Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/72093
THE QI PATH another point somewhere further down the body to connect my other hand, and I'll do it intuitively. Then the energy flows and the muscle loosens up. Or, I'll feel the muscle loosen up, and it doesn't matter whether I feel the energy flow—I know it is flowing." Litter finds there is a profound overlap between his practice of qigong and his ability to perform massage. "The qigong is opening me, opening the energy channels, allowing me to have an influence over other people's energy. The deeper that I get into the qigong, the more I realize that I'm doing what I call spot healings. I call it orthopedic energy work, because I'm still working from the structure of 'I want your neck to move better, I want your shoulders to move better, I want to address your pain,' so I still have a structure of massage work, but I'm using energy work to achieve that, whereas in a true [energy] healing session, I'd be able to work more directly with energy." Burgess found himself drawn strongly to qigong. "What I mostly use the qigong for is trying to figure out what clients need," Burgess says. "I often tell people I'm just the monkey doing the pushing; I'm the channel. I have to think about muscle groups, the origin and insertion on the muscles, how the joint works, and what bone this is. But I try not to let my ego get caught up in that. I try to use the energy, the qi, to figure out what your body is really telling me, what is going on, what do I feel?" He asks himself a variety of questions in the process: Where is the stagnation? Where is the excess? Where is the deficiency? What needs to be worked on? "When you look at all the diagnosing patterns we use in Chinese medicine (qi stagnation, liver- blood deficiency, or spleen dampness, etc.), and when you break them all down to their smallest point, it becomes an issue of qi," Burgess says. "Is there not enough? Is the qi moving? Is it not moving? Is it moving too much? Is it going to the wrong place? What do we need to do with the qi?" UNDERSTANDING ENERGY AND HEALING Burgess notes that what qi is "is a hotly debated topic, because there's no direct translation in the English language." The way he has come to understand it and explain it to clients is to use the analogy of a boat. He describes a boat in the water and says, "The wind reaches the sail, the sail expands and applies pressure to the mast, and the pressure to the mast moves the boat through the water. The wind isn't qi, the sail isn't qi, the mast isn't, the boat isn't, the water isn't. The qi is where the wind meets the sail, where the sail applies pressure to the mast, where the mast applies pressure to the boat, Resources 96 massage & bodywork may/june 2012