The Secret Healing Intelligence You Were Never Told About

Carrying the flag

I've been called a lot of things for doing this work.

When I started sharing the Activator, and the practice of slapping and stretching that it grew out of, people didn't know what to make of it. Some laughed. Some called it a parlor trick. Once, late at night in Toronto, a group of women cornered me at an event. A medical doctor had told them I was a bad man who was hurting people. They wanted to know how I could do this.

That was one night. Over the years there has been plenty more: the ridicule, the doubt, the threats. When you carry a flag nobody else wants to carry, you learn to expect it. I chose to keep carrying it, because I've seen with my own eyes what this work can open up in a person.

But none of what I've faced compares to the scale of the man who handed me that flag.

Nine years ago, I watched an interview with Hongchi Xiao. He introduced me to Paida Lajin, to self-healing, and to the connection between the physical body and the spirit. He has spent his life taking this message across the world, and he has faced far greater opposition for it than I ever have, at a cost I can only imagine.

This week on Younger Than Yesterday, I finally got to sit down with him.

What he shared goes deeper than any technique. At the heart of it is one idea. Chi carries a higher intelligence. It is the spiritual mind that heals, and when the mind heals, the physical body follows. Here is how he explained it.

What moves the blood?

Hongchi began with a question so simple I almost missed how deep it went.

We are taught that the heart pumps the blood, and that when the brain runs short of blood or oxygen, we feel it. He didn't argue with any of that. He just asked one step further: how can the blood move at all without energy? What drives it?

In Chinese, that driving force is called chi. In India, it's called prana. Every old tradition I know of has a word for it. Modern life mostly doesn't.

As Hongchi describes it, chi flows through channels in the body called meridians. It doesn't wander at random. It moves, in his words, "in a beautiful order." Each meridian connects to the organs and runs its own path. Some run along the inside of the arm toward the chest, some along the outside toward the head and the gut. The shoulder is a place where several of them meet.

When those channels are open, chi moves freely and the body does what it was designed to do. When they're blocked, the flow slows or stops. Hongchi sees that blockage as the common root under many different symptoms. That's why one chapter of his book is called "Ignore the Disease Names." He isn't interested in the label. He's interested in what's underneath it.

He was careful to say he isn't a doctor and this isn't medicine. It's a different way of looking at the body, one that begins with the flow of life itself.

An energy that knows

This is the part that moved me most. Hongchi doesn't describe chi as a mechanical force, like current in a wire. He describes it as something with wisdom in it.

He put it this way. When you eat, you don't instruct your stomach which part to keep and which to let go. You don't tell your intestines what to absorb. The body sorts it out on its own, perfectly, every day of your life. In his view, chi works the same way. It recognizes what belongs and what doesn't. It does the diagnosis and the healing at the same time, without asking your permission or needing your understanding.

Then he took it further. I had been wondering whether, when we bring attention to one area of the body, the brain sends help there. Hongchi agreed, and then asked the question behind mine: who controls the brain?

His answer was the mind. Not the physical organ, but what he called the invisible heart. In his understanding, the mind decides first, the brain carries out the instruction, and chi follows. Science has named a few of the messengers involved. He believes we have mapped less than one percent of what is actually happening.

I keep sitting with that. We spend so much of our lives looking for the expert who knows more about our bodies than we do. Hongchi's view is that the deepest intelligence about your body has been inside you the whole time. Nobody taught us to listen to it.

Where the mind goes, chi follows

If the mind directs chi, then what directs the mind? For Hongchi, very often, it's pain.

He calls pain "one of the most beautiful gifts from God," and he means it. First, it protects us. Second, it tells us exactly where to look. He pointed out that the English word disease holds its own meaning: dis-ease. Third, and this is the part I had never heard put so clearly, pain draws your whole attention to one place.

When something hurts, your mind stops wandering. It isn't on your money, your business or your family. It's right there. And wherever your attention goes, he says, chi goes too.

He also made a point I think many people need to hear. The pain we feel during this kind of practice is not something we create. It was already there, hidden underneath. We are only bringing to the surface what the body has been holding.

What comes up isn't always physical. Hongchi described people who begin to cry, sometimes for a long time, as old memories and grief rise to the surface. He sees those tears as the heart releasing what it has carried. The invisible heart, he believes, is where so much of our suffering begins.

I've always told people that you build courage the way you build a bank account, one deposit at a time. Hongchi gave me a deeper reason why. Every time you choose to face what's there instead of running from it, you are the one deciding. No healer can make that choice for you.

The body is the door

By the end of our conversation, we were no longer talking about the body at all.

Hongchi told me that over the years he collected more than five thousand personal accounts from people who practiced this work. He noticed something he never set out to find. People came because of something in their body. But as they went through the process, their minds began to change. They started to forgive. They let go of things they had held for decades. Many of them, without meaning to, became spiritual seekers.

That's how he understands the purpose of it all. The body is not the destination. It's the door. Most people won't sit still for a conversation about philosophy or the soul, but everyone cares about their own body. So you begin there, and the body leads you somewhere much deeper.

There's an old Taoist saying he shared: so small there is no inside, so large there is no outside. Look in either direction and you never find an edge. I had been showing him the Mandelbrot set, the pattern that repeats forever no matter how far you zoom in or out. He saw the same truth in it. At the bottom of everything, there is only one.

We live in a world of opposites: hot and cold, high and low, yin and yang. Hongchi believes those are real to us, but they're not the deepest reality. What is eternal is real. He quoted A Course in Miracles: "Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists."

He talked about frequency too. He combines Paida Lajin with breathing and chanting, the yang from outside and the yin from within. He believes the shallow, fearful way most of us breathe is part of what closes the channels in the first place. When your breath changes, your frequency changes. And as he said, quoting the book he's preparing, The Winds of Liberation: "Once your frequency changes, so does your reality."

What was never hidden

I titled this piece "the secret healing intelligence you were never told about." But sitting with Hongchi, I realized it was never really a secret. It's been inside every one of us from the start. It moves the blood through your body while you sleep. It knows things about you that no test will ever show.

We just stopped listening. We were taught to look outside ourselves for the answers, and we forgot to ask the one question that matters: who is doing the healing?

Hongchi's answer, after a lifetime of searching, is that it was always you.

Nine years ago, that idea found me through a stranger in an interview. Last week, I got to thank him in person. If any part of this speaks to you, I hope you'll listen to the whole conversation. It's his story in his own words, and it's one of the most meaningful conversations I've ever had.

Listen to the full episode of Younger Than Yesterday: [add link]

Join us in the Living Activated community on Skool: skool.com/living-activated-w-ian-clark-3057

— Ian

This article reflects my personal reflections and Hongchi Xiao's views as shared in our conversation. It is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice. Always talk to a qualified healthcare professional before changing your health routine or any prescribed treatment.