Katrien Hendrickx delves into the three levels of Qineng Qigong practice: the physical movements, the flow of Qi energy, and the direction of consciousness. Katrin, who recently published a comprehensive 435-page book on Zhineng Qigong, shares insights on the importance of understanding the science behind Qigong for enhanced healing and effectiveness. The conversation explores Dr. Pang’s theory, which conceptualizes Qi as consisting of the physical body, the Qi level, and the information level. When harmonized, particularly through the consciousness theory, Qigong practice becomes significantly more effective.

Welcome to the Zhineng Qigong Community Podcast. My name is Torsten Lueddecke, and this is today’s story. In Zhineng Qigong, we practice on three levels. There is the level of the correct movements and postures. There is the level of the energy, the Qi, and the level of consciousness that directs the Qi. Now imagine what is possible when all three levels are aligned and work in perfect harmony. Katrien Hendrickx

will take us on the fascinating journey of understanding this theory intuitively and intellectually. Here comes Katrien. She is extremely knowledgeable and just brought out a book about Zhineng Qigong, covering all aspects. And that book, Katrien, how many pages does this book have? It’s about 435 pages. So you can see there’s a lot of knowledge in this book, and Katrien is going to share some of that with us

today. Now, the topic we want to focus on today is what is behind Zhineng Qigong? What is the science? Why is it actually working so well? Now, many, many of us, we just do our little exercise and we discover, wow, this is great, we can feel the Qi, something is moving. I’m feeling better, my health is improving. But we hardly ever ask why. And this is an important

question because we all know that if the mind understands why something is working, the effect can be even bigger than if we don’t know what’s going on. So this is basically what we want to talk about today, Katrien, and maybe you want to share a little bit about, you know, why you think it is so important that we understand the why Zhineng Qigong is actually working so well

and healing people. Yes. Okay. Torsten, what you already mentioned is about the consciousness theory. You said if you know with your mind what is happening, Zhineng Qigong will be far more effective. And the consciousness theory is a consequence of the theory of Dr. Pang, who has this theory about Qi, about the energy. And Qi consists of three layers. You have our physical body. That’s the form, that’s our

body. Then you have the Qi level and you have the information level. And if you understand that these three levels always transform into one another, and you do an exercise or you just breathe in and you breathe out, you know that each moment, each tiny little moment, you. Your body is transforming. If you know that if you are doing Qigong and you work with good intentions, you are

standing in a healthy nature, then you know you benefit your body. And the consciousness theory, what you already mentioned, is this information level, and you can practice Zhineng Qigong just on the form level and do your movements so good and so well. And this is very important because if your posture is good, if your movements are good, Qi will flow well and you will get abundant Qi. But

you stay on the form level. If you work with Qi and feel Qi, if you see and feel and experience Qi coming in and coming out, then you are working on this Qi level and then you do your practice even better. But if you can do it on the consciousness level, that you know what you are doing, that you know about the science, that your logical mind knows

what you are doing, then you are working on the consciousness level. And because everything happens in our brains, then Zhineng Qigong will be even more effective. And that was the aim of Dr. Pang, that we know about science, that we know about the importance of a focused mind, so that our practice will be far more effective. So Dr. Pang thought it was very important to understand the theory

behind it. Right? Because, you know, as you just mentioned, it is like three arrows aligning in the same direction, and that’s far more powerful than if just one arrow would do all the work. Right. I know you’ve done a lot of research for your book, so do you actually know a little bit more about, you know, Dr. Pang and why he thought it’s so important and what he

was actually teaching or how he implemented that, how he made sure his teachers knew about the science behind Zhineng Qigong? Do you have any anecdotes there or anything you can share with us here? Since 2020, since the famous corona pandemic, I followed so many online courses with Chinese teachers who were trained by Dr. Pang, and they insist on the knowledge of the science. So I got knowledge from

different teachers, from different Chinese teachers about this science. And they also said that for Dr. Pang, it was so important that people in the West also know about this science, know about the philosophy, about the holistic concept of Qigong, because it’s traditional Chinese medicine. And in the West, we normally don’t know a lot about Chinese medicine, but it’s based on this knowledge. So that’s why Chinese teachers also

teach about the science. And they teach it in science itself, in the theory, but they also put it into the practice so that we know if we do a movement, we know what happens and on what level we are transforming. That’s very interesting. And I can see that it is an important topic for most masters, and yet every master has their own balance between practice and theory, and

some focus more on the theory and some a little less. Also, it’s not so easy to get this knowledge across because it’s quite complex, and we know that the Chinese masters, they… We adore them for their English-speaking abilities because it must be so difficult to learn English for them. Yes, but obviously, they don’t have the same level to be able to communicate all this knowledge in a clear,

precise way so that we in the West understand. That is, I think, one of the problems that we sometimes have. Is there any shortcut? I mean, is there any basic idea how you would explain the whole theory so that people understand it a little better? If you would have to explain it to a 70-year-old or something, you know, how would you explain the theory so that we all

have a base here of how this whole thing works? Yeah, that’s true. What you say, Torsten, that it’s a difficult theory. There are books in English, translated books from Chinese into English about science. But it’s a lot of text, and it’s difficult. So what I have been doing, I have been interested in Chinese medicine since 20 years ago, and it was so huge for me, it was so

big, and I tried to memorize all this, and it was such a vast knowledge. So I read about it, and I read again, and I read again, and the more I read about it, the more I could integrate and understand. And what I think is very important when I wrote my book is that I don’t have text and text and text, but I put pictures in it. I

found good pictures, got permission to use pictures of Chinese teachers, and put highlights, keywords in bigger text so that people can immediately catch highlights in the text and understand. And I would advise people not to try to learn it and understand it, but just read it, just read it again and again. And after a while, after a few months, after a few years, you understand the theory. That’s

my experience with this difficult theory. I have been doing Zhineng Qigong since 2009. But now that I know about the science these few years already, it’s so much more than just doing these exercises. Now I know why I’m doing the movements, I know why I have that experience, or why I improve on that level. I understand now that it’s all very impressive. But I can already see my

listeners, a lot of the listeners, they say, “Okay, well, I don’t see myself reading years and years and years to get the basic ideas.” So I’m hoping to get one or two pieces of information out of you here in this conversation. Is it okay if you share a great insight you had that helped you personally, or once you understood this, it made a difference in your life? Maybe

there’s one or two things you may share with our friends here. What I think about now is that I experienced so many things in doing Zhineng Qigong, and when I got to know this theory, I learned about the layers that in Qi, you have information. So then I understood why I saw things, when I knew things, when I was in a certain place, that I could feel what

happened there so many hundred years ago. It’s just because if you know the theory, it’s because you have information in energy. If you can pick up the energy of a person, of a place, you know, you can get information if you are open to it. And what’s very important to me is silence. Being silent, not always talking and talking and talking. If you are just in silence, you

can get so much information. You get so much information about nature, about places you are in, about people you are with. People ignore the importance. Especially sensitive people feel so much they can’t normally see, they can’t normally touch. But it’s in the air. It’s in the energy. Is this what we call or refer to as the Hunyuan Qi, that we pick up information with? The Hunyuan Qi? Or

am I on the wrong track here? The Hunyuan Qi? No, that’s perfectly right. Torsten, you speak about the Hunyuan Qi. The Hunyuan Qi is the energy of our brains. And that’s very subtle, very fine energy. And with the energy of your brain, you can be open to information. You can get information, and you can send information. And that is used in healing Qigong. If you train your mind,

if you train the energy of your brain, you can use this energy to get information, to receive information about so many things, about so many people. But you are also able, if you train it enough, to send information. If you feel that somebody is not well, you can send good information to that person. So let me try to summarize it for those of us who are not so

familiar with the three levels of substance theory of Dr. Pang. So basically, what Dr. Pang was saying is we have three levels. We have the material level, which in our case could be the body, but also all the material outside of the body. We’ve got the energy level, which is the Qi level, where all the energy is moving back and forth and doing whatever it needs to do.

And we’ve got the consciousness level, which is our thoughts, and everything that has to do with consciousness. I’m hoping I’m summarizing this correctly. If anybody’s out there in the community who knows it better, my apologies. But this is how I understand the theory. And these three levels are interacting with each other. They are transforming from one into another, which is the reason why, when we send Qi, we

can heal the physical body. Yes. Energy transforms into the physical form. And that is also why we direct the Qi, the energy, with our consciousness level. So if the consciousness sends Qi, the energy, into a certain body part, this is why there is a transformation happening. This is why healing is happening. Am I summarizing that correctly? It is completely right, Torsten. And what I want to add, because

now you are talking about people and how you can heal people, how you can heal yourself, how you can heal other people, but a very, very simple example to illustrate what you were saying about these three levels is just if you take the earth, that’s material, you can take earth into your hands, but in the earth is energy. And the energy causes trees and plants to grow. And

in trees and plants, there is information. Because when you have a very tiny, tiny seed, you put it in the earth, the seed gets energy from the earth, and the information in the seed makes the plant or the tree grow as it was planned to grow. So this is such a simple example to illustrate the three levels of Qigong, of Qi, and then you transfer it to human

beings. But our physical body has energy in it that flows through our body, through the meridians, through the channels, and with the energy of our mind. And then you have all these difficult names for it. You have the eoint, that’s the energy of your mind. You have so many difficult words for all these levels of Qi. With your mind, with your eoint, you can direct things to happen.

My name is Leila Cupido, and I’m the project manager of the Students Hub. Our team is constantly adding events, teachers, videos, and other resources to take your practice to the next level, improving the quality of your life and the lives of the people around you. We do this work for you, so please use it. Hunyuan Ling Dong—if I’m thinking of what we focus on in Zhineng Qigong and

also what Dr… Pang was focusing on at the Huaxia Center, the first medicine nurse hospital. It was always about seeing the people perfectly healthy, with their functions normal, their organs normal, and basically, what we are doing there and what they have been doing there is connecting with the information of a healthy body. This information of the healthy body can do its work and transform the material, or the

currently ill body, into a healthy state. So basically, when we say healthy information, it doesn’t mean that our consciousness needs to know exactly what a healthy liver looks like, for example. We are not doctors, so we don’t need to understand the anatomy behind it. It’s enough to just have the consciousness that, say, the Qi field out there holds the information of what a healthy liver actually is. What

we do is connect with this information of what a healthy liver is. The liver is just an example, obviously, or a healthy heart is, or healthy lungs are, or whatever your problem might be. We connect with this information out there, of what a healthy liver is, and that information will then do the work and transform our liver into a healthy liver. I think that is kind of, in

an easy way, a simple way, explained why the theory is so helpful to know that this is why we focus on the healthy. We imagine ourselves being healthy and the functions being normal. And lots of you guys out there would have heard a master saying, “this all functions normal, everything healthy, and so on.” So this is the information we connect with in order to use this law and

this science to transform whatever is going on in our body to a healthy state. Is that correct? Yeah. Correct. That’s correct, yes. Okay. Now, do you have any personal story to tell about this experience? Anything that comes to mind where you had a particular insight or where it worked particularly well, or where you felt how this actually works in practice? Yes, Torsten, I have a very beautiful and

a very strong example of that because I have had a hearing problem ever since I was 31 years old and I was in China and Tibet with a few teachers, Chinese teachers, in 2016. And I said to Teacher Wei, I want to hear again on one side. And he said, what’s wrong with your ear? And I explained it, and he worked on me. And that same evening, I

heard again in my bad side. And the next morning, I asked him what was wrong with my ear. And he, he said, this is so typical Western medicine thinking. I put in healthy information. And at that time in 2016, I did not understand what he said. I put in healthy information. And that’s what you were explaining about. You use healthy information. And that is so amazing. He just

said, I put in healthy information, and it works. It works. And if I teach Qigong and I give the commands, like you said, my lungs are healthy, my liver is healthy, I sometimes get a reaction from somebody who says, but that’s not true because my lungs are ill, and I’ve got this tumor in my lungs. And that’s difficult for our Western people. We are so thinking logically. The

doctors say we are ill, we have a tumor, and that’s in our mind. And our minds get programmed to know I am ill, my lungs are ill. And that’s why you insist, why the doctors, why the Chinese teachers insist on using healthy information. And I had this beautiful example. Teacher Wei just put in healthy information without me knowing it. And it worked. It worked. I mean, that’s a

great example, because as you just pointed out, in our Western world, we are focusing on the opposite. You go to the doctor and the doctor says, this is your problem. You are ill. Here, you have this tumor. Here, you have that, you have this. And then what we do is we use this information and basically we, even if it isn’t ill yet, we transform it into an ill

liver or ill heart or whatever it is. What Teacher Wei was doing, that he said, it doesn’t really matter what’s wrong, what was wrong with your ear? Because that’s information that makes the hearing come back. What I’m focusing on is the positive information that makes the hearing good. And then things will transform, and then the hearing is good. That is what he did. But my question to you

is now, how do I deal with that? If I unfortunately know I have this problem, say I’ve got a tumor in my liver or something like that, how do I deal with that? How can I focus on the positive information without my, the other part of my personality saying, you’re kidding yourself because it is ill? Right. How would you deal with that? I think an important thing is

also accepting. If you accept a situation, it’s far better to deal with it. If you fight against it, you lose energy, and you need your energy to get better. So accepting a situation is the first step, I think. And then being positive about it and being convinced, having the trust that you will get better. I think these are important informations. I work with cancer patients too, already a

long time. Since 2007, I’m teaching yoga to cancer patients. I see this so often in these groups. People who are confident, who are positive, have a far better feeling about their cancer than people who are negative about it and who fear about the future. I can see these people who always complain they will not get better and people who believe they will get better and have a positive

mindset, that’s so important. So basically, what could say it can be true, Both can be true at the same time. So you can accept, yes, that my liver has a problem on the physical level. Yet it can be true that on the information level, it is already healed. So I’m not lying there. On the information level, it’s already healed. And if I focus on that information level of

being healed, then the physical will follow the information. Yeah, I think that is maybe a way to. For us in the West, who can’t just sit there and say, well, but I know I’ve got this problem. Yes, leave it there. It’s on the physical level, but we all know the order of things is the consciousness is the most important thing. Whatever the consciousness creates is going to show

up in the energy and in the physical world. It’s just going to follow naturally. So that’s why we can rightly focus on the healthy liver and the information of the healthy liver without having to go into big internal conflicts saying, yeah, but I know it’s not right. Yeah, on the information level, it is right. On the information level, it is healed already. I also hear a lot of

Chinese masters using this word already. So it means it is there without us necessarily knowing it yet. Because if we look at the scan, it might not have materialized yet, but it is already there on the information level. And then the physical form will follow. Yeah. What I want to add is what you are telling about illness and the causes of illness. There is also a saying. If

you get ill, you focus on the laws of illness. If you get well, if you heal yourself or people, you focus on the laws of healthiness. That’s what you were saying. Right, right. The information is in your consciousness, the information, the laws of health or the laws of illness, and the laws you follow are what’s going to happen in your body. But for Western people, it’s not easy

to understand that or to accept that. And it could be, you know, because we are more theoretical people and wanting to understand people here in the West. I think. Yeah, that’s why maybe your work is also so important and your book is so important so that people get a better understanding. Because it is also a fact that my body knows perfectly well what it means to be healthy.

Yeah, it knows exactly. Yeah. You know, just when you talked about the seed earlier, you know, the tree. All the information of the tree is in the seed. All the information of what it means to be perfectly healthy is in our body. Now, all we need to do is connect that information versus the wrong information, the ill information. Connect that information, and then, you know, it’s like, oh,

I forgot. I, yeah, I want to do cooking tonight, and I forgot how to do the soup. I’ll go back to my cooking book and open the page and, oh, yes, that’s how I do the soup correctly. So basically, we’re doing the same with our body. We just say, okay, we connect with the information that is in our body of what it needs to be healthy, and then

let the body and the Qi do the work. Some teachers say, go back to your baby state. Normally, you are born as a healthy baby, and then you live and you experience so many things, you get situations. Some teachers say, go back to your baby state and visualize your baby state. You were born perfectly. And if you were born not, okay, you go even further back, but you

go back to healthy information. And for most people, it’s the baby state. Go back to the baby state. Go back to that information or whatever. You have been healthy because it was a time when all this oil was healthy, or your ear was healthy. And to just reconnect with that information and reset the information level back to the healthy state versus wherever you are right now. And yeah,

I could even say, even if you were, you know, unfortunate that you were born with a disease, the information of what it means to be healthy is still out there, even if it’s not in you, but it’s out there. And you were in the beginning of the conversation, you spoke about how the Hunyuan Qi can connect with the information outside of who you are. So you can easily

just get the information of what it means to be healthy with this organ or that organ from the outside if your body doesn’t have that yet. Right? Yeah, perfectly true. Yeah. Well, we’re talking a lot about theories here, and hopefully this is helpful for some people to get. Okay, okay, now I understand how that works or that might be useful in their daily practice. When you do your

Qigong practice, do you do any conscious remembrance of how this exercise works or why certain movements work before you get started, or do you just connect with it while you’re doing your exercise? I think it’s very important that I connect to birds. That’s, for me, very, very important. And that I have my Qi Field around and that I go to silence before I even start doing movements, that

I connect deeply with myself and what I am doing. Since I have been following all these Chinese teachers online, they, they also built a far bigger Qi Field. They connect with family, they connect with friends, they connect with earth, heaven, nature around, but always with positive intentions, positive information. And I heard, I got feedback from people who trained with me that since we do this, building up such

a big Qi Field, harmonizing it with so many people, that your life gets better, that your relationship with people gets better. And that’s so important that you know also from a theoretical background, that the Qi Field is supporting us. If you do your exercises and you are in a bad environment, then you get bad information in your exercise. If you build up a very healthy and a very

positive and a very harmonized Qi Field first, it’s the Qi Field that supports your practice. And so this is what I’m doing the last few months, this importance of the Qi Field, a harmonized, positive Qi Field, and not only for yourself, but you are having this podcast for a community. The community is so important. You are not alone. You are not on your own. Even if you practice

alone, you are not alone. That’s a wonderful way to remember, a wonderful thing to remember, because so often, you know, we’re just doing our exercise by ourselves, but at the same time, you know, there’s a big community out there who’s also practicing or in the Qigong state or supporting positive information. And I think to connect with that is a beautiful thing, and to do that before you start

the exercise might actually, you know, even increase the power of the exercise for you further. So I think that’s a wonderful thing to do before you start your practice. We are connected to one another, right? We’re also connected when we’re not talking to each other, aren’t we? Yeah, we are connected with all the people who are listening right now or who will listen afterward. We are just connected

to one another. And that’s so beautiful. Some people feel connections. So let’s hope this podcast is also contributing a little bit because then we can get to know each other. You know, people that didn’t know you before get to know you. And we’re going to get to know more people while the podcast evolves. So that is also one of the purposes of why we’re doing this project here.

And I’m grateful for that, Torsten. Thank you. And I’ve got a practical question for our listeners. I mean, we know that we have a lot of fantastic Qigong and Zhineng Qigong teachers out there. Also, a lot of really great Qigong masters who are working with people from the West, offering trainings, doing courses, traveling to countries, and so on and so on. And from my experience, every student kind

of finds a teacher that they resonate more with, and then they might be, yeah, that might be their favorite teacher, and that’s different for everyone because we’re all different people. And every teacher has their own style of bringing things across, their own style of teaching and connecting with people, and so on. But as we were focusing today on the whole theory, now, in your research, did you find

any particular teachers that you found helpful, particularly with respect to understanding theory? Did you do any courses along your research with, okay, this helped me a lot to understand or to take my knowledge about the theory of Qi further to the next level? Is there anything that comes to mind? I find this a difficult question because I have my own preferences. And as you say, some people are

more attracted to some teachers and less to others. I think this is a very difficult question, but there are so many online courses lately and so many teachers giving free sessions. I think it’s a good idea to just follow a few sessions with one teacher, then another, and then just experience which teacher suits you best. Because it’s so difficult, I don’t want to say, “I like that teacher,

I like that teacher.” That’s not okay for me. Also, what I’ve realized is that sometimes I listen to lots of teachers, obviously, because that is what we’re doing at the Students Hub. We are forming a community for all teachers to show and showcase their work. What I’ve found is that sometimes I get basically the same message from three different teachers, and it doesn’t sink in. And then the

fourth teacher says exactly the same thing, and it clicks. I say, “Okay, wow, what an insight!” Only then do I remember, well, all the other teachers have told me the same thing, but it just didn’t click with me at that moment. So I think it’s a good idea to stay open and try new teachers—not because one isn’t enough, but because, you know, you might hear certain things in

a different way that will make the difference just for you. Because that is where you are at this moment, and that is what you needed to hear at that moment, right? Torsten? That’s so true, what you say. It’s like a book you can read—you can read a book five years ago, read it again three years ago, and now you read it again after three years, and you get

information in the book that you did not get at the first reading five years ago. That’s so true, what you say. If you hear it a thousand times, then you understand. Oh, yes, now I understand. Katrien, is there any other aspect that you want to get across today with respect to the theory, why you think theory is so important, and how it can help people in their practice?

Is there anything we didn’t cover, or that you feel like you would like to add to our conversation today? I think we told a lot. And for me, it’s not important that you know these difficult names, because each level has a name and each aspect of a level has its name. For me, it’s not important that you know these difficult names, but it is important that you just

understand what happens in the universe, that you understand these laws, the laws of the universe, the laws of nature. We are part of the universe, we are part of nature, and these are also our laws if we follow the laws of nature. If you understand that, you understand about Qigong, about Zhineng Qigong. Yeah, I think these are great closing words. I think I couldn’t have said that any

better. So, I think we’ve given a lot of food for thought to our community out there, and hopefully, it’s going to inspire one or two people to look a little deeper into the theory. And I totally agree. Don’t get discouraged by all the complicated Chinese words. It’s not about that. It’s about understanding the fundamentals. Once you’ve got that, it will automatically take your practice to an even better

level. But for those of you who don’t know anything about the theory, please know that just doing the movements, just doing the exercises,already has a very positive effect on your body. So we don’t need to become experts when we do Zhineng Qigong. We can also trust the Qi to do its work, and that alone will be a big contribution to our daily life and our health. So thank

you very much, Katrien, for this conversation. I really enjoyed it, and I’m sure we’re going to have one or two more, because there are other great aspects covered in your book that I would like to explore with you in the future. Thank you, Thorsten. The pleasure is mine. Thank you. 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 Qin Inchi Gong teacher Katrin Hendricks. Enjoy. Sing a Song. To get your free ebook on the Eight Verses Meditation, please check the show notes below.