Introducing Chi Gung Tui Na: Susan Kansky Teaches Little Known Bodywork with Big Impact April 2009

"This won’t be abstract anymore,” says Visiting Senior Energy Arts instructor Susan Kansky of the unique form of energy-healing bodywork —chi gung tui na—that she will be teaching four evenings during Immersion Week, April 20-23.

“It’s actually a natural extension of the solo practice of pulsing (or opening and closing) joints that BTC students already do,” says director Dan Kleiman, “only applied to another person.”

Tui na teaches you to work directly with the joints of the body in ways largely unknown in the West, Susan says. The class will go a lot further than pulsing, for instance, to balance two possible patterns—joints that close more easily than they open, or vice versa—and learn energy sensitivity exercises for feeling into the core. Students can expect to leave class with better alignments, more mobile joints, and more spring in their walk. Even for those with no chi gung or energy gates experience, it’s possible in four days to become very competent at pulsing joints in wrists, elbows, shoulders, plus ankles, knees, and hips—the easiest areas to start with. Experienced bodyworkers can deepen perception of all the body’s layers and balance the core of the body, helping clients relax everything from muscles and fascia to nerves and blood vessels.

Susan is a Chinese medicine practitioner specializing in chi gung therapy and Asian bodywork, with 25 years of experience and an “Optimum Wellness” practice based in Arizona. An AOBTA-certified instructor, she teaches chi gung bodywork to medical doctors and people with backgrounds in various healing modalities and has trained with Bruce Frantzis since 1989. In her own practice she works to clear not only physical, structural, and energetic imbalances of the type she will deal with in BTC classes but also the underlying conscious and unconscious patterns (including emotional conflicts) that may be contributing to unhealthy patterns. Chi gung tui na is also great first aid knowledge to have on hand, she says, whether as self-help or to use for friends and family. She has known people to recover in short order from injuries—a sprained ankle, torn rotator cuff, limb in a cast—that are usually assumed to require lengthy healing. Though the art is as yet “virtually unknown,” Susan says, there are signs of recognition among physical therapists, osteopaths, and others whose work naturally blends well with chi gung tui na. “It can fill a huge gap in both alter- native and Western medicine. This work enables practitioners to do things that nothing else I know of can do.”