Qigong Tips for Working with Pain: Share with your reiki clients impatient with pain relief progress

This video is about how to manage chronic pain with deeper somatic awareness. These tips come from my 30 years' experience as a professional massage therapist and from my training as a qigong instructor.

You can share this video with your reiki clients if they are discouraged by slow progress. We know reiki works for our best and highest good. When a client is discouraged we can teach them to treat it as an opportunity for healing. We can suggest they are being asked to become more self aware during a healing process.

If you or your reiki clients are challenged by chronic pain, sometimes we need to slow down EVEN more, become EVEN more mindful, and be EVEN more compassionate with ourselves. Sometimes it's hard to know whether to rest or try to push through it. This video will help find a middle ground.

This video is for people dealing with chronic or recurring pain who feel stuck between avoiding movement and forcing through discomfort. You’ll learn how to move more slowly and mindfully, using breath, awareness, and energy to support healing without overworking your body.

⚠️ Important:
Sharp, sudden, or worsening pain, or pain related to injury or medical conditions, should be evaluated by a medical professional. This video is intended for educational purposes and general wellness support.

This video explores how to work skillfully with pain using Qigong, especially when you feel stuck between two unhelpful extremes: avoiding movement out of fear or pushing through pain in hopes of “working it out.”

Many people don’t know when to rest, when to move, or how to move in a way that actually supports healing. This teaching offers a middle ground — learning how to keep moving without forcing, using awareness, breath, and energy alongside gentle physical motion.

In this video, I cover:
How to tell when it’s time to see a doctor vs. when movement is appropriate
The difference between unsafe pain and “safe but intense” sensations
Why slowing down more than you think you need to often allows healing to happen
How fear and over-effort both interfere with recovery
How to work with micro-movements instead of large ranges of motion
Using breath, attention, visualization, and energy awareness to support the body
How to stay present with discomfort without pushing or shutting down

I also demonstrate how I personally work with a painful arm by:
allowing the body to stay where it is
visualizing full, healthy range of motion
breathing into the area
making minute adjustments instead of forcing movement

This approach helps retrain the nervous system, reduce guarding, and rebuild trust with your body over time — especially for chronic or recurring pain patterns.

If you’ve tried pushing through, resting completely, injections, or structured exercise and still feel stuck, this video offers a different way of listening and responding.




00:00 Intro

00:40 What if even qigong is “too much?!”

01:03 When to see a doctor

01:27 When you know it’s safe

01:35 “Safe” pain that’s still intense

01:47 working skillfully with chronic pain

02:25 even MORE slowly, more mindfully

02:44 example of being a runner

03:09 next-level awareness

03:14 how to work with it

03:34 first sign of discomfort

03:55 forcing

04:08 shouldn’t I keep moving it?

04:34 what’s too much movement?

04:48 when to consider “pushing through” pain

05:05 when to NOT push through

05:14 how to work on micro movements

05:20 listening to your body

05:48 let it do what it wants and SLOW DOWN!

06:24 body + mind working together

07:10 using breath, energy and minute adjustments

08:33 work with energy in general too!

09:14 awareness, listening, energy, slowness

09:49 the truth about time, patience, injections, qigong

10:49 the cost of unawareness

11:05 fear vs overwork

11:28 stay with your energy work!