How Qigong Helps Reduce Chronic Stress | Kathy Jankowski, Trauma-Informed Qigong Trainer

It's the inner culture. How much stress am I under? And the stressors actually create blinders. So where most people, especially under chronic stress, even before the pandemic, when I would meet with groups of people, 90% of people didn't have a breathing pattern deep enough to ever truly alleviate the stress they were under. So anything you do in your family or anything you do in a group was going to be, you know, have a ceiling based on the level of stress the individual members would have. Because we work together. Well, that's true about our inner world too. It's. And we're sort of blind to it. That's the challenge, because our stress becomes a way that we function in the world. And as our stress increases, we're functioning as best we can and it can become the new normal.

Welcome to the Mental Health Entrepreneur Podcast. We are here to inspire creative ideas and connections for entrepreneurs and advocates working to address our mental health crisis. As you listen, I hope you will experience new ideas and motivation to innovate in your business, your community, and in your life. Welcome, welcome everyone, to the Mental Health Entrepreneur Podcast. I am your host, Rachel Harrison, and today we are going to talk about using qigong as an innovative way to support mental wellness. With me today is Kathy Jankowski, who is a trauma informed qigong trainer, a breath coach, and a human potential and consciousness consultant. Welcome, Kathy.

Thank you, Rachel. I'm so happy to be here.

So let's dive in. I love how you help both groups and individuals to support their wellness goals. And I'm very curious why these ways of doing it? Why qigong? We'll start there.

Terrific. So people have wellness goals, right? And we have goals and aspirations and an idea of a life that we'd like to craft and shape for ourselves and others. The research shows, though, that stress management has priority in, in the nervous system's approach to how to reach a goal. So the very first thing that happens is, am I under stress? If I am, what do I do about that? And then, okay, now that I know where I am, can I move to a goal? Chronic stress intervenes negatively on even our ability to reach our goals, no matter what they are. And we can't outthink our nervous system. So if we don't reduce our stress, we might find ourselves falling short of our goals. And in falling short of our goals, that increases our stress. So we get caught in these habitual loops of thinking there's something wrong with us because we can't reach our goals. And our nervous system is saying, gee, I would really like you to reach your goals, but you're under a lot of stress. I think you need to address that first. So if you build into your life a way of very quickly and efficiently reducing your stress in a way that becomes a sustainable way of approaching how to live with more vitality. We say in Qigong, live with more vitality, more wisdom, deeper sense of relationship and reciprocity. Then you are actually working with your nervous system and working with your body and working with your biochemical evolutionary process that wants us to move towards homeostasis. And then we optimize the conditions that allow us to reach our goals. So nervous system balancing, and I'm trained by the Polyvagal Institute and two integrative psychiatrists behind Breath, Body, Mind. If you really allow yourself to experience what you're feeling, experience your sensations, know where your attention is, then you're going to also optimize the choices that you make to reach your wellness goals. Because wellness is. Rachel, this is the thing. Wellness is not just a goal. We're evolved to be. Well, and so it's a way of listening very deeply to what would it look like? So rather than going through life, what's wrong with me? You start to realize what's happening. Where is my attention? Am I feeling physical, emotional or mental stress or all three? Okay, I'm going to meet myself where I am. The thing that's fun about a qigong practice, along with voluntary regulated breathing, is if you stretch and move your body and voluntarily regulate your breathing, you are going to activate your parasympathetic nervous system. And in that parasympathetic nervous system activation, you're going to going to optimize your body's own ability to calm itself and you're going to intervene on the fight flight response system that keeps chronic stress going. So it's a realization, I would say so mental wellness, physical wellness, emotional wellness, it's who we are. And it's honorable and inspirational to say, I want to feel healthy and whole all the time. All the time. Or the thing about Polyvagal theory is, is that if we have a regular practice and sort of know how to see where our attention is, like, am I experiencing tension that's not arising from my inability to. Like, this is what happens when people are under a lot of stress. It's like, how come I can't cope with this? I was able to cope with this before, right? We're in what's called a energetic cul de sac. The number one goal of the brain is to help us Create a future. It's a predictive process that in which something is going to be better than this minute. But if we're locked in and we don't know, the stress response system responds, trying to activate us into something. But what polyvagal theory shows us is that if we don't alleviate that stress, the parasympathetic nervous system will then shut down. So in that shutdown response, we are actually turning all of our attention again to releasing the stress. And so when we can release the stress, activate the parasympathetic nervous system, our body's own capacities to calm, we start to engage what's called the social engagement system. And it's the ventral vagal branch of the vagus nerve. And that's the thing that provides adaptability, flexibility, neuroplasticity. It helps tune us in. What am I experiencing inside my body? Do I feel safe? What's going on around me? How do I want to respond? Rather than react from that place, we are giving ourselves an ability to realize life is going to have ups and downs. We're not always going to be happy. But the thing that we want is this balanced nervous system so that we are responsive to ourselves first. Then we're responsive to our relationships. We're responsive to the ways that we participate in the world meaningfully. That becomes a way of life. That rather than life happening to me, I'm a crafter and creator of a life that I want to live.

That responding piece. Yes, there's a lot of interesting kind of deeper ideas in there, but I think this idea of wellness not being necessarily the same thing as happiness and wellness, maybe being that ability to tune in and to do something for ourselves in instead of thinking that wellness means that nothing is wrong and life is peachy because you're right, things happen. We can't control things that happen in the world all day, every day.

Right, right. And, you know, in the business world, we have a saying. I'm a strategy consultant. You know, culture eats strategy for breakfast. So it's the inner culture. How much stress am I under? And the stressors actually create blinders. So where most people, especially under chronic stress, even before the pandemic, when I would meet with groups of people, 90% of people didn't have a breathing pattern deep enough to ever truly alleviate the stress they were under. So anything you do in your family or anything you do in a group was going to be, you know, have a ceiling based on the level of stress that individual members would have. Because we work together. Well, that's true about our inner world too. Right. It's. And we're sort of blind to it. That's the challenge. Because our stress becomes a way that we function in the world. And as our stress increases, we were functioning as best we can and it can become the new normal. And so in that place of new normal, it's how we feel safe. And that's the basic idea behind polyvagal theory, is that stress is a way that our nervous system is managing and functioning with the conditions of our life. And it's all based on whether it's safety. So if we can optimize the sensations that the nervous system is safe, actually safe, we are going to change the dynamic of how we respond rather than react. So it's like the nervous system under stress is fight, flight, freeze. Work with balancing the nervous system. It's relaxed, refresh, renew. You've got something new to offer. There's a creativity. This is what's fun about qigong, is that, as I said, the nervous system needs three kinds of safety. Physical, emotional, and mental or cognitive. Psychological safety. Qigong practices target three places in your body that have a huge number of nerve endings that are communicating. Right. Where are they? In your gut, which we now know has a lot to do with mental health and wellness, especially as it's communicating through the fascia and the vagus nerve. Right. Where else? That's the dorsal vagal connections of the parasympathetic nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, and then around your heart. So when our hearts are relaxed and our gut is relaxed, we have what's called ventral vagal activation. Now, you don't have to know all this. What it's good to know is, is if you can relax your heart and all of the nerve endings around your heart and all the nerve endings in your gut, you're automatically going to be relaxing your face. So then you're actually. People don't even know when they're stern because the ventral vagus nerve is going from a very tight place around our heart all the way up into our face. So if we do practices that relax the spaces around our heart and relax our face, our faces just simply become more responsive because the social engagement system is ready to be receptive. And so how the vagus nerve works, 80% of the cells in the vagus nerve communicate from our torso to our brain. So if 80% of those cells are saying, I'm distressed, I'm physically tense, and that makes us angry and frustrated or shut down, the brain is going to keep going Right, right, right, right, right. Anxiety arises. It's a natural response to the. To the what? The signals.

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If we can relax the torso so qigong movements isolate the gut and the heart, we do all these twists and spirals and shaking and shake off stress, they're going to start sending signals. Everything down here is okay. Then it sends signals to the brain. Everything's good. So by relaxing that the amygdala and hippocampus can relax. And then when they relax, the relays throughout our brain, especially into our prefrontal cortex, can then activate. So executive functioning is a result of a relaxed nervous system. And so when we can relax negative thoughts, the nervous system starts to send different signals. And so in qigong, we call those signals. They're not thoughts per se, because our thoughts are the slowest part of our nervous system. They've already been decided. So if I can unconflate a negative thought from a thought arising from relaxation, I'm going to empower myself to make a different choice because I'm no longer caught in the energetic cul de sac. And in that moment that we break out of conditioning, a new neural pathway is created. Then we try it out. Did it work? Did it not work? Our brain is a great tinkerer. The brain wants to help us out. It wants to notice. Does that change in attitude, feeling or behavior work? It does. Repeat. It doesn't. Don't do it again. So it's how we activate these actual capacities of our whole body to respond, our physical, emotional and mental interwoven networks to respond to the situation we're in. Again, it's always first turning attention inward, noticing my state. Am I in a state of receptivity? Am I in a state of tension? Am I in a state of shutdown? Depending on what state we're realizing we're in, we have different tools in the toolkit. The other thing that I want to just say about qigong is that it's a combination practice. So it's already a systemic kind of practice where we do movements, voluntary regulated breathing, attention, focus, and also imagination. And it's all of that that works together to change the inner conditions, change the lens through which we're perceiving the world. One of the things I love most about the combination of movement, Qigong movements with breathing, and we work with breathing patterns that are thousands of years old and evidence based today. I mean, these are thousands of year old breathing practices that have become evidence based breathing practices to, to relax the nervous system is that qigong, all this movement releases the tension in our body and increases circulation so oxygen can go everywhere. So we're oxygenating the whole body. And then with this oxygenated body, with our tension reduced, let's breathe and help it go deeper and more sustainable and really ensure that our parasympathetic nervous system is activated. So if you have movement with about 10 minutes of breathing, five breaths per minute, you've activated the parasympathetic branch of your nervous system. I want to emphasize why circulation is so important. So breathing is about oxygen exchange, but breathing is about circulation. It's because inside our bodies, if I lined up all the blood vessels in my body, the veins and the capillaries, end to end, they would reach around planet Earth two and a half times. That's how much is going on inside your body. And so that's what we're optimizing. That whole system of getting the capillaries out to our fingertips, you know, into every tiny, tiny particle in me. We say, every tiny particle in me is going to be invited into wholeness. And so this is why I think the combination of movement, breathing and visualization is so efficient and effective in reducing stress and promoting wellness. And then more significantly, like you said, Rachel, promoting choice.

What does the qigong practice typically look like? You've mentioned a couple of time, things like about 10 minutes here or there. Someone get started in this practice?

Well, there's all kinds of. There's like hundreds of schools. I'm a Robert Peng qigong trainer, and I came to qigong because I wanted the mental health benefits of it. I was working in social justice for many years, and especially with people who are frontline service providers over, you know, the different contractions of the economy and kids and after school programs. So the service providers for that public education system, I trust, I trust the qigong approach that I have learned because it works. So there's a couple of different approaches. There's, you know, martial arts, qigong. I'm a Robert Peng qigong trainer. Why I like Robert Peng is because he emphasizes the three Dantians. Dantians are the centers, our head, our heart, and our belly. Some qigong approaches focus in on the belly, but in Robert Peng qigong, we focus in on all three centers because what we are aware of is that there's a quality of wholeness beyond defendantness. Like martial arts is more learning to be flexible and, you know, defend it, which is a good thing. But there's a quality to living a thriving life where we have to also work with our heart and with our head, with cognition itself. So how people get started is you find a teacher that you like. The way to get started is learn a couple of the basic practices. I'm actually running a series on, you know, seven skills for building resilience. It's six qigong movements and learning the optimal breath. So start there. Start there. If your goal is just stress management, my goal is I need to give myself some space. It's a complete gift to want that for ourselves. Start there. But if you want to keep going again, do a little research. I stuck with Robert Pang even when I became aware of the, you know, I mastered some of the basic skills because he has a whole series of practices that I've been trained in and that I now teach that keep this quality of stress management and mental wellness going deeper and deeper and deeper. And that's the understanding of a qigong practice. You can't do it wrong. Like the foundational practice, anyone can go after they listen to our program, Rachel, and go and do a qigong movement, which is just feel your feet on the ground, make contact with sensation, take a big in breath, relax completely on your out breath and shake your whole body, have no pressure in your arms so you're not moving your arms. Your arms are like ropes. Shaking is the fastest way to just shake off layers and layers of stress and tension. If you shake for four or five minutes, beautiful. And then breathe a coherent breath, optimal breath. Voluntarily regulate your breathing for 10 minutes. Research shows that in little. In as little as 20 minutes a day, a person can begin to reset their nervous system. And yet, for me, what happens and for many of my students, what happens, it's like, oh, my God, this is so much fun. You know, I'm going to classes each week, and I'm going to take, you know, I'm going to learn how to work. Like we end up, you know, you just go deeper. You end up working with all of your organs. You work with your meridians. You work with healing sounds. I have a class right now where we have these beautiful visualizations of colors. We use humming to vibrate our body and then direct energy to different organs, connect it with colors. But then we spend a lot of time or more time on nourishing the transformed energy. This is another really important understanding in qigong, Dan Siegel says, where attention goes, neural firings flow, and neural connections grow. And qigong is very similar. We spend at least twice the amount of time during a practice on nourishing and empowering the positive qualities of our energy. So what we're doing is when we're nourishing the growth of this transformed energy, which we can literally feel in our bodies, it's a kind of exercise. We're exercising the muscle that helps us perceive our wholeness. And we spend more time on that than what we released because we want to feel a sense of clarity, assurance. We want to feel a sense of alignment. We want to feel a sense of our wholeness, our reciprocity and wonder and awe. And so we don't just release contracted energies and optimize by optimizing even what we're perceiving, we then spend time, oh, how does it feel? Noticing our attention? Oh, how does it feel to be relaxed, to be filled with our potency, our wisdom, our reciprocity, to be inspired, to be grounded? So once you spend some time there, you'll find yourself in a situation like you were saying, something is going on. I'm aware that it's making me tense. I'm aware of what it feels like to not be tense. And your brain does not know the difference between the situation you're in and a situation you've practiced. So you're able in the moment, without anyone knowing what's going on, to sense into what you're experiencing and activate the sensations of wholeness that's unique to you.

I love this. You have painted such a beautiful picture of Qigong and for those people listening, if you're interested in that practice, you can find Kathy and all her links and offerings in our show notes. And I just want to thank you so much for being here and for sharing this beautiful practice with us.

Rachel, thank you for inviting me. I really appreciate getting the word out.