Qigong as a Complement to Psychoanalysis

Posted on September 11, 2015

By Dr. Joan White

“Qigong is to pull out the suffering at its root” – Dr. Yang Yang, Director of The Center for Taiji and QiGong Studies

My daughter refers to it as the day I hit myself on the head with a rock.  I had unconsciously reacted to the death of a loved one in a destructive way; after working too hard in the garden, I fell and severely cut my head on a rock.  I thought that through work, writing a dissertation and the support of family, I was coping well with the loss.  But, here I was without words, being dominated by the death drive to join my loved one.

I am a student of the mind who is aware of the on-going struggle between the life and death drives.  Although I do not feel that death is a pathology – it is simply a part of life – I do believe that we can enjoy a more rich experience of life when we become aware of the ways we unconsciously sabotage ourselves, thereby avoiding those repetitions.

When I fell, it signaled to me that I did not have the availability of words to communicate my feelings, so I chose Qigong to help me work with a body/mind process.  This served to propel my awareness of the unconscious emotions to a place of understanding and acceptance. Read the rest of this entry »