Livia Kohn - Chinese Healing Exercises: The Tradition of Daoyin

In a more academic and theoretical vein, I would like to thank several of my graduate students for doing outstanding work and raising my awareness and understanding of different aspects of physical practice and healing. Stephen Jackowicz, highly gifted acupuncturist and graduate of Boston University in 2003, did outstanding work on the absorption of qi, successfully applying information from medieval Daoist materials to a twentieth-century patient. His in-depth analysis of how medieval Chinese understood the workings of the inner body and his thorough medical and therapeutic analysis of the process of qi-absorption have greatly influenced my interpretation of this rather advanced aspect of Daoyin practice.

Another graduate student whose work and help were invaluable was Shawn Arthur, who graduated from Boston University in 2006. His dissertation is on the dietary and fasting techniques of Daoists and modern qigong practitioners, examining them both on the basis of traditional concepts and in terms of modern physiology and pharmacology. His work on fasting and the replacing of ordinary food and drink with qi provided me with great insights into the Chinese understanding of the bodys structure and the role of breathing and diet in the context of healing exercises. Besides aiding this project with his knowledgeable expertise, Shawn has also been invaluable in assisting the actual manuscript preparation.

A third graduate student who provided knowledge and inspiration is Heidi Nugent at the Union Institute, Ohio. She has just completed a pathbreaking dissertation on breath, its understanding in different cultures, and the various ways people use (and abuse) it to create health or sickness. As she moved along in her in-depth study, she has greatly increased my understanding and awareness of breathing physiology and the role it plays in traditional forms of healing.

Beyond the background practice and information necessary for the completion of this book, I also received enormous support and encouragement in the course of manuscript preparation. First, in the summer of 2005, I was given the great chance to present my findings on Chinese healing exercises to experts at the annual convention of the National Qigong Association (NQA) in Boulder, Colorado. During a whole-day workshop on Daoyin and a two-hour seminar on Animal Forms, participants in good cheer actually performed the exercises I had translated from ancient texts. In subsequent discussions, they provided extensive feedback and substantive insights into the effects of the exercises, the connection to modern practices, and the best terminology to use. Until then I had, in imitation of European scholars, translated the term daoyin as gymnastics, but workshop participants made it very clear that in the United States the word has too much of an athletic connotation to be ap