We have news for you. There is an exciting project on the way for a documentary on Zhineng Qigong. Not only is Jeremy Colledge a well-known Zhineng Qigong teacher, but he also has a successful background in producing for his own channel. This man is serious. Let’s hear his plans and what he has achieved already. My name is Torsten Lueddecke, and this is the Wisdom Qigong podcast. So, welcome everyone.
Today I’ve got Jeremy Colledge with me. Jeremy is well-known in the community as a Zhineng Qigong teacher. He’s been around for, I don’t know, 15 years or something. As a teacher, maybe Jeremy more, 25. More than 25 years. But today I’ve got him with me for a very different reason because he approached me and said, look, Torsten, I would like to do a documentary about Zhineng Qigong because
there is nothing like it produced in the West about what actually happened in the Huaxia Center and how the healing work works today. And I said, well, Jeremy, what are your credentials? And he said, well, I started something called Positive TV, and it was long before YouTube even existed. And we had a huge following, like 250,000 views a month. And we interviewed people like the Dalai Lama and
presidents of countries. And I thought, wow, this guy is serious. So let’s hear what he has to say about the documentary plans. And Jeremy, maybe you would like to give us an idea of what you’ve got in mind there. Wow. Yes. Well, thank you for the introduction, Torsten, that’s great. What do I have in mind? It all came about when I was sitting with one of our teachers,
Teacher Liu, in a wonderful retreat. At the retreat, maybe there were 20 or 30 people there. I was looking around, and I was thinking, gosh, this is priceless material. How can it be possible that only 20 or 30 people are hearing this? You know, when I feel like it’s life-changing. And so I think I must have been looking a bit glum. One of my students said to me,
“Why, you know, why the long face?” And I said, “Well, you know, I think it’s such quality material. It’s such a shame that we don’t have many, many more people listening and, you know, learning about Zhineng Qigong. And she just said to me, “What do you want to do about it?” And I said, “I think we need a documentary.” And that’s how it came about. So, as you
say, I had this background with Positive TV just as an idea. A next-door neighbor and I had talked about the state of world news. From that had been born a TV channel, which eventually became, as you say, a YouTube TV channel. We were hoping we would eventually get onto a satellite channel, but then somebody mentioned to us that it was only a quarter of a million pounds a
month or something like that. So we kind of quashed that idea and went onto YouTube. But yes, we had some really, really extraordinary interviews with amazing people. And so, along the way, I taught myself to interview, I taught myself to edit, and I taught myself how to be a soundman. So I have the kind of credibility, the background tools to make a documentary. And that was how this
whole project began. We put a little bit of funding behind it. We visited China a couple of times. We’ve shot quite a lot of footage, and now we have a website. That website has our short trailer and our long trailer, one’s three minutes and one that’s 10 minutes, along with a bit of information about who we are. And the project is sitting ready to go. So you’re not
just coming up here and saying, “Look, I’ve got a good idea,” because, you know, many people have good ideas, and they never bring them to life. You’ve actually started already, and you’ve done your research, you went to China, you created some footage. Like, this is the starting point. So now you’re just saying, “Okay, I want to make this bigger, I want to make more of an impact, and
I want to, you know, add more content to it and then hopefully get it out to a huge audience worldwide.” Because everybody deserves to know about, you know, what’s happening with Zhineng Qigong. Right, exactly. I absolutely believe that. And this is a great juncture just to stop and say thank you to the Zhineng Qigong Students Hub. I think you’ve done an amazing piece of work here. My colleague
John Millar and I tried to do exactly what you’ve done several times and never managed to get it. I think in the Zhineng Qigong world, trying to bring people together is a bit like herding cats. So you’ve done a very credible thing to make that happen. We thought that the idea of spreading the word was really, really important. I come across it again and again. I’m sure everybody
in the Zhineng Qigong world does. When people say to you, “What do you do?” and you say, “Oh, I’m a Qigong teacher,” they look at you like you’ve sneezed or, you know, what was that word? And then you have to say, and so I’ve been very cheeky. Over the years, I’ve developed a phrase where I say to people, “Chinese yoga.” And they go, “Ah, I get it.” And
so, “Chinese yoga,” you know, it really is a sort of a shortcut because yoga has become so predominant, and I think there’s time for something new. And so, Zhineng Qigong, clearly not, you know, something new; it’s been around for a long time, but something new on the high streets of the Western world. And Zhineng Qigong. Why shouldn’t it be that? We all know how powerful it is; all
the people here, the viewers understand that. But yeah, the project as such, we’ve decided to create a phased kind of version of it. And so, as you said, we got out there, and the thing that brought us to a stop in it, actually, unsurprisingly, was Covid that sort of stopped everything, stopped the whole world. We’d already been to China twice and shot lots of interviews, but we needed,
we still need much more of a spread around the world. But we looked at the project and thought if we raise a small amount of money—well, I’m about to say a figure that anybody would be happy with to have in their bank account. If we raised £20,000, and this is the subject of this call, it’s because we’re starting our crowdfunding project. If we could raise £20,000, we can
finish this documentary completely. And it won’t be the documentary I really, really want it to be, but we can still put an hour’s worth of really interesting footage up on YouTube about Zhineng Qigong, which will be informative and interesting, and we’ll have lots of interviews. But there’s a bigger project behind this. In fact, there’s an even bigger project behind that, and I’ll go to that in a moment.
Through our various film connections, we have a connection to Twickenham Studios in London, which is a very famous studio where some of the James Bond films were made and various other things, and to a director who has made quite a few documentaries. And so we approached him and we said, “What would it look like if we tried to make a really large-scale documentary that could go to the
big companies like Netflix or Amazon?” And so, with him, we’ve created a business plan which is seeing us raise over £450,000, which is a really significant ask. I say it’s a significant ask, but I know, I mean, you’ve got tens of thousands of subscribers, and if we could ask each one of them for $10 each, then, you know, things will already be starting to happen really well. But
yeah, so we have this much, much bigger project which would see us travel around the globe. So, as many of your viewers will know, there’s a huge community of Zhineng Qigong practitioners in Mexico. For example, I met a young guy called Diego in China this year, and Diego has told me that, in fact, we went to the 3rd International Qi Science Conference when we were there in China.
And Diego was one of the speakers at this conference, and he announced at the conference that he hopes that by 2030 they will have between 2 to 3 million Zhineng Qigong practitioners in Mexico alone. And so he has very, very advanced plans to put that into reality. They think they probably have something between 50 and 100 at the moment. And so, this is one of the key things
that we noticed, of course, is that our trailers are currently both in English, and we have subtitles in Spanish now because there seems to be such a burgeoning Zhineng Qigong community in the south of America as well. And then, of course, we’d like to go to America, and we’ve got a few names that I could mention if you’re interested. There are several European countries that we would travel
to—keen to go to Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain to interview lots more people there. And then, of course, there are wonderful communities in Malaysia, as well as Australia and New Zealand. So this is quite an extensive tour, especially if we’re going to take with us a first-class director, a first-class cameraman, and a sound person, etc. Etc. So, you can imagine how a small budget of £20,000 can
be inflated to a budget of £460,000 when you suddenly add teams around the world and travel budgets and things like that. So, yeah, it’s a lovely idea that it scales up and it scales down, and whatever we can manage to raise will produce something that will benefit the Zhineng Qigong community. We have a way you can discover Qigong. So, at the Zhineng Qigong Students Hub, we know that
understanding Qigong is very important and also that Zhineng Qigong in itself has various nuances that people can’t easily comprehend. So, we’ve approached it in the style of a video game. On this page, “Discover Qigong,” you can select your character, so you can either be a beginner, a practitioner, a holistic healer, or a self-healer. And you click on your character, and it takes you to these different sections. In
these sections, you can explore the nuances, and when you click on a card, all of the resources pop up. We’ve made it really fun, and not many people know about it. So, if you are interested, have a look and discover Qigong. Now, this is something that I really like about your approach. It’s great to dream big, and I think you’ve got a fair opportunity here to make it
big. So, let’s aim for that. But in any case, you’re going to produce something of value. Now, we don’t know whether this is going to be like a low-budget production that still brings the message across, or a medium-sized production, or whether it’s going to be a big hit on Amazon or Netflix—we don’t know that. But in any case, it’s going to be something of value that will support
people and will bring new people to the Zhineng Qigong world and have more people benefit from this incredible work that’s been done all over the world. So, this is what I love about it. So, it’s not an either/or situation; it’s going to work, we just don’t know to what scale we can actually bring that project. Right? Exactly. Now, when it comes to the content, I’m not sure how
much you can share, or are willing to share, or allow to share. How do you see this happening? So, I get that you will visit today’s teachers, but how much is it going to go into the past? Are you also going to do some footage about how things used to be, about the Huaxia Center, and how the whole thing developed? Are you looking at that as well, or
more about the recent work of Zhineng Qigong teachers and masters all over the world? The script, as it stands at the moment, has an introduction that asks, “How did I discover Zhineng Qigong?” And how did I discover Qigong? Because the raison d’être for me doing Qigong was that I had a very toxic lifestyle. I worked in the city of London—too much drinking, smoking, late nights, stress, wow, such
stress. And I had to find what was going to save my life, effectively. So, I tried yoga, which I found great, but you know, it was not really what I was looking for at that stage. I studied Tai Chi for two years. I really enjoyed that. Again, it didn’t quite seem to be it. And then, when I discovered Qigong, it really felt like I had come home. It
felt like, you know, I’d finally found my place in the world. On top of that, it helped me build up the strength and the reserves to actually leave this toxic job, and I never believed I was going to be able to do it. But with the power of Qigong behind me, I was able to leave the city and instantly drop into a new career working in computers, actually,
as it happens. But all the time that I was working with computers, my newfound Qigong journey ran alongside that. I started my own classes, then I became a therapist. And somehow, actually, as a strange aside, I found that working with and diagnosing computers was very similar to working with and diagnosing humans, as they have the same kind of tree structure. If you can find out what the problem
is, you work your way down to the root cause, and then you can solve it. And so, yeah, the bottom line is that the film script starts with a brief description of how Zhineng Qigong saved my life, right? Then we move on to move away from the sort of generality of Qigong, if you like, to the more specific Zhineng Qigong world. Because the story of the medicine-less hospital
is a really, really powerful one. We have some footage that we’ve taken from various films on YouTube, and we have been asking around various other teachers because I know that there was actually a department run by Teacher Gao, who’s one of my teachers, who made tons and tons of footage. So we’re trying to find out how much of that still survives because it would be lovely to be
able to incorporate some of the older footage. Then the next part of the story takes us through to current day teachers, as you say, around the world. And we wish then to spread the interviewing much wider because we have predominantly Chinese people in our, in our current trailer who have made dramatic changes to their lives. And on that trailer there’s one lady who talks about her tumors on
her thyroid which just evaporated over a space of three weeks. And we have many other lovely stories like that that we picked up in, in China in our, in our travels. But now we’d like to speak to Western people because there is a tendency for people to think to themselves, this is something that only Chinese people can do. And as we know, it’s not, you know, it’s something
that anybody can do. And so, yeah, so that’s, the next phase is to, is to then start putting some Western people on, on tape. And, and then I think eventually what we really want to do is to move towards the last third of the film, perhaps being about the, I don’t say more esoteric and more spiritual, although I think a lot of people see it that way. But
for me, there’s an aspect of Qigong that meshes perfectly with quantum science. I really like the way that quantum science thinking talks about, you know, the universe and the waves moving to particles and vice versa. And we talk about matter, you know, being turned back into non-matter or being turned into matter, cancer tumors disappear. And it’s exactly the same process that people talk about. When you take the
information away from a particle, it turns back into a wave. And so for me, you know, we can look at this on a much more scientific basis. Although we all feel, I think, that there’s a very spiritual side to our journey, there’s also a very practical side. So I think we’d like to touch into that as well. I just think it’s funny that you start talking about the
more spiritual side and then you move straight to science. Because for me, now what we call spiritual science is actually all very, very simple to explain. For me, Zhineng Qigong is not some airy-fairy miracle thing. It is, you know, deep down, it makes total sense. So even the logical mind can understand why Zhineng Qigong works so well. And for me, that is also one of the powerful messages
that if I would do a documentary, I would like to get across. So it’s not just another, you know, one of these movies that promises all kinds of wonders if you just do certain things, right. It is actually, you know, that’s why they call it Qi science, there are scientific thoughts behind it. They all make total sense. If you get down to the basics, everybody can say, okay,
now I get why Zhineng Qigong works so well. And I would love to see that incorporated in a documentary. I think it’s fundamental, so that it is not just for the airy-fairy people but, you know, basically for everyone. And that would be great if you can—yeah, if that could be part of what you’re doing here. Yeah. Dr. Pang, you know, his watchwords in this are, it has to
be safe, it has to be repeatable, it has to be easy to learn. And we all know that that is, you know, the case with Zhineng Qigong. And so the science that Dr. Pang used in the medicine-less hospital fascinates me. I don’t know if you know the stories about them testing adding Qi to structural concrete and that you can reinforce the strength of structural concrete by 30%. They
could increase the yield of a certain rice crop by 42%. And so those are things that are really tangible. Imagine the ability to, you know, almost double the harvest and how that would help with, you know, world hunger. And rather than asking one of these large pharmaceutical companies or big pharma, you know, if you know what I mean, agricultural companies, to just add some more terrible chemicals to
it, now we’re talking about Qigong practitioners helping the harvest. And I think that’s a really, really nice idea. So, yes, the Qi science is very, very important. Is that the script basically? Is that the story? There’s another little bit to it, which is that when we looked at this kind of Western side of things, as it were, and how do we make, how do we help Western people
engage with this more easily, as it does, on the face of it, look like Eastern esoteric, you know, arts. And so from my days at Positive TV, I’ve made some very, very good connections in the spiritual and science world. And there are quite a few people who are trying to break these kinds of boundaries as well. And so many of your viewers will have come across an American
guy called Joe Dispenza. He’s often found paired up with Gregg Braden and Lynne McTaggart, who’s a friend of mine as well. And so there are some of these. Bruce Lipton was the other person I was looking for. So we have connections to go to, certainly to Bruce Lipton and Gregg Braden, both of whom are scientists who work in this kind of field and who are talking about energy
from a Western perspective. However, what they’re talking about perfectly, perfectly knits with what we know as Zhineng Qigong science. And so what we’re hoping to do is to be able to bring those people into the documentary as well and ask them to give their Western perspective on this Eastern art so that we can perhaps simplify it, I suppose, for people and show that it is not something, you
know, woo-woo, that actually, you know, it really, really genuinely can be thought of as science from a Western perspective as well. Unfortunately, Western scientists tend to, well, if it’s not chemical-based or it’s not something you can make a lot of money from, our Western scientist friends tend not to be very assiduous at testing it as such. So, it’s very nice to have, you know, much more of a
scientific perspective from a Western viewpoint, as well as the kind of work they’re doing in Xi’an where they’re testing the science there. And I believe he was saying Master Liu as well; he’s also working from a scientific perspective. Yes, absolutely. And so you’re suggesting here that, you know, the thoughts of the likes of Joe Dispenza, Bruce Lipton, or Lynne McTaggart are very much aligned with the fundamental ideas
of Zhineng Qigong because, you know, more people know these people and their work than actually know Zhineng Qigong. So this is a great bridge to reach people who are already open to the ideas and thoughts; only they might not know, you know, how beneficial the tools are of Zhineng Qigong because it is a bit as if, you know, what Gregg Braden and Joe Dispenza say. And that’s wonderful.
And here’s the toolkit, right? So here are the exercises you can do. And because that’s something that’s probably lacking. I mean, I don’t know enough about their work, but yeah, I would assume that when it comes to actual exercises, Zhineng Qigong has a lot to offer to people who love the ideas of Joe Dispenza. Torsten, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. And I’m treading into
sort of delicate territory here when I say, when I bring down the whole of Buddhism with one comment. But I also, you know, look at something like Buddhism where you have nothing but meditation, or many of the styles have nothing but meditation because also Buddhist styles of Qigong, so we have to say that. But, you know, something that’s based entirely on the mind. And I think an awful
lot of the work that these guys, you know, Joe Dispenza and Gregg Braden, are doing is again based on, you know, the mind. And I think it is interesting because when I first started doing Zhineng Qigong, okay, so just to put the timeline correct on that, I started studying myself 35 years ago, 34 years ago, something like that. I only started teaching 25 years ago. I only discovered
Zhineng Qigong probably maybe 15 or so years ago. But yeah, right, back at the very beginning, people would say, you know, 50% of all problems are in your mind. And now if you listen to Joe Dispenza talking, he’ll say 95% of all problems are in your mind. So, you know, whether that’s the case, he certainly says it because it fits his work. I’m not sure. Perhaps let’s say
80% of all problems are in your mind. But that still leaves a very large part of the work that needs to be done on the body. And I don’t think those guys address it. So I think that also Zhineng Qigong is perfectly placed to mesh with Western spirituality, Western science, and Western medicine. It fits so nicely with all of those things. And the other thing that, you know,
that I like so much about Zhineng Qigong is that it doesn’t challenge anybody’s religion either. So it doesn’t matter if you’re a Christian or a Muslim or anything. You know, we don’t ask you to believe anything apart from the fact that you can heal yourself, which, I don’t know, maybe that’s a problem, but I don’t think so. But I think that that’s it. You know, for me, it’s
an incredibly powerful tool that adds so much to all of these other things. It, you know, augments everybody else’s ideas. I couldn’t agree more. And in particular because I also see a tendency in Zhineng Qigong these days with a lot of the teachers to shift the focus purely towards consciousness. Now I don’t want to disregard consciousness because, you know, it is the key. And there are ways to
get there that can be physical and that can approach the whole consciousness from a different angle. Because not everybody is very good at just calming their mind. Some of us are doing quite well if they do a great lift job and use that as a vehicle to get to that state and to activate the self-healing. So I don’t think it’s. Yeah, I’m just observing that even in our
world in Qigong, a lot of focus goes to consciousness, which is great because Zhineng Qigong isn’t chilling; Zhineng Qigong isn’t a sport, right, where you just go out and do your exercise. It’s obviously something very different. But there’s a reason why Dr. Pang did all these exercises. And if you look at the medicineless hospital, the Huaxia Center, this is what they did eight hours a day; they did
exercises. So let’s get the balance right here. And this is, you know, where we can bring something into the world that is quite simple because the exercises aren’t difficult. Everybody can learn them, and we can bring something and add something to the work that other people are doing that is more consciousness-based. Like, you know, Joe Dispenza, for example. So that’s what I love about Zhineng Qigong because it
just gives us one more route to get to where everybody seems to be heading towards. I agree with you. Yes. I think that the last, well, in my lifetime, the trend has been moving from the physical to the mental, as it were. And certainly when I started studying, first off, I started studying just standing Qigong with a master called Master Lam. And I used to say to him,
you know, “Why do we do this?” And he said, “Just do it, don’t ask questions.” You know, and so many Chinese masters mean that. And when I say “just do it, don’t ask questions,” that is about all he ever said to me over the space of about two years. Literally, all the instruction I ever got was “just do it, don’t ask questions.” Certainly, nobody was talking about consciousness
at that stage. And I think that, you know, the sort of spiritual revolution was beginning, you know, I suppose obviously in the sort of 60s and 70s. We were sort of, you know, I don’t know, people taking LSD and kind of discovering consciousness, but it was still in the sort of the esoteric field. And then by about maybe the 80s and 90s, people were starting to think of
this as being more commonplace and being a subject that we could actually start to research as well, that it, you know, would have its own field. And that is mirrored entirely in what’s happened in Qigong. So to begin with, it was just a physical exercise, and I was told that I was learning it because one day I could turn it into a martial art. I said, “Okay, fair
enough, you know, I’ll try that.” And it was only in the early 2000s that I discovered medical Qigong. And that’s been studied in the universities in China since about the 1970s and 1980s. And I think Dr. Pang was probably part of building medical Qigong. Most Qigong people in China were, or high-level Zhineng Qigong people were. And so I started studying that as a therapist. And you tend to
find then that what has happened is that many spiritual arms of Qigong in China had their spirituality gently removed from the top, shall we say. Because of course in China, you know, there’s nobody higher than the government, and that’s the important part for them. And so a lot of that had been changed, you know, had just been disregarded. Let’s say it had become a very, very technical device.
And that is the beauty of it because they were able to look at the exercises and say, “This is why this works, this is why this one doesn’t work so well.” Select an incredible set of exercises. And I have some enormous tome somewhere about this thick that has, you know, all of the different types of exercises that they selected to teach at the universities and why they were
good and what they did and so forth. And out of that comes Zhineng Qigong. But it’s quite clear that Dr. Pang has gone very deeply on his own spiritual journey, and from that, he’s evolved these things, and the whole study of consciousness was evolving at the same place. I suspect that he was pushing it forward as much as anybody. And so now we’ve moved in my lifetime from
this kind of “it’s only physical” to now, as you say, perhaps it’s got to. It’s only mental, and perhaps we have to swing back to the middle, as you know, often happens with these pendulum swings. We shouldn’t forget that the physical is important. But I think that’s it, you know, I think we have such a lovely balance of both of those things. And if you think back to
your starting point, everybody starts—90% of people start just by doing exercises. You know, it’s just bit by bit you start to think, “Ah, there’s more to this than meets the eye,” you know, as your teacher slowly drip-feeds some new information in. But yeah, we always start with the physical, so you know, that’s the natural progression for us, for each person. It also seems a natural progression for Qigong
over the years as well. Right. So I can see there’s plenty to put into your documentary. You might have to turn it into a series. At the end of the day, it’s not going to be just one movie. But this is a great project, Jeremy. And we from the Zhineng Qigong Students Hub will follow you in the next months and years, depending on how long it takes. We
will regularly report on the progress you make and what’s happening so that our listeners, viewers, and community are informed about this project because I think it’s something that’s close to all of our hearts. Everyone listening here has probably benefited from Zhineng Qigong in one way or another; otherwise, they wouldn’t be here. So this is a great way of giving back and making it approachable for other people who
don’t know it yet. I think this is a cause that we can all subscribe to. We will obviously link your page in the show notes here, and we will continue to report on what you’re doing. You said you’ve started this crowdfunding platform, so I can only encourage people to support this wonderful project and continue to observe what you’re doing and watch what you’re doing by staying tuned into
what we are reporting here. And the Zhineng Qigong Students Hub has a newsletter, so there will be regular updates about how the documentary is coming along. Very good. Well, that’s it. Yes, we hope, as you say, lots of material, and you know, it’s possible that if somebody like Netflix were to be interested, that we might cut it into four or five shows. One of the crazy ideas was
actually to have a month-long retreat and follow people to see how they get along and actually film their stories. So yes, who knows how the project will turn out. And yeah, and that’s my appeal to all the people who have come this far on the podcast with us. If you can find some way to support this documentary, we would really, really appreciate your help. We have an Indiegogo
crowdfund, and as you said, Torsten, you’re going to link that. That would be amazing, and thank you yourself too. That’s been really good to talk to you as well. Thank you very much, Jeremy. Good luck with the project, and we’ll talk soon to see how far you’ve come already. Yeah, we’ll send you some good news. Okay, good. Okay, thank you. Thanks. We trust you enjoyed this conversation, and
we invite you to subscribe to our podcast so we can stay in touch and notify you of future episodes. We will end today’s episode with the Eight Verses Meditation performed by Zhineng Qigong teacher Katrien Hendrickx. Enjoy! To get your free eBook on the Eight Verses Meditation, please check the show notes below.
We need your consent to load the content of YouTube.
