eso_nwah

Random guy with PTSD here. Having an insightful and gifted therapist for a bit improved my life ten-fold, and I'm starting back when I can afford.

I am not your average Joe. I have taught Buddhist meditation, I circulate the chi in my body, I've lived at a Taoist commune, I do pretty good tai chi, I have a medical marijuana prescription, and I've done most psychedelics to great and holistic ends.

Two sets of eyes, man. Never ever underestimate the contribution to your life that other humans can make. People tend to get into their boxes, particularly people with trauma and people with a damaged parasympathetic nervous system, or damaged trauma handling mechanics, in general. Gifted therapists who are pursuing a life work can always help you see things in a way that... uh.... you personally aren't seeing things, simply put. To exclude that simple thing which is being practiced by uncountable gifted people who are walking a noble path, with dozens and dozens of proven tools at their disposal-- would just be silly. There is some awesome trauma management methodology out there, literally as life-changing as all the millions of other things that humans just ignore because they are too caught up in their own world and survival.

Can psilocybin tell me things? Yeah, sure, absolutely, in the context that it is what it is. Can a trailed therapist with 30 years of helping people get back on their feet and repaired, also tell me things? Oh hell yeah, at a speed only limited by my ability to heal without further trauma, and by my willingness to work on myself.

Jesse Gould's source-of-truth answer is directly below your question. But let me throw this out there. Buddhist kung fu-- not flowery performance art, or even the wushu that Jet Li did, but the really boring stuff-- immediately taught me small heavenly cycle breathing, along the primary ren and du TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) channels. When I first went looking for Therapy, the first friend I talked to immediately suggested Mindful Compassion, Mindful meditation, whatever. It's hot and the West is using it the way the East uses taichi-- rolling it into health practice to reduce overall health costs. If you want East meets West, there you go. While looking for a therapist, I started free online classes from the Cambridge Center for Mindfulness and Compassion, a medical center run by the Cambridge Health Alliance. And yes they still offer them free, by Zoom. Guess what-- I had three different instructors try to teach me how to do my Small Heavenly Cycle breathing I'd been doing for years. Thank you kungfu. Then the fourth instructor had a heavy yoga background, and walked me into a MASSIVE emotional release and entirely changed my awareness of what was "stuck inside". So my answer is, for me personally, martial arts is energy based, always has been, and it would be easier to find a taichi and qigong instructor who actually knows what they are doing, and makes you do energy work, than it would be to find a gongfu instructor who practices actual Buddhist-temple-based gongfu. But it would be even easier to find a yoga instructor, focused on therapy, who knows what they are doing. The order would be, you are more likely to find a yoga instructor who will do something tangibly effective for you, sooner than later, than a qigong teacher, and then moreso than a tai chi teacher, and then moreso than a gongfu teacher, and then unfortunately there is almost no internal energy Aikido actually being taught (not enough, anyway), and then now you are soon deep into the realm of physical and percussive martial arts, which don't directly address the repair of the parasympathetic nervous system and autonomic trauma response handling. Which the mentioned arts have directly and historically done.

As to why I think the benefit lies in internal work, you can get a copy of "The Healing Power of the Breath" by Brown and Gerbarg on Amazon, and it has a CD which can walk you through learning a medium-difficulty breathing cycle or two, which is similar to what the very best gongfu and taichi should teach you. It leaves out reverse breathing and meridian awareness, but nails it otherwise. These MDs use this to directly treat Trauma worldwide (Katrina, Haiti, private practice with vets, etc. etc.) and they have tried to condense basic energy/qi breathing from several cultures into trauma work. But I tell you, the right yoga instructor-- even a brand new teacher-- may have you spend half an hour opening up your shoulder blades and upper back and neck-- and then put you into some sort of hybrid goddess / hero pose and suddenly you are having emotional releases and weeping, because some tiny bit of trauma got released accidentally, SPECIFICALLY because they opened up your upper chest and shoulder blades. That is the sort of stuff you can get from therapy-aware yoga instructors. The Amazon book is a faster way to learning basic channel openings through breathing, than any Chinese martial arts teacher you are liable to find, including taichi "masters"-- and that level of breathing work would prepare you better for actual healing yoga or taichi. So yeah, gongfu and taiji are not quite the same advanced art as good BJJ grappling, if you know what I mean. I mean, BJJ, TKD etc. are incredible arts but not the same art or even the same development that you find in taichi and gongfu, or even yoga/qigong. The AMA's answer below is basically source of truth. I am just hoping to show the spectrum of study you are asking about. The other Chinese martial arts that would fall into the cross-cultural yoga/qigong/taichi/northern-gongfu bucket, would be Hsing-I and Bagua, and a high percentage of instructors who teach those two slightly rarer arts actually know what they are doing.