I have suffered from migraines for quite some time. Most easily triggered by lack of sleep or bad sleep patterns (I also have been diagnosed with sleep apnea, which is a player here as well).
I have been practicing SFQ for a little over a year now and I get considerable benefit from that practice. I have studied and practiced other forms of qigong over a 25 year period. I have found SFQ to be a logical progession from what I had already studied and the most complete self-contained and easy to learn system I have studied.
I did a phone healing very early on in my learning SFQ some time last year (or it might have been late 2005) and felt a boost in my healing right away. I also found that when I practice regularly, I have much better health then when I don't.
Having said all that, I also began learning from a local qigong teacher late last year. She appeared in my life through a series of unusual coincidences and I kind of focused on the forms I learned from her, and did less SFQ.
It helped me, but not as much as SFQ.
In any case, I did 4 phone healing sessions last month. I prepared myself a bit by doing more SFQ for the few days before (and have been doing it again more regularly ever since that first May phone healing), as well as by getting into a juice fast and raw veggie diet.
After two phone healings, I have had no migraines and even when I have the "pre-migraine" condition, I am easily able to "meditate it away", by doing either Small Universe, Self-Concentration (the two incredibly simple sitting meditations included in SFQ Level 1), or just a few minutes of simple sitting, with no special technique.
This stuff works, but it is not pure passive healing. There needs to be some engagement.
A big part of the qigong philosophy (and Chunyi Lin speaks about this in his book and in the course), is that while Western Medicine is very effective for many things (just for one example, in terms of crisis medicine, e.g. things like massive trauma, broken bones, heart attacks and many more such emergencies, our Western medicine is unsurpassed and it is where I would go in almost every case I can think of!), the problem with it in terms of healing for many people, is that we depend so much on a pill, a procedure, whatever, that we do not access our own natural healing ability, both in terms of prevention and in terms of healing for non-traumatic conditions. Even with medicine, by using our natural healing abilities, we can often speed up the process that the medicine or surgery is allowing us to participate in.
So here: I have given you a testimonial. And I appreciate the opportunity. But the problem with such questions (and this in no way implies anything bad about it. On the contrary, I am glad you asked!
), is that you can really only get the full benefit from any response by investing some of your energy into the process (and a question is a good beginning, but it takes a bit more than that to experience healing or spiritual development).
As my previous qigong teacher, K.C. Mao always likes to say, "It's all about energy!" Once one really starts to realize what this means, the rest becomes easy. And almost any regular investment of energy in the healing process will likely bare some good fruit.
For me, I tend to always come back to Chunyi Lin and SFQ as the best conduit for me. I am actually wrestling with inner conflicts between practicing SFQ and my current teacher's forms. But that is another story and another thread altogether.
