Season 1, Episode 22
Slower Moments for Faster Conception with Kevin Yee-Chan
The smallest change can have the biggest impact.
Meet Kevin Yee-Chan—professional ballet dancer turned acupuncturist, Qi Gong & yoga practitioner, artist, and practitioner at Acubalance Wellness Center. The life of a dancer might be physically tough on the body, but Kevin always found relief in holistic remedies. That’s why he dedicated himself to weaving modern somatic sciences with eastern healing arts to create his unique treatment approach for his clients today.
In today’s episode, Kevin explains what Qi Gong is and the epigenetic research behind this anti-aging practice. You’ll discover why it’s an effective tool for boosting fertility and how it can have a positive impact on the health of your future child.
The practices you’ll learn in this episode are subtle but powerful ways to calm your nervous system and release trauma in the body. With just a few small changes, you can become more present, optimize fertility, increase vitality, and increase your health long-term.
As Kevin so eloquently puts it, “The slower that we go, sometimes the more we’re able to see.”
Key Topics/Takeaways:
- Why Qi Gong is effective for fertility. [5:15]
- The power of repetition. [8:25]
- The research behind Qi Gong for well-being and fertility. [9:56]
- Chronological vs. biological age. [17:10]
- What Qi Gong is and how it works in the body. [21:08]
- The meditative aspect of Qi Gong. [26:32]
- Kevin shares the real-life results of Qi Gong. [29:42]
- How Qi Gong can positively impact the health of your future child. [32:28]
Watch the Episode
Read This Episode Transcript
Lorne Brown:
By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guest or contributors to the podcast.
Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions, so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lauren Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I’m on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It’s time to learn how to be, and receive, so that you can create life on purpose.
Welcome to another episode of the Conscious Fertility Podcast. Today we are with Kevin Yee Chan, and for me this is a special episode because Kevin and I practice together at Acubalance Wellness Center in Vancouver. He’s one of the practitioners that does a lot of work on my body, and so it’s great to have Kevin here talking about Qigong and in particular Qigong for fertility. And I like to give him an official introduction, even though we know each other quite well.
Kevin, and he goes by he/they, is an acupuncturist, also a Qigong and yoga practitioner. He’s also an artist who’s been fascinated by the functions of the body for as long as he can remember and he did graduate Magna Cum Laude from Pacific Rim College and is a certified ERYT 500 yoga teacher.
Kevin, before I read anymore, what is an ERYT 500 yoga teacher? I know you’re a yoga teacher, but what’s that mean?
Kevin Yee Chan:
Oh, yeah, that’s the designation that the Yoga Alliance gives, which essentially means that I teach yoga teachers.
Lorne Brown:
Okay, so he teaches the yoga teacher, so this is good.
Kevin Yee Chan:
Yeah, we do trainings.
Lorne Brown:
And in Kevin’s first career, he was a ballet dancer and he would always find his way back to acupuncture and yoga as potent tools to heal himself from various injuries and illnesses. And so he has a great appreciation for the people that we see in our clinic when they come in with some aches and pains because as a ballet dancer, he has experience, he has compassion, he knows you. And in his practice he does weave modern somatic sciences, and somatic mean body sciences. I’m with Eastern Healing Arts, and this is one of the beauties of your practice, and I’ve experienced this for myself.
The somatic tools that your yoga, your Qigong, your acupuncture, your massage called Tui na, we know from a Chinese medicine perspective and Western now that emotions and trauma get trapped in the tissue and it gets held there and it can cause pain, but also lead to poor health and disease.
And a lot of the work nowadays, is talking about somatic work. We’re using the body to help release these trapped emotions and this trauma. It’s just amazing that Chinese medicine’s known this for eons, but now it’s becoming well known in the modern psychological and scientific community and you have the skillset to work on the body, the somatic tools. So, great asset.
Kevin does believe everyone’s health journey is a unique work of art and his clinical practice, Acubalance, is ignited by discovering each person’s distinct alchemy of vitality in providing patients with a heart-centered researched base space. Kevin has trained in Tui na, that’s former Chinese medical massage, in reflexology, medical Qigong, shadow yoga, non-violent communication.
Kevin, that’s why you and I get along really well. This whole thing about non-violet communication. It’s good to know I don’t have to be threatened that you’re going to attack me in one of our disagreements. And also in polyvagal theory to support Western science in the body’s full-spectrum of health and wellbeing, both short and long term. And in the spare time, you can find Kevin experimenting in the kitchen, making music, dancing, and learning about new cultures and exploring the natural world, including oceans and subsets are his favorites.
And as I said at the beginning of this, I have the good fortune to have Kevin work on me, both on the physical, mental and spiritual level. So Kevin, welcome to the Conscious Fertility Podcast.
Kevin Yee Chan:
Thank you so much. It’s good to be here.
Lorne Brown:
Now, before we talk about why Qigong for fertility, how many ways can we spell and pronounce Qigong? What do we got going on here?
Kevin Yee Chan:
Oh, I’ve heard all sorts of things along the years. Kegong, Chigong, Kigong, I don’t know. There’s a bunch of different ways.
Lorne Brown:
I see it spelled a lot C-H-I, but we like to spell it, Q-I.
Kevin Yee Chan:
Yeah, I think phonetically in English, C-H-I is a nice phonetic spelling because I usually pronounce it CHI. There’s other people that pronounce Qi, but again, it’s bridging so many different cultures and different avenues of receptivity of this lineage. So, I’m pretty open to however it’s said and expressed.
Lorne Brown:
So a lot of our listeners, and the men and women that you see at Acubalance are looking to grow their families and this is an interesting modality. And so can you start with just why Qigong for fertility? Why does this interest you and you have an interest that we make more awareness to the public about this modality as well, this healing art.
Kevin Yee Chan:
Oh yeah, for sure. I think what it comes down to, what we talk about in the clinic so often is nourishing the soil, and this is a concept in Chinese medicine largely across the whole spectrum of Chinese medicine, that when we nourish the soil, when we nourish our own body and being, then we create vitality for new seedlings, new fruits to blossom.
And so coming into really a state of vitality with our own body and being is, in my opinion, the very first step of fertility and it’s also the most foundational piece that we can allay that just builds a lot of other great tools on top of it, for us to feel steady and stable in this journey that we’re going on. Because fertility, like you said, it can be quite a journey.
Lorne Brown:
And as you shared, nourish the soil, this idea to nourish the soil before you plant the seed, there’s many ways to get to that state of vitality and fertility often requires you to be in the range. When you look at a range from to the far left or right, or call it 50 to 100, when you look at grades at school, you want to be in the bottom 10%, or the top 10%. And fertility, often to conceive a child and have that healthy child, we got to get our range of vitality into that top 10%. And so this is another tool from a Chinese medicine perspective, to help bring about vitality.
Kevin Yee Chan:
And it’s a tool that it’s so accessible. It’s movement and meditation. It’s intentional movement, when it comes down to it. And I feel like so many of us have access to that and we have access to it in lots of different pockets of time in our day, sometimes when we don’t even realize or think of right away. So, I like to imagine that it’s a foundation and a practice that can really permeate the different pockets of our day. And in that way, really delay a track and a foundation of wider support for us in the fertility journey.
Lorne Brown:
So, it’s accessible and it’s a practice, meaning you don’t do this once and you’re done. This is something that becomes part of your life, like you brush your teeth or people that actually do aerobic exercise is something that you would do regularly.
Kevin Yee Chan:
Right. And I think that’s really where the power of most practice lies, in my experience. So, I have lots of experience in the body, like you said, as a dancer and as a yoga and Qigong practitioner, and now more so in the clinic as an acupuncturist.
But one of the really amazing qualities that I’ve discovered through embodied work is there’s a lot of power in repetition. There’s a lot of power in repetition and there’s a joy in that kind of discipline, that we start to discover over a wider breadth of time. And that joy can really shift the ways that our body regulates, in really profound ways.
And so being able to, it’s really easy to have these experiences sometimes that are really profound and concentrated. Some people talk about going on retreat and having a yoga retreat or a Qigong retreat, and you’re so impacted by it for the few days that you’re on it, maybe like three or five or seven days if we’re lucky to have that. But really the continuity of that practice is. How do we insert or absorb the power of those practices in small moments, every day.
Lorne Brown:
And why Qigong for fertility then from a Western perspective? I understand big picture, improves vitality. Look, if you’re functioning, if your organs are functioning well and the tissue’s functioning well and the hormones are balanced, then this is all ways to optimize your fertility.
But can you talk about, is there any evidence and just what’s happening when people do this repetition and you call Qigong basically, and we’ll talk more about what it really is, but you said it’s intentional movement, it’s a form of meditation. What data, what research is out there right now using Qigong for wellbeing and for fertility?
Kevin Yee Chan:
So there’s been some studies on the length of our telomeres and how that relates to aging and then how that relates to the vitality in our body and the resources that we have in our body to heal and to conceive.
Lorne Brown:
I have that book beside me because there’s a book by Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn and Elissa Epel, called The Telomere Effect. So they talk a lot about that research. Oh, can you tell us what they shared a bit in their book or in their research?
Kevin Yee Chan:
So the research really is, and this is also coming back to lots of traditions that have been passed on for thousands of years, is that the way that our body is most supported to be resilient in the face of challenge and also to be supported and vital at a foundational level and to really be with the process of aging in the most graceful way possible, is to make small but noticeable habits, throughout our day and continually throughout our days.
Like we were talking about before, it’s nice to have these impactful experiences over a few days. Get away on a vacation if we can have some time off, but what’s really important is to create habits in our daily rhythm, that support a calm nervous system, that support that engagement of the parasympathetic nervous system so that a body comes back to rest and digest on a regular basis and has a different baseline.
Lorne Brown:
I heard you talk about the parasympathetic nervous system, which you’re sharing that Qigong has shown a positive effect on that, and you use the term rest and digest. And I’ve heard it also called the rest and digest, breath and feed nervous system. And so emphasis here is on breath. And if your parasympathetic nervous system’s going, I hear you in the clinic when you’re talking to patients, how it allows for that flow and receptivity, which is part of the fertility journey when we think of it from at least a Chinese medicines perspective.
Kevin Yee Chan:
Yeah, exactly. And I think we’re talking about how we incorporate this practice and why into our daily lives now as they are our modern lives. And our modern lives are filled with all kinds of stressors, that’s for sure. I think we all feel that, right? And the scope of change that’s happened, that’s kind of shifted our pathogens in a way to things like anxiety and stress is really profound. And so to be able to recognize that and to take action and make small steps every day or every week, but regularly, that’s balanced off all of these stressors that we’re faced with, I think is just super important.
Lorne Brown:
And the other part that I caught you saying that I want to emphasize is you talked about in the research on the telomeres, in the book that I had shared, The Telomere Effect, in their paper, they showed that Qigong had changed the telomere length. And so why is that relevant or maybe share a little bit about what telomeres are in an easy to understand way.
Kevin Yee Chan:
So telomeres, they’re, I’m going to talk about it in a little bit of Chinese medicine language.
Lorne Brown:
I like that. I’ll understand that. Maybe I’ll convert it to a laypersons. Go for it.
Kevin Yee Chan:
So we could think of it almost as Jing as essence. And there’s this kind of essence that we carry in our body that is governing longer term systems of life, such as growth, such as reproduction, aging, all these different phases that we might go through physiologically. You think about a female bodied person, and it’s very much in charge of as well the menstrual cycle and the phases of menopause and all these kind of bigger shifts. And so having a healthy telomere length and that’s that in itself that term maybe up for discussion, what is a healthy telomere length? The longer our telomeres are, the more resource we have in terms of this Jing and this essence to continue proliferating. Because each time a cell replicates the telomere gets shorter and shorter and shorter.
So as our cells replicate through the natural stressors of life and maybe through increased stressors of life, if we have challenges or traumas that we’re faced with, which inevitably we will, these telomere shortening, they start to dwindle our resources in terms of how long we can regenerate and how long that cell can regenerate and that telomere can continue having a healthy lifespan.
Lorne Brown:
I like how you brought this into the Chinese concept of health and reproduction. And so these telomeres, which people in the scientific community often compare, use a metaphor, they’re like the plastic tips on the end of your shoelace, and these are at the end of the chromosomes. And like you’re saying, as they shorten, we get higher risk of disease and the cells lifespan shortens. And so you don’t want them to shorten at an accelerated rate. And when you think about fertility, we want to stay as biologically young as possible. So if you’re 40 biologically, sorry if you’re 40 chronologically, but your body’s biologically 50, it’s hard to reproduce even though chronologically 40 year old women can get pregnant. But if you’re biologically 50, not the case. And in their research on using Qigong as one of the modalities, they showed that this slowed down the shortening, the accelerated shortening of the telomeres, which we interpret that as it slowing down, that accelerated biological aging.
And they even showed in their studies that the health of the man and the woman leading up to conception will impact the telomere length and then the woman’s pregnancy. So you’re setting the health blueprint of their future child. What I liked how you just brought that into Chinese medicine, so we talk about the Jing or the essence as you shared, have you ever heard the analogy of metaphor where it’s like a candle, your Jing is a candle, and once the wax is gone, Jing, there’s no more life. And so if you burn the candle hard, sex, drugs and rock and roll, you burn that flame really bright, lots of stress, then the wax melts quicker. And so you only have so much, it’s a finite amount and you want to conserve it as much as you can.
And so I liked how you were bringing that into the Jing in essence, because we need that in Chinese medicine to reproduce. So you want to tie some more of that in. Because I really find that fascinating and I think the listeners may like to hear a little bit more about that now that we’ve brought in the telomere aspect of it, research.
Kevin Yee Chan:
For sure. Yeah, I think there’s another thing that I want to touch on with what you said and that difference between chronological and biological age, because we all know folks that are in their early 20s, but maybe they’re quite severely sick, have had lots of illnesses. So biologically their body it’s aged quite a bit. And also the reverse, there’s people who chronologically are maybe in their 60s or 70s in terms of years, but biologically their systems are maybe back in their 30s or 40s. And this is, I think something really important to consider is that our chronological age doesn’t always, for sure it’s a good marker, and especially with lots of our western systems it’s a good marker, but it’s not always indicative of your total health.
Lorne Brown:
Right, right.
Kevin Yee Chan:
And so bringing in that difference, and it might be semantics, but it’s also there’s a clear difference between chronological and biological age is where we start to decipher and to discern what resources we have and what resources we have in terms of in Chinese medicine, Jing or essence that really foundational well and reserve of energy that we’ve got in our body.
Lorne Brown:
And Qigong is one of the tools. There’s diet, there’s lifestyle. We use Chinese herbs, acupuncture, but here we’re talking about Qigong is another way to conserve your essence, your Jing, your telomere length, and sometimes even reverse it.
Kevin Yee Chan:
Yeah, yeah. And so here’s the thing is I appreciated that analogy you brought up about the candle right going down and that the candlestick is our Jing. I think as a blanket statement, we get told that in Chinese medicine school that a Jing is irreplaceable. And to a certain degree, it’s true. We’re all going to die one day. That’s just part of the cycle of life. And there’s also ways to replenish our Jing.
Lorne Brown:
Absolutely. Well, your metaphors are never perfect, so you are able to add a little bit more wax. But one thing I want to clarify to our listeners, because we’re talking about this chronological and biological ages examples, although research has shown certain interventions like Qigong diet and lifestyle can slow down accelerated biological aging. So the shortening of the telomeres, for example, and often sometimes can reverse it where it lengthens them again. When we talk about the biological age and chronological age, I gave the example, you’re 40 chronologically, but your body’s behaving biologically 50. In theory you can become chronologically and biologically 40 again, but we’re not going to make you biologically 35 or 25. You’re going to go as good as your chronological age. So the other idea is if you’re 55 chronologically, the best we’re going to get you is 55 biologically. So like our candle example, there’s some limitations, but if you’re in your reproductive window chronologically and biologically your hormones and the way you’re responding to say IVF cycles, there is an opportunity to see if we can help your chronological and biological age match and Qigong is one of those tools.
Kevin Yee Chan:
For sure. Yeah. It’s important to consider all of the scopes of references and not take anything to extremes. And Qigong is so helpful in bringing our biological age back to its most vital at whatever chronological age we are.
Lorne Brown:
Coming from the West, so many people want want to have a big sweat and aggressive movement. I know you have a series of Qigong practices available through AccuBalance, you do it in your practice and you also the online courses. Can you share though, because some have never heard of Qigong, so how would you describe it? And for those that like a workout, my understanding is still if you’re not exercising, it can be sore a little after, right? This is not super easy, easy but easy.
Kevin Yee Chan:
I think especially in the West, we tend to think of exercise as this really fiery, active, sweaty thing. And yes it is, and it can be, but we can also work lots of subtle layers of the body and lots of subtle connections and foundations of the body. And it’s been my experience and it’s been shared with me through many teachers, their experiences as well, but I’ll speak to my own, that is oftentimes actually the small subtle changes that we make in our foundation that can have the biggest effects. So I like to sometimes bring in this analogy into the treatment room that if we steer the rudder of a boat one degree different, take about five hours, 10 hours a day, we’ll be in a completely different place. And so the Qigong exercises that are offered through the coursework or online work through AccuBalance, they’re not super fiery and super sweat inducing perhaps, something like a hit class.
But what we’re doing is we’re kind of sifting down into the layers of our body and finding these micro attachments and micro awareness of how we can hold ourselves differently. And so one of the things that I like to talk about in these practices is allostatic load. So the load of stress that our body is able to digest and to take on and just posturally if we think about that, because this is a physical practice. So if you’re standing or seating for example right now, if you just kind of stand up tall or sit up tall and close your eyes and tune into your body, is there a way that you can notice where you’re supported? Are your muscles holding you up? Are your bones holding you up? Are your tendons holding you up? And so when we talk about a physical practice like Qigong that integrates energetics, we’re taking about 80% of the weight into the bones. 80% of the weight into the bones so that the muscles and the connective tissues have a little bit more clancy plasticity to move and react when they really need to.
And the thing with modern exercise as we perceive it today, is that it’s heavily focused on muscle, heavily focused on muscle. You even look at diagrams of ancient Chinese anatomy and the bodies are shaped very differently. They’re much more around and the pathways that are illuminated within that anatomical depiction, they’re much more analogous to a garden. If we look at anatomy that’s depicted through more a Greco-Roman lens, which is for the most part what we have here in North America, it’s very muscle based. And so we’re familiar with that. And lots of times our bodies are holding themselves up by muscle, and we’re having these holding and these guarding patterns that actually start to constrict the circulation to our organs, to our vital organs.
Whereas if we divert that pattern of holding to the bones, about 80% to the bones, we’re freeing up the muscle tissue and the connective tissue to move a little bit more fluidly, to let the circulation go back to the organs when they need to. And then also to allow our muscles and tendons to react when they need to in a very appropriate way rather than in a habitually stuck way.
Lorne Brown:
And I remember when, I don’t practice Qigong, but I remember when we had to learn Qigong in our training for Chinese medicine school that I was a little sore after the first couple of days. I thought this is silly at first. It was so slow and I thought the breathing, but it was hard to hold some of those positions. So I did think it was a bit of a workout, but in a different way than we’re used to in the west.
Kevin Yee Chan:
Oh yeah, for sure. And that’s the thing about when we start to dial things down into a different rhythm, it’s a little bit slower than maybe what we’re generally used to. It’ll seem maybe boring at first, but we’re digging into those subtler layers of the foundation and the body. And so there’s different ways of accessing activation and different parts of the body that cuts sore for sure.
Lorne Brown:
And there’s a meditative practice to it, and there’s so much research on meditation and the benefits of that for health and vitality and longevity. And so you’re bringing in some subtle movement, how you’ve described it to me in the past there’s subtle movement, there’s breathing and then there’s some intention as well. Is that the meditative part, like your thought process?
Kevin Yee Chan:
Yeah, for sure. And so this is, I think one of the beautiful things about something that’s so simple, like Qigong, beautiful and challenging. It can be challenging to do something so simple, but there’s also something very beautiful about it in that there’s not a lot of fanfare to it. It’s coming back to your breath, it’s coming back to your intention, it’s coming back to awareness of your body, proprioception and space. And so when we start to elongate and slow down the movements, just think of it for example, so if you’re used to weight lifting, if you’re doing a curl with a dumbbell and you’re used to doing a certain speed, and just if we would take an experiment and we would slow down the speed of your curl by maybe twice as slow as you normally do it, and you can start to notice when you do that, there’s different articulations in the joints and the muscles that start to be illuminated and awakened in your consciousness.
And so we’re digging into these micro attachments that then correspond with fascia lines in the body and how the fascia breathes and holds all the organs and the muscles and the bones. And so we can use the body holistically as a whole system to start to weave not just this physical proprioception of where we are in space, but also the mental and emotional. And so that’s where the meditative aspect comes in. And some of the help of Chinese medicine and its theory comes in is because all of the tissues in our body and all of the organs in our body, they associate to different seasons and different emotions in our lives. And so we can be able to start to, even if you don’t know that, you can make your own language for what you’re feeling in your body as you start to move a little bit more slowly and bring more attention to what comes up.
Lorne Brown:
And this meditative and slow practice, it makes you aware should practice this, you have to be focused. You have to be aware. And you and I have had many discussions on just consciousness and conscious work, Qigong being a tool as that in that awareness, in that state of presence is where a lot of magic miracles, things happen.
And so you’re seeing Qigong as part of that process too, but at least we’re getting something to do. Because for me to just sit and meditate is to I’m more of a dynamic type meditator. And so Qigong is to get in that presence, that awareness and meditation, it would feed that part of me that needs to do something. And so I think I’d be interested in Qigong, but I’m just curious because the people that you’re seeing, are they receptive to it in the treatment room? They want the acupuncture, it’s very material. You’re putting an acupuncture needle in somebody. I know you do some body work on people. How have you found the receptivity for the Qigong and the feedback you’re getting from the people that you see that are starting to incorporate this into their livelihood?
Kevin Yee Chan:
Totally. I think it really is always dependent on the person and where you’re at. And what I’m a real big fan of is having a range of tools that we can use that meet us where we’re at. And I feel like Qigong is a real key tool in that tool that belts you’re talking about to dip into meditation and awareness and mindfulness and in a deeper way. I think sometimes, well I know for myself, it’s really easy to be in the physical body, and that’s a really good tether point and really easy access point for lots of folks to just be present and aware. Is like, okay, where is your body? What do you feel in your body? And so it can be really easy to go into those super physical exertion, fiery exercise practices. And I feel like in my journey, the more I’ve been curious about that, the subtler the movement has gone.
I went from being a ballet dancer to a yoga practitioner and teacher to a Qigong practitioner and teacher to now acupuncturist, where these teeny tiny needles are doing so much work and movement in the body. And so I feel like in the Qigong practice, is a nicer link between something that’s more fiery and active, like going to the gym or then going to yoga or hot yoga that a lot of people like to do, but starting to slow things down so that we can widen our aperture. It’s this sense of being able to play with time in a way, the slower that we go, sometimes the more we’re able to see. And there’s a lot of power in that we miss when we’re in our busy lives.
Lorne Brown:
And so Qigong gives us that chance what we need in this day to slow down, which creates awareness, presence, which the nervous system really likes. And when we get that nervous, everything’s connected. So the nervous system, we get the hormonal system, the endocrine system, and all this can help optimize your fertility. And to circle back to the telomere effect where they talk about the research by Elizabeth Blackburn and Alyssa Appell, they did show that when people address their telomere length, so Qigong being one of the tools, it impacted the child. So in Chinese medicine we say that when the men and women meet conception, in that form of conception, the health of them leading up to conceptions over those three to four months, and you talked about creating that, preparing the Jing, nourish the soil, so getting healthy, and then the health of the woman throughout the pregnancy is setting up the Jing of the child. So prenatal jing to postnatal jing we talk about Chinese medicine, but this is epigenetics and genetics.
The West also have a way to validate or scribe what was talked to, spoken about 2000 years ago. We can just now measure it in telomere length. But this was discussed a long time ago, and Qigong is one of the ways to cultivate this health and longevity to help you reach your peak fertility potential.
Kevin Yee Chan:
Yeah, totally. That’s again another, we talk about peak fertility potential, it’s not just about the conception, but it’s also about having a healthy baby and a healthy human in the world after all is said and done.
Lorne Brown:
And the people are going to raise this child, right?
Kevin Yee Chan:
Yeah.
Lorne Brown:
You want them to be healthy as well. Kevin, before we close here, I’m going to put you on the spot. So I know we have this online program that you’ve created for teaching Qigong for fertility. Somebody just wants to get a taste of it, to go in and just check you out to see a Qigong exercise to use for themself. Can you put something up on the site, maybe under one of your blogs or something just so they could try out Qigong and what should they look for and what should they expect In this exercise?
Kevin Yee Chan:
There’s a warmup sequence that we usually do for before every practice that is pretty foundational and it really sets the tone for the body and for being in the body in this way. And so what it is primarily are joint mobilizations. Yeah, there’s different reasons why we focus on the joints. One of them is that the Jing collects there, the essence collects there. And it’s also said in physical practice that the mobility of our joints dictates a lot of the health and the rest of our body. So it’s a really simple practice focusing on joint mobility and again, bringing our attention back to the allostatic load of where we are supporting ourselves from and bringing our foundation a little bit more back to the bones so that we can feel a little bit more ease and the rest of our body.
Lorne Brown:
All right, so we’re going to put that up on the AccuBalance site under a blog. And it’s interesting you talked about the joints and the Jing because we had a Chinese medicine practitioner, friend and colleague of yours as well, doctor Yvonne Pharaoh. Episode 14 was how to unblock stack energy. And she talked about how in Chinese medicine the divergent channels take this trauma and often store it in the joints as a way of survival of resilience, because if this stuck energy, because trauma negative emotions is this negative charge. If it gets into the organs, it risks the survival of the organism, as the human being, so it stores it into our joints and a lot of people with achy joints.
And so again, this Qigong exercise is another way to get this energy moving because we’d rather get it out of our tissue than having it hanging around in our tissue.
Kevin Yee Chan:
And again, it’s this shift of focus, like that exercise isn’t just our muscles and it isn’t just stretching our muscles and tendons, but it’s also being aware that there’s different spaces in the body to lean into. And one of the key things that I start with in that warmup sequence that maybe just share now is that we start from a place of ease and starting from a place of ease and openness. And that is much more available for most of us, not all of us, but most of us in the joints. Starting with that sense of ease, it creates a foundation and a trajectory of ease going forward. And we don’t have to struggle. You don’t have to start with the struggle.
Lorne Brown:
See, and again, you’re tying it all together because Randy Lewis’s episode, I think it’s one or two, she talks about fertility, about receptivity, and to have receptivity you have to have ease and flow. And so it’s all tying together. So we’ll put in the show notes down below where you can find this warmup Qigong exercise that Kevin is mentioning. And we’ll also put in the show notes a link to where to find the Qigong program that he’s created as well, and how to connect with the community and all the things to help support you on your journey to grow your family as you work towards reaching your peak fertility potential.
Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Conscious Fertility, the show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram at LaurenBrownOfficial. That’s Instagram, LaurenBrownOfficial, or you can visit my website, laurenbrown.com and accubalance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.
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Kevin Yee-Chan
Kevin Yee-Chan is an acupuncturist, Qi Gong & yoga practitioner, and artist who has been fascinated by the functions of the body for as long as he can remember. He graduated magna cum laude from Pacific Rim College and is a certified E-RYT 500 yoga teacher.
In his first career as a ballet dancer, Kevin continually returned to acupuncture and yoga as potent tools to heal from various injuries and illnesses. As such, his practice weaves modern somatic sciences with eastern healing arts. Kevin believes everyone’s health journey is a unique work of art. His clinical practice is ignited by discovering each person’s distinct alchemy of vitality and providing patients with a heart-centered, research-based space.
Kevin has trained in tui na (Chinese medical massage), reflexology, medical qigong, Shadow Yoga, non-violent communication, and polyvagal theory to support western science and the body’s full spectrum of health and well-being: both short- and long-term.
Where To Find Kevin Yee-Chan:
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