Medicine of Flow Orientation Call

Pavi Mehta: So what to say about Cynthia? She is an unusually accomplished person, and an unusually humble one. She's a renowned author, a gifted physician, a riveting teacher. She's also playful and poetic and able to bridge the worlds of science and spirit and healing practices like Qigong in a way that is simultaneously practical and profound.

And her life is very full, and somehow her presence is very spacious. I don't know how she does that. I remember during a difficult period, Cynthia, I was telling you once about all the different things I was holding. And I could feel the deep care of your listening, and at the end, you said something like, "Pavi, I wonder, instead of saying, I'm holding this hard thing, what would it feel like for you to say, I'm beholding it?" And it was such a gentle, perfect invitation, and it just gently unclenched something in me, and I feel like that's...

that little exchange really, to me, really embodies your essence. And I've noticed over the years of our friendship that there's a quality of depth, a consistency and sincerity in your inner practice that brings a kind of fluidity into your way of being. And there's an attention that you have that just shines through. You're the doctor who knows how to be a patient.

You're the teacher who's never stopped learning, the author of two memoirs, Brave New Medicine and the more recent book, The Medicine of Flow, that this pod takes its name from. Many of you here, and also many of you who applied to the Pod and may not be on this call right now, described Cynthia and her way and her work as a beacon that you stumbled upon in the darkness of your own health challenges. As a grounding voice whose guidance and insights helped make sense of the wilderness. That can be complex illness.

In their own words, writing about what brought them to the pod, one person simply wrote. I am a cherisher of Cynthia Lee. And I have a feeling it won't be long before all of us are, too, and more than that, I think. We're going to become cherishers of what you cherish, Cynthia.

The field. And all that it brings. Over to you.

Cynthia Li: Wow, thank you so much, Pavi, and thank you so much, Madhu. You guys are two beautiful presences to follow. Well, what I really hope for this call, and more broadly for this… The 7-day pod. Is that we all learn to become cherishers of ourselves.

So you become your own cherisher and deepen into that experience of what is even you. Who… who am I? So, as Pavi mentioned, the inspiration for the 7 Day Pod is a book I wrote. This book began as a series of intimate letters written to my younger self, and this was the me now, writing to the me of 2017.

And this was when I was amid a really, really deep health crisis. I was teetering on the edge of life and death, and I was very uncomfortable in my body. I was also terrified. I was terrified of dying, more terrified of suffering for a long time.

And perhaps most of all, I was terrified of not knowing. And to not know at this point confounded me, because I had come quite a long way from a debilitating autoimmune condition that had started 10 years earlier. And it had left me housebound for 2 years with 2 young children. And in that decade that followed, this complex illness would force me beyond my conventional training in internal medicine to broader frameworks of healing.

I went into integrative and functional medicine, complementary medicine, intuitive medicine even. And it also took me into Qigong. And as many of you know, qi means energy, gong means to cultivate. And so I began to learn how to cultivate energy, or so I thought.

I was trusting that this practice was rooted in thousands of years of tradition. I was trusting that it was serving as a foundation of martial arts, acupuncture, and herbs, frameworks that I began to relate to on a more practical level. And I began to practice this every day. It was very pragmatic, it was very much a mind-body rehabilitation for these internal systems that I was trying to heal.

So first, I began for 15 minutes, and then 20, and then 30. And I was receiving a lot of tangible benefits. I was healing, and I was sharing whatever I learned with my patients and with larger groups. And all of this kept me intrinsically motivated.

Until health crisis number two. So, that was 2017. And I found myself lying on the couch one night. In this very, very brittle state, and I was staring into the black sky, and I was just realizing how everything I had learned about in healing, which was quite a lot, it was just this tiny little drop in this vast universe.

I knew then, not just conceptually, but in my full being, that what I knew was nothing. And for me, this was probably a very necessary unraveling because I surrendered. I let go of this doctor's mind that was in control of everything. I let go of the need, and truly, I began to understand I had no capacity to know.

And so what unfolded afterward was that I began to surrender, and I was not surrendering into freefall. It turned out I was surrendering into this practice, Qigong, that I had been practicing for 4 years at this point. With the simple and gentle movements that you are going to be experiencing in this pod, right? Because I couldn't really get off the couch, couldn't really get out of my bedroom.

And this was really because I couldn't do much else. I wasn't seeking any enlightenment, any expansiveness, I just couldn't do much else. So, I wanted temporary relief from my symptoms. But something began to stir deep within.

I began practicing the same simple guided meditations and movements that I had been doing earlier, and I want to first express gratitude to my many teachers, primarily Master Mingtong Gu and Master Wei Qifeng. And this time, in a state of surrender, I was dropping deeper into the energy and consciousness dimensions of Qigong, which is where its true power lies. In the months that followed, I was still doing a lot to support my health. But strangely, and without explanation, there was this deep part of me that felt calm.

I felt centered. I was an observer in the middle of this tornado of symptoms and medical appointments, while also inhabiting my body, inhabiting myself. In a way that I had so often avoided. I began to experience this kind of floaty quality to my days, and this felt very different from the effortful effort that I had been making in the past.

I felt much more clarity, simplicity, not just in my healing, but as I began to heal and participate more in my life, this sense of ease began to ripple out into my relationships, my work. And then, even quiet joy. With things like washing the dishes and scrubbing the toilets. So, it would take me some time, but I began to realize that the flow state isn't just psychological.

It can be embodied, and it needs to be embodied. For healing. Somehow, I hadn't learned to really cultivate that before, or to sustain it outside of my practice sessions. I also learned that flow is not just reserved for elite athletes or gifted musicians.

It was available to me, even as I was struggling to make it from my bed to the bathroom. I learned that science was emerging that could explain some of these phenomena. In neurophysiology, flow can be correlated with heart coherence, or simply coherence. And the effects of coherence through flow methods and systems like Qigong can be measured subjectively and objectively.

The more I began to embody flow, the more I realized I had been understanding healing, which shares the same root word as wholeness, on much too small a scale. That I can embody a much larger body of life, that the larger whole can support my healing, and that my healing can support the larger whole. Cultivating flow does not mean, unfortunately, much to my chagrin, and to many of my patients, that there won't be challenges, right? Life continues.

And often, when life throws me another one, I will catch myself thinking, wait, I thought it was done, and wait, I'm living in flow. But what Qigong has really taught me is that healing is like living. Right? It is living with greater abundance to who I am and to the nature of life.

For me, what makes it special to be exploring Flow Methods right now, in this day and age, is the science and technology that are available. They have opened the door for the wisdom of Qigong for me to be accessed and applied in new ways. Science can make abstract concepts like energy fields and coherence more relatable, and technologies like this digital platform, which we can love and hate, can connect us like never before. So, when we move and flow in the quiet of our personal spaces, we are directly connecting to a collective field.

So, this was the inspiration for my book, and this is what we will explore together this week. An introduction to the concepts, but more importantly, to the experience. This 7-day Pod is just a taste of what might be possible for you and for us together. And one little note.

The doctor in me, as transformative as this system has been to my life and health, I still recommend that you see the flow state or coherence as a complement to what you're doing in terms of healing and treatments, rather than something in place of them, and always consult with your medical provider if you have questions about your specific health conditions. Okay, people are smiling at me. We've expanded the curriculum and practices from my book to include other writers and teachers. And I'll give a more detailed overview toward the latter part of our call.

One of them, Madhu, you've already been blessed to experience through that beautiful opening song.