At The Anzelmo Wellness Center we have carefully selected various therapies as part of our detox plan and recovery program. These therapies help you on a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual level, in order to make your transition into a sober lifestyle as easy as possible after your Ibogaine Treatment. When a recovering addict opens up new body and mind pathways of thought, emotion and being, new vibrations are created, thus disrupting and decreasing previous addiction memory pathways.
As you remove your old habit — addiction — we want to replace it with new habits: positive and supportive techniques that you will take with you when you leave and start rebuilding your life. Our Qigong instructor talked to us about what the ancient practice of Qigong is, and why it’s so effective for those suffering from heroin addiction:
“Qigong is an ancient practice — there is a drawing from the 2nd Century that shows Qigong exercises on it. It’s been here a long time. It’s an energy exercise that helps us in many ways — the first thing it does is helps us to keep our energy flowing in all of our body’s channels.
The Chinese say that if we maintain our channels of energy flowing, we’ll never get sick. We’ll be connected with ourselves and with the sources of energy in nature like the earth and the sky and the ocean. We are able to receive the energy from the air, fire, water, wood, and the earth. Each source is represented by a different organ. The fire is represented by the heart, the stomach is the earth, the lungs are air, wood is the liver, and water is represented by the kidneys.
The same energies that are in the natural world are also in our body, so if our channels of energy are flowing, they are always recharging themselves with a different source of energy from all around, from nature.
Chinese people think in a very mythic and poetic way. They were trying to find something to make them infinite, immortal. And they did, in a way. Many Chinese people that practice Qigong live a very long time. Thousands of years ago, they felt that something was flowing in their bodies but they didn’t know what it was. So they did a lot of research on themselves. They would do experiments – some of them were not very nice — to discover the channels of energy. They discovered that there is energy that flows into our bodies. And when they started doing these exercises, they began to feel the energy flowing in different ways, so they started to make a map of the body based on the energy inside of it. And they would ask each other if they felt the same energetic movements and they said, ‘yes, yes, I feel it, too,’ and that’s how they created the map. They discovered different channels and different dots that make up the meridians which are like pathways that your chi, or energy, follows through.
They discovered how to influence them to increase their levels of energy. But it’s not just that — the found out that when they are balanced they feel different — better. So they started to affect their meridians with needles, with heat, with herbs, and with exercises, all with the intention of making them flow and connecting them with another, bigger, source of energy, which is all around us, in nature. In the air that we breathe, which is the first energy source, but also in the water; and the sun, which is fire energy; and the woods, which is all the food we eat, fruits and vegetables; and the earth, which is the ground we stand on and comes into our bodies through our feet, if we are grounded properly. So they discovered these exercises to help us reconnect with these different energy sources so if we maintain our bodies, we will always be receiving energy from them, and we will always be healthy.
Qigong focuses on three big energy vortexes in the body, called dantians. There’s one in the lower abdomen, the chest, and the head. The lower dantian works with the legs and the organs in the lower part of the torso – the reproductive organs. The middle dantian works with our heart and lungs, our emotions. The upper dantian works with our thoughts and our spiritual selves. But in this practice, the lower dantian is also the spiritual one because this is where we came from — the generative energy comes from this area.
The Chinese found out a very important thing — you don’t have to die in pain or sick. In the West, that’s what we are taught, and often it’s true, but that’s just cultural because of how we treat our bodies here. It’s really normal here to end your life in pain and suffering. But it doesn’t have to be like that. There are different ways of leaving this body. And the Chinese are experts at that.
Our body has more interesting things than what we know. It’s not a machine that we know how to properly use in this part of the world. So we need to be taught, Western people. We need to learn how to use our bodies. But once you start to feel it, it’s so powerful.
QiGong is a vital step in a 10-part program The Anzelmo Wellness Center. We have found that this ancient Chinese practice will not only increase vitality but is directly able to re-direct cravings into emotional balance…in five short minutes.
The Anzelmo Wellness Center is an integrated clinic dedicated to healing severe addiction, deep trauma, and other challenges that life hands us. Our treatment philosophy combines the best of Western treatment modalities with ancient healing techniques and traditional indigenous wisdom.
