Can Medical Qigong Be Done at a Distance?
One of the first questions people ask me when they discover I work with clients online is:
But how can Medical Qigong work if we're not in the same room?
It's a good question.
We're used to thinking that if someone is going to work therapeutically with our body, they need to be physically with us. They need to touch us, manipulate something or give us something to take.
Energy medicine operates from a different premise. It's a much more subtle process.
Medical Qigong doesn't require physical touch
Medical Qigong works with Qi — the vital energy that, in Chinese medicine, flows through and animates the body.
When I work with someone remotely, I'm not attempting to physically manipulate their body from hundreds of miles away.
I'm working energetically.
The person receiving the session can simply get comfortable at home while I practise from wherever I am.
And this has become one of my favourite ways to work because clients love it.
Think about it. There’s no journey home afterwards. No requirement to make conversation. You don't even need to get out of bed!
You can receive your session from your sofa and then carry on lying there if that's what your body wants.
What does a distant Medical Qigong session feel like?
There isn't one universal experience.
Some people notice physical sensations: warmth, tingling, pulsing or a sense of movement through the body.
Some become deeply relaxed.
Some notice emotions, memories, images or insights appearing.
And sometimes people don't experience anything particularly dramatic during the session at all.
I don't think drama or big releases are a useful measure of whether something meaningful is happening.
One of the things my work has taught me is to become much more interested in what changes afterwards and in between sessions.
How are you sleeping?
How's your energy?
What's happening with your mood?
How are your relationships?
Do you feel differently in your body?
What are you suddenly clear about?
You don't have to believe in it
This is probably one of my favourite things about energy work.
You don't need to be in a particular state of mind to receive.
You don't need to convince yourself that you can feel energy.
And you definitely don't need to become a person who talks about chakras at dinner parties.
You can simply be curious.
Honestly, I was very sceptical about energy medine in the beginning. It was my experience of healing and transformation that completely changed my mind about it.
I kept encountering shifts that made me want to understand it better.
Eventually, that curiosity led me to train in Medical Qigong and make energy medicine a central part of my work.
For me, distance creates freedom
Working remotely also changed something fundamental about the kind of practice I wanted to build.
I realised I didn't want healing work to depend upon me and another person being in a particular room, in a particular town, at a particular time.
I wanted the work to be able to travel.
Today I work with people remotely through Medical Qigong, energy medicine and the wider body of practices I've accumulated over years of working with the body, mind and imagination.
That work now lives inside The Gold Standard, my signature one-to-one programme for women.
Because sometimes the most powerful thing about receiving support at a distance is very simple:
You get to stay exactly where you are.