The Pursuit of Wellness

By Krystle Menendez

If you’re like many Americans, you are interested in and desperate for wellness, but don’t have a clear idea where to start on your path to achieving it. Western culture doesn’t exactly lend itself to this idea, after all–most of us have to work long weeks, take care of children or other family, maintain a home and maybe even a social life. Toss the need for sleep into the mix and there is often absolutely no time left for that daunting ideal of wellness. Many of us look to Eastern medicine and wellness practices, romanticizing them without fully understanding the concepts on which the practices are built. In my journey to understand what role Eastern medicine and healing arts could play in attaining wellness, I met Paul Cavel, expert Taoist practitioner, teacher, and author.

Paul is sage, to the point, and impassioned as we speak. If studying with him is half as enlightening as simply hearing him explain these practices, I’m in good hands, I decide. My first questions for Paul were rather simple–I wanted to know what Tai Chi and Qi Gong were and how they differed. Before our conversation, my entire exposure to the art form consisted of mere glimpses of the slow, fluid movements of bodies in classes taught in grassy, beach front parks in Santa Monica. I was mystified and very eager to learn.

Qi Gong roughly translates to “energy skill” and is essentially your ability to develop, manipulate and control the energy of your body, which tells your muscles what to do. “Qi Gong is the overarching term for healing exercise,” Paul tells me. “Tai Chi is a martial art that contains the inner technology of Qi Gong. [It is] one of the vehicles through which Chinese medicine is utilized. Tai Chi and Qi Gong both heal,” he continued. “Qi Gong are the inner mechanics that make Tai Chi work.”

As Paul excitedly delves into this several-thousand-year-old practice of healing, I cross and uncross my legs, sloppily shifting my weight back and forth, and occasionally straighten my very rounded back. At the same time that I’m trying to make my body comfortable in my chair, I begin to notice how balanced his head and neck are on his shoulders, how still and straight he is able to sit, and how clearly he is able to articulate a seemingly complicated Eastern tradition to a novice westerner.

“[Tai Chi and Qi Gong are] methods for going into the body, releasing unwanted tensions, traumas, stagnancies…. the negative things you’ve been collecting in your lifetime…. And when you release these things the body naturally resets and functions way better. It’s extremely good at circulating blood and other bodily fluids,” he tells me. “Huh,” I think, having officially lost feeling in one of my crossed feet.

Paul points out that allopathic (modern/Western) medicine has been around for 150 to 200 years, while these Chinese practices have been around for thousands and thousands of years. In the 1960’s, he explains, the standard Chinese medical approach was to send patients with non-life threatening ailments–aches and pains, digestive issues, etc–to a local, often not very good, Qi Gong and Tai Chi teacher for six months of daily practice. If after this six-month period their issues weren’t resolved, they could see a surgical doctor in an allopathic setting. As it turned out, sixty percent of the folks that practiced Qi Gong and Tai Chi during those six months never needed to see the doctor.

That struck me as significant. And, frankly, this scenario and these aches and pains sound familiar, don’t they? They’re the ones that wouldn’t let me sit still, the ones that plague us after sitting for eight hours in front of a computer at work. They’re the ones that are made worse by the constant stress of balancing home-life and work schedules, made worse by the fatigue that causes so many of us to come home from our sedentary days and sink into a couch for our remaining wakeful hours to unwind. So often in the West we settle for not being sick. But, why settle for barely staying well, when you have the ability to optimize your internal functions?

Paul became the teacher he is today because Tai Chi and Qi Gong did just this for his body and changed his life. He endured some serious injuries from years of hard martial arts and a couple of motor accidents, one of which was harrowing enough to result in crippling soft tissue damage and years of pain. It was during the journey to rid himself of that pain that Paul found his teacher, Bruce Frantzis, and within a year of study found himself in a nearly new body–no pain, no damage. As he continued to study he also found old injuries healing, achieved mental clarity and emotional balance, and noticed himself maturing in a way he hadn’t been able to before. He saw such profound change in his own body and wellness that he decided to spend his life pursuing the study of this transformative practice, a study he’s now over thirty years into. Eventually, he founded “The Tai Chi Space,” a seminar based school in London, which continues to thrive even as he lives and practices here on the West Coast now.

As we discussed chi (or qi)–that vital energy in Eastern medicine that I vaguely understood–in greater detail, he said something revelatory. “The West is really focusing on the muscles,” he tells me. “But the Chinese didn’t look at it like that…[they] came up with a system of acupuncture meridians and other channels in the body. Their understanding is this: the mind moves chi, the chi influences the [body’s] fluids, and the fluids bring the body into movement. So, if your chi is blocked you get pain or you get discomfort or you get disease, and when you open up those flows of chi, the pain, discomfort, and disease dissipate.” And, you can control your chi–this is what the regular practice of Tai Chi and Qi Gong are teaching you to do. That’s an empowering message to people who are suffering: you have the ability to heal yourself without needing to have something done to you. All you really need is dedication and a teacher.

The most profound thing that I came away with from this conversation was the confidence that I could try this, perhaps be bad at it, and still see results. Paul is not only an excellent teacher and master in his own right, he makes Tai Chi and Qi Gong accessible for the novice. Paul, in his wise and wonderfully disarming way, removes the biggest challenge for people who don’t know where to start and empowers them. Whether you’re reading his books, taking an online seminar through, “The Tai Chi Space,” or perhaps, best of all, studying one-on-one with him, you are indeed in great hands.

Krystle has been a featured writer in Life & Thyme & Veritas Creative Agency.