The term Qigong was first coined in the 1950’s by Liu Guizhen, a scientist who wrote Qi Gong Liaofa Shiyan (Experiments in Qigong Treatments), a book describing how a series of meditative breathing and movement exercises cured a number of his ailments. But for perhaps as long as 4,000 years, the exercises Liu dubbed “Qigong” were known by other names, such as Dao Yin, products of Daoism and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) that emphasized movement and breathing methods as a means of cultivating and moving Qi, or “energy,” through a complex network of pathways covering the body. Qi, according to this lore, also could be absorbed from nature as well as the cosmos. The Chinese words used to describe the sensation of Qi vary, depending on the source from which Qi emanates. But in terms of the bodily circuits Qi supposedly travels, the word mai sometimes has been used. Though “meridian,” as in “acupuncture meridian,” is the most common translation of mai, it can also mean “pulse.”

The notion of sensing Qi in the body as a pulse is virtually unknown in the West, largely because of the secrecy that has historically surrounded Qigong, which until the mid-20th Century was practiced exclusively by elite religious, martial, and aristocratic segments of Chinese society. But for a brief time in the 1980’s, large numbers of Chinese learned to sense Qi as both energy and a bodily pulse: the result of a bold social experiment conducted by the government under Deng Xiaoping, who saw Qigong as a way to shore up public health. Though initially successful, the experiment had an unanticipated destabilizing effect on civil order, as it had many times in China’s past, dating as far back as the first century A.D, and as recently as the mid-19th Century, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

   The lead-up to the Deng-era public health experiment with Qigong began with its official banishment in 1949, when the communist took over China. The anti-communist aristocracy that fled to Taiwan carried traditional Qigong culture with it and until recently has been responsible for almost all the West’s experience with the exercise, the vast majority of which was concentrated in the relatively tiny subcultures of martial arts, TCM, and the Chinese diaspora. Among that population, Qigong maintained its esoteric, high-spiritual character.

Meanwhile in China the general population continued practicing Qigong sparsely and covertly, while at the same time government-sponsored institutions began refining and simplifying Qigong methods. Chief among these sources of refinement and simplification was the Beijing Sports University: home of Olympic athletes and the nation’s premier martial arts college, the Beijing Wushu Institute (BWI). Despite the changes made during these Maoist Qigong experiments, the spiritual component of the practice was never eradicated. Instead, it was obfuscated in traditional rhetoric used to explain the effects the exercise could produce.

The first extra-institutional places where these modern Qigong methods showed up were the elite college campuses, which in Beijing were physically close to the Sports University and the BWI. Under Deng Xiaoping’s liberal hand, leaders of this first wave of reformed Qigong competed for followers, which in turn engendered more experimentation and greater efficiency in getting results. Consequently Beijing’s prominent universities became the seats of trend-setting Qigong cults, led by masters that advocated a seemingly contradictory return to traditional Chinese culture and strict adherence to the principles of Maoist communism.

In 1987, John Alton landed in the midst of this obscure but historically significant time, as a visiting English professor at Beijing University. What he saw and learned was something for which his previous fifteen years of East Asian martial arts training had not prepared him. Stricken with a broken wrist that had been diagnosed as necrotic, Alton sought to heal his injury with TCM. Within weeks he became the private student of one of Beijing University’s top Qigong masters, who was also the head coach of the martial arts team. Alton experienced early success with sensing a pulse that traveled with his breath up and down a ventral pathway from the abdomen to the head. He used the pulse to heal respiratory infections as well as his necrotic wrist bone, and so was rewarded with visitation rights to Qigong classes that consisted exclusively of Beijing University student practitioners, numbering as many as 500. He also attended classes of rival Qigong masters, who tried to entice him to embrace their methods, which resembled those of the martial arts coach. In time he would learn that the various masters sent spies to their rivals’ classes to pilfer ideas and techniques, resulting in innovation and quicker results.

Between 1987 and 1988, Alton witnessed many of the students of these masters grow disaffected with Qigong and turn to more politically and secularly driven student groups. In the spring of 1989, galvanized by a series of politically provocative events, these groups evolved into what became know as the “Democracy Movement,” which staged a mass demonstration in Tiananmen Square that brought Beijing to a standstill for almost two months. The now infamous military crackdown on June 4, 1989 put an end to the Democracy Movement. A few days after the crackdown, Alton fled the country and returned to the U.S., where he opened a martial arts and Qigong studio based on his combined experience with martial arts in the West and what he had learned from his Chinese teacher.

Following the decimation of the student protest of 1989, the government banned all public gatherings, including those of Qigong practitioners. While restrictions on Qigong were lifted after a few years, officials began a protracted effort to standardize and regulate what had grown to become a daily routine for an estimated 60 million Chinese citizens, making Qigong the most popular form of exercise in the world. By the middle 1990’s, the Ministry of Sport took over the task of regulating Qigong and established criteria for official recognition, including the requirement that a Qigong system explain its methods and effects in terms of both science and classical Chinese philosophy, which also left intact Qigong’s stealth spirituality. The Ministry of Sport created the China National Qigong Institute (CNQI) and tasked the organization with regulating Qigong. By 1999, the CNQI recognized thirteen Qigong systems as legitimate.

In January 1999, the Beijing Health Promotion Society (BHPS), a consortium of China’s leading medical and health professionals (including the Minister of Sport), invited John Alton to return to Beijing to discuss his ideas on how to westernize Qigong, contained in his book Living Qigong: The Chinese Way to Good Health and Long Life (Shambhala Publications, 1997). By the time Alton left Beijing, the Minister of Sport recognized him as the first non-Chinese Western Qigong master, and the BHPS formed with him Health Masters International (HMI), an international corporation for combining Chinese and Western medicine.

A few short months after the formation of HMI, the government’s efforts to establish accreditation for Qigong systems got blindsided by the next generation of Qigong that had leaked out of their institutional bases in the 1980’s. In May of 1999, the wildly popular Falun Gong Qigong sect staged a 10,000-person strong protest in Tiananmen Square, very close to the ten-year anniversary of the Democracy Movement demonstration. The peaceful objection of the Falun Gong practitioners to efforts by the Ministry of Sport and the CNQI to regulate their practice drew a swift, punitive response from China’s leadership, who were clearly unnerved by Falun Gong’s ability to assemble such a large gathering in a very short period of time. The Minister of Sport was forced into retirement and the CNQI was disbanded.

The turn of the century saw a reconstruction of the 1990’s efforts to define and regulate Qigong. By 2005, a new Chinese Qigong Association (CQA) had replaced the CNQI, and the focus and interpretation of healthy Qigong practice underwent significant change. The CQA abandoned the focus on powerful bodily effects of the Deng-era Qigong methods that had taken root first on Beijing’s elite college campuses before evolving into the highly successful, trans-demographic Falun Gong. Instead, the CQA advocated “Wellness Qigong,” which prioritizes a vague sense of “well being” as the ultimate indication of Qigong efficacy. According to this approach, troubled feelings of any sort indicate a disturbance of “Qi.”

Throughout these developments in China, Alton kept working to explain the pulse effect of the Qigong he and so many he had encountered on the campus of Beijing University had experienced. One of the hurdles he had to clear was the Western Qigong establishment, which consists largely of the Chinese diaspora and Western Qigong and martial arts converts, who are in direct competition not only with each other but with the more efficient Qigong systems produced by Maoist institutions like the BWI. To break this bottleneck, Alton devised a completely westernized explanation for the Qigong he learned during his two years in Beijing. In a 2002 book entitled Unified Fitness: A 35-Day Exercise Program for Sustainable Health, he introduced this Western version of Qigong as Reflective Exercise (RE), along with an East-West integrated wellness program.

RE simplified Qigong even more than did its Maoist predecessor of the 1980’s, so that Westerners can learn and benefit more quickly. In 2002-2003, the University of Virginia varsity swim team adopted RE as part of its training and had its best year in school history up to that point. In 2003-2004, the Center for the Study of Complementary and Alternative Therapies found among UVA varsity swimmers a significant correlation between RE practice and a 70% reduction in reported respiratory infection. Subsequently, Alton presented these findings to the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs and the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania. In 2008 UVA’s Cancer Center began conducting experiments that show that RE is a feasible and useful complementary therapy for cancer patients receiving radiation therapy.

More recent research with an innovative pulse monitor shows that sensing the pulse—the main objective of RE training—marks exceptional control over the cardio-autonomic nervous system. The evidence thus far suggests that learning to sense the pulse with RE may help maintain elasticity of the thoracic aorta, the key to long-term cardiovascular health. Combined with the evidence of the immune system effects on elite swimmers, the pulse effect generated by RE may constitute an important neuro-immune capability that has the potential to revolutionize preventive health.