The best way to good health is to remain healthy. But in the event you become ill, the conventional way we handle things, both in Cleveland TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) and Western medicine, is to go see a physician and have him or her prescribe some type of medication for you or perform some kind of surgery on you. For addressing sickness, the conventional paradigm requires medical attention and help from traditionally, a licensed medical practitioner/doctor. Wouldn’t it be a good idea if you have the means to cure your illnesses by yourself? Is this merely wishful thinking just a fantasy? Maybe, maybe not. A man named Hongchi Xiao with a very interesting background, who in over the last decade, had been taught by several renowned medical doctors and masters throughout China and other countries of the world, including a lot recluses but with unique skills in the healing arts. He not only learned acupressure, acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, but has been taught and mastered Paida and Lajin self-healing therapies. In Chinese, Paida means to slap and pat a person’s body parts and Laijin means to stretch your ligaments and tendons.
Hongchi Xiao has helped to resuscitate and made accessible to the public these age-old self-healing practices. He has helped set up over a hundred successful workshops in various locations in Taiwan and China, as well as in the U.S, Switzerland, Germany, Malaysia, and Singapore. Legions have participated and benefited tremendously from these workshops. In addition, aside from its effectiveness in curing illnesses, they also can detect health problems including the ones that have not obviously manifested. Hence, these same group of exercises can be utilized to recognize and treat diseases, cure illnesses, and help maintain good health. This article is an introduction to these exercises.
Before we proceed with the exercises, we need to discuss the background of Mr. Hongchi Xiao. He was born in the Chinese province of Hubei and graduated from the University of Int’l Business and Economics in 1985. He worked in Jiangxi, Beijing and Tibet as a village school teacher, government official, and university lecturer. He later, he went to the States and acquired his MBA in 1990 from the American Graduate School of Int’l Management. Then for more than ten years, Mr. Xiao worked as an investment banker in Los Angeles, New York, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing.
He collaborated with legendary director Ang Lee in 2006, and made a fruitful pitch for the concept proposal for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Although he has no educational background in medicine, he always had some connection to medicine, as his mother is a Western medical physician and his uncle, a Chinese doctor. He had a special interest in TCM ever since he was a child. Beginning around ten years ago, a chain of events caused him to take an extraordinary mission throughout China, and in other countries of the world, to rediscover and learn TCM. He moved about aimlessly as a vagabond to temples, monasteries, and even in the forests of China and other areas of the world to search for and reach out to masters of TCM. From them, he was able to learn and eventually master a wide variety of TCM practices, including unusual acupressure and acupuncture techniques and theories, Paida and Lajin self-healing therapies, needle-knife technique, and bone-setting therapies.
Of all the therapies that he learned, the Paida and Lajin self-healing techniques were the most interesting to him, simply due to the fact it is a DIY or a do-it-yourself method. You are the captain of your own health; these practices will help you perform diagnostics on your health and help treat your illnesses.
The primary recorded study of TCM is the Yellow Emperor’s Journal of Internal Medicine or the Huang Di Nei Jing written over two millennia ago. The Paida and Lajin self-healing techniques is founded on the principles of TCM (meridians, qi or chi, yin and yang) in which illnesses and disease are caused by imbalances and problems in the flow of these TCM concepts. The human body has 14 primary energy channels or meridians. Some of the benefits of Paida and Lajin self-healing techniques is that it isn’t necessary for you to know where each of the meridians are located, since they impact all the meridians anyway.
As earlier mentioned, Paida means to slap or pat parts of your body. This exercise forces out and eliminates toxic substances in the body to bring back health and promotes unobstructed flow of chi in the meridians of the body. The slapped and patted body areas will automatically gather blood and chi together, and then speed up circulation. The accelerated chi flow can scan the body and clear out the blocked meridians, leading to a clearing of tumors, illnesses, and toxic body waste. After Paida, symptoms of those illnesses and toxic body waste are manifested in the skin as greyish or darkish dots or spots. Therefore, performing the Paida exercises can also help you be aware of early signs of sickness, occasionally, at an early stage when Western medicine methods may not be able to identify them.
Lajin means to stretch your ligaments and tendons. Some practitioners say that stretching your ligaments and tendons (Jin) just by an inch will extend your lifespan by ten years. A person dies when his Jin totally degenerates. A set of Lajin exercises increases the flow of blood and chi within the body. Good health is the product of a flexible Jin. When this Jin dwindles, the body will exhibit a variety of symptoms including an inability to bend or extend the elbow, inability to squat down, muscle atrophy and contraction, back pain and stiffness, and neck pain and stiffness among others. Therefore, performing Lajin exercises would help you be more aware of illness in your body, and many times, at an early stage when Western medicine techniques might not be able to detect them.
What health problems can be treated by the self-healing techniques of Paida and Lajin? They can treat a wide range of illnesses because they blanket all the meridians. In addition, because someone diagnosed with a certain illness may have multiple problems, you need to be careful with the name of a condition. For instance, if you suffer from high blood pressure (or hypertension) you will often be told to take anti-hypertensive prescription medications. However, many anti-hypertensive medications are also diuretics that could negatively affect the functions of the kidney. This means, a person should really know the underlying issues that are causing his high blood pressure and use techniques to eliminate those underlying issues.
As we have mentioned at the start, Xiao has done over a hundred workshops in many parts of the world during the last three years. The outcomes have been very encouraging. For instance, here’s a part of the summary report from the organizers of Soweto Old Age Home workshop in South Africa: “All the participants experienced benefits from the Paida and Lajin classes. They are no longer dependent on others and can move again without outside help. Some who are wheelchair bound can now walk without walkers. What‘s noteworthy is that the patients who suffered strokes are much improved and are expected to fully recover over the coming months. Noted also is that their spirit and mood have improved a lot.”
In fact, the outcomes have been so promising that many people asked the organizers whether they’re only announcing the treatments that are successful. Xiao and his collaborators have asked medical experts to come to his workshops to document observations, perform tests, and take measurements. No one has yet taken up his offers, unfortunately.
We believe that it won’t take long before the medical establishment takes seriously what Xiao and his team are claiming. They are willing to perform the required experiments and observations. These claims will be modified, refuted or verified. If the Paida and Lajing self-healing exercises show even just a fraction of the benefits that Xiao and his team are asserting, then this will be already considered a major turn of events and will have huge benefits with respect to the cost of our healthcare and our health.
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