With Qigong for Health and Vitality coming up next month, this month’s blog is inspired by a question I recently received about whether or not Qigong can help improve autoimmune conditions. Spoiler alert: the short answer is yes. But let’s unpack why a little bit so we can understand how both autoimmunity affects our bodies, and how Qigong might quiet its effects.
Simply put autoimmunity refers to a number of conditions where the body’s immune system attacks itself. This can be any part of the body including the brain, digestive tract, blood, etc. We know many of these common conditions as lupus, multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, colitis, psoriasis, and many, many more.
Autoimmunity does not appear at birth, but rather, some time after. Although the exact mechanisms for why the body attacks itself are still not 100% clear, we know that there are several factors that may bring it on, including diet, lifestyle, environmental factors, and family history of autoimmunity. Women are far more likely to develop these diseases, with four out of five autoimmune patients being female. Often, these conditions can come about in mid-life, but they can also happen at any time. One of the best theories that I’ve heard for why autoimmunity occurs, in laymen’s terms at least, is basically the idea of the straw that broke the camel’s back. We go through our lives being subject to one stressor or another, and for some people, at some point, there is just one too many, and autoimmunity ensues.
Which brings us to how Qigong can be beneficial for these conditions. I’ll spare you a long discussion about how we see autoimmunity through a Chinese lens and keep it simple (But I’ll be going into more detail in my soon to be released on demand course, Qigong for Metabolic Health!). Anybody with one of these diseases will tell you that it always gets worse with stress. Major stress or minor, it doesn’t matter, they will experience flare-ups of what they are suffering from. This blog already houses a lot of posts about stress, its effect on the body, and how Qigong can mediate it. You can check them out here and here. Basically, any stress response is going to engage your sympathetic nervous system to some degree. This is your fight or flight nervous system that is designed to get you away from the bear that is trying to eat you. The bigger the stress response, the bigger the immune reaction and resulting inflammation.
Mindfulness practices like Qigong mold and change those stress responses, making us, and our bodies less reactive to the stressors around them, whether it’s the bear, the standard American diet, the 2024 election, or anything else that has the potential to be harmful to us. The more we learn and train how ground ourselves, calm our minds, and enter into a deep Qigong state, the more our immune systems remain quiet, keeping inflammation in our bodies at a lower level. It has been such a joy to have students tell me how their symptoms have been in remission for months or years since they started their Qigong practice.
While I could jabber on for hours about just how beneficial Qigong can be for our health, if any of this piques your curiosity, the best way to learn more is to try it for yourself. There’s still time to take advantage of the early registration discount, as well as a variety of ways to take the course: live, remote streaming, or recorded.
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