Nick Loffree on "Restoring Connective Tissue"
Nick Loffree, a young QiGong teacher based in Boise, ID, whose YouTube classes are attracting tens of thousands of views by sharing ancient, Taoist, "bio-energetic" practices for greater health and spirit, talks with AllCreation cofounder, Tom VandeStadt.
At age 17, Nick was diagnosed with schizophrenia and after years of searching for solutions he ended-up discovering QiGong ("Chi Gong"). Today Nick is a leading QiGong instructor and historian, helping people help themselves by reconnecting to their bodies and Nature around the world. In this conversation, Nick and Tom VandeStadt, co-founder of AllCreation.org, discuss QiGong, the history of Asian energy practices, Nick’s journey from illness to mastery, and more.
Listen to Nick’s interview here, or click the image below.
Highlighted Quotes
Our bodies have a lot of information they give us that I think we’ve kinda been culture out-of being able to listen to. The body’s full of intelligence.
There’s a weak interface between body and mind for most people, especially well educated, smart upper-class people. I think people who work in those kind-of mental fields need something like this.
From the Taoist perspective, Nature has an energy to it and different natural environments have different energies. So, a lot of Taoist monasteries would be built at the top of mountains… If you needed more of a physical healing you might want to go somewhere more Yin, to the valley of the mountain where the waters collect and you can more nourish your body with that sort of energy…
Stress narrows our perception.
I think most people who’ve spent a lot of time in a city and then went camping or something like that, you notice a difference in the way you feel in your body, just being in Nature. The Taoist perspective is that that’s because there are energy fields: the trees, the mountains, the Earth, and everything are emanating an energy field our bodies are evolved to attune with.
At the psychological layer there’s no real, pure return to a natural state, but the Taoists try to push in that direction. So Taoism is often seen not as a movement forward and upward towards heaven or enlightenment, but backwards towards an innocent, child-like wonder, a return towards a simpler, more natural state.
In Qigong (Chi-Gong) we mirror nature in our movements, and you can never quite draw distinctions between where one movement ends and another movement beings.
A lot of the postures are still named after Nature, things like “mountain” or “moving like a river” or “standing like a tree.”
All the great spiritual teachers have tried to tell us to go past the nation, to go past the tribe, to go past the religion.
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Visit NickLoffree.com for more. This interview is one of the keynote features from our Summer 2022 collection, Restoring Connective Tissue.
