Brad Brown

In early 2007, a friend convinced me to attend a three day QiGong seminar in Asheville, North Carolina. QiGong is a set of exercises similar to Tai Chi, with emphasis on breathing technique, or if you are Southern Baptist, it’s what you would call “the Devil’s work.” The general thought is that breathing produces an energy field around the body, and the exercises allow you to manipulate this energy field to heal what ails you; this is a gross oversimplification that will probably offend some QiGong practitioners, but I feel it summarizes it quite nicely.
 
I’m not a religious or spiritual man, but I am fascinated by the people who believe what they do. It’s the same reason I attended an Amway meeting in my early twenties - I wasn’t interested in the 20lb bag of potato chips being sold, but I wanted to know more about the people hawking them. I was Jacques Cousteau and the QiGong seminar was my ocean. I guess that makes my Ford Ranger the Calypso.
 
The seminar was presented by Jeff Primack. Jeff is to QiGong as Joel Osteen is to Christianity. He rents civic centers and attracts hundreds of people to his conferences. Beyond the spiritual aspect, one of the major attractions is that if you’re a massage therapist, you can get continuing education credits just for attending. I’d say that at least 90% of the people at the seminar were massage therapists, based on the number of massages I observed being given.
 
The cost of the seminar was $70 for all three days. Regardless of your feelings towards QiGong, you have to admit that it’s a bargain, even if you are only attending for the entertainment aspect as I was. Once you actually get in the seminar, then you have the opportunity to buy accoutrements to further enhance your QiGong experience - DVDs ($45), manuals ($95), and blenders ($399). It’s not a hard sell, but you are given ample opportunity between the exercises to listen to entertaining sales pitches disguised as lectures.
 
The exercises themselves were quite enjoyable. I had no idea holding one’s hands over one’s head for minutes could be so taxing, so what I thought would be easy ended up humbling me. Each exercise involved moving a ball of chi around my body in various motions. I didn’t actually see the chi, but I’m assuming that’s because I’m not enlightened. In my head, I just visualized a flaming volleyball.
 
The most entertaining part of the seminar occurred on day two. After the first set of exercises, Jeff demoed his $399 three horsepower blender (with matching $95 smoothie cookbook). The nice thing about the blender was that, given its impressive motor, it could blend anything, not just soft and juicy items. You could blend the entire apple, the entire banana, or even a cinder block. The motivation for eating the entire fruit or vegetable stemmed from a Bible verse in Genesis, which roughly translated, reads “You really should eat the seeds as well as the pulp.” So Jeff blended a carrot with the stem, an apple with the core, and beets with the stem. A funny thing happened when he got to the avocado - he didn’t blend the avocado pit. When an audience member questioned this, Jeff dismissed this as the one exception to the Bible verse. The end result was a beautiful purple concoction - I was anticipating something that tasted like the grape popsicles of my childhood. Unfortunately, what I tasted was the bitterest concoction I had ever tasted. Oh well, his intentions were good.
 
The seminar ended on the 3rd day with all 500 people sitting on folding chairs arranged in a serpentine pattern on the civic center floor. By holding hands with one another, we were combining our individual energy, much like multiple D-cell batteries in a row. This would in theory cause a positive change throughout the world, more so than breathing without hand-holding. While holding hands, we performed the 9-breath method (aka hyperventilation) while bending at the waist in order to add a multiplicative effect to the hand holding. Each person would alternate breathing out and bending forward, while the person to each side would breathe in and sit up, resulting in an undulating effect. The results were truly unspectacular.
 
After 30 minutes of the hand-holding hyperventilation snake ring, we sat upright and Jeff took comments from the audience. He was briefly interrupted by a woman channeling a spirit from another dimension; “I hear your pleas,” said the woman in a robotic voice. Call me cynical, but I thought it was the best audience plant I had ever witnessed - very entertaining. Most of the comments were complimentary, mainly because negative comments were discouraged. The comments that were made were typical new-age vague [e.g. “I feel an energy I’ve never felt before.” or “I felt a rhythmic pulsing in my brain tumor…surely I’m healed.”]
 
Would I recommend one of these seminars? Yes, it was one of the most entertaining events I’ve been too in a long time. In terms of exercise, I was actually challenged, and my fatigue afterward was a wakeup call for more physical activity; for a no impact exercise, I’d highly recommend QiGong. However, I can’t speak to the religious or spiritual aspect of QiGong - which is a shame, since the claims of healing are fantastic.
 
The true highlight of the whole event was having the back of my head appear in a promo shot on the Primack website [left-most male along the bottom wearing a blue shirt; notice my wrists are glowing…reflection or chi?]. I hope to parlay this fame into a cable access TV show.
 
Have you been to one of these events? Have you tried QiQong? Your thoughts?
 

 

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