(By Master MingTong G: YT) I remember the first question, when I started working with Tom, was do you want to go or do you want to stay? And I remember distinctly, Tom is actually my first client to say, well, it’s a percentage.
And he said, 40% stay, 60% go. When I visited him in the hospital, I saw kind of a shell of a man who was just aching to be seen and gotten, aching to have deep connection. I remember him crying and it was like, oh.
The wound was so fresh at that point, it’s like, oh, now I understood the 60% of I want to go. It’s just too painful here. My sister got married that year and I just remember we didn’t even think he was going to make it to the wedding.
When he had his father-daughter dance with my sister, I just completely broke down, I just lost it because none of us thought that he would make it to that point. I mean, we all hoped, we never spoke about it but it just, for him to be able to stand up and do that was a miracle.
My name’s Tom Loeswick. I live in Felton, California near Santa Cruz in the beautiful redwoods. My current main job is I’m a coach at the Chi Center in Santa Fe and work with clients that are looking to heal and to awaken and help them shift the way that they relate to their life, to their body, to energy.
I was born in Tonawanda, New York near Niagara Falls and was the third of four boys. Grew up in a pretty happy family although my mom was pretty anxious and nervous and that kind of translated into me.
I was a very forgetful boy and so I lost a lot of things. At the end of the school year, my mom would come collect all the coats that I had lost all year long and that was a consistent thing. Being forgetful, I had an experience of anxiety growing up when I was younger and it was, I kind of went back and forth between being happy-go-lucky and very worried most of the time.
That pattern continued on and then when I was 12 years old, I had a severe back experience where I had nerve pain in my back and was disabled and went to the doctor and they diagnosed me with Scheuermann’s disease, which is kind of a rare condition.
Basically the discs in the body in the lower spine don’t develop correctly. I believe, really, that the anxiety that I experienced when I was younger was a big part of why I was so deformed, those discs were so deformed.
I had so much tightness and so much fear in my body. From the time I was 12 until, well, through most of my adult life I had back issues and severe back issues I had to deal with. As I got older, I went to college in University of California Santa Barbara, surfed and played volleyball and did all the fun things there and then went on to become a very successful businessperson.
I studied business economics in Santa Barbara and found my passion in commercial real estate. I went directly into commercial real estate when I graduated and made a career for myself. From a very young age, I think I knew how ambitious my dad was.
I think starting in middle school was when it became really obvious because he was doing things like getting in the business journal and I’d see his picture in the paper, in the business journal, and he was going to special awards dinners where he got to meet the Sharks players, and he had the fancy cars for clients to take them out.
I think as soon as I got old enough to recognize what that type of stuff meant and how hard he was working, I think I really saw how ambitious he was. You know, I think where that came from, the striving, was I had these two different influences in my life.
One was is my mom’s nervousness and anxiety that was really general. She was always watching out for and worried about things and I picked that up. And then my dad was a big striver and so being the third child also I wanted his attention and so that also drew up a lot of the striving.
I wanted to be successful enough that dad would probably pay attention to me. Those things, those two things really colored my life and really were the themes that I ended up dealing with, ended up creating a lot of the major issues for me both in my emotional life and my spiritual life and my physical illness that eventually came on.
With all the fame and the fortune that came, I got everything I wanted that I learned from my dad, which is, I was the guy in the Valley and I was being romanced. People came to me. There was a line outside my door to talk to me.
It was all the things that I had hoped for and the money was huge. We had just bought $60 million dollars of real estate and my advisory company, my brokerage company had sold over 1/3 of what had traded in the Valley that year.
We were just hitting it really big and yet I was not happy. There was the distractions with the vacations and the exotic stuff and buying the nice cars and things like that and I had the big house. But there was still a deep dissatisfaction.
The next thing that really shifted was both of my daughters had emotional problems shortly after that in 2002-2003. Each one individually had separate major emotional traumas and depression and other things I don’t need to go into but it was terrible and I didn’t have any answers.
I didn’t have a story, a philosophy, or a way of being that I could show them that life is worth living and life is beautiful and meaningful and happy. I just knew how to strive and make a lot of money and so I felt really bankrupt with all my money, with all my experience.
I had done so much self-help, so much Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and all the other things of trying to improve myself. But that was more striving and there wasn’t any deep meaning in it.
When both the girls hit the wall at different times, it really pulled me up. It really got me to a point to go what am I doing? My body started to shut down. I couldn’t go to business meetings. In August of 2003, I can remember, I just went through a shift and there was like this inner thing that said you are done, done, done! When my dad left commercial real estate, I was away at college and I knew he’d had some kind of heart issues that turned out to be anxiety-triggered.
It triggered a really big life shift for him and just for our family in general. The severe panic was I had just left everything I was and everything I knew and I didn’t know who I was going to be or what I was going to do and I was left with this just empty space and it scared the hell out of me.
He was really trying to distance himself from emotions in that point of his life. He was emotionally constipated. He knew that he was feeling things, he just didn’t know what to do with them. He was looking for something bigger and greater and something more purposeful than just getting up and going to work.
The search that he had been for a few years at this point with different teachers and modalities and meditations and retreats, it really, really became clear that he just wasn’t very happy. That was like a really tough time, a really tough time for me.
Then I decided to shift and that I wanted, I knew I wanted to do something to help people. That had been my favorite part of being in the commercial real estate business is developing the team and so I went into life coaching.
I went through life coaching training and life coached for a year. I was in my shorts, we bought a place, we moved from the city up to the mountains as part of this whole experience and bought our dream house up in the mountains.
I was in my shorts and tank top and had a full book of coaching clients. It was great and I was coaching everyday. It was better, I was enjoying it. Was I deeply happy yet? Eh, no, not yet, but I was happier, happier.
I did that for about a year and then realized working on my own, on the phone, up in the mountains was not my thing, I needed to be around people. So I started to look for to do some business coaching and finally found an international firm called Shirlaws, who is a global company, and joined their San Francisco office and started business coaching.
I opened the office in Silicon Valley for them, built a team there, again, and we were successful but I was still doing the same thing. I was still unconsciously, subconsciously, wanting to be the it guy, have people come and want to get my advice so I felt important.
I was still striving to get to the next thing. I was, kept pushing and it was always about more, can I be a better coach, can I be clearer, more, it was just a constant push everyday. I did that for about four years and at the end of the four years I started to get weak.
I was doing Bikram yoga at the time and I remember I could do less and less of the postures until finally I couldn’t do them at all. That’s when I realized there was something really wrong with me and started working with my doctors to find out what was wrong.
All of a sudden it seemed like he had no energy and started having all these physical symptoms that were pretty scary. These episodes that kind of looked like seizures and no one could figure it out. It got to the point where he and my mom and my uncle all went out to the Mayo Clinic and they ran all kinds of tests.
In the end, they could say, well, we know you’re in a ton of pain, and we can see all the inflammation you have going on, but we don’t know what’s causing it. I went back and did some more doctors and finally found a doctor that referred me to a specialist who he thought could help me.
He was a specialist in Lyme disease and they discovered first that I had a black mold infection, which explained a lot because I was starting to have electrical storms in my brain. My brain started to get really fuzzy and have all of this electrical activity in it and it started to scare me.
Once they discovered the black mold infection, that helped clear up that. I also was eventually on oxygen so I was on an oxygen tank because I couldn’t breathe, I wasn’t getting enough oxygen in my blood.
They cleared up the black mold infection and underneath that was the Lyme disease. I remember coming home shortly after he got that diagnosis for a visit and we all sat down and watched the documentary Under Our Skin together and I think that was the first time where I really experienced how sick he really was and really kind of absorbed how everything was going to change.
I went through two years of treatment for Lyme disease, IV antibiotics, injections, medi-port, the whole banana, and that really took me into a really dark place. I wasn’t working anymore, I was lost, I was in medical and supplement hell, I was just trying to survive and get better but things weren’t really moving along very well.
In the background, something I hadn’t mentioned earlier is that my disease in my lower back had continued to progress. In my late 30s, my lower back was fused together because I couldn’t walk anymore.
My back was fused from S1 to L2, five levels, and I have all the arbiture and metals and screws in to do that. When I went through the IV antibiotics it exacerbated all the damage in there and above it and started a lot of severe pain, some nerve pain.
In addition to being treated for the normal stuff of Lyme disease, which creates a lot of pain, I had also a lot of nerve pain from my spine. It started a pain syndrome. I worked on the Lyme disease for a couple of years and we made some progress and then started to feel a little bit better but felt something in my stomach, just above my stomach and that turned out to be a tumor.
I had, they did some investigation and it turned out to be Stage III lymphoma, Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It’s actually a hybrid between Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s. They did surgery on that and very extensive chemotherapy, really nuclear chemotherapy.
Chemo was incredibly difficult and rough. The Lyme had already caused severe pain issues and the chemo just turned it up to 1000. He was on high levels of pain killers and it was barely even covering it.
The chemotherapy damaged my nerve system a lot more and so now I was in severe, severe pain. I had so much pain. It also affected a lot of my systems in my body, damaged my digestion, my urinary system, and I was slowly but surely having to take medication, more and more medication for pain.
I had a good friend, my former business partner who was in commercial real estate with me that introduced me to Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work and I started, reluctantly at first, doing some of his meditations to try and get control of my pain.
Like everything else I did, I was pretty committed and so I went after it pretty hard. I had done some meditation before so it worked out pretty well and I started to get a different experience in my body.
That kind of got him to the point where he could survive. I thought, okay, here we go. It’s like, things were really happening. I’d had some really good experiences with Adyashanti. About the year before, I was getting some more spiritual input and so I go, okay, I’m finally going into recovery, this is going to be amazing, my life is going to start.
Then about two months later, I had a pain in my lower gut and my gallbladder failed. I went in for emergency gallbladder surgery. They had to do two surgeries to get it taken care of and that just finished off my body.
My energetic body was done and all that momentum that was starting to get was gone and I was now at the weakest state and barely alive. I could hardly breathe and just felt ready, like I’m going to die here.
If this doesn’t, if I don’t do something, I’m not going to make it. He went to a specialist and the specialist basically said that based off the scans they had done, he thought my dad was going to get Lewy Body Dementia.
His future just kind of evaporated at that point. He was still dealing with all the pain and with that diagnosis looming over him, I think he got pretty desperate. But I think it was that diagnosis that led him to finding Mingtong and the work that Mingtong had done with Parkinson’s patients.
I had done a little bit of qigong before with another master in Tai Chi before that and just really knew that I needed to do something in my body that the meditation I had been doing was not going to be strong enough and was still not getting to the core issue as far as I could tell.
I found Master Mingtong online. I remember seeing him online, he had this smiley happy face and this bald head and I go, I don’t think I can study with a guy like this, he just looks too strange to me.
But I got to tell you, he was the only guy that my master that I’d worked with before didn’t have anything so I went and saw him up Port Townsend in the summer of 2016 and I went to retreat. First time when I met Tom, it was about two years ago when he came to retreat in Port Townsend and I was literally noticing he was struggling with pain, with emotions, and yet also I’m noticing he was literally determined to make this work for him.
I quickly recognized he’s going to thrive in the program. That is the most important piece when students show up, how determined, they are ready for this work. I went to retreat and I still had my stitches in.
It was three weeks post-surgery and my family was not happy with me. They were going, what are you doing? And I’m going, I’ve got to do something, I don’t think this is, my intuition was I’ve got to do something and I’ve got to do it now.
I went to the retreat in a wheelchair through the airport because I couldn’t walk that far. I remember sending him off to the first retreat. He was pretty much at the end of his rope and he’s like, if I don’t find something soon, this is it, I just can’t do this anymore.
The pain is too much, it’s too hard, my brain’s going to go. He went and it was a last minute trip so getting the medications organized was super stressful. At this point I was still on a lot of medications, I think eight or nine.
There was stuff post-gallbladder surgery I was still taking, my digestion, of course, had to be completely redone. My digestion already was shut down because of the Oxycontin, even though I’d gotten off of it, or was going off of it.
My vagus nerve was completely shut down and so my body was not, my bowels were not moving hardly at all. My urinary system was really messed up. I had a leaky bladder. I also had problems urinating, period, so both problems.
I had still severe anxiety, severe sleep problems. I had, I couldn’t get to sleep at night so I had to take a lot of Medicine to get to sleep both for anxiety and just to knock me out. Then when I woke up, I had severe fatigue.
I was taking narcolepsy medication everyday and so I also had a Parkinson’s tremor from all the damage in my spine that they were trying to work with. I had severe PTSD. I had sleep apnea very bad, severe nightmares, I was still quite a mess.
I heard of the story that he came on wheelchair in the airport and, of course, once he’s at retreat and he’s sitting most of the time, actually on the floor, lying down on the floor, sitting on the floor.
Then of the days he gradually sitting more on the chair and he was energy was really low, was very fragile. So he sustained in most of practice with a great effort. Then the main practice we did as a movement and actually I discovered later he was going through extreme pain.
I think for most people, probably give up easily, yet he really persisted in spite of greater pain. I’m kind of gung ho but the first thing he says we’re going to do is we’re going to do spinal twists.
Well, my spine’s fused from the bottom to almost the middle and the doctor that operated on me said, listen, you can do a lot of things but you can never twist again because the twisting is going to put too much torsion on your surgery and the discs above your surgery.
So don’t ever twist again and the first thing we’re doing is this movement. I’m kind of at a point, I’m really, literally, concerned about whether I’m going to live or not so I don’t care.
It’s like I’m gone, what have I got to lose? I start twisting and it opens up huge amounts of pain. I’ve got all this scar tissue, areas I’ve never moved before and at one point, I can’t remember, at the end of the third day or the fourth day or when it happened but all of a sudden I had this amazing opening in my spine and this energy popped up from the bottom of my spine all through the top of my head.
It was like this just huge amount of energy and voltage and I had this connection, a spiritual connection, that I had never ever experienced before. It literally blew me away. The explanation of the teaching and the practice is literally taking a different approach than approaching the body as physical body, approaching the movement as exercises.
It’s literally about opening the energy, opening the energy. It’s a new way of approaching a body and approaching health, approaching the condition that we are challenged with and from the pain.
Most of therapists would say don’t do that, you want to do less, less movement and not to mention dramatic movement with spine. But the idea here is a very different approach. It’s about opening the energy, opening the practice, opening the internal power, flow, so that you can recover.
Often in the beginning, it can be challenging as Tom experienced. Then in a few days, the energy opens up so the great shift changes started happening, continuously happening. When he came home, he didn’t need a wheelchair, which was the first time he’d been able to do any travel without a wheelchair in years.
That was pretty huge. That was a huge turning point and I think that was the first time either of us really felt like there might be a light at the end of the tunnel, that he might be able to get well enough to function again.
I finished my first retreat in June of 2016 and then started this regime of spinal bone marrow and sound healing and then meditation in the morning and then back to, I’d watched some of the videos online about how to reorganize my relationship with my body and my life, these teachings that Master Mingtong had.
Then I do sound healing at five o’clock instead of drinking wine and then I’d listen to Master Mingtong’s healing session that he recorded from our retreat. That was my regime and I did that from June to August religiously.
Then my family had a vacation planned, which we’d been doing for many, many years, and I just went again just recently up to the Nevada City area. I figured, well, I’ve got a week off, I’ll take a week off my practice, I don’t need to do sound healing this week, it’ll be okay, it’s just a week off.
I’ve got to tell you, I was a mess. After that week, I was a mess. I came back and I go, oh my God, what was I thinking? My anxiety was back, I was just not well and so I went back after it. My practice was weaker after that, my commitment to it and everything else.
We had another set of retreats, the second retreat in September, I think it was maybe September, late September, early October of 2016 and I limped, I limped into that retreat, just barely making it, my commitment going, okay, I need something, I need some help.
Spending another week at retreat, I got connected to the energy again, connected to Master Mingtong again, really passionate about the practice. I learned a lot more about the practice, I learned some new parts, I learned Lift Chi Up Pour Chi Down which is an amazing practice.
Now I have three different practices to work with. I got revitalized but I also realized I needed more support. At that time one of the senior teachers, Rhandee Lipp, was teaching a class at 7:00 a.m.
online and so I joined that every day to kind of support myself energetically. I also had Rhandee give me some private lessons. I hired her to help me with my form and teach me some things. Very helpful.
And things got stronger then. I came out of October in better shape. But there was also a lot of stuff moving in me still so emotionally there was still a lot of challenges. And also there was now a lot of rewiring going on in my brain and that had happened to start with my first retreat.
I could feel my brain going through a lot of stuff, there was a lot of brain fog and other things and fatigue I had to deal with. But as I got further into it, there was some really strong nerve pain in my brain and I had learned that the brain was being rewired, literally being rewired.
I took my energy and my focus and I went, instead of going away or trying to move away from that pain, I took all my energy and went to the source of that pain and just put all of it into. The more I did that, the better it was, the more it opened.
It’s amazing, the brain shifts to a different set of awareness. I’m more calm, more connected and that rewiring has continued to happen. It’s not as dramatic anymore but I definitely am getting rewired all the time and upgraded.
I went to my third set of retreats in the early winter of 2017 and I plan to go back for a week, maybe two weeks or more to continue to go deeper and continue to work my anxiety, to feel better, to feel stronger.
I had made a lot of progress by then, I had been able to slowly but surely let go of different medications and my body was getting stronger and it was healing at an amazing rate. My daughter had seen that my eldest daughter who had severe anxiety as well, just like me, and she had some severe issues.
She was hospitalized with bleeding intestinally and some other stuff from all the anxiety she had. She decided on her own that she wanted to go to the Chi Center with me if I would go with her. I was only going to go for a week or two weeks and we ended up going for three weeks together.
And it was amazing, it changed her life. The qigong practice for me, especially the retreats, were life-changing. Taking away my dad’s experience and only focusing on myself, it changed my whole self-identity.
I had been sick for so many years at that point that I saw myself as a sick person. I didn’t think I’d get back to work ever. I had been dating a wonderful man and before I went to the first retreat, I was ready to break up with him.
Not because I didn’t think we were right for each other, but because I felt like I was just dragging him down. I thought I’d always be sick, I’d always have to have someone take care of me and I didn’t want to do that to him.
After the first retreat, by the end of the first retreat, we were talking about marriage. A couple of years later, we got married. I am back at work. I actually even supported my husband for a little while he was getting his graduate work done and being able to do that is a huge gift.
My life will never be the same in the best possible ways. I came back from that retreat in the winter of 2017 knowing that a decision that I had put off for a long, long time, that it was time to leave my marriage.
It was another deep calling, the same calling that I got to leave my career many years before in leaving commercial real estate where I was done, done, done. I had the exact same experience. I was just like you are not staying anymore.
I knew, there were just so many things, and I still, I love my former wife, she’s a beautiful woman. I just, we weren’t a match at that point. We’d just grown so differently and so far apart and had so many different goals.
I had been trying to make it work and it wasn’t, obviously, working. I left my marriage in May of 2017, a few months after I got back from retreat, and for the first few months there was like a relief but a couple of months after that, similar to my experience of leaving my job, I had severe anxiety.
I was waking up with severe panic attacks in the middle of the night. But I had sound healing and I would get up and literally feel like I was drowning. I couldn’t drink water, I couldn’t breathe, and I would just go sit on my cushion and I would start sound healing and I’d sound heal for an hour and a half, sometimes two hours, sometimes three hours.
But it gave me a way to deal with it that didn’t require me to take a pill and it got to the source of it and it took about two and a half, three months. I was, I left in May, August is when it really got bad and it really started to settle down finally again around September, October timeframe.
The contrast between what my dad’s like now and how he was when he was sick is, it’s amazing. Even well before he got sick he had to give up surfing because of back issues. That was a major passion from him when he was growing up and I just remember, I think it was after the third retreat, he took a trip to Hawaii and my cousin was able to take him out surfing for the first time in maybe 20 years.
That was unbelievable. I have a such a gratitude and such optimism and such excitement about my future. I feel like I’m in such a phenomenal place to be creative, to be resourceful, to feel wholeness.
I feel so connected to source and it’s an increasing connection. It just gets stronger and stronger. I feel guidance online, I feel access to love. My heart is more open than it’s ever been. He really comes from his heart now instead of his head.
Ah, that’s beautiful. This whole process, whole journey of recovering from these conditions allow him to tap into, discover on a deeper level as who he is, the essence of himself, essence of who we are as human beings.
It’s been really quite wonderful to see him blossoming in a new way and now he able to help so many people. It’s amazing, this journey with qigong has only been three years. It’s been a little over three years now and from the time I started in 2016, it was only 14 months before I was able to let go of most of my medications and two years before I healed everything, including my low thyroid that I’d had for most of my adult life.
I’m on no medications now. I healed my urinary system, my gut, my anxiety, brain fog, PTSD, sleep apnea, severe pain and my nerve pain, a tremor, all kinds. I mean, there’s just so many things I was taking and doing and it’s all gone and I just got my labs back about a month ago and I have really great labs on every level.
There’s not one thing that’s out of kilter. I have no signs of cancer at all so it’s been really wonderful that way. The technology that Master Mingtong has brought to the West is just amazing because he, for me, with all that severe emotion, no matter how much I worked with my mind or how much I meditated, all that was sitting down there is kind of like the mine field that I was trying to step over and it wasn’t working for me.
I couldn’t, I couldn’t connect even if, I did have some amazing spiritual experiences but it didn’t change my experience of my life, my day-to-day. This has changed my day-to-day. I’m more loving, I’m happier, I’m so much healthier, and I’m so much more optimistic about my future.
And I feel fully resourced to grow spiritually, mentally, and emotionally. I can’t imagine a bigger gift, I really can’t.
Recommended Book Natural Healing with QiGong
A simple Qiqong routine that combines physical exercises, stretching, breathing and self-massage. The program is divided into six groups, each focusing on different areas to achieve maximum benefit: https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=s6wEAAAACAAJ