Neigong with Ana
My personal experience with healing trauma through neigong and how it shaped my approach
Trauma and Qigong
Reading "The Body Keeps the Score" by Bessel van der Kolk in 2021, I learned how trauma imprints itself in our nervous system, leaving us with anxiety and depression, causing autoimmune deseases and other serious conditions.
Van der Kolk and other researchers of trauma (like Prof. Ruth Lanius) explain that traumatized people’s brain is rewired for hyper-vigilance and stress. Their Default Mode Network, a group of brain regions that are more active in calm states of daydreaming or introspection and play a key role in self-referential thought, memory recall, and planning for the future, is inaccessible to them without traumatic stimulation.
Over 30 years of trauma research informs us on the necessity to increase the window of tolerance in traumatized people and their capacity for self-regulation. We do it by engaging in rhythmical, physical activities while connecting with others. Van der Kolk specifically refers to thousands of people practicing qigong together in Chinese parks.
The Practice and Mental Health
I started my practice online during the first Covid-19 lockdown and immediately sensed positive shifts in my mental state, supported by the community I gained in group classes.
Weeks into regular classes, I began facing my anxiety and hyper-vigilance manifested in the way I moved and breathed. Within a few months, for the first time in my adult life, I started clearly seeing how my psychological pain shows physically. In two years of regular classes, I felt at home in my body, ready to finish my psychotherapy.
Practice allowed me to start healing my complex PTSD at the level of physiological stress-response.
Dealing with the tragic loss of a close friend a year later, I embraced the heartbreak and stayed with it. A daily hour of practice stabilized me and gave my shocked body the necessary break for rest and regeneration. Several severely destabilizing events followed, including the war, the divorce, and the loss of my job. I was able to navigate my life through heartache and change. I could fully rely on myself and had hope.
The practice gave me tools for self-regulation that helped me change my entire life for the better.
My Approach
I grew up in a family of medical doctors, and it somewhat shaped the way I approach practicing Internal Arts. Instead of working with qi that I cannot trace, see, or test (for now), I work with something tangible: physical sensations, scientific data, gravity. This is why neigong is the practice that I rely on.
Scientifically speaking, we work on regaining interoception and proprioception. We experience the complex interdependencies between the physical and the psychological. We observe how emotions drive our behavior and how identifying with the mind leads to suffering. We learn self-compassion, knowing it changes our hormonal response — reducing inflammation, releasing stress, and raising our vitality.
Still, over the years, I've learned to humble myself before the unknown and trust in my body's internal wisdom. I'm trying to walk the middle path between the inexplicable and the objective science, drawing from both while going with the flow.
Essentially, I'm not just teaching the forms or sequences but rather self-decoding. My role is to gently guide each person back to themselves, helping them to tune into their body's natural capacity for self-healing.
Research supports the effectiveness of qigong (and by extension neigong) for working with anxiety, depression, (complex) PTSD, and other challenging conditions. But most importantly, gradually and quietly, it brings us back to true love, the ultimate force at the root of all life on Earth.
RELATED RESEARCH
Qigong Improves Quality of Life in Women Undergoing Radiotherapy for Breast Cancer
The effects of tai chi mind-body approach on the mechanisms of gulf war illness: an umbrella review
The body does not keep the score: trauma, predictive coding, and the restoration of metastability