan zhuang (chan chuang) jawn jwawng Literally, “stand (like a) column
(or pillar or post).” The term refers to a common preliminary practice in the
martial and healing arts, of standing relatively still while adjusting postural
and energetic alignments.
7
Prologue
Wawa the demon strode through her desolate realm. War had
raged through the kingdom, but now she emerged victorious. Unchallenged.
Alone. She glared at survivors who crossed the boundary mists into other
lands, fleeing before the presence of she whose gaze froze their hearts, their
breaths, and their minds. Smoke rose from the broken landscape and
curtained the sky, a shroud under which gusts of wind whipped across the
scorch marks and scrapes of the cratered ground.
“Why did no one remain?” Wawa pondered, as she stepped lightly
over the bodies of the fallen. Her dark eyes turned even darker, but no
answer came. Only her personal army and retainers were left in the realm.
She would just have to pursue the others, for none could be allowed to
abandon the dread lady of the demon domain.
8
Chapter 1: Class notes (1), compiled by the Guanyin
Warriors
Overview: Foundations of Power

The practitioner cultivates the circulation of energy by practicing
joint expansion, then linking the movement of energy to her breath, and
then using the visualization of bone-breathing. The flow of energy tends to
get stuck when there is tension around the joints; visualizing expansion of
the joints removes such impediments. Visualizing the breath as a carrier of
healing energy gives the practitioner a method to circulate the energy. The
bones can then be visualized as the primary pathway for the breath’s
movement of the energy within the practitioner’s body.
Although we use the term “visualize,” we actually mean using all
available senses – such as kinesthetic and auditory, as well as visual. The
flow of energy follows the practitioner’s attention and intention. The use of
visualization also engages the practitioner’s nerves and muscles in rehearsal
of movement; this is what explains a study of free-throw shooting in
basketball: players who visualized shooting free throws made about as much
progress as players who physically practiced free throws.
Joint Expansion
The basic practice of joint expansion starts with the image of a
deflated balloon in the space where two bones meet, and then inflates the
balloon until the practitioner imagines that the two bones are gently moved
apart from each other.
9
First, imagine a deflated balloon in a joint, the space between two
bones. Next, start to inflate the balloon in every direction – forward and
backward, up and down, left and right – so that you see and feel the balloon
filling the space between the bones.
Finally, see and
feel the balloon as
so expanded in
every direction, so
full, that the bones
are gently moved
slightly apart from
each other.
Expansion
can start with the
major joints of the
shoulders, elbows,
wrists, hands and
fingers, hips, knees,
ankles, feet and
toes. The
practitioner can then also expand the spaces between the vertebrae of the
spine, and the spots where the ribs attach to the spine and sternum.
Apparently immobile joints, like those of the sacrum and the skull, can also
be expanded. Once you have a feel for the process, experiment to find the
sequence of expanding joints that works best for you.
Initially, the expansion of one joint can take half a minute or so.
Later, with practice, you’ll develop your intent so that the expansion of one
joint will be quicker and you’ll also be able to expand several joints
10
simultaneously. If you sense that a joint you previously expanded is starting
to close, go back to it, open it up again, and pick up with where you left off.
Students have often observed increasingly strong sensations of
warmth, tingling, and fullness in their hands as they expand the joints of
their arms and hands. Several students mentioned that they “feel taller”
after expanding the joints of their spines. Workshop students who have
arthritic knees have reported that expansion of the joints of their legs has a
cushioning effect on their knees. Some students have also noted that
expanding the seams of the skull has relieved habitual feelings of tightness in
their heads.
On rare occasions, more dramatic effects can also occur, such as
Teacher Danner’s experience with joint expansion.
The Breath
In several ancient languages, a single word could mean breath,
energy, or (in some sense) spirit – examples include the Chinese “qi,”
Japanese “ki,” Sanskrit “prana,” Hebrew “ruach,” Latin “spiritus,” and Greek
“pneuma.” In healing, the practitioner’s breath is a means to move the
energy. She might imagine seeing her breath like a mist and also feeling it
like warmth or coolness. At a beginning stage of practice, the healer
coordinates the movement of energy with her own breath. Each time she
inhales, she sees and feels energy that she pulls into herself from the outside
– primarily down from the sky (through the bai hui point at the top of the
head), or up from the ground (through the yongquan points in the soles of
the feet), or both – so that she won’t drain her own energy during the
healing session. Each time she exhales, she sees and feels the energy move
through her hands and into the recipient.
The breath should be almost full but not forced, and also not held.
Any discomfort, such as shortness of breath or a feeling of pressure in your
11
head, indicates that you’re probably either holding your breath or using
undue force in breathing. Let the process be full, complete, and natural,
rather than stiff or broken or forced. Although some traditional advanced
practices use power breathing methods – the “reverse” breath taught in
some schools of taijiquan and qigong, for example – they should still be done
in a manner that doesn’t cause discomfort.
12
Chapter 2: Don’t Strain
On an internet taijiquan message board, Jinlong “meets” someone

who took a qigong workshop featuring some power breathing methods.
During and after the workshop, the participant became oversensitive to
smells and tastes – she believes her thyroid gland was overactivated – and
she had severe difficulty in getting to sleep for at least the next few months.
And yet the instructor still claims that his techniques have never harmed any
students.
The “quick fix” advice that Jinlong conveys to his friend by e-mail is
to shower when she feels her energy level spike, letting the water run the
excess energy off from her body. It works, but it’s not a long-term solution –
she shouldn’t have to throw her energy away.
“If an instructor is wrong about the assurances he gives,” Jinlong
later notes to his students, “then the student – not the instructor – suffers
any adverse effects that result. As a matter of common sense, just don’t
engage in any practice that uses forceful methods to move energy around.
Using force runs the risk of unbalancing your energy system.”
*****
“You have us stretching some of the endpoints of the movements in
taijiquan, to really open up the body,” a student observes. “But does that fit
with the idea of avoiding strain?”
“Yes, and it works like this,” Jinlong explains. “As you noted, we
work on stretching outward or stretching inward, according to the direction
of the particular part of the movement. It’s involved in developing an elastic
sort of force in each movement, and the sequence of moves is a series of
opening outward and closing inward. But even if you’re at your most
stretched and ‘holding’ that posture, you continue to breathe smoothly and
evenly, rather than holding the breath or panting. Teacher Jay’s friend Korl
13
referred to this stage of training as ‘hard-burning.’ The extension and
compression of the body can produce lots of heat, and even result in
sweating while standing still, but the breath must still be soft and even.”
*****
Jinlong is talking with his students about the sort of spontaneous
movement that can occur during practice or treatment: “It’s like when a lid
loosely covers a pot of boiling water, and the pressure of the steam rattles
the lid.”
“Or – another comparison – energy encountering a blockage can be
like when you turn on water and send it through a garden hose, and there’s a
kink in the hose. The hose might move in odd ways because the constriction
in it diverts the water from its normal path. But when the kink is removed,
the water just flows through without incident.
“Similarly, when energy encounters a blockage within the body, it
can result in some involuntary movement like shaking or trembling. But with
practice over time, the energy flow dissipates the blockage, and eventually
the spontaneous movement smooths out and then disappears.”
“People can get themselves into trouble,” he continues, “when they
try to recreate the spontaneous movement each time they practice. The
energy flow has become stronger through their practice, so that tends to
clear the blockage. But to get the same shaking movement, they have to
reinforce the blockage – maybe by muscular tension – to divert the energy
from its natural path. Stronger energy flow, increased blockage, then
stronger energy flow, then increased blockage – eventually, something might
blow out. It’s better to just let whatever happens, happen. When the
blockage is cleared, the movement tends to subside – and that’s okay.”
14
Chapter 3: “Relax”
The classic writings on taijiquan prominently mention relaxation and

softness, but it’s an elusive quality in practice. “Relax doesn’t mean
collapse,” Jinlong’s first teacher had noted. Similarly, “The idea is to be
relaxed, but not soggy,” Teacher Galen once mentioned to the people who
came to his practice group.
Jinlong attends a workshop taught by Teacher Leon, who has been
brought into the area for the weekend by one of his longtime students. Leon
uses hands-on instruction to clarify the quality that should be present,
extending his arm to each student three times, and commenting while
having the student touch the arm each time to feel the differences: “This is
hard. This is soft. This is hard and soft.” The first one clenched the arm
muscles. The second one was just loose without much tone. The third one
engaged the elastic quality of the tissues of the arm, Jinlong realizes. Leon
confirms that idea when he explains that acceptable hardness occurs as a
result of extension. A few years later, Jinlong moves to another location for
a new job; luckily, it’s in the city where Teacher Leon’s school is located.
Much of the instruction is aimed at producing the same sort of extension
throughout the student’s limbs and torso. Aggghh, Jinlong says to himself,
as he’s put through the unaccustomed stretch of various parts of his body by
Leon and his senior students. The classics describe the quality as one of
cotton wrapped around iron. I guess this is it, Jinlong muses.
Years after that, Jinlong is attending another of Teacher Leon’s
workshops, enduring the burning in his legs as Leon makes successive
changes to his position at the end of a taijiquan movement. Jinlong’s
student Suen later mentions that Leon made adjustments to the flow of
energy through Jinlong’s body. But Jinlong’s attention at the time had just
15
been on the burning in his legs and the ache of extension throughout his
body.
16
Chapter 4: Basic Training – the Touch
“It’s the same sort of touch that you use in the two-person exercises
of taijiquan,” Jinlong mentions to Suen. “Our teacher Jay’s friend Korl said
one of the paradoxes is that the energy cultivated by the fighting art is the
same energy that’s used for healing. And that guy had one of the softest
touches I’ve ever encountered among martial artists. We were light-contact
sparring once, and it took about twenty seconds before I realized that he was
hitting me multiple times. If it had been a real fight, it would have been over
before I knew it.”
Jinlong has Suen place her hand on his shoulder, and asks her to
send qi to his dantian, an energy point in the lower abdomen that coincides
with the body’s physical center of gravity. “The statement in taijiquan is that
your awareness penetrates into the other person’s bones,” he notes. During
the next few minutes, he gives a series of comments on how far Suen’s
energy has traveled into him, talking her through the process of extending
her intent and so leading her energy further: “It stopped about where my
shoulder blade is. Send your breath further into me. Now it’s reached the
middle of my back. Keep going.” Until the energy flow reaches his dantian.
“Yes, that’s it.”
*****
Jinlong stands in front of his sister, Leilani, who has charged her
hands with energy. She then places a hand on the middle of his back,
directly behind his heart. “Okay, but you’re sort of pushing,” Jinlong
observes. “Instead, just let your hand rest there.” She makes the
adjustment. “Now, it should be as if your hand and my back melt into each
other. You have to sort of ignore the solidity of surfaces.” In the next few
seconds, Leilani’s hand starts to join energetically with Jinlong’s back.
“That’s it. Now it should feel as if you’re reaching into me, even though your
17
hand stays where it is. Let your breath move out through your hand.” The
area of his back under her hand is rapidly warming. “Now a refinement,
keep doing that but with the idea that your hand is directly touching my
heart. Even though physically, it’s not.” The sensation of heat that starts at
his back goes through to the middle of his chest. “And now, imagine that
your hand is occupying the same space as my heart, as you keep breathing
the energy through.” He can feel his heartbeat accelerating at the resulting
influx of energy; becoming overloaded, he now steps away to let it return to
normal.
*****
A few weeks later, Leilani is practicing at home, holding her hands a
few inches apart to let the energy build up between them. Her husband
walks in and asks, “What are you doing?”
“I’m working on qi,” Leilani replies.
“Do something with it,” her husband suggests.
“Okay, I’ll move it into you,” Leilani says, and then places her hands
on his bare legs, which are left uncovered by his shorts.
“It’s hot! Get it off!” he exclaims.
*****
“Hands-on healing, versus hands-off healing,” Jinlong announces the
session’s topic to his students. “They’re basically the same thing, connecting
with the other person’s energy, and then facilitating the movement of the
recipient’s energy to where it should go.
“In hands-on healing, you can place both of your hands on an area of
the recipient’s body and saturate that area with yin energy, yang energy, or a
combination of both. Or you could place your hands on two different areas,
and send energy from one of your hands, through the recipient’s body, to
your other hand. As a variation, you could move energy through the
18
recipient by sending it in with one of your hands and pulling it out with your
other hand – when I do that, my right hand tends to be better at sending,
and my left hand tends to be better at pulling; I’m right-handed, and maybe
that has something to do with it.
“Now, in hands-off healing, your hands are a few inches away from
the recipient’s body. You know you’ve established energetic contact when
you feel the other person’s field respond to what your hands do. For
example, if – from a short distance away – you slowly sweep your hands to
trace the person’s centerline, and a ripple of his energy follows the path of
your hands, then that’s the sort of connection that can be useful for healing.
It’s as if your hands are magnets that pull on the field of the other person’s
energy.
“By the way, the same principle applies in your solo qigong exercises
– when your hands face your body, they lead your body’s energy along a
particular path, sort of like using a magnet to pull a chain of paper clips.”
“Do you have a preference, for either hands-on or hands-off?” a
student asks.
“They both work, but when I have to move a lot of energy through
someone, it’s easier for me to do it hands-on,” Jinlong mentions. “On the
other hand – so to speak – the qi healers I’ve seen from the PRC seem to
work exclusively hands-off. So did Galen, one of my teachers, who learned
the method while translating for a master who was visiting from Beijing.
Obviously, hands-off energy work more easily accommodates privacy
concerns, and it’s also useful if there’s a condition where touch would be
painful – say, something like a burn or an open wound.
“By the way again, Galen also described the effect of solo qigong
practice by saying it’s like you’re washing yourself on the inside of the body.”
19
Chapter 5: Kidney Yin and Yang
Coming back from visiting his sister and her family. It’s the last hour
of the long flight segment from Honolulu to Atlanta, where he’ll then wait to
catch a connecting flight. Jinlong’s face flushes with heat for a few minutes.
Then his entire body shivers. A few minutes later, fever again. Then cold
again. This is ridiculous, Jinlong thinks, how can I be afflicted with both
sweating and cold like this? More fever, followed by more shivering. It was
like what he’d heard about malaria, but that couldn’t be it.
Then a voice appears in his head during the next wave of heat: “This
is a classic example of deficient kidney yin, resulting in kidney yang going
everywhere uncontrolled.” What was that!? But the voice has gone, as have
the alternating fever and chills. Coming back to himself, Jinlong sits up and
glances through the plane’s window as Atlanta shows up in early-morning
gray. The yin/yang imbalance of this must be like hot flashes, he realizes.
Kidney energy controls the reproductive system. Yin is a container for yang.
When there’s deficient yin, yang is no longer restrained, so it rushes
throughout the body and overheats it.
*****
The taijiquan exhibition had been fun, with teachers of different
schools of the art demonstrating their practices. At dinner after the event,
the various teachers sat chatting with each other. “I’m having hot flashes,”
said Marla, in some discomfort.
“Could I send some energy through you?” Jinlong asks.
“Yes, sure,” she responds.
Jinlong charged up his hands with a few seconds of deep breath. “I
can feel your qi,” Marla remarks. At this time, I’m just charging up, Jinlong
muses. She might be sensitive to the flow of energy. Either that, or she’s just
imagining it.
20
“I’ll place my hands on your shoulder and back,” Jinlong explains.
Deficient kidney yin, resulting in kidney yang going everywhere uncontrolled,
he remembers. So bringing in more yin would be the way to go, to contain
the yang again. Visualizing standing in a cold mountain stream of Iao Valley,
he inhales yin energy up from beneath the ground, through the “bubbling
spring” points of his feet, through the bones of his legs, into his kidney area.
Exhales the energy from his kidneys, up his back and through the bones of
his arms, his palm and finger bones, and into her kidneys, keep breathing the
energy up from the ground, through me, then into her. Charging her kidneys
with yin energy, filling them until the yin energy starts to spill over. Now
leading the yin energy from her kidneys up her back to the top of her head,
then back down, over and over. “It feels like ice packs on my face,” she says.
Huh, she must be really sensitive to the energy flow, Jinlong thinks.
*****
“My acupuncturist says I have deficient kidney yang,” a new student
mentions to Jinlong.
“Okay, we’ll teach you to send energy out through your hands, and
then you should place the palms of your hands over your kidneys and
adrenal glands and send energy into them. But first, here’s a quick and easy
alternate method, to jump-start your work on increasing your kidney yang
energy.
“Place the backs of your hands on your back, and rub them up and
down, until the area between your kidneys becomes hot. That includes the
mingmen acupuncture point, which is located on the back directly across
from the navel. It helps to regulate kidney yang energy. You create heat by
rubbing the area, and then let the heat sink in to your back, including the
kidneys, the adrenals, and the mingmen point.”
21
Chapter 6: Martyrdom
“Surrender now, and bring your people back to the Realm,” the
Demon Queen demands.
Kozaris, former commander of the demon army, motions for his
counselors to keep their refugees moving on into other worlds, into spaces
where the dread Wawa might not think to look for them. He then turns to
face his former Queen. “Your Majesty, I’m afraid I cannot do that.”
“Your pathetic rearguard action cannot stop me,” Wawa says,
pronouncing judgment.
“Still, I must try.” Kozaris’ blade comes to his hands in a lightning-
fast draw as he leaps forward. And then he suddenly stops.
The last of the fleeing demons see Kozaris frozen in place, locked in a
staredown with the dread Queen. They shudder at how the Queen’s eyes
have turned completely black. “Go, go, go!” the counselors urge, prodding
them to flee.
Kozaris continues to hold the blade still, as if ready to deliver a
downward stroke that would cut his enemy in half. And then he simply
collapses, his body cold long before it hits the ground, the blade clattering to
the side. “I hope others will have more sense,” Wawa sighs.
22
Warriors
Bone-Breathing
In the book Inner Bridges, Fritz Frederick Smith observes that the
strongest flow of energy within the body is through the densest tissues, the
bones. Theories of taijiquan and qigong also place importance on the bones,
as the qi can be condensed into the bone marrow. Moreover, the bones are
subject to the piezoelectric effect, in which squeezing a crystalline structure
results in an electric current.
In bone breathing, the practitioner combines breathwork with the
bones’ property of energy conduction. She visualizes the bones as hollow
tubes, and draws energy in by imagining inhaling through the extremities,
then sending energy out by imagining exhaling through her hands. It’s
easiest to begin by charging your hands with energy, then connecting the
hands with energy flows that move through the rest of the body.
Charging Your Hands

It’s generally easiest for beginners to begin the bone-breathing
process with the dominant hand. Given the prevalence of right-handed
people, we’ll talk about the procedure as beginning with the right hand,
although starting with the left hand is also okay.
To begin the practice of bone breathing, stand with your right hand
out in front of you, palm up and with the forearm parallel to the ground.
Then without strain, elongate the hand – imagine that someone is lightly
pulling your fingertips to lengthen the hand.
23
Then again without strain, broaden the hand – imagine that someone is
lightly pulling the base of your
thumb (within the palm of your
hand) and the base of your little
finger (within the palm of your
hand) away from each other to
make the hand wider.
Now imagine that the bones of
your right hand are hollow tubes,
through which you’ll move healing
energy with your breath. Your
right hand can move very slightly in
time to your breathwork – e.g., the
fingers might have a small curling
movement on the inhalation, and then straighten on the exhalation. Use
your breath to draw energy into your fingertips: visualize a mist just out of
reach beyond the fingers of your right hand, then as you inhale, visualize
your breath pulling the mist into your finger bones, filling your fingertips
down to the first joint just below your fingernails. As you exhale, see and
feel the mist going out of your hand by exiting through the tips of your
fingers. Repeat the process until you can do it without effort. (If you’re
having some trouble in maintaining your intent while simultaneously
drawing energy into all the fingertips of the hand, then narrow your focus by
working with just one fingertip at a time. With practice, you’ll be able to
work with all of the fingertips simultaneously.)
After you can fill your fingertips with energy, work your way down to
the second joints of the fingers. See and feel yourself inhaling the mist from
the tips of your fingers down through the first joints, continuing to the
24
second joints of your fingers. Then see and feel yourself exhaling the mist
from the second joints of your fingers out through the fingertips. Repeat the
process until you can do it without effort.
Then work your way
down to the third joints, where
the fingers meet the palm of
the hand. On each inhalation,
see and feel your breath
drawing the mist from the tips
of your fingers down to the
third joints. With each
exhalation, see and feel your
breath sending the mist from
the third joints of your fingers
out through the fingertips.
Again, repeat the process until
you can do it without effort.
Now work your way down through the bones of your fingers, all the
way to the base of the palm of your hand. With each inhalation, bring the
mist in from your fingertips down to the base of the palm. With each
exhalation, send the mist from the base of the palm through the fingertips.
As before, repeat the process until you can do it without effort.
25
Visualize sending the breath through all of the fingers, joint by joint.
First, work on the space between the fingertips and the first joints, as shown
for the fifth finger in the illustration. Then focus on the area from the
fingertips to the second joints, as shown
for the fourth finger in the illustration.
Next, work on the length from the
fingertips through to the third joints,
where the fingers emerge as distinct
from the palm of the hand, as shown for
the middle finger in the illustration.
Finally, lead the energy from the
fingertips to the base of the palm and
back, as shown for the thumb and index
finger in the illustration.
At this point, notice any differences between your two hands – does
your right hand feel different from your left hand? Students have noted that
– like the effect of joint expansion– bone breathing can increase sensations
of warmth, tingling, and fullness.
The next step is to involve your left hand in bone-breathing. Go
through the same step-by-step procedure as was outlined above for your
right hand. In subsequent practice sessions, you’ll be able to go through the
bone breathing process in both hands at the same time.
26
Chapter 8: Burned Fingers
Jinlong remembers the first time he drew upon healing energy after
he’d hurt himself. He was removing a prepackaged meal from the
microwave oven, peeling back the plastic wrapping from the box, and not
thinking of what the escaping steam would do to his index finger that was
lifting the plastic. Ooww. He let go of the box, rushed over to the sink, and
doused his finger in cold water. The temperature of the steam was higher
than the boiling point of water, and there was also the energy of the change
of state as some of the steam condensed back to water on my fingertip, he
realized as his left index finger continued to complain under the stream of
cold water. About twenty seconds later, he shut off the water, but his finger
still hurt.
Okay, I guess it’s time to put this to the test, he thought. Sort of
scary, if the healing side of the art doesn’t work – that would mean much of
the effort of the last few years would have been wasted. Looking at his hand,
Jinlong used his intent to move qi up the back of the finger, under the
fingernail, to the front of the fingertip, then down the front of the finger. Up
the back, then down the front, over and over again. Within a few seconds,
the sensation in his fingertip changed from merely painful to excruciating.
He stayed with it, sending qi up the back of the finger and down the front.
After a few more seconds, it was as if someone had flipped a switch – there
was no pain there, at all. Jinlong continued sending qi through his finger for
awhile longer, just for good measure.
For the rest of the day, the finger was pain-free and fully functional.
The next day, there was one noticeable change as the front of the fingertip
turned dark brown. The day after that, the dark brown skin peeled off,
revealing fully formed new skin – pinkish and just a bit shiny – underneath.
27
Okay, working with the qi results in a ridiculously accelerated rate of healing,
Jinlong thought, pleased and relieved.
Months later, after watching Teacher Galen do energy healing on
someone, Jinlong would realize that he could also have sent energy out
through his unburned hand to help move energy into his burned finger. But
it had worked anyway, using just intent.
*****
“I did something stupid,” Leilani tells Jinlong by phone. “I turned on
a stovetop burner, but I wasn’t noticing any warmth coming from there, so I
didn’t remember whether it was still on. So I touched a finger to the burner
to test it, and it was really hot. I burned my fingertip.”
“Did you send qi through the finger?” Jinlong asks.
“First I soaked it in cold water. Then after that, my finger still hurt. I
didn’t even think about using qi, but your nephew asked if he could try
energy healing on it. I said yes, and he charged up his hands and held them
close to my burned finger. And then it started to hurt more. But after a
couple of minutes, it completely stopped hurting.”
“Great to hear he could do that,” Jinlong says.
“Why did it hurt more at first, when he started working on it?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I’d guess it has something to do with
reestablishing normal blood flow, after the site of injury has gone into shock.
Coming out of shock, the injured area feels the damage more than when less
blood was going into the area. But that increased blood flow is probably part
of what enables healing to occur.”
28
Chapter 9: The Past
Two such opposed kings encamp them still

In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will;
And where the worser is predominant,
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.
-- Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, scene iii
The group that practices at the Cube has gathered at Teacher Galen’s
residence; the smell of his apple pancakes starts drifting through the house.
As they’re waiting for the first batch, someone mentions that Galen’s pet
snake is in the bathroom.
“What sort of snake is it?” someone else asks.
“It’s a ten-foot Burmese python,” Galen answers from the kitchen,
“and they can grow to be much longer than that.”
A subgroup of seven or so people rushes toward the bathroom to
see the serpent. They stand gawking at the patterns on the shiny scales of
the snake that’s coiled in a far corner of the room. Like almost everyone else,
Jinlong stands outside the doorway. Just in case the snake is hungry today.
The lone exception is Wawa, who takes a couple of steps into the room to
get a closer look. “It’s a beautiful snake,” she later comments.
*****
“Okay, lightly put your hands on my chest, and breath my energy
into your own connection to the ground – it should seem like you’re drawing
some of my energy into you, which results in your being more firmly rooted
to the earth,” Jinlong tells Wawa as they’re working on the technique of
“uprooting” an opponent. She accomplishes the preliminary step after just a
couple of attempts, amazing Jinlong with her natural ability.
“Now as you start to exhale, use your intent to lead my energy so
that much of it is behind my back, where it’s no longer supported by the
29
structure of my body.” Wawa does it, cutting the energy connection that
had kept Jinlong rooted to the ground.
“Now, shift your weight forward into where I’m standing, and at the
same time have the idea that you’re sending my body to catch up with the
energy that you’ve projected behind me.” Within five minutes of starting
the practice, Wawa is sending Jinlong far back, with both his feet leaving the
ground. Jinlong is dazzled by how quickly she’s picked up the method of
effortlessly propelling an opponent backward – before today, he’d never met
a beginner with such great aptitude for the art.
*****
Unable to control his curiosity, Jinlong finally inquires: “So, why does
your family call you Wawa?”
“It doesn’t matter. It was from a long time go,” she answers.
“But why do they do it?”
She sighs. “It means baby,” she explains, “and that’s what they
called me when I was really little. Then when I turned two years old, they
started calling me by my name, but at that time I refused to answer to it.
Instead, I said, ‘I’m still Wawa.’”
“Aww, that’s so – “
“Don’t say it.”
Jinlong starts to laugh, then coughs to swallow it. “Okay. But they’re
still calling you that? Even decades later?”
“Uh, yes.”
“Sorry, but it’s just soooo cute.”
“Shut up.”
“So they still think of you as their baby.”
“At least it’s not like what they call my sister. Their nickname for her
is Small-and-Fat.”
30
“Seriously??”
“It sounds better in Chinese.”
*****
“But why?”
“It doesn’t matter, why,” Wawa declares. “I just can’t be with you.”
Her eyes turn black, and the heat drifting from Jinlong’s body, just a couple
of feet away, is so tempting. She wants to pull that energy out from him and
devour it, feed on the heat until he has nothing left. Instead, she forces
herself to her feet and walks out.
She glances back over her shoulder once and sees Jinlong just
standing there, watching her leave. Then she turns and hurries away.
*****
Months later. Jinlong is in the middle of checking his e-mail, when
an instant message notification pops up onscreen. I don’t IM. Who on earth
would be contacting me this way? He clicks on the message.
**Wawa: How’ve you been? **
**Jinlong: Uh, what’s it to you? **
**Wawa: Why do you need to hate me so much? **
Something tugs at Jinlong’s heart, maybe a pang of regret. But then
his fingers tap out a message, as if all on their own.
**Jinlong: You’re you. **
He sits there for a minute. The instant messaging screen fades out.
Then he resumes checking the rest of his e-mails.
*****
Memory comes unbidden. Standing behind Wawa, as she’s seated in
a chair in her office. Placing his hands lightly on her shoulders. She tilts her
head, touching her cheek to the back of his hand.
31
Ugh. Might as well play that Kodak song about “The Times of Your
Life,” Jinlong thinks with disdain. And longing. Over. Done. Forget about it.
Exeunt Omnes
32
Chapter 10: Online Dating Disorder
Years after the falling-out with Wawa. Jinlong tries an online dating
site, and labors over writing an ad: “I tend to be attracted to women who
are smart, nice, funny, and smart.” After finishing the draft, he asks a friend
to preview the ad, and she warns that his mention of “bonus points” for
travel abroad or for ability in different languages “could play into the Asian
stereotype of adding up numbers like an Olympic judge.” His response to
her warning is to mention it in his ad, along with a statement of “5.6, 5.6, 5.8
. . . .”
But he finds that – based on requirements listed in the vast majority
of women’s ads – he’s regarded as too short and too Asian. One such ad is
posted by someone declaring herself to be in search of her “sole mate.”
Hmm, is she a fish lover, or a foot fetishist? Or, more likely, she once heard
the term “soul mate” but didn’t understand it.
Another ad-writer declares herself to be different from most women,
in that she has “higher standards” and is unwilling to settle. Unable to resist
tweaking that person, Jinlong sends a message acknowledging that he's too
short and too Asian to fit the profile of the sort of person she’s seeking, but
also pointing out five spelling errors in her ad: spell-check doesn’t catch
everything, like the difference between “peak my interest” and “pique my
interest.” She actually messages back to thank him for his comments. Either
she’s a really good sport, he thinks, or she didn’t realize that I was laughing
at her assertion about higher standards. But he later notices that she didn’t
correct the spelling in her ad.
Then there’s another personal ad posted by a woman who requires
that her match be someone who speaks Tagalog. Really? Here in the
Midwest? One of Jinlong’s uncles emigrated from Manila, but didn’t impart
his linguistic abilities to Jinlong. Oh, well, moving on, then . . . .
33
Frustrated by the listings of required height and ethnicity in most
women’s ads, he changes the heading of his own ad to say, “Too short, too
Asian?” And he’s soon chastised by a message from someone who lives
about a thousand miles away in another country. She tends to be attracted
to Asian men, but finds many of them to have insufficient self-confidence.
She also spent some time in the Far East, and speaks fluent Cantonese as
well as passable Mandarin and Japanese. If she just lived closer, Jinlong
muses.
He then sends a message to someone who was originally from the
same city in China where he taught English for a year, but the only thing he
learns from her answers is that she works out five times a week and so her
legs are very firm. Well, I guess that’s nice, Jinlong says to himself, but I was
wondering more about what sorts of books, movies, and museums she likes.
He next finds that five different ads – ostensibly from five different
women who have varying characteristics of age, height, hair color, eye color,
and so on – all have the same text, word-for-word, paragraph after
paragraph. That’s weird. Either people plagiarized from each other, or
somebody is running some sort of social psychology experiment about online
dating.
Jinlong continues to examine ad after ad, developing friendships
with four energy healers along the way, but no romantic involvement. In
one search session, he inadvertently clicks on another category and views
ads of women searching for women – and notices that most of them don’t
list any height or ethnicity requirements. Now why can’t women looking for
men be more like that? he complains to himself. And why do we keep
banging our heads against the odds in these sorts of searches? Someday, I’m
going to write a book titled Online Dating Disorder.
34
But then his attention is captured by an ad that doesn’t list any
particular demands regarding height or ethnicity, but requires that anyone
who responds “must be from a dysfunctional family.” Hey, I qualify!
*****
Later still. The topic of Wawa somehow comes up, and Shell teases,
saying, “You must have really had a ‘thing’ for her.” Jinlong glares, but Shell
just starts laughing. Jinlong glares harder. “I’m laughing with you,” she says,
then continues to laugh at him. Jinlong sighs at her. But hey, at least she
appreciates the sort of family in which I grew up.
35
Warriors
Yin and Yang Energies

Yang energy (“hot”) tends to be good for clearing blockages. Yin
energy (“cool”) tends to be good for supporting tissue regeneration. Some
healers, who work only with yang energy, unbalance their systems – as if
slowly burning up their own resources. Using yang energy all the time is like
leaving an empty pot on the flames of a stovetop burner; it ends up
scorching the pot. Yin/yang balance can be restored by adding water to the
pot, to absorb the heat and preserve the structure of the pot.
Yi (intent) leads the qi (energy). Engage the senses to focus the
intent and thus intensify the flow of energy.
In working with yang energy, on the inhale, the healer might see and
feel a warm golden mist come down into the top of her head and travel
through to the center of her body; on the exhale, she would see and feel the
warm mist move from the center of her body and out through her hands.
In working with yin energy, on the inhale, the healer might see and
feel a cool, dark blue mist come up through the soles of her feet and travel
through to the center of her body; on the exhale, she would see and feel the
cool mist move from the center of her body and out through her hands.
Later, with experience and a developed intent, the flow of energy – both
through the healer and into the recipient – can be continuous.
Later, after more experience, the healer can choose proportions of
yin and yang energies to combine in herself and then send into the recipient.
Or in the alternative, and with still more experience, the healer can
send unmixed yin energy and yang energy simultaneously into the recipient.
For example, sending yang energy into a tumor to dissipate the blockage,
while also sending yin energy to strengthen the nearby healthy tissue.
36
Chapter 12: Continued Training
“Again,” said Jinlong.

“But Uncle, I’ve already done it,” Ellen protests.
“We need to repeat it many more times to develop your power,”
Jinlong replies. “The warrior trains basic stances and movements over and
over again to develop the ability to destroy. But the healer trains in the
basics many times to develop the ability to heal. Your energy will become
like the power of a bowstring that sends an arrow into the target, but you’ll
use the energy for healing. And your mind is what directs the energy.”
Ellen grudgingly returns to her practice, standing with one foot
forward, pulling her hands back toward her body as her weight shifts
backward, then sending her hands forward as her weight shifts forward.
“Your movement is good now,” Jinlong concedes. “So it’s time to
coordinate it with your intent and your breath. Do you remember the bone-
breathing that I taught you earlier?”
“The thing where it feels like my breath travels through the inside of
my bones?”
“That’s the one. Now coordinate the bone breathing with the
movement. Breathe the energy in through your fingertips and all the way
down to the center of your body, while you shift your weight to your back
foot and pull your hands back toward you. When you exhale, send the
energy from your center out through your fingertips and beyond, moving
your hands forward as you’re shifting your weight to your front foot.”
Jinlong watches his niece practice the more detailed exercise a few times.
“More intention,” he admonishes. “You have to really feel the qi flowing out
through your hands when you exhale.” Ellen makes the adjustment and her
hands light up, turning red as the qi moves through them. She smiles at the
sensation.
37
“That’s good,” Jinlong says. A few more repetitions, and then he
adds to the exercise again. “Now this time, draw the energy down from the
sky and in through the top of your head as you inhale, and send it out
through your hands as you exhale.” When Ellen is able to do that, Jinlong
has her change to drawing the energy up from the ground and in through the
bottom of her feet on the inhale, and sending it out through her hands on
the exhale.
Ellen comments that the energy from above is hot, and the energy
from below feels cooler. “That’s right,” said Jinlong, “it’s yin and yang. Yang
energy flows from the sky downward and is related to fire and the sun. Yin
energy flows from the ground upward and is related to water and the
moon.” Jinlong instructs his niece to repeat the yang path a few times,
visualizing the sun itself moving from a foot above her head down through
the trunk of her body, into the center of her body on the inhale; then
exhaling the sun through her arms and out her hands. Then he has her
practice the yin path several times, imagining the moon moving from three
feet below the ground up through her feet and legs, into her center on the
inhale; then exhaling the moon out through her arms and her hands.
After Ellen demonstrates that she can send energy through all three
paths – first, in and out through her arms; then in through her head and out
through her arms; and finally, in through her feet and out through her arms –
Jinlong adds one more layer to the exercise. “Now bring the energy in
through the top of your head and the bottom of your feet at the same time,”
he says, “so that you’re inhaling both fire and water energy. Mix them
together in the center of your body. And then when you exhale, send the
mixed energy out through your arms, your hands, your fingertips, and
beyond.” Ellen does so, inhaling fire and water energies as she shifts her
weight back, then letting the energies mix together as if creating steam, and
38
finally exhaling the mixture out through her hands as she shifts her weight
forward. Not bad!, Jinlong thinks. But aloud, he just says, “Keep working on
it.”
39
Chapter 13: Treating Auto-Immune Conditions
A phone call from Suen. “You sound terrible,” Jinlong says into the
phone. Hey, why waste time being tactful?
“I feel terrible,” she replies. “I’m calling because I’m bedridden with
a flare-up of autoimmune hypothyroiditis. Basically, my immune system is
eating my thyroid.”
Jinlong extends energy through the phone, and gets images of red all
through Suen’s body. “It looks like overactive heart fire,” he observes.
“That’s what it feels like,” Suen confirms.
Overactive heart fire. Use the destructive cycle of the five elements.
Water restrains fire. “Bring yin energy up through the ground, and into your
kidneys,” he says, and she does it. “Okay, now send that water-based energy
to the area around your heart.” Looks like steam, where fire and water
combine. “Keep raising the water energy to heart level, but also sink the fire
energy down to your lower dantian,” Jinlong instructs. “Remember the
Daoist thing about reversing the natural positions of fire and water, so that
they combine rather than separate? Yes, that’s it, keep doing that.” The
area around Suen’s heart is cooling off, but there’s still too much red fire
energy throughout her bones. “Now, take the steam that results from
combining the fire and water together, and drive it into your bones, letting it
condense in the marrow.”
After the session, Jinlong would marvel at how astonishingly quickly
Suen was able to accomplish each step in the improvised protocol. But in
the moment, he’s just monitoring what’s going on.
“My skin is itching,” Suen mentions. Use the creative cycle of the five
elements. Fire creates earth. Channel some of the heart fire into the
digestive system. Jinlong extends his energy through the phone again,
40
diverting some of Suen’s red fire-based heart energy into her stomach and
pancreas. Almost immediately, she says “Ah. That’s better.”
The following day, Suen calls again. She sounds normal! “I could
have gone into work today, but stayed home instead to continue the qigong
that you taught me yesterday,” she says. After subsequent practice sessions,
Suen would explain that she visualized using the water of Manoa falls. Hey,
what a coincidence, that she knows the place. A couple of my great-aunts
live near there.
*****
Months later, Jinlong brings up the topic of autoimmune conditions
with Jay, his taijiquan teacher from decades ago. “It’s what happens when
the heart fire goes into the bones and dries out the marrow,” the teacher
comments. Yes! That matches what I’ve been seeing. Although I don’t know
why that results in the immune system becoming overactive. But what a
great, succinct description on an energetic level.
41
Warriors
Five Elements
These “elements” are dynamic processes, rather than static
materials. They interact in a cycle of creation (support), and a cycle of
destruction (restraint). Each element has both a yin organ and a yang organ.
The yin organ is classified as “solid” and is regarded as the location where
the body stores the energy of that particular element. The yang organ is
classified as “hollow” and is regarded as drawing energy from the
corresponding yin organ. In this scheme of things, each organ is not
restricted to the specific boundaries of its counterpart in western medical
science. For example, the liver “opens into” the eyes – so deficient liver
energy can be observed as jaundice in the eyes. The kidneys “open into” the
ears – tinnitus is an indication of deficient kidney yang energy.
********
Fire: yin organ = heart; yang organ = small intestine. Color = red.
Qualities of heating and rising. Handles emotion of “excitement”
(distraction?).
Earth: yin organ = “spleen” (pancreas); yang organ = stomach. Color
= yellow. Qualities of neutrality, solidity. Handles emotion of “pensiveness”
(obsessive rumination).
Metal: yin organ = lungs; yang organ = large intestine. Color =
white. Qualities of contracting, condensing. Handles emotion of grief.
Water: yin organ = kidneys; yang organ = bladder. Color = “blue”
(can also be translated as dark blue/green). Qualities of cooling, sinking.
Handles emotion of fear.
Wood: yin organ = liver; yang organ = gall bladder. Color = green.
Qualities of growth, expansion. Handles emotion of anger.
42
********
The five elements interact with each other through two cycles: one
of creation or growth or support, and the other of destruction or restraint or
control. The sequence of the creative cycle is shown by the arrows on the
periphery of the following diagram. The sequence of the destructive cycle is
shown by the arrows in the middle of the diagram.
Creative Cycle: Fire
creates earth, like
ashes merging into the
ground. Earth creates
metal, like the ground
bringing forth metal
ore. Metal creates
water, like an old-style
mirror being a surface
for condensation of
moisture. Water
creates wood, like a
river or stream supporting the growth of trees. Wood fuels fire, self-
explanatory.
Destructive Cycle: Water drowns fire, self-explanatory. Fire melts
metal, like using the heat of a furnace to refine metal ore. Metal destroys
wood, like an axe head chopping a tree. Wood destroys earth, like tree roots
splitting rock. Earth restrains water, like a dam holding back a river.
********
Examples of using the creative cycle. In a situation of deficient
energy of the kidneys: In addition to directly boosting the energy of the
kidneys, you can also boost the energy of the lungs, and then move some of
43
the increased lung energy into the kidneys (metal creates water). In a
situation of excess energy of the heart, you can lead some of that excess
energy into the pancreas (fire creates earth).
Examples of using the destructive cycle. When there’s excessive
heart fire, you can boost kidney energy and then lead some of that energy to
restrain the excessive fire (water destroys fire). Or when there’s congested
lung energy, you can boost heart energy and then lead some of that heart
fire to regulate the lungs (fire restrains metal).
Notice the creative and destructive cycles can be used together.
Excessive heart fire can both be led on to the next element/organ (earth, the
pancreas) according to the creative cycle and diminished by water energy
(the kidneys) according to the destructive cycle.
Parallel between Western medicine and part of five-element theory
– kidneys and heart again. In the destructive cycle of the five elements,
water (kidneys) restrains fire (heart). In Western medicine, the kidneys play
a role in regulating blood pressure.
44
Chapter 15: Internal Striking, Projecting Energy
Jinlong is a fixture in Jay’s class, having formally been installed in the

role of senior student. At that time, Jinlong is deadly serious about
everything. By contrast, a new classmate, Wollen, takes nothing seriously.
Jinlong’s approach to training is to do whatever it takes. Wollen’s approach
is to stop as soon as training starts to get a bit uncomfortable. “You’re
responsible for Wollen’s progress,” Jay had told Jinlong. Uhhh, what?
Jinlong consults with his teacher, obtaining approval to travel and
attend a workshop that someone else will be teaching about principles of the
internal martial arts. To Jinlong’s surprise, Wollen announces that he’ll be
going along. After class, they’re at the café across the street and Jay is
holding court amid the talk of martial arts. Then he turns to Jinlong and
announces in front of everyone, “Sometime when you two are up there at
the workshop, Wollen is going to open his mouth and offend somebody. At
that point, as his senior, it will be your job to protect him.”
It happens at dinner on the first day of the workshop. They’re at a
Thai restaurant, waiting for their food to be brought out. There’s been all-
around good banter, until Wollen says to the workshop teacher: “This might
sound like a trite question, but did Bruce Lee have any influence on you?”
Jinlong’s elbow smacks Wollen’s arm, hard. “What!?” Wollen says in protest.
Jinlong leans over and murmurs, “His teacher had a fight with Bruce Lee.”
“Oh, now I get it!” Wollen shouts to the assembly at the table.
Aiya. Now I’m looking at getting into a fight with the workshop
teacher, Jinlong thinks. He’s going to kill me. And it’ll be Wollen’s fault. But
fortunately, the teacher takes Wollen’s indiscretion in good humor.
The next day, at the end of the workshop. The teacher is
demonstrating internal punching on anyone who wants to feel it. An
external punch is the way that “everyone” strikes. It’s consistent with widely
45
given advice about tightening the hand for impact. By contrast, an internal
punch is delivered with a hand that has only enough tension to maintain the
shape of the striking surface. Given equal amounts of force in each type of
punch, the internal strike is less likely to bruise the surface of the target’s
body, but more likely to create damage inside. The idea is that more of the
power of the strike penetrates into the body, rather than bouncing off at the
surface. Some sources have described it as hitting with a “soft fist” or
“cotton fist.” Others have analogized to the padded hoof of a camel kick
rather than the rigid hoof of a horse kick.
Of course the teacher is controlling the impact so that it doesn’t
damage the students, but Jinlong still notices interesting changes of
expression on their faces as they’re hit. His turn comes last, and when the
teacher hits him with a backfist just under the collar bone, it doesn’t feel like
a punch – instead, it feels as if someone has taken a needle and jabbed it
into him. “Thank you,” Jinlong manages to croak, a few seconds after the
strike.
*****
A day after returning from the workshop, Jinlong calls Teacher Jay to
give a progress report. And then he mentions Wollen’s question to the
workshop teacher.
“His teacher had a fight with Bruce Lee. Did you know that?” Jay
says.
“Yes, I knew it. And Wollen should have known it too, if he’d done
his homework,” Jinlong points out. It was in the days before the internet,
but Wollen still should have used due diligence to research the workshop
teacher’s background. Jay just laughs at Jinlong’s righteous indignation.
*****
46
Years later. Jinlong is practicing his internal punch, striking lightly at
someone he met earlier at Teacher Galen’s practice group. Commenting on
that person, Wawa had said, “He knows too many people,” because
whenever he’s walking along the sidewalk, others always come up and start
talking with him.
“You’re flinching,” Jinlong complains, “even before the strike
arrives.”
“You try being hit by you,” the other guy replies. But he also
mentions that the effect of the internal strike traveled down through his
torso, rather than staying at the site of the impact. Huh, that’s interesting,
Jinlong says to himself.
*****
Jinlong tests some palm strikes on a boxer’s heavy bag that he’s
hung up in his bedroom doorway, and sees confirmation of what he’d read
somewhere some years ago. When he uses an external strike, the bag
swings back and forward, tracing an arc first away from him and then toward
him. But when he uses an internal strike, the main motion of the heavy bag
is to bounce up and down as if on a spring, while there’s a minimal
component of swinging forward and back. The internal strike isn’t pushing
the bag away like the external one did, Jinlong realizes.
He now starts to incorporate projection of qi, the same as in energy
healing, into his striking techniques. And he notices that the mechanics of
the upper body, at least, are automatically correct – extension of the arm,
sinking at the elbow, hand held loose but in the proper position, body
centered rather than tilting too far in the direction of the punch.
Body mechanics and energy movement reinforce each other.
Mechanically, bend his legs and back; energetically, compress the qi.
Mechanically, extend along a path toward the target; energetically, let the qi
47
release as if it’s being pulled into the target. Senior students in Teacher
Leon’s school spoke of movements using “opposing forces,” but Jinlong
thinks of them as “counterbalancing forces” – movement components that
complement each other rather than fight against each other. Mechanically,
different parts of the body counterbalance each other, such as the extension
of the striking arm being balanced by the extension of a leg in a different
direction; energetically, the practitioner simultaneously extends qi both
forward and backward.
*****
Years later, Suen convinces Jinlong to return for a couple of days to
teach a qigong workshop for Teacher Jay’s students and grandstudents. In
talking about extending qi outward, he makes an analogy to internal striking,
but there’s no sign of recognition from anyone there. So at the next break in
the schedule, Jinlong demonstrates on a couple of the school’s assistant
instructors.
Jinlong does a light internal strike on one of the assistants, just
beneath the left collarbone, careful to avoid anything that would connect to
the heart. The instructor mentions and gestures that the power of the strike
went down to just below his ribcage, left of center. Suen has him start to do
some “spleen” (pancreas) qigong practice, and then Jinlong places his hands
on the student’s pancreas and the spot of the strike, and sends energy
between his hands to clear out the effect of the hit.
The strike on the second assistant is a mirror image of the hit on the
first. Jinlong lightly hits him under the right collarbone. The instructor
indicates the power of the strike went down to just below his ribcage on the
right side. Suen has him start to do some liver qigong practice, and then
Jinlong places his hands on the student’s liver and the area of the strike,
48
sending energy between his hands to reestablish the instructor’s normal qi
flow.
49
Chapter 16: Faith? And Guidance?
Someone asks about whether qi-healing and related practices are

forms of faith healing.
“I don’t think so,” Jinlong replies. “When people talk about faith
healing, the faith of the recipient seems to be what’s important.
“But that’s not true for energy-healing. The recipient should be
open-minded enough to consent – after all, we generally don’t work on
anyone without obtaining permission. And the healer probably has to
believe at least a little, to get the energy flow process started. But after that,
energy does what it does. When I’ve worked on people, I haven’t noticed
that their initial belief or skepticism has any correlation to what happens in
the course of treatment. As an analogy – someone could say ‘I don’t believe
in x-rays,’ but that doesn’t mean he would be unaffected if exposed to x-
rays.”
“So it’s not placebo effect?” someone else asks.
“Placebo effect doesn’t explain studies showing that healers affect
cell cultures growing in Petri dishes. Nor does it explain results of some of
the better-designed clinical studies that have control groups – noting results
when patients receive treatments from energy healers, compared with
results when patients receive ‘treatments’ from people who pretend to be
healers. And it also doesn’t explain how instrumentation picks up on
infrared radiation, infrasound, and magnetic fields that are emitted from the
hands of healers doing their thing. So I’d say it’s not a placebo effect.”
*****
Jinlong looks for some indication of where his life’s path should go.
He sits on a cushion placed on his living room floor, his legs pulled up in half-
lotus posture. His hands are held together in the oval shape that he was
taught in zen meditation training – hands placed palm-up on his lap, left
50
fingers above right, thumb tips touching each other. Spine straight, chin
tucked inward. A few deep breaths to relax the body, and then letting the
mind settle into calmness.
He now lets his attention explore options for where to focus his
efforts. Lawyering? No response. Healing? Apparent endorsement comes
quickly: light flashes in his head, filling his mind’s eye vision, and then he
hears a directive that’s familiar from ancient text – “I am the Lord, thy God.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Jinlong sits for a few minutes
until things seem normal again, then sits awhile longer. God is talking to me
now, stating the first of the ten commandments? And in King James English,
no less?? Seems crazy. Maybe I’m just going crazy. But it felt real.
It sounded like a mandate for healing, although I guess there’s
always the free will exception, Jinlong continues his cogitation. But then
there’s the story of Jonah, who was subjected to divine coercion, he
concludes grimly.
51
Chapter 17: Introduction to Cancer Treatment
Jinlong charges his hands and begins the healing session the way he
usually does, reciting to himself the first line from the prayer of St. Francis of
Assisi: “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace.” He then moves his
hands to a few inches above his father, who lies on the couch, resting. Ouch,
Jinlong comments to himself, as the cancer’s energy stabs like hundreds of
needle pricks on the palms of his hands. Wow, that’s intense. “Dad, I want
to move some energy through the area of the tumor.” “Okay,” his father
replies. Cancer is congested energy, Jinlong intuits. Yeah, that makes sense;
the build-up of so much energy is why the tumor’s energy level is so intense.
The next few days go by in a patchwork of improvised protocols.
First moving energy into and through the site of the tumor. Placing his palms
on the area, ignoring the pain of the needle-prick sensations, breathing
energy in from above and below, and sending it into and through the
affected area deep in his father’s body. Keep it moving through, don’t let it
get stuck there, Jinlong reminds himself.
Another session, and this time as Jinlong sends energy through his
hands into his father, he notices his two-year-old nephew is slowly
approaching, staring at them. The young Ian continues to look, fascinated,
while slowly and carefully stepping forward. Then he finally places his hands
on his grandfather, in imitation of what Jinlong is doing. Aww, cute, Jinlong
muses.
The next day. Jinlong and his mother have their hands on his father,
sending energy into the tumor site and the bones. Leilani carries Ian into the
room, sets him down, and this time he runs up to place his hands gently on
his grandfather.
*****
52
“I have some gas pains when I eat,” said Jinlong’s father. The cells
lining the digestive tract are fast-growing, so they get hit hard by the chemo
treatments, Jinlong realizes. The chemo feels like a fire energy, so send yin
energy there to balance the yang. He draws cold water-based energy up
through his feet and sends it out through his hands, letting the yin qi
saturate his father’s stomach and small intestine. On the first visit, the
procedure neutralizes gas pains for a couple of hours at a time. In
subsequent visits, the procedure provides relief for two months between
treatments. (Still later, Jinlong reads on an electronic message board that
“friendly flora” in the digestive tract – helpful bacteria that help to digest
food – can also be affected by chemo treatments, and that drinking
buttermilk can reintroduce colonies of those bacteria. It works for his
father.)
Another day. “Mom, could you send energy into Dad’s bone
marrow? Touch any bony area like his wrists, and send energy through the
inside of the bones.” Jinlong monitors the flow of energy that goes through
her and into his father’s wrist bones and up through the bones of his
forearms. “That’s good. Keep doing it.”
*****
“I’d thought that more energy would always be better,” a student
comments, “but you’re saying that cancer can occur when there’s too much
energy in some tissue?”
“Yes,” Jinlong answers. “Which is why we can detect tumor sites by
scanning with our hands. And it also makes sense from the viewpoint of
allopathic medicine. Cancer results in accelerated cellular activity and
division, requiring additional resources, so more blood vessels grow in the
site of the tumor – all of which would increase the heat at that site. The use
53
of thermal imaging techniques like thermography depends on the greater
energy of a tumor, compared with the surrounding region of the body.”
“As for what we do, the stimulation of the bone marrow helps to
alleviate some of the effects of chemotherapy,” Jinlong continues. “Chemo
disproportionately affects fast-growing cells. So it kills cancer cells but it’s
also hard on normal processes like blood cell production. Red blood cells
carry oxygen, which is of course necessary for us to live. White blood cells
fight infections directly and also by producing antibodies. By affecting the
bone marrow, long-term effects of chemotherapy tend to include both
reduced oxygen levels in the blood and reduced effectiveness of the immune
system. When you send energy into healthy tissue that’s hit by the chemo,
you’re supporting the functioning of that tissue.”
*****
A few themes recur in the series of improvised treatments. Clear
blockage at the site of the tumor. Send energy into the bone marrow to
stimulate production of red blood cells. Support the immune system by
sending energy into the bone marrow to support production of white blood
cells, and into the thymus gland where T-cells mature. Send yin energy to
the digestive system to alleviate gas pains, and – later – to stop bleeding
there.
*****
An herbalist recommended the use of burdock root to strengthen
the healthy tissue in Jinlong’s father’s pancreas, so Jinlong passes the
message along. But when his father checks with his oncologist, the doctor
just says he doesn’t know anything about the herb so it shouldn’t be used.
Jinlong urges that the doctor should educate himself about it and then make
an informed evaluation, but it doesn’t happen. The same thing happens with
a suggestion of looking into the use of supplements such as astragalus to
54
help strengthen the immune system. In Jinlong’s view, his father is too good
a patient, following the doctor’s instructions exactly even though the medical
treatment doesn’t offer long-term survival.
55
Chapter 18: Shaking, Swaying, and Icons
Intro. nights and practitioner nights at Grey’s house, opportunities

for reiki students to practice. When it’s his turn to be worked on, Jinlong
notices that the effect of receiving energy from more than one practitioner is
synergistic. Okay, good to know. He also sees the rather dramatic reactions
a few people have to the energy. “Kriyas,” Grey calls them. Jinlong knows
them as ziyun, spontaneous movement: the twitching or shaking or other
movement that arises when energy encounters a blockage.
Jinlong thinks back to the first time he experienced it, in a qigong
exercise – feeling as if something was shaking his body from the inside out,
and nevertheless feeling good when it was over. After several months of
practicing the exercise, the shaking subsided as the blockages were cleared.
But until then, Jay referred to Jinlong’s ziyun as “breakdancing.” Ha, ha.
Quite a sense of humor you have there, Teacher.
*****
On a tour of the temple complex on the Buddha’s Light Mountain on
Taiwan, Jinlong left the main group to wander through some of the buildings
that the guide neglected to include in the tour. He exchanged greetings with
a couple of nuns in front of an entrance, then stepped in. It was the Hall of
Great Mercy, Jinlong would later learn from reading a pamphlet. But for the
moment he just stared up at the huge standing statue of Guanyin, the
bodhisattva of compassion. The statue’s porcelain face depicted serenity as
her left hand held a stalk of some sort of grain, while her right hand tipped a
slim jar to pour water. It’s beautiful, Jinlong thought. And then noticed that
he was starting to sway, feet rooted to the spot as his upper body tilted
forward and back. This – is – weird! Jinlong’s internal commentary noted, as
the swaying became more pronounced, his body like a pendulum tracing an
56
arc that was becoming larger and larger. Finally, after a few minutes, Jinlong
willed himself back to stillness, the parts of his body slowly complying.
“Where were you?” the tour guide asked in Mandarin when Jinlong
finally caught up with the group.
“Guanyin temple,” he answered in the same language. Then he
didn’t understand the guide’s next question, so she switched to English,
teasing, “Did you cry?”
“No.” But I did experience something really odd.
A few weeks later, after returning to Wuhan, Jinlong asked his
teacher Zhong about the phenomenon. Getting an answer was a long
process – listening to his teacher pronounce a word, looking for the word in
the Chinese-English dictionary, having his teacher select the correct word
among the homonyms, then repeating the process, supplemented with
pantomime whenever it was helpful. But finally, the pieces came together:
People visiting the temple prayed to the statue, over time creating a
magnetic field in the object, and that’s what caused the swaying when you
were standing in front of it. Okaaay, Jinlong thought to himself, unsure of
what to make of the explanation.
Several years would pass before he found some mention of research
results showing that magnetic fields associated with the hands of energy
healers doing their thing were about a thousand times stronger than those
among the general population. And that the oscillating magnetic fields of
the healers’ hands were centered around the same frequency as that of the
earth’s magnetic field. Apparently some sort of entrainment. Magnetic
induction from the earth to the healer to the recipient. I guess that could be
similar to what was going on with the Guanyin statue.
*****
57
More swaying, this time in the presence of a collection of wooden
bodhisattva statues at the Royal Ontario Museum. None of them had the
same intensity as the statue in the Hall of Great Mercy on the Buddha’s Light
Mountain, but collectively, their composite field was too strong to ignore.
Working on the assumption that they acquired the energy field through the
prayers of devotees as his teacher had suggested, Jinlong was surprised that
they were still charged. The statues came from different dynasties, but the
most recent were hundreds of years old, while the more ancient were over a
thousand years old, and – scanning them from fifteen feet away or so, by
sending energy out through his hands– there didn’t seem to be any
correlation between the age of the statue and the strength of its field.
*****
Now more experienced, Jinlong started looking for icons that hold a
charge. He found a few among statues of gods and bodhisattvas in the
University of Michigan Museum of Art, and more in a collection of Hindu
sculptures in the Art Institute of Chicago. As with the Ontario museum, the
ages of the charged statues ranged from hundreds of years to more than a
thousand years. Sandstone and limestone seemed to be particularly good
materials for holding such fields, for whatever reason.
*****
Visiting a museum in Honolulu, Jinlong is standing in front of an ugly-
looking stone statue of an old Hawaiian god of fishing. A docent giving a tour
of that section of the museum mentioned that – years earlier, when the
museum was undergoing renovation – staff members had tried to move the
statue but it didn’t budge. Then they dug around it and again tried to
relocate it, but the statue still just didn’t move. The museum administration
resolved the problem by placing a tarp over the statue and conducting the
renovations around it.
58
Intrigued, Jinlong stands a few feet away from the statue and
extends his energy field toward it to determine if he can “see” anything
unusual about it, but nothing out of the ordinary shows up on his sight. But
then, he thinks, the subtle energies in Hawaii tend to be more ephemeral
than elsewhere, making it more difficult for me to see them anyway. So then
he tries a different method of detection, holding his right hand toward the
statue and sending energy toward it, but he doesn’t feel anything coming
back. He sweeps the palm of his right hand up and down – above, below,
and directly at the statue – and still doesn’t notice anything. He’s just about
to give up, but then uses his left hand to scan the statue – and feels warmth,
like butter melting on a hot plate, that forms a column running through the
statue and extending both above and below it. Jinlong tries again with his
right hand, and doesn’t perceive anything there. He switches back to using
his left hand, and again perceives the warm column going through the
statue. I guess the vertical current of warm energy somehow anchored the
statue in place, Jinlong says to himself. But why would there be such a
difference in perception, depending on which hand I’m using?
*****
Still in Honolulu, but at another museum. Jinlong stands in front of a
Guanyin statue that sits on a raised platform. It’s an old version – the figure
is male, having been sculpted before the popular imagination changed the
bodhisattva into a female incarnation. Something flickers in sight, but it
takes a few seconds to register in Jinlong’s awareness. Then he looks again,
and sees it again. Shadows around the statue’s arms seem to be moving. He
checks the light source, which is steady. And of course, the statue itself is
stationary. So, logically, those shadows shouldn’t be moving, Jinlong
reasons. But there they go again, twining around the figure’s arms.
59
A phone call to Danner follows. “It was just letting you know it’s
alive,” Danner says in a reassuring tone after hearing Jinlong’s summary
about the Guanyin statue. Though the experience was odd enough that
Jinlong isn’t certain about whether he feels reassured.
60
Chapter 19: Frequency, Intensity, and Other Matters
Jinlong’s new acquaintance, Val, has been experiencing recurring

migraine headaches for the past 20 years. Jinlong charges his hands, then
places them at the base of her skull and along the top of her head. It feels as
if the palms of his hands are pricked by lots of pinpoints. Static electricity
sort of feeling of stagnant energy, he thinks to himself, blocking the flow of
fresh energy through that area. Jinlong ignores the pinpricks, continuing to
breathe energy into himself and out through his hands, with Val commenting
on the soothing heat that she feels.
After the session, Jinlong drives home, and about an hour later is
struck by the same sort of pain that Val has had. He can’t walk more than
two steps before the pain at the back of his head becomes overwhelming.
Stops, rests. Starts to walk across his living room again, and the pain
intensifies again. I’m not some defenseless little novice, Jinlong growls at the
headache, which comes back half a minute later with another paralyzing slice
of pain, cutting through the back third or so of his brain. After that subsides,
Jinlong charges his hands and scans himself, placing his hands a few inches
from his body and slowly moving them to feel for imbalances in his energy
field. And he notices that the baihui point at the top of the head – where
yang energy enters the body – is closed. Stupid, to let that happen, Jinlong
admonishes himself. He circles his right palm above the baihui point,
clockwise, and feels the opening of the point as a magnetic sort of pressure
on his hand. He keeps circling the point until it opens fully, and the static-
electricity sensation is gone. Then checks every now and then, to be sure
that the baihui point remains open.
*****
“So, one of the things you want to do in preparation,” Jinlong later
explains to his students, “is build up your energy field so that it’s strong
61
enough to keep you from being affected by the symptoms of the person
you’re working on. You don’t want to be caught up in backwash coming
from the recipient’s energy. Healing shouldn’t debilitate the healer.”
Jinlong relates the story of how he experienced the symptoms of
Val’s migraines and what he did to clear his own energy. Then he gives a
theoretical underpinning to the discussion: “When two fields come into
contact, the more intense one ‘wins.’ Basically, if the fields interact, the
stronger field shapes the weaker one.”
“So you want to maintain high frequency in your energy, right?” one
of the newer students asks.
“Argh! No, that’s ridiculous!” Jinlong exclaims, as other students
lean away from the line of sight between their teacher and the newbie,
unwilling to risk what longer-term students have started to call the glare of
death. At least as a joke among themselves.
“That’s a misunderstanding perpetuated by people who try to use
the vocabulary of physics without understanding anything about physics,”
Jinlong expounds. “Frequency is
how fast a waveform wiggles –
it’s measured in the number of
cycles per second, and it’s
inversely proportional to
wavelength. Intensity is
completely different; it’s directly
proportional to the square of the
amplitude – and amplitude is how high and low the wave goes.”
The wave form at the top displays high frequency – but small
amplitude and therefore low intensity. The wave form at the bottom
displays low frequency – but large amplitude and therefore high intensity.
62
“Think in terms of light. If higher frequency were always better,
then blue light would always be better than yellow light, which in turn would
always be better than red light. But it doesn’t work that way. Intensity is
the brightness of the light, regardless of the particular color of the
frequency.
“Or think in terms of sound. Frequency is what determines the pitch
of the note that results from pressing a particular key on a piano. Where is
the note depicted on the treble clef or the bass clef? That’s frequency. But
intensity is what determines how loud or soft that note is, and it’s
independent of how high-pitched or low-pitched the note is.”
Jinlong grasps for another way to explain the point, then continues:
“If two pulsating magnetic fields come into contact with each other, and one
entrains to the other, then intensity is what matters, not frequency. Say that
you have an object that emits a 5 gauss field with a frequency of 800 herz,
and you have another object that emits a 10,000 gauss field with a frequency
of 2 herz. If the two objects come into close proximity to each other, the
stronger, more intense field is the one that will prevail in setting the pattern,
even though it has lower frequency in the example that I gave.”
Now, where was I? Jinlong ponders. Oh, yeah. “So when you’re
doing energy healing, maintain your own energy at high intensity. And be
sure to keep open your contact with the sources of your energy flow. We
draw primarily upon the energy of the sky and the ground. That’s what
allows us to keep the flow going during healing, so that we don’t exhaust our
own energy supply.”
*****
Back at Val’s. Jinlong ensures that his baihui point remains open,
charges his hands, and places them on Val’s head. This time, he sends
energy all the way through her head, rather than stopping at the surface.
63
Previously, he was squeamish about doing that, because of qigong theory
about adverse effects of high levels of qi in the brain. But this time, Jinlong is
confident that he can move the qi through and not have it get stuck in Val’s
brain. Breathe the energy in, send it out through his hands, again and again.
A few minutes into the session, Jinlong feels some wiggling under his
hands, as if worms are crawling there. Weird! That must be the muscles of
her scalp. Breathe in, send out. The wiggling, squirming sensation
intensifies. That feels creepy! Focus. Breathe in, send out. Even more
wiggling, and then Jinlong notices bigger movement from deeper under the
scalp. It feels like the bones of her skull are shifting their positions.
Soon after, Jinlong moves halfway across the country to take a new
job. But during a phone call, Val mentions that she’ll be meeting with a
chiropractor who periodically visits her area, and that they plan to have him
work on her based on x-rays that were taken a few years ago. “Be sure that
he’s working from more-recent x-rays,” Jinlong cautions, “because I felt the
bones of your skull moving around when we last got together.” Val then gets
a new set of x-rays, which confirm the shifts in her skull bones. That’s
strange, Jinlong muses, but it’s the only thing that could explain the moving
around under my hands. The energy must have activated the muscles to
contract, and they somehow pulled the bones along with them.
*****
“I never know what’s going to happen during a session,” Grey says to
Jinlong, as they’re sitting at Grey’s kitchen table, chatting about healing.
“Yeah, I understand that.”
The flow of topics goes free-form. “By the way,” Grey reveals, “my
own teacher says that cancer is contagious.”
“What!? If that were true, then doctors and nurses who work in
cancer wards of hospitals would have a higher incidence of cancer than the
64
general population,” Jinlong replies. “But I’ve never heard of such a thing.
Have you?”
“I haven’t heard of studies or anything showing that, no. But he said
he saw that the energy of cancer is contagious.”
“But Grey, there should be numbers to back it up, if it’s true. Enough
people work around cancer patients, that there should be statistically
significant relations.”
“By the way,” Jinlong says, switching topics, “I’ve been meaning to
ask you about differences in energy from place to place. Here, I can often
see the energies involved in conditions that we work on. When I travel to
visit my parents, the energy around their city seems sort of murky, and I
have to rely more on scanning with my hands. At the opposite end of things,
when I fly over to visit my sister, the energy there seems more subtle, so
again it’s harder for me to see it but that’s because it’s more . . . ethereal,
over there.”
“The energy of a place can definitely be different from that of
another place,” Grey responds. “So it makes sense that it would affect your
‘sight.’”
I guess it makes sense to think of it as an effect of fengshui, the qi of
the environment, Jinlong realizes.
*****
Reiki practitioners night. “I’ve been meaning to speak with you
about something,” Grey says. “The woman who introduced you to my
classes said you think you look too Asian. Maybe you should consider getting
a different style of haircut?”
“No,” Jinlong explains, “it’s not that I think I look too Asian. I
mentioned to her that height and ethnicity requirements listed in most
65
women’s ads – from the site through which I first messaged her – indicate
that they think I’m too short and too Asian.”
“Oh, well, then that’s different,” Grey says, “and you don’t have to
change your hairstyle.”
*****
Another reiki practitioners night. As usual, Grey starts the session by
having the group members go through “a couple of minutes of meditation.”
Ten minutes later, Jinlong glances at Grey to see that his consciousness has
drifted to some other place, far from the realm of the living room where the
group is seated. I guess it would be rude to say something to break the
silence, and it would also be rude to walk over and tap his arm to bring him
back, Jinlong debates with himself, but this could go on a long time. And I
have to go into the office early tomorrow, to see if the judge has any
questions about my bench memos for the motion hearings. Jinlong finds
himself building up energy, placing it behind an intention summarized by the
words Come Back, and then hurling the energized thought of Come Back at
Grey. He’s a bit surprised as well as satisfied to see Grey’s head jerk upward
and his eyes snap open. Grey then taps a cylinder against a bowl, producing
a ringing sound to signal the end of the meditation session.
A couple of minutes later, as the group is walking through Grey’s
kitchen toward the treatment tables, Grey asks Jinlong, “Did you hear
someone say ‘come back?’”
“No,” Jinlong answers, “but I thought it really loudly.”
*****
“One of my students is doing her psychology dissertation on effects
of reiki on depression. Would you have any interest in participating in the
study?” Grey asks Jinlong.
66
But I’m not depressed these days, Jinlong thinks to himself. It takes a
few moments before he realizes, Oh, he means be involved as a reiki
practitioner, not as one of the depression patients. Jinlong then agrees to
take part in the study.
*****
During a break in class, Grey mentions the old Cherokee story in
which an elder tells his grandson about internal conflict being a battle of two
wolves, one good and one evil, within each person. In response to the boy’s
question of which wolf wins, the grandfather says, “The one you feed.” Grey
extends the analogy to apply in successive lifetimes for each person: the
balance between the wolves continues after death, and into the next
incarnation. In this lifetime, Grey says, we may select particular sorts of
energies that we previously encountered in past lives – thus deciding which
wolf to feed, in the terms of the old story.
67
Chapter 20: On the Verge
The armies of the Demon Queen have swept across the dimensional
planes, leaving scorched ruins in their wake. Flurries of demon refugees
desperately race ahead of the oncoming tide of the Queen’s forces.
*****
Wawa the demon gazes upon the realm where the largest group of
refugees has fled. “I lived there, for quite awhile,” she says softly, “before
discovering my real nature. And now there it is, again.”
“But we could still go back to our own world,” says Meihua, the
Queen’s sister. “We don’t need to enter the human realm.”
“Hush now, Small-and-Fat,” Wawa replies. “Too many of our people
are hiding here now, and I mean to get them back. And all this tracking them
across the mists has made me hungry.” As if emphasizing the last point,
Wawa’s eyes turn obsidian black. “Summon the Finder,” she commands.
Servants scurry to do her bidding.
A minute later, the Finder enters and kneels, its energy muddy
brown, with fog-like tendrils flailing about, exploring the surrounding space.
Wawa leans forward to scratch the top of its head, much like a human would
do with a favorite dog. She then leans back to pick up a bundled item.
“Take this sword,” Wawa declares, placing it into the grasp of the
Finder. “Make better use of it than the previous owner did. Locate a fit
location for the rest of us to gather, and remove all obstacles to our entry.
When you’ve secured it, we’ll follow in numbers.”
The Finder bows lower, then rises to its feet and walks through the
mists, into the land of the humans.
“Why does that realm have such a hold on your attention?” Meihua
asks her sister.
“I’m a people watcher,” Wawa answers.
68
Chapter 21: Idiosyncratic Mentorship
Yin must not leave yang,

Nor yang depart from yin,
Because their perfect union
Is where true skill begins.
-- from the Teacher Jay analects, construing the taijiquan classics
Much of Jinlong’s approach to training and teaching has been shaped

by Jay: transmit traditional methods, but search for alternatives when
tradition is silent. The touchstone principle is practicality. The idea was
conveyed in an article titled “Let’s Be For Real,” that Jay had written for a
taijiquan magazine. Or as Jay’s friend Korl once said, “We didn’t learn taiji to
float in the clouds. We learned taiji because we wanted to kick ass on the
streets.”
Jay embodies the attraction of paradox. After class, Jay’s taijiquan
group meets at the restaurant across the street to replenish, and to discuss
the art. As usual, the discussion drifts into related topics. Jay mentions that
during a recent middleweight title boxing match, both contestants displayed
“heart” – the will to keep fighting, even when seriously hurt. He then
comments, “Boxing is immoral. But I love it.”
A few minutes later: “But Teacher, how can you promote the health
benefits of taijiquan and qigong while you’re still smoking and drinking?”
“See what practice has done for me,” Jay responds, “in spite of my
bad habits.”
*****
Jinlong is sparring with his teacher, and they get locked into a
position where neither is able to gain advantage. Until Jay leans over and
bites Jinlong’s shoulder. “Hey, what the –” Jinlong exclaims in outrage. Jay
merely laughs at him.
69
*****
Some months later. Jinlong is finally able to score enough strikes on
his teacher to move him back a little. At which point, Jay starts to refer to
him as “The Evil Disciple.” Sounds like something from a bad gongfu movie,
Jinlong thinks.
*****
For years, Jay had been prodding Jinlong to resume teaching and to
cultivate a base of students. Finally, Jinlong sends an e-mail message, saying
he will do so.
A couple of days later, Jinlong picks up the phone: “Hello?”
“What’s this I hear about you opening a chain of Qigong Marts, O
Golden Dragon?” Jay asks.
Sigh. I should have known that after criticizing my failure to do it, he
would make fun of my decision to go ahead with it, Jinlong ruminates. But
now he starts to think of the sort of hype he’s seen from other schools and
teachers. And how it would work into a TV or radio ad.
voiceover: "Yes, here at Qigong Mart, we've slashed prices way, way
down. Now, and for a limited time only, you can learn to cultivate and use
your life energy, help heal yourself and others, all at deeeeeeply discounted
rates. Take advantage of this! Crazy Jinlong is offering craaaazy low
prices! And if you act NOW, you'll automatically attain coveted disciple
status!! That's right, not only can you – yes, you! – attain radiant good
health and healing ability, but you'll also impress your friends while doing it."
testimonial: "I used to feel fatigued and insignificant. Then I took a simple,
easy course at Crazy Jinlong's Qigong Mart. Now I have robust good health,
as well as the respect and admiration of my family, friends, and co-workers."
voiceover: "So what are you waiting for!? Look younger!! Feel
younger!!! Sign up now!!!"
70
No, that would be silly, Jinlong declares to himself.
*****
Sometime later. “Hi, Dee, this is Jinlong. Is Jay there?” Jinlong asks
into the phone.
“Just a minute, and I’ll get him,” Jay’s wife says. Half a minute later:
“What?” Jay asks, answering the phone.
“I don’t know. You left a message saying to give you a call.”
“And I could have been standing here with a spear in my back,
waiting to gasp out the name of the student who did it to me,” Jay says.
“Waiting while my senior disciple refused to answer the phone.” It’s been
years since Jinlong moved away – first for graduate school study, then for a
job, then law school, then a series of other jobs. But some teacher-student
roles endure.
“That’s maybe just a bit paranoid, isn’t it, Teacher?” Jinlong
comments.
Jay ignores the comment, instead asking, “Why didn’t you get back
to me about the draft of my article on sword practice?”
“Uh, because you didn’t send me your article.”
“Yeah I did. I sent it to your e-mail at work,” Jay says, then mentions
the e-mail address.
“Uh, Teacher? It’s been three years since I last worked there. That
was two jobs ago. I don’t get anything at that e-mail address anymore.”
“Jinlong, why do you persecute me?” Jay sighs, while tapping on his
keyboard to send the draft to Jinlong’s current e-address.
“Drop the road-to-Damascus complex already, Teacher. I’ll get back
to you after I’ve read your piece.”
*****
71
But Jinlong appreciates the sense of family that comes with every
visit back to the school. Jay encourages his working with experienced
students who seek his advice, and younger students take their cue from the
longer-term students.
During Jinlong’s return to the city to visit his old teacher, Jay has
gathered some of his students for a celebration dinner at a Chinese
restaurant. One of the newer students is the mother of a cute five-year-old
girl who slowly starts walking around the large circular table where the
school members have gathered. As Jinlong converses with Jay, he notices
that the girl keeps looking over at them while she continues her slow
approach along the circumference of the table. Finally, he turns toward her
and smiles. The child immediately runs back to her mother, shouting
“Mommy, he scared me!” That’s not what I meant to do, Jinlong sighs to
himself.
*****
The most important thing Jinlong learned from his time as Jay’s
student was the emphasis on principle-centered study, rather than blindly
collecting techniques. “One principle is worth at least ten techniques,” Jay
had impressed upon his students. And so Jinlong searches his memory for
principles to share with his own students, to help them make sense of what
they’re doing – some unifying ideas that apply to whole categories of
actions.
72
Warriors
Dantian
There are three dantian – upper, middle, and lower. When used
without specification, the term dantian refers to the lower one, a spot three
finger-widths below the navel and about halfway between front and back.
This location is regarded as a primary area for storage and refinement of
personal energy. The middle dantian coincides with the location of the solar
plexus. The upper dantian is located around the middle of the brain, directly
behind the “third eye” area of the face, and is believed by some practitioners
to coincide with the location of the pineal gland.
A basic qigong principle is to align the three dantian along one
pathway, facilitating exchange of energy between them.
Qi exchange through the hands

Remember to keep your hands charged throughout each part of
each exercise. If you go through the movements without having your hands
charged up with energy, then you’re only doing calisthenics, not qigong.
Placing your hand up above your head = connecting to yang energy
above: Either bringing it in to you (charging yourself with energy), or sending
energy out from you into the sky (cleansing yourself of stagnant energy).
Placing your hand down close to the ground = connecting to yin
energy below: Either bringing it in to you (charging yourself with energy), or
streaming energy out from you into the earth (cleansing yourself of stagnant
energy).
An ancient philosophical idea of connecting heaven (sky) and earth
(ground) is literally true from an energy practitioner perspective. The
practitioner is a bridge joining the energies of above and below.
73
Placing your hand on part of your body sometimes indicates placing
energy into that spot, or pulling energy out from that spot. For example,
placing your right hand over your liver and your left hand up toward the sky
could be a posture for charging your liver with yang energy, or for expelling
stagnant energy from your liver. Notice the crucial role played by intent – to
get the energy moving, and to set the direction of the flow.
Qi exchange through other points

While standing, the practitioner can direct her awareness through
the yongquan points of the soles of the feet –just behind the ball of each
foot – to facilitate the exchange of qi between her own body and the earth.
Major points of exchange of qi between the practitioner and
external sources of energy: laogong points of the hands, yongquan points of
the feet (especially when standing), baihui point at the top of the head,
huiyin point at the perineum (when sitting).
Alignments
Some qigong movements tend to align energy points together. For
example, in a common posture: laogong point of one hand lines up over the
laogong point of the other hand, and both of those points line up over the
dantian. The alignment establishes energetic connection between all three
points.
Touching tongue tip to the roof of the mouth connects the major
yang channels (along the back) and yin channels (along the front) of the
body. The tongue tip, although it remains inside the mouth, aims at the
renzhong acupuncture point on the external surface of the skin, just below
the nose.
74
Three M’s, in an M
Uses of mantra, words or phrases repeated in meditation: (a)
vibrate the body with sound; (b) set the focus of the mind according to
words of the mantra; (c) tap into energy that others have invested into the
mantra (is the Ave Maria an example?); (d) initiate a preset pattern of energy
change. Teacher Grey advised saying the word(s) three times whenever
invoking a mantra.
Uses of mudra, hand/finger positions used in meditation: (a) extend
energy through individual meridians, through the fingertips; (b) connect
energies of different meridians, where fingertips touch or where other
energy points align; (c) focus energy out through extended fingertips; (d)
other?
Uses of mandala, visualization of images used in meditation: (a) set
attitude and focus; (b) place your mind in framework where your power is
most effective (“sacred inner space”); (c) other?
75
Chapter 23: Scanning and Seeing
Jinlong charges his hands and scans the arm of his landlord, Moke,
who asked him to see if he could help with a pain there. Moke’s arm began
to hurt after he was in a recent car accident. Jinlong passes his hands up and
down, up and down, a couple of inches from Moke’s arm. Nothing. But that
doesn’t make sense. Up and down along the length of the arm again. Still
nothing.
“I’m not picking up on anything,” Jinlong said, “but I’m going to back
up and check more completely.” Standing behind Moke, Jinlong passes his
hands down near the sides of Moke’s head, nothing unusual there, then his
shoulders, still nothing, then his upper back, whoa that’s hot!, then mid-back
and lower back, nothing unusual. “There’s a hot spot, like a flare, in the
middle of this area,” Jinlong tells Moke, using a finger to trace around the
general area on the middle of his upper back. “I don’t know what it means,
but the problem might be there, because I’m not noticing anything wrong
with your arm.”
A few days later. Moke comes in, excited: “They did an MRI and
found a pinched disk, where you said the problem was.” Okay, now that
makes sense, Jinlong says to himself. The problem in the back is causing pain
in the arm.
*****
“We’re going to work on scanning, so charge up your hands,” Jinlong
says to his students. Each builds up the field between his or her hands,
intensifying the heat, tingling, or magnetic-repulsion sort of feeling.
Jinlong then charges one of his own hands and leaves the other
uncharged. “First scan one of my hands, and then the other one,” he says.
One student steps forward to undertake the exercise, and Jinlong notices the
look that flashes across the student’s face as he scans each hand in turn.
76
After every student has detected the difference, Jinlong explains: “It’s
important to be able to detect changes in energy, because there may be an
underlying problem that’s not where the pain is felt.
“So what you’re looking for is a change in the person’s energy field,
from one part of his body to the next. I’ve noticed a problem tends to fall
into one of three categories. It could feel like a hot spot, if energy is leaking
out where it shouldn’t. Or it could feel like a cold area, if not enough energy
is reaching that part of the body. Or it could feel like a static electric charge,
when there’s a build-up of stagnant energy.”
“What do healers do,” a student inquires, “when they don’t yet have
the ability to do things like scanning?”
“If the recipient mentions pain in an isolated area, then they could
work just on that area, although it has the drawback of chasing symptoms.
The pain could dissipate for awhile, then pop up again at the same spot or
elsewhere if there’s an underlying problem somewhere else.
“Or they could use a preset protocol of treating the same areas on
each person. The standardized hand positions of the reiki systems are an
example of that; they cover the major organs and glands. Similarly, some
acupuncturists work the same set of points on each patient.”
The student follows up by asking for Jinlong’s opinion about such
predetermined protocols. Jinlong answers, “They’re good for general health
maintenance, but in my humble opinion, when there’s a particular ailment
and when time for the treatment session is limited, the one-size-fits-all
approach isn’t as effective as more specifically focused treatment.”
*****
It’s just after a practice session of qigong and taijiquan at the Cube
on campus. Someone is waiting for treatment by Galen, as he talks with a
few stragglers after the practice. “I have a problem with my left arm,” she
77
confides as Jinlong chats with her. He asks if he may scan her arm, and she
agrees. “I can feel your qi!” she says, as he sweeps his hands along the path
of her arms, a few inches away from actually making physical contact. “But I
can’t feel yours!” Jinlong says, alarmed. It’s as if her arm weren’t right there
between my hands. “That’s because of nerve damage,” his new
acquaintance reveals. “It’s just dead there.”
*****
Jinlong remembers when he was visiting the Science Center of
Ontario with Shell, his girlfriend at that time. Among the interactive exhibits
that the museum maintained back then, there was an infrared camera
hooked up to a TV monitor. Shell rubbed her hands together briskly and held
them up in front of the camera; the monitor showed her hands changing
from dark to red, then to a dull orange. “Now you do something,” she said.
“Okay, I’ll send qi through a hand,” Jinlong responded. He held up a hand,
which showed up as dark, and then he started to charge it with energy.
Redness began to creep upward through the bones of his hand, from the
base of his palm up to the fingertips. Jinlong sent more energy through the
hand, and the red turned to orange, then to bright yellow. For a moment, it
looked like an x-ray picture, but with the bones showing up as yellow instead
of white, and then the yellow spilled over and filled the rest of his hand.
“Now I’ll do it with the other one,” Jinlong said. Both of his hands showed up
on the monitor, one filled with yellow, and the other dark. Then after a
minute or so, the second hand completed the same process as the first one
had. After both of Jinlong’s hands were lit up, Shell announced she was no
longer a skeptic.
*****
“For me, the energy sight starts with noticing what look like
convection currents, like waves of air rising from a roadway on a hot day,”
78
Jinlong tells a group of his most experienced students. “And sometimes
colors appear; then it’s sort of like looking at splotches on an MRI.”
“Certain conditions match up with certain colors when I’m using the
energy sight,” he continued. “When I see something in red, it generally
indicates inflammation. Dark spots show areas of deficient energy. White
shows areas of congested energy, like cancer or asthma.”
“But,” he cautions, “the significance of colors seems to be a personal
experience, varying from one practitioner to another. For example, although
I see cancer as white, a friend of mine says she sees it as dark. So the thing
to do is to see what correlations you notice, as you work on people’s various
conditions.”
*****
“You need new pictures to promote your taijiquan teaching,” Danner
told him over the phone, “and Sherrie says she’ll take them.” So here they
are in one of Ann Arbor’s lakeside parks, Jinlong moving into some of the
stances of the art, and Sherrie taking a flurry of pictures with her digital
camera. Settings of a bridge, a hiking path, and a dock.
“Thanks for the pictures,” Jinlong says on the phone, after Sherrie
has e-mailed them to him. And they actually look good; the alignments in my
stances aren’t bad. But he gets a surprise the next time a couple of students
come over for their class with him. One of them asks Jinlong to pull up one
of the pictures on his computer, and then points to the top of his head in the
picture; the other looks at it and says “Is that an aura!?” Huh? Jinlong looks
at the picture again, and it shows light around his head, especially at the top.
He checks a few more of the pictures. Several of them show his head limned
in light; enlarging the digital images, his arms and legs still look clear but
wavy ripples like convection currents now show up around them. Some sort
of distortion of the light around me?
79
He forwards the pictures to Suen, mentioning what showed up in
them and asking for her opinion. “I missed the chance to call you glow-in-
the-dark Jinlong,” she e-mails back, “so instead I’ll call you glows-in-broad-
daylight.” On the other hand, another student – a chiropractor – comments
after seeing the pictures, “I’d really downplay that. Otherwise, you’ll get all
sorts of really flaky students.” Okay, good point.
*****
“As you know, the ‘third eye’ is in the hollow that’s centered just
above the ridge of the eyebrows,” Jinlong says. “Take the tip of your finger
and move it along the area until you’re touching the spot.”
“Okay, this feels like it,” Suen observes, lightly circling her fingertip
on the slight depression just above the bony ridge of the eyebrows.
“Allright, put your hand back down. Now you’re going to send
energy out, and see what bounces back,” Jinlong advises, moving to stand
just in front of the white-painted wall of his apartment. “Expand your energy
field, including out through your third eye, and then see whatever comes
back in through your third eye. It also helps if you unfocus your eyes just a
little.”
“Wavy wrinkles in the space around you,” Suen remarks.
“Keep looking, and see if there’s any change.” Jinlong starts
reverse-breathing, charging his body and the space around him.
“More waves, and some . . . lights flashing in and out around you.”
“What about now?” Jinlong asks, holding up a charged hand and
slowly moving it in front, as if lightly pushing something across.
“Trailers that follow the path of your hand. They slowly fade out.”
“Now let’s go outside.” Jinlong closes the apartment door. They
take the stairs down, head out into the yard, and stop in front of a 20-foot-
80
tall pine. “Pine trees give off lots of energy. Go through the process, and
notice what you see.”
“It’s like jets of white light, coming off the top of the tree and the
ends of the branches.”
“Good. Now scan the energy with your hands, and see how closely it
matches up with what you’re seeing.”
*****
In the middle of a workshop, a student asks about whether scanning
someone’s energy means starting to heal that person.
“Not really,” Jinlong answers. “When scanning, you’re just detecting
the other person’s pattern of energy, without any intent to alter it.”
“But how can you project energy without the idea of healing?” the
student persists.
“Think of the difference between x-ray imaging for either airport
passenger screening or medical diagnosis, on the one hand,” Jinlong
suggests, “and on the other hand, radiation therapy to shrink a tumor. They
deal with the same sort of energy, but for different purposes and at different
intensities. The first sort of purpose is just to see what’s there. But the
second sort of purpose is to change what’s there.”
81
Chapter 24: Practice and External Factors
Jinlong stands before the old

pine tree, hands charged but hanging
loosely along the sides of his legs. He
sinks his qi down through the
yongquan points in the soles of his
feet, then further until his energy
reaches more than three feet into the
ground. Now he slowly sweeps his
hands in a shoveling motion toward
the tree; his intent combines with the
movement of his hands to direct his
energy to travel under the ground toward the roots of the pine.
Jinlong now raises his

hands, bringing his qi up through
the roots, rising like sap up the
trunk of the tree, then through the
branches and needle-leaves.
82
He brings his hands back toward himself, now directly over his head,
laogong points of his palms streaming
qi down into the baihui point at the
top of his head.
As he lowers his hands, the qi
moves down his body, refreshed by
having been cycled through the tree.
He goes through the process over and
over again, and extends gratitude to
the tree for filtering his energy.
*****
Some sources of information
on qigong practice have described it
as using the energy of the earth, and warned that it would be ineffective if
done too high above the ground. For example, “Galen said it won’t work in
the upper floors of a tall building,” a member of the group at the Cube once
mentioned.
But Jinlong finds that such theory collapses in the face of experience.
He’s on a flight to visit his sister, and with the airplane cruising at 35,000 feet
above ground level, he’s still able to pull both yang energy and yin energy
into his body and out through his hands. What were they talking about? he
muses. It still works.
*****
Jinlong stands outside at night, facing the full moon. He charges his
field, and then opens his third-eye area, and finds that the moon’s energy
pushes him back a couple of steps. He tries it again, and is pushed back
again, until he turns his attention away from drawing the moonlight into
himself. Over time, he notices that the full moon is the only lunar phase with
83
that effect. Suen later confirms the full-moon effect, although she doesn’t
have an explanation for it either.
*****
In conversation with several students, Jinlong notes that together,
the Chinese characters for sun and moon form the word “bright,” ming –
which was the name for the second-to-last imperial dynasty. But physically,
the sun and moon together would mean an eclipse. “Solar eclipses are fine,”
he mentions, “but lunar eclipses bother my energy.”
“Why does that happen?” asks a student.
“I don’t know,” Jinlong replies. “I can’t think of any reason that the
earth moving directly between the sun and the moon would have such an
effect, but it does, for me.”
“What happens to you, during a lunar eclipse?” a second student
inquires.
“Normally, I feel a background hum of energy, the rhythm and
intensity depending on what’s around me,” Jinlong says. “But during an
eclipse of the moon, that hum becomes wildly arrhythmic, and rather
distracting.”
*****
Jinlong sits at the desk in his living room, reading by the light of a
nearby floor lamp. He decides to put in a few minutes of practice,
straightens his spine, and relaxes with deep natural breaths. After a minute
or so, he switches to reverse-breathing, his abdomen pulling in during
inhalation and pushing out during exhalation. Inhaling, he brings qi in
through the baihui point, down to his dantian. Then Jinlong remembers how
Galen had said it was difficult to send qi out through the top of the head, so
he decides to try it now. Inhale qi through baihui down to dantian; exhale qi
from dantian up and out through baihui. Seeing the qi as a stream of white
84
energy, and feeling it as a tingling. Letting the sensory experience become
more substantial with each cycle.
After a few minutes, he hears a clicking noise from nearby, each time
he exhales. Don’t get distracted. But now he notices that the floor lamp
dims each time he inhales, and that it makes the clicking sound and gets
brighter again each time he exhales. Keep going; don’t get distracted. He
perseveres in his practice, but a minute or so later he notices a burning smell
coming from the lamp. He rushes to unplug it, then coughs as he opens
windows to air out the living room. I’ll have to buy a replacement, he
observes. But in the meantime, ugh, what a smell. I have to get out of here
for awhile. It takes a few hours to dissipate the odor of the lamp’s burnt
wiring.
“So it’s a really good idea to pay attention to what’s happening
around you, as well as within you,” Jinlong later summarizes for his students.
“And be careful in what you do around lamps.”
85
Chapter 25: Meridians
“Could you say something about the meridians?” a student asks.

“Each meridian is a specific pathway within the body,” Jinlong notes,
“and is a conduit for the energy of an internal organ. Each organ’s meridian
is present on both the left and right sides of the body, like mirror images of
each other. The beginning or end point of a particular meridian is located on
the hands or the feet. The internal organs associated with the meridians are
in the torso.
“There are also eight or so ‘extraordinary channels,’ which are
energy pathways that are not associated with any particular organ.
“As used by acupuncturists, a meridian is a pathway where the
energy of an organ comes close to the surface of the body. An acupuncturist
uses needles at points along a meridian to regulate the flow of an organ’s
energy. Teacher Jay mentioned that his acupuncturist cured drug addicts in
their city.”
“How did that happen?”
“He said that she took away their withdrawal symptoms, so they
didn’t need the drugs anymore.”
“Now, from the standpoint of Western science,” Jinlong continues,
“the acupuncture points are spots of decreased galvanic skin resistance.
Which suggests that the nature of the qi is at least partly electrical.”
Another student asks, “Can you use acupuncture points if you’re not
an acupuncturist?”
“Yes,” Jinlong replies. “You can send energy through your fingertip
into an acupuncture point, and the energy should travel from that point
through the associated meridian. Several teachers have mentioned that if
you send energy into the beginning point or end point of a meridian, and you
86
also send energy into the associated organ, then the energy should travel
through the entire meridian.
“For example, if I noticed someone needed a boost in his liver
energy, I could touch the lateral side of his big toe – on either foot – because
that’s the start of the liver meridian, and send energy in through there. At
the same time, I could also extend the palm of my other hand toward his
liver organ itself and project energy directly into the liver. I would visualize
sending in bright green energy, because that’s the color associated with the
liver in five-element theory.”
*****
Leilani is visiting the parents, and she helps to work on her father’s
cancer condition during each day of the visit. Jinlong will arrive there in a
couple of days. “Things are okay here, but Dad has some pain along his left
side, going up into his shoulder, and it kept him awake for awhile last night,”
she tells him over the phone.
Jinlong extends his energy sense to “look” at the area of his father’s
pain, then consults the charts and sees that the pain is in the general area
along the paths of the heart and small intestine meridians. If I were more
proficient at this, I’d know where each meridian goes without having to
consult a chart, but anyway. “Here’s something to try,” he says to his sister.
“Use your thumb and index finger to lightly touch Dad’s small finger of his
left hand, at the base of the fingernail on both the left and right sides. Send
energy through those points, directing it to go into and through the area of
the pain.”
Leilani reports back the next day: “Dad said he was able to sleep on
his left side last night, for the first time in several nights.”
87
Warriors
Meridians and the energy field

Meridians seem to extend beyond the physical body, into the space
around it. (This discussion doesn’t seem to appear in other sources.)
Because of that extension, meridians can both bring energy into the body,
and energize the space around the body – what some call the aura.
The central channel – one of the “extraordinary vessels,” meaning
it’s not associated with a particular organ – can extend both upward and
downward from the physical body. It’s located just in front of the spine.
(This contradicts other sources, which locate the central channel inside the
spine.) It can bring energy into the body from above and below; it can also
serve as a reservoir for absorbing excess energy from the body.
In the 5-element cycle, the energies of the organs connect to each
other through the meridians. But in energy healing, we can balance out the
energies more directly, bridging straight from one organ to another.
Using a few acupuncture points

The “sword fingers” hand formation works well for sending energy
into an acupuncture point. In this configuration, the index and middle
fingers are extended together, while the tip of the thumb folds over the nails
of the fourth and fifth fingers. This pumps qi through the tips of the
extended middle and index fingers. This is the same hand formation used by
the empty hand in single sword practice. Why use the fingertips? Because
they have a small surface area, appropriate for the small area of an
acupuncture point.
88
Use a reference like Shmuel Halevi’s website, The Meridians of
Acupuncture, to see the approximate location of the points. Then scan to
zero in on the exact location.
Sanyinjiao (literally, “three yin meet”) (spleen meridian point 6) is
generally good for boosting upward flow of yin energy. The “spleen”
(pancreas), liver, and kidney meridians intersect at this point. Located on the
medial side of the shin, just behind the bone there, about 3 finger-widths
above the ankle bone.
Yongquan (literally, “bubbling spring”) (kidney meridian point 1) is
the main focus for exchange of energy with the ground. Located just behind
the ball of the foot, and centered between left and right edges of the foot.
Mingmen (literally, “life gate”) (governing vessel point 4) is a point
for stimulation of kidney yang energy. Located on the back directly across
from the navel, and sits halfway between the two kidneys. Kidney yang
includes the effects of the adrenal glands.
Large intestine meridian point 4 (in back of webbing between thumb
and index finger) and large intestine meridian point 11 (top of the crease of
the elbow) are generally good for tonification.
Renzhong (governing vessel point 26) generally good for regulating
blood pressure. Located just below the nostrils, in the middle of the
depression above the upper lip.
Many acupuncturists use a clockwise rotation of the needle to tonify
at a point, and a counter-clockwise rotation to sedate. (But some authorities
disagree with each other about which direction produces which effect. Use
what works for you.) The same effect can be obtained by circling your hand
above a point. It’s like turning a valve to regulate the flow of the qi.
89
Chapter 27: Distance Healing
The question comes over the phone from his friend, Kage: “The qi
healing that you do – can you do it long-distance?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never tried it,” Jinlong answers.
Kage describes the ophthalmologist’s diagnosis of a partially
detached retina. And the experience of pain that accompanies random
flashes of light. He’s going in for laser surgery in a few days, and wants to
see if qi-healing can help with that.
“We can try it out and see what happens,” Jinlong offers. So they do
it. For the next 45 minutes or so, Jinlong holds the phone’s handset between
his cheek and shoulder, switching sides whenever stiffness starts to set in.
He passes his hands over the base of the phone and the cord, visualizing
sending energy through the telephone company’s wiring, up through the
telephone on the other end of the conversation, into his friend’s eye, and
into the affected areas of the retina. Over and over again, focused on the
process of moving energy through. Finally, his body demands a stop. “Let
me know how it goes. And good luck.”
A couple of days later, Kage calls Jinlong at work, all excited. In the
final pre-surgical exam, they found that the retina had reattached, and so the
laser surgery was cancelled. The doctors told him that it just sometimes
happens that way. “Hey, that’s great! Congratulations,” Jinlong replies.
*****
Jinlong is back in Hawaii for the winter holidays. His uncle is
breathing from an oxygen tank, suffering from an accumulation of mucus in
his lungs. But today they’re celebrating, an extended family gathering at a
restaurant: a grandmother, parents, several uncles and aunts, and a number
of cousins. “In Hawaii, it’s traditional to go through the buffet line at least
90
three times,” Uncle Lo explains to Jinlong. But Uncle himself eats little; his
lung condition has suppressed his appetite.
A few days later, Jinlong places his hands on Uncle’s back, moving as
much energy as he can into his lungs. “I’m picking up that the blockage is
especially severe at the bottom of your right lung,” Jinlong observes. “That’s
correct,” Uncle Lo answers. After the session, Jinlong asks to be allowed to
send energy long-distance after he returns home, and Uncle agrees.
Jinlong periodically moves qi long-distance into Uncle’s lungs for the
next couple of months. Then one day in March, as he’s driving home,
Jinlong’s energy level crashes. He manages to steer through the remaining
five minutes to his carport, stumbles to his apartment, gulps down the
takeout General Tso’s chicken and fried rice that he’s brought home – but
can’t stay awake much longer. So he goes to bed although it’s still
afternoon.
Three or four days after that, Jinlong receives a phone call from his
mother: “Uncle Lo died.” After the initial surprise, Jinlong becomes curious,
asks about the timing, and learns that it happened on the day that his own
energy level dropped. Hmm, maybe some of my energy went along with him
when he left, Jinlong speculates.
*****
Some years later. “My brother-in-law was just diagnosed with
hepatitis C,” Jinlong’s friend Cam says by e-mail. “Can we do anything for
him?” Cam lives on the other side of the continent from her brother-in law,
so it looks as if distance healing is called for.
“Check with him to see if he’s okay with us sending energy over to
him,” Jinlong types back. “If he is, then we might try some things.”
After the appropriate consent is obtained, Jinlong considers what
sort of written instructions would work for his friend. She has really strong
91
energy, but no formal training. So the method should be fairly
straightforward, direct. Build up the energy, then deliver it. “Charge up your
hands, then hold the palms of your hands just a few inches apart, letting the
energy field build up between them,” Jinlong types into his e-mail message.
“Green is the color of liver energy, so visualize the energy as bright green.”
Now for the delivery method: “Blow your breath through the space between
your hands, and see your breath carrying the energy to your brother-in-law,
filling his liver. I’ll also work on sending energy from over here.” They work
on it periodically. Jinlong images green energy and sends it out through his
hands, placing it into the brother-in-law’s liver as if he’s right there. Cam
messages again a couple of months later, explaining that her brother-in-law’s
liver tests are now clean. Success! “If he can visualize green energy in his
liver,” Jinlong responds, “then he can actively participate in his own further
healing.”
*****
Jinlong’s reiki classmate Kay sends an e-mail, asking for help in
healing her middle daughter’s foot. Jinlong hasn’t met any of the daughters,
but he remembers that Kay had earlier sent some pictures by e-mail
attachments. He pulls up the picture that’s labeled with the middle
daughter’s name, and uses that image as a connection for sending healing
energy. But I’m not picking up on anything being wrong with her foot. He
sends more energy over, “looks” long-distance at both of the girl’s feet, and
still doesn’t see a problem there. So then he closes the process, and e-mails
his friend about what he saw, or rather didn’t see, after working from the
picture that had been sent. Kay messages back, mentioning that the pictures
were mislabeled – Jinlong had been looking at the picture of her youngest
daughter, while trying to send energy for her middle daughter.
92
Jinlong later recounts that experience for his students, and
summarizes what it showed. “The more specific the intent, the better the
results seem to be when I send energy. But precision can be problematic
when working from faulty information.”
*****
Jinlong sits, breathes deep and slow, charges up his hands.
Visualizes his father as if he were right there in front of him. Father and son
are hundreds of miles apart, but Jinlong moves his hands as if sending energy
into his father in person. He’s done it several times each week since the
diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, supplementing the energy work that his
mother is doing on-site. But tonight, Dad is in the hospital, experiencing
chills. As Jinlong goes through the distant healing, there’s something wrong.
In fact, it’s been wrong all week, becoming progressively worse, and now he
finally has to mention it.
Jinlong dials the phone, and his mother answers. “Mom, when I
send energy long-distance, I’m seeing that Dad’s liver is turning dark. More
and more of it. Something’s wrong there. And it’s serious.”
A few days later, and his father is back home. “The doctor said my
liver grew back over the stent they put in so bile was backing up into the
liver,” his father says into the phone. “They drained it, and they’ll have to
put in another stent.”
Huh, okay, I guess that’s what I was seeing, Jinlong said to himself.
Then his father speaks again: “How did you know there was
something wrong with my liver?”
Gee, how am I ever going to explain this? “Um, well, . . . .”
“Did you visualize my internal organs?”
“Yes.” Whew. Something short, concise.
93
Chapter 28: Permission
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
-- Shakespeare, Sonnet 94
One of Jinlong’s colleagues at the law school has been diagnosed

with cancer. Jinlong thinks he can help, wants to help, but isn’t sure of how
to bring up the idea. Still, he has to try: “I do a thing with energy healing,”
he mentions. “It might help, and it’s good for pain relief, and at very least, it
doesn’t have the sort of side-effects that pharmaceuticals do.”
“Thanks,” the colleague replies, “I’ll think about it.” A month later,
he looks as if he’s aged 30 years. Jinlong makes the offer again, and again it’s
politely acknowledged but not accepted. About a month after that, Jinlong
has moved to a new job but receives news that his former colleague has
died. Why wouldn’t he accept my offer to help? He didn’t have anything to
lose, Jinlong thinks. And then has to remind himself, It’s not about me.
*****
Half a year later. Jinlong’s mother tells him that a family friend has
been diagnosed with some sort of late-stage cancer that’s spread to
everywhere in his abdomen. “Convey to him my offer to work on him long-
distance,” Jinlong suggests. “If he’s amenable to it, then I’ll do it. It sounds
like he wouldn’t have anything to lose by it.”
But the friend turns down the offer. “Can you send energy to him
anyway?” Jinlong’s mother asks.
“No. It’s not something that should be done against his wishes.”
Their friend dies two weeks later. At the end, he required morphine
shots every five minutes to control the pain. Why wouldn’t he even just try
out the energy treatment, to see if it could help? And metaphysically, even if
there’s some sort of lesson to be learned in cancer, Jinlong wonders, what
94
could be learned in those circumstances, with such frequent doses of pain
meds?
*****
“People are sometimes tempted to send energy long-distance
without getting the recipient’s permission,” Jinlong warns his students. “But
it generally shouldn’t be done.”
“But why not? ” one of the younger students inquires.
“For a couple of reasons, both reflected in the informed-consent
standard used by medical professionals,” Jinlong answers. “First, although
energy-healing is relatively free of side effects, it’s not always completely
free of side effects. The recipient shouldn’t have treatment forced upon
him, as it were.”
“But what about reiki?” someone else asks. “They say it can’t do any
harm.”
That student shrinks back as Jinlong levels the glare of death at her.
“‘They’ say so, because somebody once told somebody else, who later told
someone’s teacher,” Jinlong declares. “And then it became dogma. But as
one of my physics professors used to say, ‘This is not an axiomatic system; at
some point, reality has to intrude.’”
Now his tone softens. “My best guess is that somewhere along the
line, a relative truth – it’s difficult to screw up and do harm with reiki –
became interpreted as an absolute one – reiki does no harm, period. On
internet message boards, you can see that dogma being repeated by people
who use it to justify sending energy without the recipients’ permission. But
on some of the same message boards, you can also see some mention of
when it in fact did harm – particularly when auto-immune conditions are
involved.
95
“For example, on one board, someone insulted everyone who dared
to disagree with her about unpermissioned distance healing – after all, her
teacher said it was okay, and how dare anyone disagree with her and her
teacher? But then she backpedaled quickly after self-treatment with reiki
left her collapsed during a flare-up of her autoimmune condition. By the
way, from what I’ve seen, autoimmune issues tend to respond better to yin
energy, rather than to yang energies like reiki.
“Now, imagine if someone had sent reiki to her for that same
condition, while she was driving a car or performing surgery. Adverse
reactions can occur, and saying ‘No harm can be done’ won’t wish it away.
The recipient is the one who has to deal with any ill effects, so the recipient
should be the one to choose. My own reiki teacher emphasized the
importance of obtaining the recipient’s permission.”
Jinlong looks at each student, while trying to frame the wording of
his next point. “And even if no harm resulted, it would still be incredibly
disrespectful to try to sneak energy over to someone. It’s an issue of
autonomy. If you went around touching random people on the street to
help them heal, you would be assaulting them if they hadn’t consented to be
touched. Moving energy over to someone without consent is also a form of
assault.
“Now, somebody on another message board said if someone is
found unconscious and in need of medical treatment, then a doctor can
provide it without first obtaining the patient’s consent. Okay, true enough.
But then that person somehow generalized to saying consent isn’t needed,
ever, for energy healing.
“Let’s work with the same sort of example of medical treatment,
mentioned by that message-poster. Under the emergency doctrine, doctors
don’t need to obtain consent from a patient who is unable to give it, before
96
performing life-saving procedures. But it doesn’t mean that doctors
somehow don’t need to obtain consent before treating a patient who has
the capacity to either grant or withhold it. Imagine if a doctor didn’t bother
to ask a patient for consent to life-saving surgery, but instead just sedated
him and then removed a cancerous organ. There’s a really good chance that
wouldn’t go over well with the patient, the hospital’s institutional review
board, or the jury in the resulting lawsuit.
“Some practitioners try to dodge the issue by saying that they ask
permission of the recipient’s higher self, or they send with intent that the
energy go to the earth if the recipient’s higher self rejects it. But when you
want to get a particular answer, it’s very easy to fool yourself into thinking
that’s the one that the higher self is providing. And it’s challenging enough
to send energy with unitary intent, so I’m skeptical about advice to send
energy with contingent intent. Moreover, we’ve already touched on why the
recipient’s every-day, conscious self should be involved in the decision.
“There’s no justification for being any less ethical than medical
professionals. Unless there’s an emergency situation that deprives someone
of the capacity to respond, don’t send energy without first obtaining the
recipient’s consent. Feeling uncomfortable about it doesn’t justify going
ahead without consent. Being embarrassed about bringing up the subject
doesn’t justify it either. And the possibility of the person saying ‘no’
definitely doesn’t justify sending energy without permission.
“As ethical practitioners, we honor the choices made by the people
to whom we offer our help in healing.” And I’ll always be grateful that Dad
was amenable to my working on him, both in person and long-distance,
Jinlong reflects. It let me do something during the time that he was going
through his battle with cancer.
97
Chapter 29: Triad
Reiki practitioners night at Grey’s house. “I wanted you two to

meet,” Grey says to Jinlong and some guy with a beard and shaggy hair and a
warm smile, “because you both saw the same woven pattern of energy on
my back when you were working on me at different times. Jinlong, Danner.”
“Hey, good to meet you,” Danner says, expansive and extending his
arm for a handshake.
“Likewise,” Jinlong replies, more reserved as he returns the
handshake.
*****
Some weeks later. Jinlong has agreed to Danner’s request for
instruction in taijiquan and qigong. “We’ll start with joint expansion,”
Jinlong says, “opening the spaces between the bones, so that the qi can
move through them.” Danner stands in neutral stance, feet shoulder width
apart, as Jinlong talks him through the visualization of inflating a balloon
between the bones of each major joint: letting it become bigger in each
direction until it’s so full that there’s a feeling as if the bones of that joint
slightly separate from each other. All goes well with inflating Danner’s left
shoulder, then right shoulder, left elbow, right elbow, left wrist and hand,
right wrist and hand. Then they start on Danner’s left hip – and he’s
suddenly reeling, as if drunkenly stumbling across the ground. Jinlong
reaches out to steady him, and Danner’s movement stops. Until they try the
expansion of Danner’s left hip again, and he starts to stumble unsteadily
again.
“What’s going on there?”
“That’s the hip that’s had problems ever since I was born.”
“Okay, it might do odd things when the energy moves through it.
But the flow should even out, in time.”
98
They go through the exercise again, this time with Jinlong’s hand
lightly on Danner’s shoulder, steadying him when Danner works on inflating
his left hip. Success. After that, they move to working on the right hip,
without incident. Then they focus on his left knee, and there’s sudden
movement again.
“Uh, Danner, what are you doing, lying there on the ground??”
“Uuugghh.”
Over a period of years, his knee probably got into some problems by
compensating for limitations of his hip, Jinlong realizes, as he watches
Danner slowly stand up again.
*****
Late night. Jinlong is lying in bed in his apartment, merging at long-
distance with aspects of Danner and Sherrie. They’d agreed to join him in a
triad, a link for sharing energies and abilities. Jinlong focuses attention on
Danner, whose energy looks like the sun. Strong and hot. After a minute or
so, he turns his focus to Sherrie, whose energy appears as a sword. Sharp
and dangerous. Then an internal explosion occurs, and he grunts in pain as
he feels his left ovary burst open. He doesn’t fall over, but only because he’s
already lying down. Oww, it’s never going to be the same again. A couple of
minutes pass before the pain subsides enough for him to realize, hey, wait a
minute, I don’t have ovaries. Twenty minutes later, the pain is gone.
He calls them the next day to report on what happened. “Aww, I’m
sorry,” Sherrie says. Danner, on the other hand, just laughs and laughs. And
laughs. Then says, “Don’t tickle the dragon,” referring to Sherrie by how he
sees her energy. It’s also her Chinese astrological sign.
“You could have warned me,” Jinlong grumbles.
“Hey, I thought you knew.”
*****
99
Jinlong sits at the café, waiting for Danner and Sherrie to arrive.
Hope they get here before the press of the brunch crowd, he muses.
“Hey there, Butthead, give me a hug!”
Ah, they’re here, Jinlong realizes. And says to Sherrie, “What do you
mean, calling me Butthead!? That’s Danner’s name.”
“You’re both buttheads.”
“See? You’re family now,” Danner comments.
A tap of knuckles across Jinlong’s chest brings his attention back to
Sherrie, who’s still demanding her hug. After which, Jinlong complains to
Danner, “Can’t you get her to stop hitting like that?”
“Nah, I’m just the husband. You’re on your own.” With a chuckle,
Danner switches to a new but related topic: “So I was over at Grey’s house
the other night when he told me that Sherrie was really hammering away at
him the night before that.”
Jinlong asks, “She was there too?”
“No, she was at home. But Grey said it kept him up through the
night.”
Oh, so it was a distance sort of thing, Jinlong pondered. “But being a
reiki master and all, Grey knows how to protect himself from stuff like that,
doesn’t he?”
“Yeah, but he said Sherrie’s intent went right through his shielding
and her energy kept smacking him around.”
Intrigued as well as impressed, Jinlong asks Sherrie, “Why did you do
that?”
“Because I was upset with him,” she replies, her tone so matter-of-
fact as to be chilling. Okaaay, mental note, don’t get on Sherrie’s bad side
100
Chapter 30: Galen’s Gongfu
Teacher Galen explains his recent self-experiment in qi-healing. “I

took a short kitchen knife, cut my fingertip open, and then qi’d it,” he says.
“And it healed without a scar. The next time, I cut another fingertip, and qi’d
it until it was almost completely healed, then I popped it open again by
flicking it with another finger, and then I qi’d it again. And this time it left a
thin white line where the cut had been.” That’s sort of daring, Jinlong
thinks. What a wild man. And he uses “qi” as a verb?
*****
After the group’s practice at the Cube. Jinlong meets Jeem, one of
Galen’s senior students who’s come back to visit from his new residence in
California. After viewing each other’s taijiquan forms, Jinlong asks Jeem
about whether he’s amenable to doing some push-hands, a basic two-person
exercise that starts to train the martial aspects of the art.
“Well, Galen said never to do push-hands with someone who isn’t a
friend,” Jeem says.
I guess that means no? Jinlong thinks, disappointed.
Jeem reaches out, shakes Jinlong’s hand, and says, “Okay, we’re
friends now, so we can go ahead and practice.”
Cool! Jinlong says to himself.
*****
They’re gathered at Galen’s house, where he explains that he was
practicing an exercise of gathering the energy several times before releasing
it. And Galen talks about how, just as he released the energy toward the
space at the bottom of the stairs, his youngest daughter ran through that
area and was thrown off her feet by the projection of qi.
I don’t doubt that it happened, if he says it happened, Jinlong
ponders. But the energy he projected just wouldn’t have been substantial
101
enough to move the mass of a person, even a small person. Maybe there was
some sort of complex interaction between the qi fields of the two people?
Galen’s qi caused an effect in his daughter’s qi, which ended up moving her
body?
It’s a mystery. But it brings to mind a story about the first-
generation Yang family taijiquan grandmaster, Yang Luchan. Shortly after he
arrived in Beijing, he was asked about whether there were any opponents
whom he could not defeat. His reply was that he could not beat men made
of brass or iron or wood. Was the statement just an expression of
confidence? Or did the grandmaster’s answer point toward some particular
property of live opponents, that he depended upon to defeat them? In any
event, his great level of skill and victories over all challengers resulted in the
nickname of “Yang Without Rival.”
*****
After practice at the Cube, Galen is talking about his early taijiquan
training, and mentions that his brother studied under the same teacher.
“But unlike myself, he really mastered the art,” Galen says.
Whoa! Galen says he’s not a master, but his brother was? Given
what he’s seen of Galen’s high level of ability, Jinlong can’t imagine it. What
sort of crazy skill must his brother have had?
“He couldn’t do it with the last fingers on each hand, but he could
use any two other fingers, hook them on a tree branch, and pull himself up
into the tree, moving like a fish swimming,” Galen recounts. What a gongfu
family they must have been, Jinlong marvels.
*****
Jeem and Jinlong are interested in the martial side of the arts, so
they ask about whether qigong can be used in fighting. “There are stories
about an evil gongfu,” Galen answers, sounding uncharacteristically solemn.
102
He explains that in the stories, someone is able to steal the qi of others when
touching them. Jinlong can’t match up that description with anything that he
knows about the art, so he just files it in memory.
*****
It’s a rare opportunity: Galen is doing a two-person exercise with
Jinlong. They start with the backs of their right wrists touching. “Relax your
arm,” Galen says, and then his fingertips are suddenly flying toward Jinlong,
who sticks to Galen’s arm and turns slightly to get out of the path of the
strike. “Now relax, even more,” Galen says, then repeats the movement.
And this time, Jinlong feels an electric spark flash up his arm. What on earth
just happened? he thinks. Galen smiles and says, “I knew you’d be able to
feel that.”
*****
They’re chatting about the martial arts. “Teacher Galen told me to
hit him,” Jinlong recalls, “and I extended my fist slowly, expecting him to
demonstrate something at the same tempo. But instead, he waved it off and
said, ‘Hit me as hard and fast as you can.’ So I did a real punch but held back
just a little, just in case of mistakes. I didn’t know what happened until a
second later, when I realized he’d grasped my wrist and lightly pulled it
upward. Of course I threw my weight down when I punched, but Galen’s
pulling upward made it hard to stay rooted. What impressed me most was
that I didn’t feel any resistance at all; he neutralized the strike so cleanly that
there wasn’t any signal that I should switch to another technique, and then it
was all over.”
Danner comments, “I went to the Cube a few times to check out his
group. And he had me do the same thing.”
“So what happened?”
103
“The same as with you, except that after he parried the blow, I
folded in and hit his chest with my shoulder.”
“What!? You did a shoulder stroke after the punch??” Jinlong is
aghast. “That was pretty rude, wasn’t it? And he was how old, somewhere
in his seventies, about that time?”
“Well, you know. I was young. And stupid.”
“So what happened then?”
“To him? Nothing. He just laughed at me and said, ‘Very good.’ But
when my shoulder slammed into his chest, I felt some sort of pulse shoot
down through my body and bounce back up from the ground, shaking me
inside. And my shoulder really hurt for the next few days.”
Jinlong nearly falls off his chair, laughing.
104
Chapter 31: Sex, Sort Of
“There’s been a lot of stuff written recently about sexual qigong,” a

student says. “What can you explain about it?”
“Not much, because I haven’t been trained in it,” Jinlong says. “But
here’s a starting point. Some Daoist traditions in southern China refer to it
as dual cultivation. One idea in such practices seems to be that sexual
energy is a foundation for both physical health and spiritual development,
and that dual cultivation raises the amount of energy that’s available, if it’s
retained by the practitioner rather than allowed to exit from the body.
Another idea involved in dual cultivation seems to be that male and female
absorb some of each other’s energies during the practice, so each becomes
more complete.
“But we follow more of the tradition of some northern schools, that
regard the sexual imagery as metaphor for the merging of yin and yang
energies within oneself. Water is the most yin element; fire is the most yang
element. So we look at a balance of water and fire energies.”
Another student asks a follow-up question: “How do you balance
water and fire?”
Jinlong answers, “The heart is the body’s power center for yang, fire-
based energy. The natural tendency for fire is to rise upward. The kidneys
are the body’s power center for yin, water-based energy. The natural
tendency for water is to sink downward. When you’re upright, the heart is
located above the level of the kidneys. So left to themselves, the two sorts
of energies tend to separate.
“By reversing their natural positions, we can facilitate their merger.
Through intention, we move the fiery heart energy to the lower dantian, and
the watery kidney energy to the middle dantian. Then the tendency of fire
energy to rise and for water energy to sink brings them together. It’s like
105
having a pot of water over a fire; the heat of the fire merges with the form of
the water, producing a combined energy like steam. The combined energy
can then be circulated through the body.
“So the dual cultivation is based on a too-literal reading of a
metaphor?” the first student asks.
Jinlong can’t help but notice that she sounds a bit disappointed.
“No, I didn’t say that,” he says in response. “I just don’t know enough about
dual cultivation to say much about it. Some Daoists from southern China, as
well as practitioners of some schools of tantric yoga, apparently believe it’s
real. A book written by Daniel Reid, The Tao of Health, Sex, and Longevity,
comes to mind as a reference.
“And I’ve heard that some practices are analogous to ones that we
do for general health maintenance. We visualize breathing into the liver,
heart, and so on. Apparently, some sexual qigong practices do the same
thing with some of the sex organs – the testicles and prostate for men, or the
ovaries and uterus for women.
“Now, remember how, at the beginning of your study, we said it’s
important to avoid using force to try to obtain results in qigong? That also
applies to sexual qigong practices. One of my teachers said he’d done some
of those exercises and it resulted in his ejaculating blood.”
“Eeeeewww,” another student exclaims.
“Yeah,” Jinlong concurs, “that’s what I said too. Bursting blood
vessels inside just doesn’t seem like a good idea.”
“Kidney energy controls the reproductive system,” he continues. “In
five-element theory, the kidneys support the liver, and liver energy is
involved in production of hormones, some of which affect the reproductive
system. So those two elements are involved in the energy of the body’s sex
system. But also in five-element theory, the liver supports the heart, and
106
heart energy is involved in the fire that heats the body. So that’s an odd sort
of triangular relationship – water directly restrains fire, but water supports
wood, which in turn supports fire.”
“Some texts mention something about original qi?” another student
inquires.
“The idea of original qi or prebirth qi is that it’s the energy we
receive from our parents at conception. By contrast, postbirth qi is what we
receive from breathing and from digesting food. Some sources say that qi
and blood are closely related – so modern terms for components of the
postbirth qi might be oxygen in red blood cells and glucose in the
bloodstream. Daoist traditions say that death results when prebirth qi is
used up, and that the rate of consumption of prebirth qi can be slowed by
maintaining adequate levels of postbirth qi.”
“Can prebirth qi be regenerated, after it’s been used?”
“Most sources say no, indicating that the initial supply of prebirth qi
is an upper limit on lifespan. But there’ve been a few rumors about there
being methods a practitioner can use to increase the supply of prebirth qi,
although I’ve never heard of any details emerging about it.”
107
Warriors
Chronic conditions
Acute conditions are easier to treat than chronic ones. (This
contradicts the conventional wisdom.)
A chronic problem is a frozen pattern of energy. The current pattern
must first be thawed, melted, before it can be restored to a healthier
pattern. The longer the condition has persisted, the more the pattern has
set into place, and so more treatment is likely to be needed at the outset just
to reach a state where the recipient’s energy can be tilted toward healing.
The healer moves energy through herself and uses it to “infiltrate”
the problem area in the recipient. Progress is possible when the problem
pattern starts to melt. The healer should then lead the recipient’s own
energy through the problem area, re-establishing a more normal flow. Just
clearing the problem pattern isn’t enough – the recipient’s energy must flow
in the healing pattern, in order to sustain changes.
Pulling Energy, Rather Than Pushing Energy

The yi leads the qi: attention and intention lead energy. But when a
practitioner tries to “push” energy into the recipient, she’s putting the intent
behind the energy, rather than ahead of it. This can result in energy
“bunching up” at the interface between healer and recipient, unless and
until the energy intensity has increased greatly, at which point it can start to
move into the recipient.
Using a “pulling” sort of intent tends to be smoother and more
reliable. In this method, the healer directs her intention into the area to be
treated, and that intent pulls the energy along with it. The intent is like a
108
sewing needle; the energy is like the thread being pulled into position by its
attachment to the needle.
109
Chapter 33: Eating Bitterness
At a weekend workshop. Jinlong has asked for correction of his

stance in the taijiquan movement of Leisurely Tying the Coat. After Jinlong
completes the movement, the grandmaster shifts his weight slightly further
to the right, then positions the left side of Jinlong’s ribcage a bit further back.
Instantly, the quadriceps of Jinlong’s right leg feel as if they’ve been set on
fire. Aaagh, he thinks, and then the grandmaster makes some subtle
adjustments to lower his stance slightly. Aaarrggghh. Jinlong’s legs are
shaking. One light touch by the grandmaster follows another, each bringing
Jinlong’s posture closer to what it should be, and each adding to the lactic
acid buildup in his legs. Just as Jinlong’s legs are on the verge of collapsing,
the grandmaster pulls him back up.
*****
“It’s called chi ku, which literally translates as eat bitterness,” Jinlong
says as he goes from student to student, making adjustments on the posture
of each one, and noticing how their legs have started to tremble. “It
translates as suffering, but more specifically, it means the sort of suffering
that you endure to make progress. Like the burning in your legs right now,
which you endure to make your stance correct, which in turn sets the
foundation for each of the moves you’ll be doing.”
*****
“In your work as healers, you might go through a period of time
when you encounter the same sort of condition again and again, in a
relatively short timeframe,” Jinlong comments to his students. “That’s the
way things happened when I started treating autoimmune conditions – I met
someone who had rheumatoid arthritis, then a relative mentioned she had
fibromyalgia, then someone else had a problem where her immune system
was attacking her thyroid gland.”
110
“Then at another time, my father was dealing with pancreatic
cancer, and during that period a friend called for help to work on someone
who was going through liver cancer, and then another friend accepted an
offer of qi-healing sessions while she was going through a month of 25
radiation treatments for a breast tumor.”
“Of course, the greatest difficulty is encountered by the patients
themselves,” he continues. “But in a way, for the healer, it can be like
another sort of eating bitterness. You’re confronted with a series of
disorders that can be difficult to alter. Is there a common feature to be
found in a series of related conditions? If so, then what does it contribute to
our understanding? I like to think that’s where we can make some progress
in the face of difficulty.
“And of course, we deal with emotional impact, both vicariously
from the recipients and directly on ourselves. Although surges of strong
emotion can spike our energy intensity level upward, overall our intent is
clearer when we can remain at least relatively calm and centered. The
calming exercises that we do – deep natural breathing, and so on – cultivate
this sort of presence.”
“You said something about emotion increasing the level of energy.
Could you explain more about that?” a student inquires.
“Unfortunately, flashes of anger are the most reliable way to
instantly increase the energy flow for me,” Jinlong says. “When something
just gets me very angry, then my hands immediately turn hot and red with
energy, without my having to think about it.” Hmm, in five-elements theory,
that would be increased liver energy leading to increased heart fire? But,
“I’m guessing that other people might experience similarly stronger energy
flow from more-benign sorts of emotions.” On the other hand, “Still, my
mother generated intense levels of energy while working on my father’s
111
cancer each day, and she said that during those sessions, she was thinking
‘kill, kill, kill’ in an attempt to get rid of the tumor.”
*****
The kids have asked their uncle for a bedtime story about taijiquan.
But Jinlong is unable to bring his imagination into focus at the moment, so he
relies on history: “Once upon a time, the Middle Kingdom was overrun by
invaders from the northeast, who would sit on the Dragon Throne for the
next 267 years. A general who was on the losing side of the war retired to
his home in Chen village, where the people continued the usual work of
growing crops in the fields.
“But the general spent some time on refining battlefield techniques
from the conflict that had been lost. As a start, he selected empty-hand
methods that a previous general had summarized in 32 routines, and then he
combined them with exercises for developing the qi, thus strengthening
health and fighting ability at the same time. He also emphasized doing the
movements slowly, so that the practitioner would be able to detect and self-
correct errors in practice.
“He then developed two-person exercises to serve as stepping-
stones leading from solo practice to fighting. And he placed some emphasis
on the spear, which was the main battlefield weapon at that time and place.
His extended family, the village members, used the general’s martial art to
defend their region against raids by bandits.
“The art continued to develop there for the next decades and
centuries, with only one ‘outsider’ being taught – Yang Luchan, who later
went to the capital city and established his reputation as a great martial
artist. Finally, about a half-century after that, one master from the Chen
family village journeyed to the kingdom’s capital city, where he beat all
challengers. When he received a richer offer to teach elsewhere, his place at
112
the capital was taken by the family’s grandmaster, who also defeated
everyone who came to test him.”
“The grandmaster told his students that he had neglected his
practice when he was a child,” Jinlong notes parenthetically, “but he made
substantial progress while a teenager, by practicing night and day for three
years. He had received the same instruction as the other young people in
the village, but he caught up to them and then surpassed their level by
working harder. Later, one of his disciples observed that the grandmaster
continued to progress through diligent practice during his time in the capital
city.
“But then, World War Two and a series of other misfortunes
scattered many of the grandmaster’s students. Meanwhile, in the village,
the cumulative effect of wars, famine, and political upheaval drastically
diminished the practice of the art, until it nearly died out there. After the
death of the grandmaster, the elders of the village asked the master who
had first journeyed to the capital to return. He reintroduced taijiquan to the
younger generation, and later – while he was imprisoned during another
wave of political upheaval, when martial arts and other traditional practices
were forbidden – he taught some of the future masters of the art whenever
they visited him at his jail cell.
“And that’s a short history of the taijiquan that you study now. It
was born in eating bitterness, from the defeated side of a war. It was
preserved in resilience, clawing its way back from near-extinction. In light of
this, it deserves our best efforts in our practice.”
113
Chapter 34: Cancer Treatment Continued, and
Dealing With Other Congested Energy
Another visit to his parents, and Jinlong notices a sickly sweet smell
as he steps toward his father. Later, on an internet chatboard, someone
would explain that the smell was due to the body’s failure to metabolize
ketones. But the smell dissipates after the first day’s treatment. Jinlong’s
left hand lightly touches his father’s abdomen, pulling congested energy out
from the site of the tumor with each inhale; Jinlong’s right hand points down
and out, sending the energy into the ground with each exhale. Repeating
the cycle with each inhale/exhale. Pull the excess, stagnant energy out, and
send it into the ground. Over and over again.
*****
“So when there’s congested energy, you can pull some of the excess
energy out from the person, like this,” Jinlong explains. Standing to Suen’s
left, his hands on her shoulder and back, he pulls water energy up from the
ground, lets it move up into Suen, and guides it to sweep through the area of
her back before moving into Jinlong’s own hands, arms, back, legs, and
returning to the ground.
“That cleared up the asthma in my left lung,” Suen declares.
“Well, let’s try the other side now,” Jinlong suggests, and repeats the
same process through the right side of Suen’s back. A couple of minutes
later, she confirms the result: “Yes, now both lungs are clear.”
Jinlong cautions, “When you do this on someone else – because
you’re using your own body as a conductor for the other person’s congested
energy, it’s important for you to be able to clear it out of yourself after you
do it.”
114
Chapter 35: Death
Jinlong remembers Teacher Jay mentioning an article about

researchers who stated that the “near-death experience” – described by
some survivors as including the presence of bright light, or meeting family
members who had previously died – is a result of endorphins being released
in the brain. “I think they’re right,” Jay decided about the article.
But a few years later, Jay’s appendix burst, and he subsequently
described undergoing a near-death experience in the hospital. A
mischievous smile curls Jinlong’s mouth as he asks, “So was that just a
release of endorphins, like you mentioned the research had shown?”
“Mine was real. Everybody else’s was caused by endorphins,” Jay
answers. Jinlong gives a mighty effort to suppress his laughter, but doesn’t
quite succeed.
Jay also mentions that during his stay in the hospital, doctors
shepherded medical residents-in-training past his bed, where – one after
another, after yet another – they pulled at his abdominal skin and then
released it. Apparently, it demonstrated some quality of skin tone that was
characteristic of a patient whose appendix had ruptured. But Jay grew tired
of having his abdomen clutched like that, so he finally grabbed and joint-
locked the hand of the next resident who reached toward him. “I made him
genuflect before me,” Jay summarizes for Jinlong’s understanding. Jinlong
laughs again, imagining the sight of the poor doctor forced to his knees by
the grumpy patient in the hospital bed. Jay continues: “Then after he stood
up again, he said ‘What was that!?’ And I said it was a reflex.”
*****
Continuing with long-distance healing, Jinlong now perceives red
energy pooling above his father’s head. The next day he calls and mentions
what he saw to Danner, who says “He’s transitioning.” Transitioning. As in,
115
dying. “Yes, I think so,” Jinlong replies. Looks like this is it. He remembers
someone from the practice group at the Cube saying Galen mentioned that
the qi of someone who’s about to die looks strange. Maybe this is the sort of
thing he was talking about?
Jinlong knows the statistics: median duration for survival after
diagnosis of this sort of pancreatic cancer is just under six months, and only
nineteen percent are still alive after twelve months. His father has surprised
everyone by lasting for twenty-six months. But, still.
Two days later, he picks up the phone and hears his sister’s summary
of the situation: “Dad’s doctors say his body is wearing down from the
chemo, and there’s no point in further treatment. They said at this point, it’s
a matter of hours or days. I’m booking a flight for me and the kids. Get
there as soon as you can.”
On an airplane to Memphis, the day after that. Hold on, Dad. We’re
coming to see you once more. The plane touches down, and the passengers
disembark. Jinlong takes the shuttle to the car rental, fills out the
paperwork, and drives to the hospital. His father occasionally gasps that he
wants ice chips. The rest of the time, he’s silent except for a few statements
to his wife, such as when he remembers their attending a conference
together: “We went to London and to Wales.” Their anniversary was just a
couple of weeks ago – they’ve been married for 46 years now.
Leilani arrives with her children that afternoon. Ellen is still too
young to speak at that point, but her grandfather perks up as he sees her
carried in, and he actually says “hiiiiiiii.” Ian stands by the bed and softly says
“Hi, Goong goong.” At the end of the visit, Jinlong’s mother remains at the
hospital with his father, while the rest drive to the family home.
Jinlong goes back to the hospital the next day, and his father is no
longer speaking; instead, his head bobs up and down in agonal breathing.
116
Sort of freaky, Jinlong thinks to himself. His mother sits in a chair pulled up
along one side of the hospital bed. Jinlong sits on the other side, his hands
on his father’s chest and shoulders, intention set for pain relief only. After
an hour or so, his father emits a sound of “aacckk” three times, and then
stops moving entirely. They call the nurse, who wraps the blood pressure
cuff around his arm, pumps air, releases it, and says “I’m not getting any
pressure. I think he’s gone. I’m so sorry.”
At the family home again, a couple of hours later, Jinlong checks on
his father’s energy. And sees white light folding and unfolding on itself, feels
warmth everywhere, hears a soft whuum whuuum sound. Marveling at all of
it, Jinlong reflects, If this is what it’s like after death, I can see why people
wouldn’t want to come back. A few hours after that, and he sees his father’s
energy shooting upward, faster and farther, greeted by the energies of Dad’s
father and maternal grandfather along the way. Godspeed to you, Dad.
117
Chapter 36: Afterlife
“Jinlong!” It’s late at night, and he wonders why his father is calling
out to him, waking him up. Turning toward the sound, he responds, “What?”
And then thinks, Wait a minute, Dad died a few months ago. But he’s here?
Jinlong wakes more fully, feeling his father’s presence, and now his
energy sight detects the glow along an edge of the ceiling, shaped as if it has
angel wings or butterfly wings. But they’re not flapping or anything; that’s
just the shape of the energy field. His father moves closer, there’s some
interaction between their fields, and now Jinlong feels his own energy taking
on the same form.
He’s not sure of how to interpret what happened. But during the
next practitioners night at Grey’s house, one of the reiki master-program
students says to him, “You have etheric wings now. They look like angel
wings.” Jinlong answers, “Funny you should say that.”
*****
Some years later. Jinlong gets a phone call from Danner: “Grey died
last night.”
“What happened??”
“He fell, broke his hip, and then he just stroked out as he was being
taken to the hospital. I’ll try to contact his students so that they’ll know. I’m
looking for his e-mail list now.”
“Wow. That’s sudden.”
“By the way, he’s hanging around you. I don’t know what it is, but
there’s something he thinks you should know.”
“Doesn’t he have better things to do now?”
“I guess he wants to be sure you get some information first.”
“What information?
“I don’t know.”
118
“Why me?”
“He thought of you as family.”
Huh. That’s nice, but really?
Several weeks later, there’s a general sense of presence, followed by
words: “Hi, Jinlong.”
Hi, Grey. What are you doing here?
Flashes of information and images, that start to unfold over the next
week or so. Followed by a phone call to Danner: “Grey wasn’t at all pushy,
but he’d wanted me to become a reiki master. I didn’t know that”
“Uh huh.”
“But then I moved a few hundred miles away, and so couldn’t go
through his master students training program. He came over now to show
me how to do an initiation that’s a bit similar to the experience I had the first
time that reiki rushed through me. Anyway, the method he showed me
works directly with the energy, rather than using symbols. Also . . . he says
to restore reiki practice to the level it used to have, at the time of Usui.”
Yeah, take it back to the effectiveness that it had under the founder. It would
have helped if I’d gone through the masters training program.
Danner responds, “In the months before he died, Grey told me about
how he’d changed his views on what he’d been teaching.”
But I don’t even know where to start. It would have made more
sense if he’d chosen somebody he had trained into becoming a reiki master.
While he was alive, I mean. “Why me?”
“You’re family.”
119
Chapter 37: Great Bright Light
Browsing through the Alternative Healing section of the Borders

bookstore, Jinlong examines the books about a particular system. Reiki, in
Japanese. Lingqi, in Chinese. Something like “spirit energy,” in English. Huh.
At that time, his ego doesn’t like the idea of energy-healing ability being
conferred instantly, but that was the claim of the people who’d been
through the reiki attunements or initiations. I did nine years of energy
practices before developing enough ability to help with healing. And these
people say their teachers pass it along in one session? What the – ? Still, he
can’t deny the strength of the energy that came through the couple of reiki
practitioners he’d met over the past few months.
He flips through one of the books until he finds a legible version of
the reiki “master symbol.” Hey, I can read this! The characters are ones he
previously saw in China, although he’s seeing this particular combination of
them for the first time now: “Great bright light,” he translates to himself.
And then he’s overwhelmed by a flash of golden light, pouring in from above
and moving down through the top of his head. Four seeds of energy follow
the golden light in, and attach to parts of his brain. The golden light
continues to pour in, then races up and down his body, finally settling into
his central nervous system as if taking up residence in his spinal cord. He
staggers through the aisles of the bookstore for the next 20 minutes, finally
near enough to normal to make the five-minute drive home.
Over the next few days, he experiences more aspects of the ling qi.
Step one, connect the golden light that’s inside my nervous system with the
same energy that’s outside me. Then I can move more of that energy into
and through me, and send it out my hands. Jinlong also notices that it’s a
higher-frequency energy – its waveform feels as if it wiggles faster than that
of the energy he’d previously been using. And that it’s not as closely
120
associated with as much sheer heat as the qigong energy that’s more familiar
to him. In fact, the golden-light energy doesn’t dispel the winter cold from
his body the way that qigong energy does.
He also sends energy to unfold the four “seeds” that jumped into his
head, but they’re stubbornly refusing to do it. Instead, they lock up the
energy each time he sends it to them, banking it for some other time. Okay,
be that way, he grumbles at them.
A couple of months later, on a weekend, he’s driving to the office,
and his mind wanders to the energy seeds in his head. And now they unfold.
Oh, yeah, it couldn’t have happened at some convenient time, could it?
Jinlong groused. But the process is mild enough that he can continue to
drive. Each one is in a different quadrant of my brain, he realizes. First to
unfold is a quality of youthful exuberance, in the lower left. Followed by
elder wisdom, in the upper left. Then intuition, in the lower right. And
finally, energy management, in the upper right. What does it mean? But
nothing answers his pondering.
*****
Months later, Jinlong meets Grey for the first time at one of Grey’s
reiki intro. night sessions, and they discuss the experience that occurred at
the bookstore. Grey suggests that Jinlong was a reiki master in a past life,
and that the symbols recognized him. Uh, that’s weird, and maybe in both
ancient and modern senses of “weird,” Jinlong thinks. Grey refers to Jinlong’s
experience as “Being initiated by the universe.” Still weird, he thinks. Grey
also mentions that people who practice martial arts for years have wide-
open energy channels, and so they’re able to move lots of energy around
after reiki initiation. That actually makes sense to me, Jinlong reflects,
especially for the internal martial arts – part of the purpose of their design is
121
to increase circulation of qi through the energy pathways of the body. In
addition, martial practice develops the yi, the intent, which leads the energy.
*****
Jinlong attended a weekend workshop of intuitive development,
conducted by Grey, who would soon become his reiki teacher. One of the
exercises involved clearing the chakras, the energy centers in one of the
systems that correlated particular locations of the body with particular
connections to subtle energies. A couple of days later, he’s walking out from
his office into the hallway of the court building, and in an instant, his energy
explodes – blowing out a spot in his field that’s just to the left of center,
immediately below his ribs. Within a couple of hours, the area of pain has
grown and now includes the region around his heart. A phone call to Grey
that night, who advises “bleeding off” the excess energy by constructing
cords from the site of the pain to lead the energy into the ground. Jinlong
goes through the process, but obtains only minimal relief. A phone call to
Suen, the next day. “Tell me what to do,” she says, after Jinlong describes
his predicament of being burned from the inside. “Scan me and tell me what
you notice,” he says, doubled over from pain while speaking into the phone.
A pause of about twenty seconds, followed by Suen’s report of “I’m just
feeling a whole lot of qi there.” I could’ve told you that, Jinlong grumbles
silently.
For three days following the energy blowout, Jinlong does everything
that comes to mind – taking extra showers so that water can dissipate the
energy; breathing the energy out from the affected area; imaging ocean
waves washing away the flares of heat that are consuming him – and none of
it provides much help. Until the afternoon of the third day, when a voice
pops into his awareness, saying This is a preview. The next time your energy
level jumps up, this is what will happen if you resist the process. And then
122
the pain is gone. Just gone. Jinlong gingerly presses his fingers to the area
that had felt like it was being cauterized by a hot wire for the past few days,
but it feels normal now.
“But the gods don’t threaten,” Suen would later say, when Jinlong
told her about the voice.
“It wasn’t a threat; it was more like a description of natural law, like
gravity,” Jinlong responded. Mental note, don’t resist the next time it
happens.
*****
Jinlong was skeptical when he first heard Grey suggest that past lives
were an influence in his current involvement with reiki. But now he decides
to see if he can discern any of them for himself. He calls up the golden light,
then shifts his mindset so that he’s tracing it back into the past. And to his
surprise, over the next few months he catches glimpses of several previous
lifetimes, linked together through time by a thread of the golden light. In
each session he gets impressions of a past life’s talents, some hints of
knowledge and skills that he might be able to incorporate into the present.
********
A twenty-two year old woman, somewhere near the capital city of
Xi’an in Song Dynasty China. Apprenticed to an older woman healer from
the age of ten until she reached her twentieth birthday, at which time she
was tasked with taking over the practice. Her long dark hair makes a
contrast with her robes of red, the color of life. Jinlong is surprised to
discern that she doesn’t use acupuncture. But he sees that one of her qi
projection exercises is repetitive open-hand striking into the air, a hundred
times per session, at least one session per day. When he looks closer, he
sees that she channels energy through her heart, then leads it into her arms
and out through her hands.
123
********
A thirty-year old Shinto priest in nineteenth-century Kyoto, two or
three decades before the reiki system was founded by Usui Mikao. Yellow
robes and a black headpiece. Yellow? I remember bright orange at the
shrines in Kyoto, when I visited on the way back from China, Jinlong muses.
But he’s wearing yellow, nevertheless. The priest shapes the golden light into
spheres that he packs into his body, filling the interior spaces with healing
energy.
********
A shaman, somewhere in the mountains of central Asia. He’s
wearing a brown shaggy coat, matched by a brown headdress that features
some sort of buffalo horns. The scene is from long, long ago – it’s unclear as
to whether his people have developed a written language system. In the
healing cave, the shaman kneels by the side of a patient who lies on a slab of
rock. Instead of directing energy through his hands, the shaman invokes the
golden light to fill the cave, creating a sanctuary of healing.
********
A village in Eastern Europe, perhaps about a thousand years ago. A
young woman with long blonde hair, wearing a simple white dress. She’s
standing in a clear spot, radiating power of so much wattage that, until a few
months ago, Jinlong wouldn’t even have believed it to be possible. In his
energy sight, she lights up like a star, power bursting outward in concentric
ripples. He’s later startled to see the same face belonging to one of Grey’s
students during a practitioners night session.
********
Forest land in northern India. A man wears a cloak of somehow-
shifting colors. He’s a rishi, one of the vedic sages – someone who
understands the wisdom encoded in the sacred songs. The changing hues of
124
the cloak shows Jinlong how to visualize energy in iridescent colors. That
quality gives Jinlong a greater feeling of immediacy – and therefore greater
precision – in working with the energy.
********
Coming back to himself after each session, Jinlong isn’t sure of what
he’s been seeing. Past lives? Or wanderings of imagination? In any event,
he starts to work with the methods that he gleaned from them.
*****
Jinlong has moved back to Michigan, a little less than two years after
Grey passed away and showed him how to work with direct energy flow for
reiki initiation. He’s now sharing the method with Thome, who was Grey’s
last reiki master program student during his lifetime. Jinlong speculates that
the method has some similarity to the process that the system’s founder,
Usui, did with his early students, before he linked the reiki energy to several
symbols. Jinlong demonstrates the process on the seated Thome, standing
behind him and sending reiki into him.
Then they switch roles, with Jinlong seated in front of Thome while
talking him through the process. “Use your awareness and intent to link the
golden light that’s inside yourself with the same light that’s outside you,”
Jinlong says, his words mirrored by Thome’s action. “Then place your hands
on the baihui point at the top of the head, and on the back directly behind
the heart.
Thome readily accomplishes each step that Jinlong describes. “Let
the golden light flow into the student through both of your hands. Good, but
now let those two currents of energy meet and merge inside the student,”
Yes, that’s the reiki energy, Jinlong confirms to himself as he feels it surging
through his body. “After you’ve established that merger, use your intent to
saturate the student’s central nervous system. Then set some of the energy
125
there so whoever you’re initiating will always be able to access it. Close off
by withdrawing your energy from the student, leaving some of the golden
light behind in him, especially in his spinal cord.”
This recreates the sort of surge that happened when Grey first
formally initiated me into reiki, Jinlong reflects. The same feel, the same
energy frequency. Which makes sense, given that he taught both of us. And
it’s a more controlled version of the spontaneous burst of golden light that
occurred when I first read the reiki master symbol.
From previous reiki experience, Thome’s hands are already open to
let energy flow through. But if they weren’t, then Jinlong would open them
by touching the laogong points of Thome’s palms and using intent to open
the energy flow in a widening spiral. Which is similar to the shape of the
power symbol that the Reiki system uses, Jinlong realizes.
126
Chapter 38: Translation, Interpretation, Context
Believe nothing, O monks, just because you have been told it, or it is
widely believed, or because it is in tradition, or because you yourselves
imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely because of
respect for the teacher. But after proper examination and analysis,
whatever you find to promote the good, the benefit, the welfare of all
beings – believe that doctrine, adhere to it, and take it as guidance.
-- the Dhammapada
While teaching English during the year in Wuhan, Jinlong continued

his studies of taijiquan, qigong, and related arts. At the start of each session,
he would show what he learned from the previous session. Teacher Zhong
usually responded by saying “zheige buhao” – this is bad – and then he
would demonstrate what Jinlong was doing wrong and how it should be
done right. Jinlong relished those moments, the ones that most directly
improved his practice.
“Chen qi,” sink the qi, the teacher said as Jinlong went through a
sequence of moves. The phrase can have several meanings, including the
idea of rooting the body into the earth by sinking part of one’s internal
energy down into the ground. But through pantomime, Zhong conveyed the
idea of breathing as if from the lower abdomen rather than keeping the
breath high in the upper chest. Oh, okay, he meant a more mundane sort of
thing, move the breath lower, Jinlong realized.
*****
Now back in the U.S., Jinlong is dealing with a toothache. He
mentions to someone in Galen’s practice group that he’s sending qi from his
hand into his lower jaw to deal with the pain in the tooth.
“But Galen said not to send qi into the head,” the other person
cautions.
127
“That seems to refer to the idea that the brain shouldn’t store lots of
qi,” Jinlong answers, “but it wouldn’t have anything to do with the teeth.”
They later bring up the topic with Galen, who confirms that the statement
about not sending qi to the head means don’t store qi in the brain. “It’s okay
to send qi in a shell around the outer part of the head,” he says.
The course of the exchange is Jinlong’s introduction to what happens
when a newer student uses a too-literal understanding of a statement. But it
turns out to be a recurring sort of problem in a variety of venues.
*****
Someone on a taijiquan message board advises that practice should
have an attitude of playfulness, because the verb “to play” is the one that’s
used in Chinese statements about doing taijiquan.
“It’s often translated as play, but the word da literally means to hit,”
Jinlong writes. “So what do we make of that?” Preliminary conclusions can
be reached, but we should be careful about perils of translation.
*****
Another example shows up on a reiki message board, when
someone insists that because reiki literally means “spirit energy,” reiki must
be divinely guided. Huh? Unable to restrain himself, Jinlong uses the original
message poster’s own method of interpretation to illustrate why it’s
unreliable. In Japanese, rei = spirit, and ki = air. But also in Japanese, kami =
spirit, and kaze = wind, which is air in motion. So that must mean kamikaze =
a subset of reiki, right? So the kamikaze pilots in the last months of World
War Two must have just been giving healing energy to the crew members of
the U.S. warships into which they crashed their fighter planes?? No, of
course not.
The debunking doesn’t find favor with the original poster, who
recognizes the absurdity of Jinlong’s literal translation and its implications,
128
but somehow doesn’t think her own translation could be subject to the sort
of shortcomings illustrated by Jinlong’s example. But that’s exactly the sort
of thing that happens, Jinlong writes back, when you rely on very literal and
limited translations of terms that can have several meanings in the source
language.
*****
“Dan bian.” The term refers to a move that occurs multiple times in
solo practice, in every style of taijiquan, and it’s usually translated as “single
whip.” Teacher Jay says the name of the move refers to one of the
practitioner’s hands being held in a hooked shape, which in classic Chinese
opera is a stylized gesture for holding a whip. Okay, I guess that makes
sense, Jinlong comments to himself.
But Teacher Galen says the term should be translated as “carry a
yoke,” and that the shape of the posture is similar to that of someone
carrying a pole across his shoulders. That makes sense too, Jinlong muses,
remembering how vendors used that sort of pole to carry buckets of items
during his time in China, the two buckets counterbalancing each other’s
weight by hanging from opposite ends of the pole.
But then a third translation appears from students of a visiting
master; in that school, the term refers to “dantian change,” based on the
center of the body undergoing multiple changes of direction throughout the
move. That might make sense, although the underlying reasoning doesn’t
really distinguish the move from some others, Jinlong thinks.
So, given several plausible and competing translations of one basic
move, how to determine which one should apply? Jinlong gives up,
concluding that it’s impossible to determine the most authentic translation
in light of different pronunciations, different written renderings of a given
pronunciation, and the centuries-old origin of the art.
129
*****
In workshops that require interpreters, Jinlong is usually able to rely
on the ones provided by the workshop hosts, although it doesn’t always
work well. In one workshop, the master who was teaching the class spoke
for a few minutes in Mandarin Chinese. Then a second master, who was
interpreting for the first, spent five minutes talking in English about the
importance of the six harmonies. Although Jinlong’s ability in Chinese is
limited, he knows enough to realize that the first master’s statement hadn’t
included anything about the six harmonies. It’s really too bad that we’re not
getting a translation of what he actually said.
*****
But now Jinlong is in the odd position of having to interpret for
others. He’s attending a taijiquan workshop for further study of the old
frame of Chen style taijiquan, and the workshop is led by a grandmaster of
the style. However, the interpreter who was originally planned for the
workshop couldn’t come because of a last-minute schedule conflict, the
substitute interpreter isn’t a taijiquan practitioner, and Jinlong has been
pressed into service to help supplement the new interpreter’s work. Uh, if I
have to do some of the interpreting, then we’re in trouble, he thinks.
At the start of a session, everyone is maintaining a familiar posture
of feet shoulder width apart, knees bent, torso upright, and arms rounded in
front of the chest – a preliminary practice common to all of the taijiquan
schools that Jinlong has seen. The grandmaster’s book refers to the position
as the hunyuan posture, so someone asks about what “hunyuan” means.
Jinlong relays the question in Chinese; perhaps surprisingly, the
grandmaster’s wife is the one who answers. “No solid, no empty,” Jinlong
translates into English for the class, watching as the wife stamps a foot down
to emphasize the word solid and lifts the foot up to emphasize the word
130
empty. “No heaven, no earth,” Jinlong relates as the wife’s explanation
continues, “it’s before they’ve separated.” That brings to mind something
from the taiji classics – in movement, yin and yang differentiate from each
other; in stillness, they combine.
Later in the same workshop, during a rest period between sessions,
Jinlong sees an opportunity for clarification on something he’s been puzzling
over for several years: he asks about the application of the movement “look
at fist under elbow.” In response, the grandmaster uses his left hand to take
Jinlong’s right wrist, then turns it and pulls it up in a way that dips Jinlong’s
head down, as if his wrist and head are endpoints of a lever. The
grandmaster then lightly touches the point of his right elbow to Jinlong’s
head, neck, and upper back – demonstrating alternate targets for finishing
the move. But after releasing the hold on Jinlong’s arm, the grandmaster
then says something to the class, which the main interpreter explains as
“Don’t think about application. For now, just learn the movements.”
*****
What do you read, my Lord?
Words, words, words.
-- Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, scene ii
A student asks about the idea that English-language translations of
some East-Asian texts are inherently deficient because written English uses
words, while the written systems of Chinese and Japanese use pictograms
rather than words. “And yet,” Jinlong replies, “written documents like
contracts and treaties – which must be very specifically stated and
understood – are routinely translated, aren’t they?”
“Moreover, some professional linguists have mentioned that a
rather small proportion of the written Chinese characters are pictograms –
maybe about five percent. Many more of them are compound characters
131
that include some phonetic borrowing, so that at least one component
indicates pronunciation rather than meaning.
“And the characters have become more simplified and more stylized,
compared with how they were written millennia ago. Even if all of them had
been pictograms way back then, it would be hard to argue that they still
have that feature in their modern forms.
“In fact, even when looking only at modern characters, we see that
the simplified forms – now used in the PRC and in Japan – are notably
different from the classical forms that are widely used in places such as
Taiwan. For example, we could point out that the character for ‘jade’
appears in the simplified version of the word for ‘country’ or ‘nation’ – but
relying on that etymology would be deceptive, because the ‘jade’ character
doesn’t appear in the older, classical version of the same written word. Are
you going to say that the idea of ‘country’ means different things for
different Chinese populations, depending on whether they’re using classical
characters or simplified characters? Or that someone who can write in both
versions changes his idea about what a country is, depending on which
version of the character he writes? That’s just goofy. Some of the simplified
characters are so far removed from their original versions that they’re rather
obviously abstract representations, not pictures.”
“Then why do some people insist that the characters are
pictograms?” another student asks.
“Eh. It seems to be an attempt at making things more mysterious –
as if saying, ‘look at how exotic this is.’ But we want clarity, not obfuscation.
“By the way, the pictogram-writing myth was debunked earlier for
another ancient writing system, the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Early researchers
originally thought the hieroglyphs were pictograms, but when the Rosetta
stone was discovered, the comparison of the Egyptian and Greek
132
representations showed that much of the content of the hieroglyphs was in
fact phonetic.
“There are some difficulties in translation of what we regard as
classic texts, but that’s usually because of having to supply context, including
cultural associations,” Jinlong observes. “For example, the classics for the
internal martial arts tend to be written in short lines of rhyming verses,
which is why the commentary tends to be so much longer than the text
itself: the short rhymes are mnemonic devices, rather than expository
treatises. So the phrases carry meaning for someone who’s already been
studying the art seriously, but they won’t mean much to someone who
doesn’t have that sort of background.”
*****
But sometimes, being able to produce the written character makes a
difference. Shell and Jinlong are browsing the shelves of an Asian grocery
store, and Shell asks the clerk at the counter about whether the store has
moon cakes. The clerk says he doesn’t understand. Jinlong and Shell take
turns saying “moon cakes,” but the clerk responds with a blank look.
Jinlong switches to Mandarin – “yue bing.” The clerk maintains a
blank demeanor.
Finally, Jinlong resorts to what he saw people in China do whenever
they didn’t understand each other’s dialects: he holds up the palm of his left
hand and traces the “moon” character on it with his right index finger. “Oh,”
the clerk responds in English, “moon cakes.”
*****
“What about the prescribed order of strokes when writing Chinese
characters?” a student inquires. “Does that show some sort of esoteric
significance in the way that they’re written?”
133
Jinlong comments, “It more likely shows that the writers didn’t want
to drag their sleeves through ink that hadn’t yet dried on the paper after
being placed there with a calligraphy brush.” The sequence of strokes for
each character seems to avoid that problem.”
134
Chapter 39: Standing, Stillness, and Movement
Zhan zhuang: the practice of making body-alignment adjustments

while standing relatively still. Aligning the posture also opens the energy
pathways. Commenting on why practice sessions begin with standing before
movement, a teacher had referred to the taiji classics, saying that “taiji
comes from wuji.” Or, a little more concretely stated, the central equilibrium
established in stillness is a prerequisite for proper movement. Thus, the
classics also refer to stillness in movement.
Jinlong is working on
a basic practice promulgated
in Teacher Leon’s school:
pull his skeleton upward,
while sinking the rest of his
body around it. His flesh
pulls tighter around the
bones, and he feels like a
tube of toothpaste being
squeezed. He remembers
Leon analogizing to a squid
flattening out. Or, using
another explanation, lengthening a flexible tube results in reducing the
radius.
Jinlong’s neck stretches upward, his shoulders and the lateral parts
of his ribs pull outward to the sides, and the stretching pulls his waist area
tight. He then has to remember to let his sternum point downward so that
his chest doesn’t stick out – raise the back and “hollow” the chest, in terms
used by the taijiquan classics, although some say that in this context,
135
to hollow the chest just means
don’t let it push out in front. He
feels that his torso, arms and legs
stretch longer, which results in their
radial compression.
Now he adds one more
component, which Leon described
as a feeling of pulling the feet
toward each other – like standing
on a small rug and using the feet to
pull the ends of the rug together –
although they actually remain
stationary.
The combined stretching
and squeezing intensifies the
movement of blood and qi through
the body; Jinlong’s hands are hot and pulsing. The sensation comes close to
overloading him, until he remembers Leon’s instruction of continuing to
breathe at the back of the throat; implementing that advice restores a sense
of calm.
Explaining the continuation of the breath while the body was
elongated, Leon compared it to the suction of drinking through a straw.
Jinlong sees the explanation apply to the movement of energy throughout
the body: Bernoulli’s principle and the Venturi effect, he says to himself. He
remembers his childhood home where the trade winds whipped through the
central valley of the island as they were squeezed between the West Maui
Mountains on one side, and Haleakala – “house of the sun,” the massive
136
dormant volcano that dominates the eastern part of the island – on the
other side.
Jinlong then incorporates the standing practice into the sequence of
movements, pausing at the end of each move to check on the alignment,
stretching, and squeezing. I guess this is what Korl meant when he
mentioned “hard-burning,” he thinks, flushed with heat but placing attention
on keeping his breath smooth and even.
Then he goes through the same process with more specificity,
subdividing a movement into segments and pausing to check at the end of
each segment. Something about Zeno’s paradox skitters through his mind,
but he brushes it away by returning his attention to the exercise. After
practice, Jinlong reflects on the prospect of cultivating the same sort of
quality of elastic force through every moment of every move – and the scope
of the task is overwhelming. Just a little bit at a time, though, he reminds
himself.
*****
A student’s inquiry pushes the envelope of theory: “If the intent
leads the energy, then we could just think of where the energy should go,
without doing any body work to get it there, right?”
“Hypothetically, yes,” Jinlong answers. “And that sounds so much
easier than having to train the body. But in practice, we amplify the flow of
energy by combining the intent with stretching/squeezing, breath, and
movement. The internal and external components work together.”
“Are there any other reasons to do sequences of movement?”
another student asks.
“Several,” Jinlong responds. “First of all, particular movements help
to stretch open particular parts of the body, which leads to a smoother flow
of energy through those areas. Also, some people say that going through the
137
movements gives a sort of massage to the internal organs, so that should be
good for health. And of course, practicing movements is essential for
developing skill in martial applications – when attacked, you shouldn’t just
stand still.”
138
Chapter 40: Wildly Speculative
Jinlong is talking with a friend about distance healing, when she asks
about the physics of it. “I don’t really know,” Jinlong admits, “but I suspect
that it somehow uses the earth’s magnetic field as a carrier for the wave of
healing energy, with intent somehow guiding where that wave goes.” The
“somehow” isn’t a good explanation, but we just don’t know why it works.
“Other people invoke quantum physics explanations, holographic universe
and all that, but I think classical physics is probably sufficient. Why resort to
more complex explanations when simpler ones will do? You know – Occam’s
razor.
“A test would be to have a healer on earth and a recipient at a point
outside the earth’s magnetic field, such as on Mars. If distance healing
works in that situation, then my hypothesis about the earth’s magnetic field
is wrong. On the other hand, if it doesn’t work in that situation, then the
quantum-explanation people are wrong. Of course, it could also be that
we’re both wrong.
“I’m more concerned that it works, than about how it works. I guess
that puts me more on the treatment side of things than on the research side.
But it’s sort of fun to speculate.”
*****
“Why does placing energy into someone help that person to heal?” a
student asks.
Jinlong says, “We don’t really know much about it. But we do know
that medical technology now uses the same sort of idea, such as electrical
stimulators to promote the repair of broken bones. Infusing energy into the
area of the injury seems to accelerate the body’s natural healing process,
and sometimes drastically.
139
“The energy that we emit through our hands might feel hot to most
recipients, but it’s still a relatively low-intensity sort of thing, as far as energy
fields go,” Jinlong muses. “So, what could be affected by a low-intensity
field? How about the weak hydrogen bonds that cause water molecules to
clump together? Maybe a low-intensity field could affect them. And that
might in turn affect the extent and angle of water molecules cohering with
each other. Maybe. And given how much of one’s body is made up of water
. . . . Well, that might be one mechanism by which a low-intensity field could
have what seems to be a disproportionately large effect.
“It might also explain about masters charging containers of water
with energy. Teacher Galen, for example, said that at some point during
World War Two, his battle group had so little to eat for such a long time that
his body was shaking. But he charged a cup of water with qi, then drank it,
and that stopped the shakes. It didn’t make sense to me when he
mentioned it, because the shaking seemed to indicate that his muscles
needed glucose that just wasn’t there. But now I’m thinking that the change
in his condition might have been due to alteration of the inter-molecular
bonds that might have resulted from charging the water. It’s just a guess,
though.”
*****
Jinlong’s musings start to match up human energy phenomena with
more dramatic counterparts in other species.
Is the aura a scaled-down version of the bioluminescence that’s
found in fireflies and some jellyfish? Scaled down, because our bodies don’t
have specialized cells for producing cold light?
Could scanning someone’s energy field be somehow similar to the
electro perception sense of sharks? Although we don’t have the organs that
sharks use to do it? Or maybe it’s like the heat-detection sense that pit vipers
140
have – again, even though humans don’t have specially developed organs for
that sort of sensing? But then again, it usually seems to be something more
active, like the echo location sense of a dolphin, which sends out a pulse and
listens to what comes back. Except that for us, it’s a matter of feeling or
seeing, rather than hearing.
And energy healing seems to trigger a lesser version of the ability
owned by lizards and salamanders, which can regenerate entire limbs?
What about bioelectrical effects on things like light bulbs and lamps?
Could that be distantly related to the charge stored and released by electric
eels and electric rays, even though we don’t have the same sort of specialized
cells for storing electrical charges?
So many questions, and so few answers. Researchers should get
working on these things, Jinlong thinks. Or maybe they’re already doing so,
and I just haven’t heard about it.
141
Warriors
Cancer Treatment Summary

Energy healing has at least three overlapping approaches to dealing
with cancer.
One approach involves dispersing the congested energy of the
cancer itself. The idea is that cells which are overloaded with energy can
become cancerous – as an example using modern conditions, think of the
effects of ionizing radiation. Clearing excess, stagnant energy from the site
of the cancer should help. Two methods can be used in this approach –
sending yang energy into and through the cancer in order to re-establish the
normal flow that has become blocked, or pulling energy out from the cancer.
A second approach is to strengthen the body’s healthy tissues. This
is especially useful for mitigating side effects of allopathic treatment such as
chemotherapy. Chemo seems to be “fiery” – yang – and so sending yin
energy into healthy tissue and organs tends to counteract the effect of the
chemo on those parts of the body. Bone marrow and the digestive tract are
especially likely to be affected by chemo, because they have fast-growing
cells. Radiation treatments also seem to be fiery yang, so – again – using yin
energy helps to alleviate the effect that radiation has on healthy tissue.
The third approach is to boost the immune system, by focusing on
strengthening the bone marrow and the thymus gland. Throughout most of
someone’s life, his or her immune system eradicates whatever cells have
spontaneously turned cancerous. So strengthening the immune system
should enhance the body’s own ability to heal.
Remember that in addition to interacting directly with particular
organs, the practitioner can also use the associated meridians to send energy
into those organs or pull energy out of them.
142
Chapter 42: A Fracas on Campus
Jinlong has come back to visit a few friends. It’s odd to think that
Grey and Galen reached the ends of their lifetimes, their presences no longer
in the town where he met them so often. Before getting together with his
friends, Jinlong takes a nostalgic walk across campus, noting changes that
have occurred in the Law Quad since his student days there. In the middle of
the quadrangle, he smiles as he remembers one spring break when unknown
pranksters had used the flagpole to display a large banner with the words,
“Surrender, Dorothy.”
He continues walking, crossing the street, and now he’s drifting
through the concrete plaza next to the Student Union building – it’s the open
space where Galen’s group used to meet. Practicing outside in the winter
here was really good incentive to get the qi flowing through your hands, so
your fingers wouldn’t freeze, Jinlong remembers.
Although the weather has been rather warm today, he now feels an
icy presence in the air. Jinlong glances around, but sees nothing unusual. He
switches to the second sight, the energy sense, and finds the source of the
wrongness. The Finder for the Demon Queen steps into this world, on the
edge of the plaza, but Jinlong doesn’t know who it is. All he knows is that he
suddenly sees a Big ugly demon, although students pass through the area as
if the intruder isn’t present; they’re talking and texting and ignoring the
danger in their midst.
As the demon advances upon a group of oblivious undergraduates,
Jinlong steps into its path. “Make way, in the name of She Who Steals All
Breath,” the demon demands.
“Not likely,” Jinlong answers, and then recites from the book of
Revelation: “Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, Dominus Deus omnipotens.” Holy,
143
holy, holy, Lord God almighty. “Qui erat, et qui est, et qui venturus est.”
Who was, and who is, and who is to come.
Unimpressed, the Finder responds, “You’ve been misinformed.
Scripture doesn’t bother us.” Then the demon explodes into action, missing
with a punch at Jinlong’s throat but connecting with the follow-up stomp
that lands on his left foot. There’s a sickening crunch, but Jinlong manages
to fall away and roll back up to his feet, only to stumble backward as the
demon draws a double-edged sword from a scabbard slung across its
shoulders. Jinlong continues to retreat, limping toward the Cube in the
middle of the plaza. My foot’s not holding up well; that stomp probably
broke something, he observes as the demon follows him, the sword-edge
positioned to kill.
One corner of the Cube touches the ground, another corner points
to the sky, and the remaining corners extend out to the sides. The
contraption is
massive, but it’s mounted on a perfect vertical axis so that a small push can
set the whole sculpture spinning. Let’s hope this guy doesn’t know that,
Jinlong thinks, hobbling back further, just enough to lure the demon in. He
144
angles his body to lean his left side against the structure, as if propping
himself up, and his right side faces the approaching demon.
The creature’s sword rises in preparation for slashing down. Wait,
wait, . . . now! Jinlong’s left arm shoves the Cube away, as he jumps straight
toward the opponent. “Whuf,” the demon exhales as it stumbles from the
impact of the rotating Cube crashing into it from
behind; at the same time, Jinlong’s right palm strike smashes the creature’s
chest. The concussive shock of the internal strike ruptures the demon’s
heart, and it crumples to the ground, dark blood gushing from its mouth,
sword-point gouging a long scrape into the pavement.
Score one for the good guys, Jinlong thinks, then winces as the effect
of the injury starts to catch up with his body. His foot throbs in pain now,
and as he looks around, three more demons newly arrive at the edge of the
plaza. “Oh, that’s just unfair!” he complains to the heavens. He stoops to
pick up the sword the Finder had dropped, and then limps toward the
newcomers. The largest one steps between Jinlong and the others.
145
“Return to your own realm,” Jinlong demands, in between his
thoughts of my foot hurts, it hurts, it hurts.
“You bear the blade of the fallen hero Kozaris, but you wield it in
service to the evil Queen who murdered him,” the largest demon of the
group accuses. “We no longer bow down to the dread one. And we do not
obey her command to return to her domain.”
Huh? Jinlong wonders as he stumbles forward, bracing himself for
the imminent battle. But all three demons turn away and flee, easily
outdistancing him when he starts to limp after them. What just happened
here!?
146
Chapter 43: “It’s Become Personal”
“Jinlooong.” The hated name rasps in Wawa’s throat as she watches

the Finder’s demise, from across the mists that separate her from the human
realm. “It figures that he would find a way to foul things up.”
“Prepare to enter that world,” she announces to her guards and
retainers. “We invade in three days’ time!”
“But is that really the right thing to do, rushing in there without
spending more time to gather our forces?” asks Meihua.
“It’s become personal,” Wawa answers. “He destroyed my Finder.
And now I’ll squash him like a bug.”
“But I thought the idea was just to get our own people back and then
go home.”
“That was before it became personal,” Wawa hisses again. “The new
plan is to destroy him and annex that world in which he lives. Or take the
world first and then destroy him. Either way, we need to get rid of the
obstacle.”
147
Chapter 44: Personal Practice
Setting the energy field, the start of practice. Jinlong stands in a

neutral position with his feet parallel to each other and set directly under his
hips, big toe of each foot directed straight ahead. Slightly bending his knees,
while aligning the top of his head and the base of his spine in a vertical line
that –if extended – would touch the ground just behind a horizontal line
connecting his heels. His arms hanging down, slightly rounded to the sides,
palms facing inward toward his legs. Letting his eyes soften their focus as his
attention goes both outward and inward.
Gladius Dei sum, Jinlong murmurs to himself. The mantra triggers a
previously practiced pattern of cascading energy. Warm, humming current
comes in from above his head and below his feet. His central channel opens,
a column just in front of his spine, absorbing the rush of heat and tingling.
More pours in. His hands heat up, specks of red and white appearing on his
palms, and then red lines creeping to the middle of each fingertip. Jinlong
feels his central channel extending, elongating to both above and below his
physical body.
Each breath fans the heat. A line of warmth appears along his front
and back– along his face and throat and down the centerline of his torso, as
well as up along his sacrum and back and neck. The front and back surface
lines – conception vessel and governing vessel, Jinlong remembers their text
designations – converge along his face and at the perineum along the
bottom of his torso. The texts called it the small circle of heaven
(microcosmic orbit), describing the energy as traveling in a circuit along the
front and back paths. But Jinlong feels it as more of an elastic band
stretched over his head and torso, the front and back halves of the band
riding his breath as they move away from each other and then toward each
other.
148
Now the vertical current of energy overflows, still filling the central
channel but also spilling out above his head as well as down into the ground.
Jinlong is anchored by the column of energy; his upright body like a bar
magnet, with the spillover filling an oval space about an arm’s length around
him. The big circle of heaven (macrocosmic orbit), as the texts named it.
149
Chapter 45: Showdown
Hell is empty,
And all the devils are here.
-- Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, scene ii
Jinlong has tracked reports of odd disturbances, following each new

instance of demons who are terrified by the prospect of returning to the
world of their own ruler. Whoever she is, they’re just flat-out scared of her,
he ruminates. And now he finally rounds the hill that had hidden the Demon
Queen from view. He’s just fifteen feet away when he sees her robed and
hooded figure, and he issues his formal challenge: “Depart at once, O dread
one. You are not welcome here.”
The Queen slowly, almost lazily turns toward Jinlong, and draws back
her hood to reveal her face.
“You!” Jinlong gasps in a shock of recognition.
The Queen smiles, her face radiant. Jinlong’s attention drifts to
memories of meeting and parting and Kui Lee’s song, “I’ll Remember You,”
and – get back to business, he chides himself.
The Demon Queen’s eyes flash black, dark and cold and pitiless as
the depths of space. Her eyes lock onto Jinlong’s, pulling his gaze to her
own, and suddenly the heat of his life energy is leaving him, spilling out
through his eyes. “I should have done this years ago, rather than trying to
save you by leaving,” Wawa declares, “but it seems that some people just
won’t accept salvation. And there are no second chances.”
Jinlong’s martial training taught him to close the distance on an
attacker, so he reflexively steps forward on an angle, trying to change the
duel to a more conventional one. But the Queen, having been trained by
Jinlong previously, anticipates the maneuver – she steps back in perfectly
150
timed harmony with his motion, maintaining the same angle and separation,
never breaking the grip of her eyes on his.
Jinlong is hemorrhaging qi, and he marvels at how cold the area
around his heart is becoming. As well as how he can no longer move. Or
even speak. Ten seconds, twenty. Wawa continues to pull Jinlong's qi out
through his eyes and in through her own, stealing his life energy. In a
horrible flash of insight, Jinlong suspects that if he loses this duel, his energy
will never transform into the next stage, the one that usually occurs upon
death. It will instead remain as part of the Demon Queen’s personal
weaponry. Jinlong’s chest is freezing, and he still can’t break the gazehold.
Thirty seconds.
Desperate, he pulls as much energy as he can, down from the sky
and up through the ground. Forty five seconds, but now there’s a change as
Jinlong reaches equilibrium between the qi that Wawa steals from him and
the replacement that he draws from above and below. Jinlong’s heart begins
to warm again.
One minute that seems like twenty, and Jinlong finally approaches
normal body temperature. He draws upon even more energy until his field
flares like a giant bar magnet, and then he improvises, raising a wall of
energy between himself and the demon. Instantly, he’s able to break the
lethal eye contact, and then he . . . turns and flees.
“Return at once!” the Queen demands, outraged by the departure.
Yeah, right, like that’s going to happen, Jinlong mutters to himself.
He’s scrambled just twenty feet before he feels her pull again on his energy,
but without the eye contact, she can’t stop him. Jinlong builds up a bubble
of his own energy to buffer the demon’s pull as he continues to flee from the
scene. It’s undignified to run away like this, but I can’t stay to slug it out.
He’s energy-blind, unable to see the hot and cold spots that usually showed
151
up whenever he used “the sight.” But it might come back; until it does, he’ll
have to rely on ordinary physical senses. No wonder those demons are
refusing to return to their own realm, he ponders. And it’s Wawa. Who
knew? She was always strong with the skills I taught her, but this was
something else. It was like the “evil gongfu” that Galen once described, but
functioning through the eyes rather than through touch.
“This isn’t over!” the Queen yells at his retreating back.
“Tell me about it,” Jinlong mutters, neither stopping nor slowing.
Running had never been Wawa’s strength, so he’s safe for the moment. His
injured foot pays the price with each step, but he knows that he must warn
the others about the threat they face.
*****
Jinlong bursts through the doorway of Danner and Sherrie’s home,
drawing the attention of the handful of people gathered there. “It’s What’s-
Her-Face, Evil Incarnate, La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” he manages to say
before falling to the floor, gasping for breath.
“You mean that Wawa’s back?” Shell asks. “After all these years?”
“Yeah, but this time she’s evil, for real. And deadly.” Jinlong
explains about his battle with the Finder, the accusation of the other
demons, and his frenzied escape from the Demon Queen.
“Well, you know we never liked her anyway,” Danner says after
hearing the story.
“There are bigger concerns now than saying ‘I told you so,’” Jinlong
answers, “although you can keep saying it if it makes you feel better.”
“We told you so,” Sherrie declares.
“Ouch! But really, we need to halt the invasion she’s leading.”
“Wawa routinely resorted to fallacies such as post hoc, ergo propter
hoc and ad misericordiam in her attempts at persuasion,” Kage recalls.
152
“Oh, that would be so annoying,” Suen comments, “especially when
done by someone who should know better.”
“Focus, people!” Jinlong says in desperation. “We’ve got a demon
invasion to stop!”
Sherrie responds with an etymological observation: “Hey, did you
know that daimon previously referred to a guardian spirit, not necessarily
something evil?”
Jinlong starts to thump his own forehead against the floor.
“Okay, okay,” Danner says, his hands waving in invitation to calm
down. “We’ll contact as many people as we can today, then meet at your
place tomorrow morning. Nine o’clock?”
“Sounds good; see you then,” Jinlong says, relieved, as he gets up
from the floor.
153
Chapter 46: Calming
Nightfall at My Window
Daylight dying – what remains?

Only tree branch hands clawing pane.
I sit and rock.
Panic at window gnomelike creeps,
Steals in through crevice – a draft, a chill –
Shadows clutch and reach.
On the floor in a corner of the room,
Chin touches chest touches knee.
Breath catches, heart pounds. Don’t know.
Too dark to see.
Just sit and rock, and sit and rock.
-- from the Jinlong analects
He’s too tightly wound to sleep. Channel-surfing brought nothing

worth watching on TV. Randomly skimming through the five books beside
his futon likewise failed to hold his attention. Getting up and pacing through
the apartment just makes things worse, raising the tension to a higher level.
“I need to calm down,” Jinlong says to himself, but his heart and breath and
thoughts keep racing. “This is ridiculous. I should be able to find some way
to bring myself back under control.” He cycles again between skimming,
pacing, and channel-surfing, but that brings only more restlessness.
Then – finally – he thinks of adapting something from training. He
goes back to the futon and sits crossed-legged, knees and feet resting on the
floor. Slows his breath over the course of a minute. Eyes closed, palms of
his hands lightly covering his ears, index and middle fingers alternating in
lightly tapping at the base of his skull. Thump-thump, thump-thump;
gradually gaining a more definite cadence, quicker and quicker, until the
beats mimic the rhythm of his own heart, thump-THUMP, thump-THUMP;
now even more primal, THUMP-THUMP, THUMP-THUMP, like what a fetus
154
hears of its mother’s heartbeat, and all else fades out. Resting in the dark,
reassured by the steady noise. And now, with the thumping providing an
ongoing beat, Jinlong remembers bits of the Heart Sutra: “No eyes, ears,
nose, tongue, body, mind. No feelings, ideas, formation, and
consciousness.” A couple more minutes, THUMP -THUMP, then he lies back
and rolls halfway onto his right side as he passes into unconsciousness.
155
Warriors
Closing
Energy is built up and moved around during each practice session.
At the conclusion of a session, the energy should be reabsorbed into the
body. Theory says this sort of closing exercise prevents qi from either
leaking out of the body or getting stuck where it shouldn’t. For example, the
brain shouldn’t store large amounts of qi; lightly rubbing along the head
helps to bring the qi back down rather than letting it get “stuck” in the brain.
Headaches can sometimes indicate that excess qi needs to be dispersed from
the head. A parallel in modern research is the observation that some
headaches, particularly migraines, occur when blood flow into the brain
increases.
Self-massage along the meridians is one way to facilitate energy
absorption. Using the fingers and palm of the hand to stroke along the
directional flow of the meridians brings the qi back into the body after the
earlier exercises have circulated qi at the surface. This is especially good for
mitigating a feeling of being “spaced out” that can result from energy work.
Another method is to line up the laogong points of the hands with
each other and place them over the lower dantian. This alignment projects
energy through the hands into the lower dantian, which is a major storage
area for the qi.
156
Chapter 48: The Sermon in the Apartment
The sword that takes life, the sword that gives life.
-- Yagyu Munenori
Preparing for battle. In the background, the song “Red Rubber Ball”
plays repetitively – a bouncy melody accompanied by cynical lyrics,
establishing the right mood. Jinlong stands with his feet shoulder-width
apart, going through the reverse breathing: inhale, his sacrum sinks down
and his abdomen pulls in, then exhale, his abdomen pushes out. Warming
the mingmen point between the kidneys with each inhale, and heating the
dantian with each exhale. Like blowing on coals to fan a flame, one of his
teachers would say. Letting the heat condense in his dantian, then building it
upward in a column. Draw the breath in, push it down, extend the heat
upward.
The column of heat responds to Jinlong’s will, intensifying as he
visualizes it taking the shape of a sword – his dantian where the hilt meets
the blade, and the tip of the sword at eye level. “Gladius Dei sum,” he
intones, I am the sword of God. Though he realizes the sword is too long and
light to be like the blocky gladius of the ancient Roman foot soldiers.
Actually it’s more like a Chinese jian, the flexible double-edged straight
sword, but I don’t know how to put that into Latin. Argh, put distractions out
of mind, back to the meditation. “Gladius Dei sum.” Strengthening his
energy by building the internal sword hotter and brighter, sweat coating his
limbs as he draws the breath in, pushes it down, extends the heat upward.
Reveling in the energy coursing through his body, Jinlong turns his
attention to the prospect of facing the enemy. He steps into the living room,
where the others have arrived.
*****
157
They gather to repel the invasion of the Demon Queen. Jinlong looks
at the small assembly of his friends and longest-term students, appreciating
their presence. “We are warriors, and we are healers,” he says. “We
participate in the paradox of fighting and healing. It brings to mind the
Hindu god Shiva, the destroyer-creator.”
“Or as Teacher Jay characterized the dance of complementary
opposites,” Jinlong continues, “‘yin and yang, yang and yin.’ We see this in
the transformation of the embodiment of compassion. At one time, it was
the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, a man who was a disciple of the Buddha.
Then when Buddhism entered China, the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara
became known by the name Guanyin. The popular imagination attached a
more feminine presence to the qualities of mercy and compassion, so over
time, Guanyin became female. She became the refuge of those who needed
a maternal sort of presence. Especially childless couples, who were faced
with the prospect of extinction of the family line – which would be a
catastrophe in the culture of Old China.”
Jinlong pauses to take a breath, then another, and then resumes: “A
friend of mine, who’s a philosophy professor and a rabbi, mentioned an
ancient idea that when two evenly matched warriors go into battle against
each other, the more sorrowful one will win. There is strength in
compassion, a strength that infuses itself into both combat and healing.
“This might sound strange, even self-contradictory,” Jinlong
concludes, “but today, we are warriors of Guanyin.”
In silent agreement, they all step out from the apartment, in search
of those who are intruding upon their world.
158
Chapter 49: Salve Atque Vale
Danner and Sherrie place themselves back-to-back as they carve a

swath of mayhem through the royal guards of the demon Queen. A boar-
tusked monstrosity with serpent’s tail roars a challenge as it bears down
upon the couple, but then hesitates when confronted by Sherrie’s rendition
of the glare of death. In the next moment, Danner’s broadsword sweeps
through the creature’s neck, separating head from body.
Another of the boar/serpent hybrids swings its tail at Suen’s
midsection. She turns to the left to let the strike miss its target, then grabs
the tail and pulls it in the same direction that it’s already traveling. The
maneuver sends the demon sprawling past Suen, but on a route that ends up
knocking Kage aside. “Sorry, my bad!” Suen yells out to her comrade, and
then she’s ducking beneath a spear-thrust, skipping across the ground
toward her new assailant, and crushing the miscreant with a double palm
strike to its ribs and head.
Jinlong presses forward, accompanied by a few of his senior
students. They know that the only way to stem the demon tide is to defeat
the Queen who commands the invasion, before more of her army can cross
into their world to join the fray. Jinlong cartwheels over the ground-
sweeping scythe swung by one of the guards, timing the technique so that
when his feet reach the apex of their trajectory, they kick the demon’s head.
At the next instance – as his bodyweight still rests on his hands, his feet still
above his head – Jinlong flexes and straightens his arms, pushing off from the
ground to augment his kicking backward against the guard’s chest, sending
the unbalanced creature crashing into two of its fellows. The unorthodox
move clears a path to the evil monarch. His feet now back on the ground,
Jinlong heads toward the Queen as his students turn to do battle with the
guards.
159
*****
They face each other again. And once again, Wawa the demon’s
eyes turn into twin pools of solid black. But this time, Jinlong touches
together the tips of his thumb, index finger, and middle finger, and he’s
suddenly immune to the demon’s pull on his energy. “What sorcery is this?”
she exclaims. Jinlong just smirks, giddy with relief that he remembered the
technique for quickly sealing his energy field.
“No matter. I shall vanquish you in the more traditional way,”
declares the Demon Queen, “but if you surrender immediately, I shall let you
live.”
“Mayhap thou shouldst sojourn to the theological realm of eternal
punishment,” Jinlong taunts.
“I’m the Queen of Hell, you idiot,” Wawa replies, a sneer distorting
the exquisite line of her lips.
“Oh, yeah, I forgot. Wawa, go home.” Jinlong could feel the Demon
Queen’s rage boiling over. Any moment now, he thinks, making himself
breathe steadily and letting his eyes slip into the soft focus that allows his
peripheral vision to detect any movement. Just a little push is all that’s
needed. “Or are you just all talk, like back when?” he asks. Her self-control
snaps, and she lunges forward in full attack.
*****
These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume.
-- Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, scene vi
A couple of minutes have passed – a long, long time in a fight.

Jinlong has landed some strikes, but not enough to do serious damage. Nor
enough to discourage Wawa from continuing to press her attack, which has
160
taken a significant toll on his body. Jinlong overreacts to a feint, raising an
arm too high in response to the semblance of a punch to his throat, and now
he’s sent reeling as Wawa smashes a palm strike to his lower ribs and follows
up by driving the tip of her elbow into his sternum. That just burst
something inside, he realizes, as he coughs up spots of blood. I should never
have taught her that elbow technique. The demon’s foot flashes in an
upward arc; Jinlong brings his hand up again to block, but the force of
Wawa’s kick knocks Jinlong’s own arm hard into his face, nearly putting him
down on the ground.
I won’t be standing for long, he realizes. I have to do something to
end this fight, and soon. Time seems to slow as he remembers an aphorism
about the advantage of old age and treachery. That would be good, he
thinks. And then his memory latches onto one of the after-class sessions at
the café, when Teacher Jay was holding court: “Taijiquan grew as a response
to the other martial arts,” the teacher had proclaimed. “It was the
intellectual’s response. It said, my body doesn’t have to be strong. My mind
is strong.”
Think, there has to be something. I almost got in a good strike when
she rushed forward the first time. How do I get her to do that again? He
now seizes on a moment from a couple of decades ago, when Wawa
commented on hating winter, in part because of the weight that she gained
at that time of year, each year. And that had been almost the last time
they’d seen each other, until their encounter a few days ago. Okay, I really
hope this works.
Jinlong positions himself to exaggerate the impression of the
considerable damage that he’s in fact sustained, bending to place his hands
on his knees as if too weak to stand upright. “Hao jiu bu jian,” he wheezes at
his adversary. Long time, no see. “Zhen pang, a?” You’ve become really fat,
161
haven’t you? Enraged, Wawa rushes forward, hands reaching for Jinlong’s
throat, determined to end his voice forever. Jinlong straightens up and
creates an opening by slipping his hands to the inside of his opponent’s arms,
while stepping forward to slam his shoulder, arm, and hip against the
centerline of Wawa’s body. The collision knocks both fighters off their feet.
*****
Wawa the demon lay twisted and broken, her lifeblood seeping into
the sand. Upon hearing a painful, racking cough from nearby along the
ground, she realizes that Jinlong is still alive but won’t be for long. “We
would have been . . . very good together,” he gasps, then chokes on his own
blood, gurgling his final breath. A small smile plays across Wawa’s lips. “I
know,” she whispers to the dead body of her enemy, and then she too
expires.
162
Chapter 50: Icarus Rising
Late upon a moonlit night, I saw Icarus rise from the sea.
From the upswell of waters he came,
Treading a roadway of shimmer on ocean,
Shrouded in dark splintered edges.
Hollow-eyed, haunted, tunic and flesh both torn.
And clinging to back and shoulders and arms,
Broken bits of wooden strips,
Framework for waxen wings melted ages ago.
The past returned in that tortured gaze when Icarus rose from the sea.
And I saw
Feathers slipping away and the mad pinwheeling of the sky,
Daedalus reaching, too distant,
Upward rush of the waves.
Then a sob, no more.
Except, somewhere, a murmur of waves
Touching soft on the shore,
And a whispered plaint, “But I flew.”
The air was still on the moonlit night when Icarus rose from the sea.
Stepping to shore, crossing the sand, treading on pebbles, then
Scrape of sandals on pavement, no longer the sound of the waves,
Banished again by the sun, for he
Seemed to grow fainter and smaller yet
As the night faded from sky.
But again his voice softly: “I flew.”
-- from the Jinlong analects
163
Epilogue
Weiguang the demon’s daughter sits in contemplation, streamers of

light and dark crackling through and around her. “Weiwei, you need to rest,”
her aunt cautions. “Even your mother allowed herself some down time
between practice sessions.”
The mention of her mother startles Weiguang into dropping her hold
on the energies, which dissipate into the ground and the air. “Auntie, what
happened to her?”
Meihua takes a slow breath before replying. “Wawa struggled with
her dual nature. Finally, she couldn’t hold the hunger in check anymore.”
“It’s like that with me sometimes,” Weiguang says in a near-whisper.
“There’s something cold inside that keeps demanding to be fed.” Her eyes
flash black, as if all pupil. “And I don’t know what to do about it.”
*****
Ian visualizes exhaling through his fingertips, sending out qi just as
his Uncle Jinlong had taught years ago. Across the training hall, Ellen holds
out her hands, receiving the energy that Ian transmits. “Good one. Feels like
water energy,” she says, before sending the qi back to her brother. This
time, he shapes and condenses the qi into a ball between his hands, then
throws it across the room. Ellen moves her arms as if catching a basketball,
leading the qi to ground through her bones, then bouncing it back from the
ground to return it to Ian. Back and forth they go, their hands getting
brighter with each repetition, the air shimmering between them.
164
Selected Bibliography
Many sources address the topic of healing, with varying levels of authenticity
and utility. Following are some that I’ve found to be useful. For each listing,
the author’s personal name is placed first, followed by the family name.
Janelle Durham, “Some Scientific Support for Energy Healing,”

http://www.transitiontoparenthood.com/janelle/energy/support.htm (cited
with permission of the author). Durham has a background in medical social
work, as well as being certified as a doula and a childbirth educator. This
page of her website presents summaries from several sources regarding
physics phenomena associated with energy healing, and it also summarizes
results of some clinical studies. On another page of her site, Durham notes
that she isn’t an energy healer and so doesn’t conduct energy-healing
sessions. (Update: This document no longer seems to be accessible.)
Janelle Durham, “Some Research Findings on the Efficacy of Spiritual

Healing,”
http://www.transitiontoparenthood.com/janelle/energy/researchchart.htm
(cited with permission of the author). This page of Durham’s website
presents a table summarizing data from another source regarding some
clinical studies of energy healing. The summary includes both favorable and
unfavorable outcomes, as well as noting concerns about the design of some
of the studies. On another page of her site, Durham notes that she isn’t an
energy healer and so doesn’t conduct energy-healing sessions. (Update:
This document no longer seems to be accessible.)
Michael Reed Gach, Acupressure’s Potent Points: A Guide to Self-Care for

Common Ailments (Bantam Books 1990). The text contains protocols for
working on some basic conditions by pressing on particular acupuncture
points. This book includes illustrations that are good at locating points by
their position in relation to the bones; also included are illustrations showing
the position of points in relation to muscles.
Richard Gordon, Quantum-Touch: The Power to Heal (revised ed., North

Atlantic Books 2002). Gordon apparently commits the sin of saying
“frequency” when he’s actually referring to intensity. But his book contains
some good basic exercises for energy healing, as well as stories of his
experiences. Of the resources listed in this bibliography, Quantum Touch
might be the most accessible “how-to” discussion for readers who don’t
have prior background in energy healing.
165
Shmuel Halevi, “The meridians of acupuncture,”
http://www.acumedico.com/meridians.htm (cited with permission of the
author). Halevi is an acupuncturist. This page of his site provides links to his
diagrams of the various meridians – you can view the meridians individually,
or choose to view all of the meridians that pass through a particular area of
the body (head, arm, leg, or torso). The page also includes a link to another
of his pages, where he matches particular acupuncture points to the
conditions that they can be used to treat.
Liu Hong and Paul Perry, The Healing Art of Qigong (Warner Books 1997). As
I understand it, the lead author’s family name is Hong. Yet all of the
endorsements at the start of the book refer to him as “Dr. Liu,” which makes
me wonder about how well the endorsement-writers actually know him. But
anyway, Hong describes a three-part approach to healing: energy
transmission from healer to patient, ongoing qigong exercise by the patient,
and nutrition and herbs. The first half of the text mentions some of his
qigong training, undertaken while he was also practicing Western medicine
at a hospital in China. The second half describes a basic set of qigong
practice, then shows some qigong exercises targeted for particular
conditions, and also discusses some nutritional and herbal remedies.
Shou-yu Liang and Wen-Ching Wu, Qigong Empowerment: A Guide to

Medical, Taoist, Buddhist, and Wushu Energy Cultivation (The Way of the
Dragon Publishing 1997). Liang (the lead author) is a very accomplished and
experienced teacher of the internal martial and healing arts. As indicated by
the title, the text explains exercises from several qigong systems spanning a
range of healing, meditative, and martial uses.
Daniel P. Reid, The Tao of Health, Sex, and Longevity: A Modern Practical
Guide to the Ancient Way (Fireside 1989). Reid describes a range of health
and meditative practices, including loosening exercises, breathing methods,
nutrition, sexual practices, and energy flow. His explanations are sensible.
The nutrition section of the book describes food treatments for particular
ailments.
Rachel Naomi Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead
Books 1996). Remen is a physician who has served as director of several
medical programs, and who developed an interest in aspects of
alternative/complementary healing. Her books present wonderful (in
several senses of that word) anecdotes of personal experience, examining
the ethos of healing from the perspectives of patients as well as doctors.
166
Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather’s Blessings: Stories of Strength,
Refuge, and Belonging (Riverhead Books 2000). More stories about healing.
Zhi Gang Sha, Power Healing: The Four Keys to Energizing Your Body, Mind,
and Spirit (Harper San Francisco 2002). I hesitated to include this book, in
light of oddities mentioned by a friend who attended a workshop where Sha
presented some of his subsequent teachings. But the meditation and energy
healing methods in this book are interesting and effective enough that I just
couldn’t leave it out of the bibliography. Sha asserts an idea of equilibrium
between matter inside the cells of one’s body and energy outside the cells.
But of course, matter is present both inside and outside the cells, and energy
is also present both inside and outside the cells.
Fritz Frederick Smith, Inner Bridges: A Guide to Energy Movement and Body
Structure (Humanics Publishing Group 1986). The author is a medical doctor
and osteopathic doctor. This book is densely packed with information, which
makes it slow reading but good for people who already have some
background in energy healing. Smith’s emphasis on the relation between
body structure and energy flow is particularly striking when he examines the
energy of the chakras in light of the shape of the skeletal structure.
167
Playlists
Following are songs that characterize some of the story’s characters. Songs
are listed alphabetically by title, followed by performer.
Danner
“Second Piano Concerto” (Rachmaninoff), Vladimir Horowitz, Artur
Rubinstein
Ellen and Ian

“Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall,” Simon & Garfunkel
“Gypsy,” Suzanne Vega
Jay
“Man of Determination,” George Lam, Jackie Chan
“My Life,” Billy Joel
“My Way,” Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley
Jinlong
“Don’t Answer Me,” The Alan Parsons Project
“Don’t Ask Me Why,” The Eurythmics
“I’ll Remember You,” Kuiokalani Lee
“Red Rubber Ball,” The Cyrkle
“They Were You” (The Fantastiks)
Leon
“Silent Moon,” Jia Peng Fang
Sherrie
“Toxic,” Britney Spears
Wawa
“Bad Things,” Jace Everett
“Behind Blue Eyes,” The Who
“Caramel,” Suzanne Vega
“Only Happy When It Rains,” Garbage
“She Bangs,” Ricky Martin
“Zombie,” The Cranberries
168

AWGH Format 7

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

AWGH Format 7

Uploaded by

Copyright:

A Warrior’s Guide to Healing

Story by Bruce Ching

The methods described in this work are not a replacement for

Copyright © 2012 Bruce Ching

The author, Bruce Ching, can be reached at his e-mail address,

Although presented as fiction, this work is an energy-healer’s

Following is a list of some commonly-used terms involved in the Chinese

baihui (pai hui) by hway Literally, “hundred meet.” An acupuncture point

laogong (lao kung) laow goong Literally, “palace of work.” An acupuncture

mingmen The term refers to an acupuncture point on the back, directly

qi (ch’i) chee Usually translated as “energy” or “breath.”

yi (i) ee Intention, although the term is often literally translated as “mind.”

yongquan (yung ch’uan) yoong choo-en Literally, “bubbling spring.” The

Overview: Foundations of Power

On an internet taijiquan message board, Jinlong “meets” someone

The classic writings on taijiquan prominently mention relaxation and

Charging Your Hands

Two such opposed kings encamp them still

-- Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, scene iii

Yin and Yang Energies

“Again,” said Jinlong.

Jinlong is a fixture in Jay’s class, having formally been installed in the

Someone asks about whether qi-healing and related practices are

Intro. nights and practitioner nights at Grey’s house, opportunities

Jinlong’s new acquaintance, Val, has been experiencing recurring

Yin must not leave yang,

-- from the Teacher Jay analects, construing the taijiquan classics

Much of Jinlong’s approach to training and teaching has been shaped

Qi exchange through the hands

Qi exchange through other points

Jinlong stands before the old

Jinlong now raises his

“Could you say something about the meridians?” a student asks.

Meridians and the energy field

Using a few acupuncture points

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;

One of Jinlong’s colleagues at the law school has been diagnosed

Reiki practitioners night at Grey’s house. “I wanted you two to

Teacher Galen explains his recent self-experiment in qi-healing. “I

“There’s been a lot of stuff written recently about sexual qigong,” a

Pulling Energy, Rather Than Pushing Energy

At a weekend workshop. Jinlong has asked for correction of his

Jinlong remembers Teacher Jay mentioning an article about

Browsing through the Alternative Healing section of the Borders

While teaching English during the year in Wuhan, Jinlong continued

Zhan zhuang: the practice of making body-alignment adjustments

Cancer Treatment Summary

“Jinlooong.” The hated name rasps in Wawa’s throat as she watches

Setting the energy field, the start of practice. Jinlong stands in a

-- Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, scene ii

Jinlong has tracked reports of odd disturbances, following each new

Daylight dying – what remains?

-- from the Jinlong analects

He’s too tightly wound to sleep. Channel-surfing brought nothing

Danner and Sherrie place themselves back-to-back as they carve a

-- Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, scene vi

A couple of minutes have passed – a long, long time in a fight.

But again his voice softly: “I flew.”

-- from the Jinlong analects

Weiguang the demon’s daughter sits in contemplation, streamers of

Janelle Durham, “Some Scientific Support for Energy Healing,”

Janelle Durham, “Some Research Findings on the Efficacy of Spiritual

Michael Reed Gach, Acupressure’s Potent Points: A Guide to Self-Care for

Richard Gordon, Quantum-Touch: The Power to Heal (revised ed., North

Shou-yu Liang and Wen-Ching Wu, Qigong Empowerment: A Guide to

Ellen and Ian

You might also like