Reiki Healing, Qigong Exercise, and Medical Qigong

I just discovered this wonderful article by Catherine Calhoun over at the AOMA Graduate School of Integrative Medicine that compares Medical Qigong and Reiki. I probably don't write enough about Reiki on this blog - short of the scant bits of information I've got up on my page on Reiki and Shamballa Healing. Reiki is an amazing thing, as is Qigong, and although I feel that there's a powerful synergy between the two practices, my sense is that those who practice them often come from two different camps and there's a lack of understanding between the two.

First, let's get some terms straight. There are two main branches of Qigong. One is all about using exercises and meditation to move your own chi / energy. This is often called "internal" Qigong because it's all about you working on you. 

When you want to use chi / energy to help someone else, it's called "external" or medical Qigong. A more helpful distinction I think is Qigong exercise vs. Qigong for healing others. 

The Qigong that I teach is the first kind: Qigong exercise and meditation that you do in order to help yourself. This type of Qigong has profound healing capabilities. In my experience, it helps keeps your joints open, transforms the mind / body into something much more hearty, and generally makes for happy times. 

I haven't personally studied medical Qigong, but my understanding is that medical / healing Qigong practitioners train extensively in the first kind of Qigong in order to open themselves up prior to learning how to work with another's energy. 

When I started my Reiki training with Carol-Ann Glenn of Roseheart Wellness, I had already been a Qigong and Tai Chi practitioner for many years (fifteen, I think?). I was used to moving chi through my own body, but hadn't had any experience in moving other people's (not intentionally, anyway). In Reiki, a trainee receives attunements from the Reiki Master. An attunement opens up the energy field of the practitioner and allows him or her to draw on the healing aspect of Source (the Reiki "ray"). I believe that Reiki is very similar to medical Qigong, in that the purpose is to move another's energy and facilitate healing.

Here's what Catherine Calhoun has to say about it:

Reiki ('rei' meaning universal and 'ki' which is the Japanese pronunciation of 'Qi') and Medical Qigong have the same root philosophies - the concept that the Qi which animates and enervates everything in this Universe can be directed through the practitioner in such a way that the Qi which flows to the patient can to effect a healing and balancing response in the patient’s body. Master Li emphasized that you let the Qi flow through you so that you are both a recipient of healing and a channel for it. Reiki teaches the same concept, highlighting the need to let Qi flow through the Crown chakra, into the heart and out through the minor chakras in the palms.

My experience with Reiki attunements and using Reiki for healing others is that it is a profound practice with many benefits. Just in case you are in the same boat as I am - you've been doing Tai Chi or Qigong and you want to get into Reiki - I thought I would share some of the experiences I had. I'm hoping this will also give people who have come here looking for healing some insight into how I work. (Go here if you're looking for information about how a Reiki / Shamballa appointment works or fees.)

When I started Reiki, I was no stranger to chi / energy. Some people who start on the Reiki path have no prior experience in feeling energy. There is nothing wrong with that: you have to start somewhere! For me, I found that having already opened my body up to some degree enabled me to start working with Reiki without getting freaked out or feeling disoriented by the physical sensations it produces. Most people have very positive experiences with their first attunement, but for some, the energy movement is a bit strange. Having already felt profound shifts in my own energies from Tai Chi and Qigong, I knew exactly how amazing the Reiki attunements were (really amazing).

I felt bewildered by the nature of Reiki. When you practice Qigong and Tai Chi, you are working with the limitations of your physical form. You're also expanding and removing those limitations, but this is done through hard work that takes lots of time. As things progress, you feel that you're moving forward, making positive changes, and this is a beautiful process. In many ways, Reiki is no different. Once you are attuned, it is up to you to work with Reiki healing in order to integrate it into your life and understand exactly what it can do.

However, there is a huge difference between the Reiki process and the Qigong / Tai Chi process. To use an analogy, learning Qigong and Tai Chi is like slowly building up a car from spare parts. You build the engine. Then you lovingly assemble the body. You paint and buff and polish. At some point, you put on tires and take it for a spin. You continue to work to improve it. Slowly over time, you pimp your ride.

Being attuned to Reiki is like being handed a set of keys to a new Porsche that's sitting in your garage. You probably have no idea how to drive it, and that is a learning process, but you've suddenly got something incredibly powerful at your disposal that you didn't have the day before.

Qigong and Tai Chi are a pilgrimage. Reiki is grace.

I faced snobbism from the Qigong camp.  Because of the way Reiki training works, there is suspicion about it in some Qigong and Tai Chi circles. Reiki is often lumped in with various new age frippery, and in certain contexts it can seem fairly flakey. Because of the perception that you learn Reiki in a weekend, the Tai Chi and Qigong camps have some major questions about how valuable it can be. Like a lot of judgmental thinking, some of this comes from a place that is less than open minded. Glenn Derrick, writing for Reiki.org, remembers having just this attitude when he first encountered Reiki:

when I first heard of Reiki, I fully rejected it as false. The claims of Reiki simply didn't match what I "knew" was necessary for healing energy to freely flow from the hands. My experience had taught me that such abilities came only through painstaking discipline and long-term efforts.

After working with Reiki, Derrick changed his mind - he's now working on ways to integrate Reiki into Qigong in order to accelerate his students' progress.

I felt I had a good model to help me keep working with and develop a better relationship with Reiki long after my attunements. Like I've already said, you don't learn Reiki in a weekend. You get the tools to learn it and the attunement in a weekend, but you keep learning long, long after that. I think without the experience of practicing Tai Chi and Qigong, I might have felt a bit lost in terms of how to keep developing my Reiki. Years of slow, steady progress, understanding how my system deals with new energies, knowing what happens if you take a long break, how to settle back into a practice after a hiatus, how to listen to my body, intuitively connecting with the ambient energies in a room or around a person - many of these subtleties were things I had started developing through Tai Chi and Qigong. I am very glad that I didn't go into Reiki practice "raw."

I feel that continuing to train will deeply enhance the effects of Reiki on my system. This one is speculative / based solely on my experience because I can't find any information on this out there. In Qigong and Tai Chi, you are literally transforming your muscles, tendons, bones, and internal organs by teaching them to allow chi to move through them more abundantly, smoothly, and constantly. When you practice Reiki, you are running a very high quality of energy through your system. Somehow I feel that my Qigong practice allows the Reiki to go right into my cells and muscle tissues on a very profound level. Reiki is supposed to do that anyway, but I guess I feel as though my system is fortified by the Qigong to allow this to occur very readily and in a way that allows the Reiki to stick / helps me integrate the changes that happen because of Reiki healing. It feels as if there is a deep level of integration going on with the Reiki, because of the Qigong and Tai Chi. If you do both, maybe let me know if you feel this is happening to you.

Reiki massively boosted my confidence in my Qigong and Tai Chi practice and helped me understand what I was doing more deeply. Like Catherine Calhoun points out, in Reiki the emphasis is on allowing the energy to flow through you. This is ideally what Tai Chi and Qigong are all about too. You need to relax and allow, surrender your tensions, and let flow happen - really relax for real. Yet, many Tai Chi and Qigong practitioners end up forcing things. Because there is all this detail to learn, and all these milestones to pass, you can sometimes end up thinking that you are in charge and that the point is that you are this amazing person with all these skills. That is so not the point. As great as it is to develop yourself and build up a list of accomplishments, the point is to use what you've learned to forget about ego, let go of pretense, and join with the flow of life itself. The more I learned how to do that with Reiki, the more I felt I could do that in Tai Chi and Qigong.

Reiki is a handy tool I use in my teaching all the time. An ideal way to experience Reiki is to book an appointment for either a full in-person healing session or distance healing. However, Reiki is also wonderful for spot treatments. Because Reiki offers structured protocols (long and short) for many different types of energy healing - including clearing blockages, moving viruses or infections out of the body, balancing the chakras, and grounding - it is something I turn to again and again for helping my students address issues that come up in class, or to enhance their Tai Chi and Qigong experience.

Tai Chi and Qigong Can Help You Feel Amazing

Warmth, tingling, a sense of aliveness, a palpable, bouncy, uplifting and at the same time grounding sensation are all par for the course when you practice Tai Chi and Qigong. One of my advanced students likes to joke that she would never have spent so much money on pot in high school if she had known she could get high for free doing Tai Chi and Qigong. There is nothing like discovering that you can take an hour class, go in feeling whatever - run down, uptight, stale, unstretched - and come out feeling absolutely excellent every single time. The best news is that once you've taken a few classes, you can practice on your own and have that great, lively, mellow feeling any time you want it or need it.

Once you get into it and start to work with correct technique, Tai Chi and Qigong can also be amazing workouts. You will build up your legs, work them in ways you never have before, stretch things you didn't know could stretch. People have this idea that Tai Chi and Qigong are gentle and that means they aren't effective as exercise. When you're ready, let me show you otherwise. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

This post is part of a series called What Tai Chi and Qigong Can Do for You. Look for more parts in the coming weeks, or click "What Tai Chi and Qigong Can Do for You" at the bottom of this post. 

I offer weekly classes and occasional workshops. For my class schedule and information about fees, click here. For upcoming workshops, click here. 

How Tai Chi and Qigong Can Help You Build a Better Relationship with Your Body

Modern living tends to disconnect us from our bodies. Most of us work at jobs that require us to sit for long periods of time, process information, and otherwise behave like floating minds barely anchored to the physical realm.

To make things worse, there is subtle messaging always being thrown at us that the body's main job is to break down over time and eventually betray us by producing disease. Alternatively, we are encouraged to treat it like a machine that is either behaving well (producing the right shape / result / numbers on a scale, on medical tests) or not, in which case it needs more discipline.

Here's an alternative: consider that your body is your vehicle for interacting with this beautiful world. Like the most patient of workhorses, it carries you where you want to go and allows you to do, make, or create anything you desire. Its needs are really few: good nutrition, plenty of water, rest, and exercise.

While any form of exercise will help your body, Tai Chi and Qigong are unique in their ability to increase body awareness so you can begin to remember how to enjoy having a body again.

As you perform the gentle range of motion exercises, you bring a focused awareness to each body part. Tai Chi and Qigong movements are initiated from the feet: that initial push against the floor is channeled up through the legs, through the low spine, and throughout the entire body to produce the wide variety of movements. This is how you can move without tension: one little push does all the work for you, so it becomes the job of each muscle group to simply relax and allow the movement to take place.

Moving in this way, you begin to understand how each body part is connected to the next, and how all move through your focused awareness, initiated by one small action. If a body part for whatever reason holds tension or falls out of line, you'll feel it, and you'll learn how to bring it back into alignment.

By learning how to attend to each body part, you'll have a greater degree of awareness when something doesn't feel quite right. This can alert you to the potential for injury, cue you to change how you are moving, or give you a heads up when you've got a cold coming on. You'll also get to experience a much more integrated sense of yourself, an awareness of what feels good and when you just need to get up and stretch.

Doesn't that sound great?

This post is part of a series called What Tai Chi and Qigong Can Do for You. Look for more parts in the coming weeks, or click "What Tai Chi and Qigong Can Do for You" at the bottom of this post. 

I offer weekly classes and occasional workshops. For my class schedule and information about fees, click here. For upcoming workshops, click here. 

Spring Chi: Go Out and Get Some

The path of the Qigong and Tai Chi practitioner is a beautiful way to become more aware of the energies that surround you. It starts with feeling your own chi: at the end of a workout you notice a little tingle in the hands, warmth and a sense of increased circulation (or pouring sweat, if you've amped up the intensity a little). A feeling of being more open, loose, and relaxed. All that good stuff.

I've written before about how Tai Chi and Qigong can change your awareness of the way you interact with other people. All interpersonal interactions (even those taking place at a distance) involve an energetic exchange. We are all connected, and that becomes way more clear when you develop your sensitivities to chi.

People are not always at their best, however. You're more likely to learn about the impact of other people's chi on you through your habitually nasty coworker than through those who are balanced and even-tempered.

Fortunately, there is one realm where you can generally speaking guarantee a positive energy exchange that has untold benefits for you, and that is the natural world.

Here in Southern Ontario, as in much of North America, it has been a nasty winter, and if you still a haven't pulled yourself out of winter hibernation, that's totally understandable. A lot of people around here like to say we "don't get a spring" here. It is true that the weather tends to turn from cool-ish (10-15 degrees Celsius) to warm (20+) rather quickly, creating a spring that looks pretty grey for a long time but then flips suddenly into all the plants growing all at once and all the leaves busting out. Trees and plants here don't kid around: when it is go time, they all burst forth as fast as they can.

However, the energetic conditions underlying the process of rebirth and growth have been building since the winter solstice - the moment when the sun begins the long slow climb toward summer. By March / April, the signs of spring are absolutely everywhere if you know where to look.

The birds are usually the first indicator that something is up. We look for robins, but even the sparrows that winter here will start being a lot more vocal. In late March / early April, the ground plants start greening up, especially in protected wooded areas. Mosses often come first, then garlic mustard (I know it's an invasive, but it's a tasty one), low-lying vines and of course crocuses, tulips, hepatica, and others. Buds start coming on - the red maple across the street from our house has pushed out its intense showy red buds in the last couple of days, and the Manitoba maple in our yard has a squirrel in it right now, snacking on its buds.

Spring is here, now, no need to wait for it.

It's great to take note of the signs of spring that you can see and enjoy intellectually, but if you do any kind of energy work, including Tai Chi and Qigong, the thing to do is get out there and experience what this chi feels like. Too often, we like to stick to our familiar practice room - we go to class, work out, feel better, and then don't do anything with it. The fact is, the Taoist arts are a path to complete awareness of the beautiful world around us. When we only attend to interactions with other people, and our whole experience of the outside world is the office or the grocery store, the insides of buildings and the insides of our own homes, we miss the fact that this world of ours is in many ways still a paradise, despite humanity's best efforts to destroy it.

One of the best ways to engage with the full range of what this practice has to offer is to get out there. Get yourself to a conservation area, park, or, if that seems like too much, into your own yard. Take off your shoes and walk through the mud a little. Pick a dry patch and lie down on the ground. Lay your spine out and feel the earth beneath you. Even the most public busy park will have a quiet unused corner where this is possible. Open yourself to the world around you and soak it in. Take note of how you feel before you head out, and see how spending time outdoors changes that.

Even if you don't do Tai Chi or Qigong, you can still do this, of course. If interacting with nature is your entire practice, it will take you far. If you are a Tai Chi or Qigong practitioner, remember that yours is a shamanic tradition. It's our birthright - everyone's birthright - to enjoy and embrace the natural energies that constantly flow all around us. If you practice Tai Chi or Qigong and don't take advantage of what the world of nature has to offer, it's not exaggerating to say that you're missing the whole point of your practice.

This is something that has been missed, I think, in a lot of Tai Chi classes. It isn't something that gets taught much because it isn't something your teacher can really show you. (I would argue this is true for most of what you can learn through Tai Chi and Qigong - classes are great, but no one's going to do your practice for you. That's a post for another time.) You have to go out and play with it, knowing that your Tai Chi and Qigong practice has already worked on you to heighten your awareness. When you practice in class, you're building a potential within yourself to see and feel differently, to experience more, to taste the sweetness this life has to offer. It's up to you to go out and experience it.

Your Daily Spa Moment, Brought to You by Transdermal Magnesium

Maybe you're feeling a little bit bunched up by the demands of the day. Maybe you hit your last workout a little too hard, and your muscles are letting you know. Or you've just hit that part of the evening where you'd like to start the long, slow, gorgeous slide into bed that is usually fraught with potholes and bumps. 

Ideally, you would call upon your personal masseuse or masseur to come and help you out. And then you would enter your private sauna where a trained monkey would feed you grapes while placing cucumber slices on your eyes and pouring fresh herb-infused water on the hot rocks from time to time. 

Okay I don't have anything for you that awesome (note to self: arrange for trained monkey immediately), but I do have an update on my previous post on the magic of magnesium. 

Transdermal magnesium, when I first read about it, sounded a little ho-hum. Oh, you spray it on your skin? And it's another way to get more magnesium (one of the most significant missing links in almost everyone's diet) into your body? Okay great fine great. I am currently working on offering my body a gram of magnesium daily in order to remineralize my system, so pursuing more than one method of taking it seemed wise. I ordered some pre-made magnesium "oil" (so called because it's oily in consistency - there's no actual oil in it) and decided to give it a go.

I am not one to back down when trying something new, so I decided to really give it the old college try and see what transdermal magnesium could do for me. I picked a time when I wanted to spend 20 or 30 minutes chilling out. To avoid TMI I'll just say I thoroughly covered my skin with magnesium oil, grabbed a book, and sat down to wait for whatever was going to happen. 

At first, nothing happened but a light stinging, especially on my hands and forearms. (This is salt water, basically, and our recent acquisition of two kittens means we always have scratches.) After five minutes, all my muscles began to relax. Basically, everything started to uncoil. The awesome thing is that this effect kept going for the next fifteen or twenty minutes. 

Although some people claim they just put on lotion following transdermal magnesium application, I have found that it's a little bit itchy as it dries. If you put a lot on one area, there's a certain sticky tackiness that occurs. Because magnesium can pull toxins and heavy metals out of your cells, my thinking is that it's best to rinse it off. Just a quick rinse in the shower and you're good. I feel that the magnesium makes my skin a lot cleaner once it's rinsed off - squeaky clean, in fact.

There is no danger in putting on magnesium oil and then throwing on your clothes. It can leave a salt residue on the clothes, but this does not harm them and will rinse out when you wash the clothes. Typically I wait until after a workout, when I would normally grab a shower anyway. I delay the shower 20 or 30 minutes, use the magnesium oil, throw my workout clothes back on, and do whatever - a little writing or editing, dinner prep, what have you - and then shower. For a truly amazing experience, I've even followed the magnesium oil with a soak in an epsom salt bath. Yum.

I've had good luck with Ancient Minerals Magnesium Oil (no affiliation - it's a good product). There are also blog posts out there (like this one) that will tell you how to make your own magnesium oil from magnesium chloride flakes and water. (Note this is not epsom salt. There are mixed thoughts on this but some researchers claim that the magnesium sulfate in epsom salts is not as well retained in the body as the magnesium chloride. There is nothing wrong with an epsom salt bath, but it's ideal to use magnesium chloride if you're serious about getting magnesium into your system.)

If you want to take things to the next level (I do, and I did), you can also make an absolutely incredible body butter that is infused with magnesium. I used Wellness Mama's recipe. I have never made lotion before, but I made this, and it worked beautifully the second time I tried it. (The first time I got cocky and subbed out an ingredient and rushed the emulsion stage.) I use magnesium oil for a daily spa moment, but I rub the body butter on my feet last thing at night to help create a gorgeous, deep, relaxed sleep. 

Qigong and Tai Chi Technique: Really Relaxing for Real

One of the things - maybe the thing - that separates Qigong, Tai Chi, and the other internal martial arts from other forms of exercise is the way you do it. Qigong and Tai Chi are supposed to be done in a complete state of mental and physical relaxation.

If you've played Tai Chi or practised Qigong for any length of time at all, you know that this is actually a big challenge. Too often, we want to hit our workout like a hammer to let out all the tension we've allowed to build up since the last one. We groan and strain and clench and grasp, all the while waiting for our bodies to relax. An hour of practicing in tension passes (all while we tell ourselves we're plenty relaxed, thank you very much!). Maybe more goes by if we've been training for a while and we're nice and strong. At last we're too tired to strain and clench and grasp any more, and finally, we relax.

We can do better.

In this post I want to talk about a couple of concrete standards by which you can measure your own relaxation, and how I personally came to work with them to improve my Tai Chi and Qigong.

The standards come from Cheng Man-ch'ing's T'ai-Chi, a wonderful book with good practical advice for the practitioner. I pricked up my attention when I read this advice on how to tell if you're relaxed:

I would say a good start is made on relaxation when the student is able to go through a round [form / set] without letting outside influences into his mind. 

Okay, fair enough! And wow! Anyone who has done Tai Chi long enough for it to go into muscle memory knows how easy it is to allow your mind to drift to anything and everything except what you are doing. There are times when I swear my mind saves the most bizarre and ridiculous things especially for my practice time. (It does, and if you're doing Tai Chi effectively, yours probably will too at some point, and there are reasons for this, but that's a post for another time.) The more I thought about this definition, however, the more brilliant I realized it was: if a focused mind is relaxed, then a wandering mind is a cause of tension. 

While anyone familiar with meditation will tell you that focus and relaxation go hand in hand, I guess I've always thought that these two things needed to be balanced, rather than thinking of them as the same thing. As a creative person (I'm a fiction writer as well as a Tai Chi player), I find a certain enjoyment in allowing my mind to drift, but this is a totally different feeling than the hectic ricochet that the mind usually gets up to if you let it do what it wants. 

When I first started to really (for real) work with the concept of focus, I told myself that the workout was a time when I didn't have to think about anything else. It is actually a treat to let everything else go. This worked wonders, but it didn't quite get me where I wanted to go, especially considering the rest of Cheng Man-ch'ing's passage on relaxation: 

But this [not letting outside influences into the mind while performing a set] is only the first step. The next step is to do the exercises in such a manner that you are nearly exhausted at the conclusion. When your shoulders feel heavy you will know you are approaching real relaxation. This is a result of "swimming in air."

Okay so. We know that none of this exhaustion effect is going to be achieved by tension, right? Tai Chi is NOT isometric, neither is Qigong. You're supposed to be harmonizing with universal life energy here, not fighting yourself. So how do you get to this feeling?

The answer is to go into your workout already relaxed. No, put down that beer. What I'm talking about is getting in touch with the part of yourself that is already soft, always calm. Even if that part is only a tiny sub-molecular dot, you can access it.

(There are all kinds of Tai Chi manuals and advice about sinking the chi into the lower dantian and directing the breath. If you try to do any of that stuff too soon, you will get into falsely manipulating what should be a natural process. The best thing you can do is to get in touch with your inner cool and stay in touch with it as you move.)

Here's a simple exercise for contacting your inner cool. You can do this whether or not you are planning to perform Tai Chi or Qigong afterward. It's very beneficial to get in touch with your inner cool and operate from there. You'll have a much better time of things, and so will everyone around you!

Direct your mind deep within your core, seeking an area of calm. If you wish (recommended for Qigong and Tai Chi practitioners), focus awareness on the lower dantian, three finger widths below the navel and two finger widths inside the body. Take a deep breath. As you let it go, see, feel and imagine yourself dropping into that inner space. Ask yourself, "How am I doing?" You may find a word, feeling, or image comes up. Take note of it and continue.

Take a second breath. As you let it go, see, feel and imagine dropping down another layer, deeper into that inner spaciousness. Ask again, "How am I doing?" You may find a word, feeling, or image comes up. Take note of it and continue.

Take a third breath. As you let it go, see, feel and imagine dropping down a third layer, still deeper into the calm centre within. Ask, "How am I doing?" and take note of the word, feeling, or image that might come up.

Don't expect that the words, feelings, or images will all be positive. As you drop down you are dropping through the crusty layers of tension that under normal circumstances make it difficult for you to feel relaxed and calm. It is typical for the first word or two to be kind of negative or unpleasant, with only the third word becoming positive. Just accept whatever imagery, feelings, or concepts come through. This is information about yourself and your current state of being. The only guarantee you have is that it will change, so if you don't like it, just know that it will be different next time.

I've found that taking the time to "drop in" before working out sets me up to bring my best, most relaxed self into my Qigong or Tai Chi practice. The first time I did this, I had an incredible sitting meditation session afterward that confirmed for me how much more profound my practice was. I took that practice session very slowly, only working on a few movements of Ba Duan Jin in order to keep the sense of calm, and yet, I felt happily wiped out at the end. My students have reported that a round of Qigong and a Tai Chi set, which under normal circumstances could be considered a good warmup, are utterly exhausting when approached from this sense of relaxation. Chi spreads much more readily throughout the body as you work if you begin by getting in touch with your centre in this way.

Magnesium: Are You Getting Enough?

I don't often post about specific things you should or shouldn't do to protect your health (beyond doing Tai Chi and Qigong), since I believe that taking charge of your own wellbeing is one of the most powerful things you can do for yourself. All the information you could possibly need to help yourself is out there, but lately I've become more aware that it is sometimes hard to sort through the vast field of research. I also think it's more and more important to add my voice to the chorus of those encouraging people to take charge of their own health and healing.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a medical doctor. I'm writing this based on my personal experience and on the writings and research of people much more knowledgeable about the science of nutrition, for what it's worth. However I am an excellent critical thinker and on every level this information makes so much sense to me.

Lately I've been sharing this information about Carolyn Dean, an MD and natural health researcher who has done a lot of work on the benefits of supplementing Magnesium. This simple mineral is important to somewhere between 300 and 800 body processes (depending on whose research you're reading). Chances are, you're deficient in it. (Yes you.) A 2009 American Family Physician article claims that 75% of Americans don't meet the recommended dietary allowance for magnesium. 

I've found it is often typical of mainstream medical articles that they will push the idea that you can and are getting enough nutrients from food if you eat a reasonable diet. Here's the thing, though: none of us are really eating a reasonable diet. Unless you know for a fact that the farmer who grows your produce is actively working on remineralizing the soil, your produce is not going to contain sufficient magnesium for you. The people who are working on remineralizing soil, like the folks at the SEER Centre in Scotland, can give you tips to work with your own garden or farm to remineralize the soil and give the plants a chance to take up those minerals, but otherwise, we are stuck with sub-par produce that is insufficient in this essential mineral.

According to Dr. Dean we are lucky to get 200mg of magnesium a day from dietary sources. What happens if you don't get enough? 

According to the NIH, magnesium deficiency signs are loss of appetite, nausea, weakness, numbness, tingling, heart irregularities, personality changes, seizures, and a few other nasty things. This all sounds very scary and if you go to that article I've linked at NIH it will sound like this level of deficiency is downright impossible if you eat food.

However let me ask you if you live with muscle cramps and contractions? That morning charlie horse is part and parcel of magnesium deficiency. If you're in magnesium inadequacy - just not quite getting enough - chances are you won't expire but you are probably still experiencing symptoms including muscle cramps and tics. 

Alternative healers tend to be much more inclusive in their lists of magnesium insufficiency signs. Dr. Andrew Weil includes the following in his list of magnesium deficiency symptoms:

Physical and mental fatigue

Persistent under-eye twitch

Tension in the upper back, shoulders and neck

Headaches

Pre-menstrual fluid retention and/or breast tenderness

Low energy

Fatigue

Weakness

Confusion

Nervousness

Anxiousness

Irritability

Seizures (and tantrums)

Poor digestion

PMS and hormonal imbalances

Inability to sleep

Muscle tension, spasm and cramps

Calcification of organs

Weakening of the bones

Abnormal heart rhythm

If that seems like a crazy catch-all list, it is. Magnesium is responsible for so many body functions that it can affect all these different systems. A longer list that is worth reading (skip it if you want to get to the stuff about what to do) is included in Dr. Weil's article, quoted at length from a piece by Dr. Sidney Baker. I'm including the whole thing here because it is may help you rethink some of those little things you live with that you have come to think of as normal but which are actually a sign that you might need more magnesium. I was personally blown away by this list:

“Magnesium deficiency can affect virtually every organ system of the body. With regard to skeletal muscle, one may experience twitches, cramps, muscle tension, muscle soreness, including back aches, neck pain, tension headaches and jaw joint (or TMJ) dysfunction. Also, one may experience chest tightness or a peculiar sensation that he can’t take a deep breath. Sometimes a person may sigh a lot.” 

“Symptoms involving impaired contraction of smooth muscles include constipation; urinary spasms; menstrual cramps; difficulty swallowing or a lump in the throat-especially provoked by eating sugar; photophobia, especially difficulty adjusting to oncoming bright headlights in the absence of eye disease; and loud noise sensitivity from stapedius muscle tension in the ear.” 

“Continuing with the symptoms of magnesium deficiency, the central nervous system is markedly affected. Symptoms include insomnia, anxiety, hyperactivity and restlessness with constant movement, panic attacks, agoraphobia, and premenstrual irritability. Magnesium deficiency symptoms involving the peripheral nervous system include numbness, tingling, and other abnormal sensations, such as zips, zaps and vibratory sensations.” 

“Symptoms or signs of the cardiovascular system include palpitations, heart arrhythmias, and angina due to spasms of the coronary arteries, high blood pressure and mitral valve prolapse. Be aware that not all of the symptoms need to be present to presume magnesium deficiency; but, many of them often occur together. For example, people with mitral valve prolapse frequently have palpitations, anxiety, panic attacks and premenstrual symptoms. People with magnesium deficiency often seem to be “uptight.” Other general symptoms include a salt craving, both carbohydrate craving and carbohydrate intolerance, especially of chocolate, and breast tenderness.”

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Consider supplementing with magnesium. Here's a summary of what I've learned so far from various sources.

FURTHER DISCLAIMER: Don't rely on my information here. Look it up for yourself or ask a naturopath to help you. Here is an article on contraindications - reasons you might not want to take magnesium. Here is another (second last paragraph on the main article).

The body naturally excretes magnesium if it can't use it / doesn't need it. This is good news because it means that unless you have certain very specific medical conditions, it is virtually impossible to take too much unless you are shooting it. The body excretes magnesium through the urinary tract and more noticeably from the bowels. If you get all excited about taking magnesium and take a ton of it all at once, you will probably experience diarrhea. At that point you are pooping out more than you're probably taking in, so don't go past bowel tolerance.

Natural Calm is a product that has helped a lot of people. It's magnesium citrate that you dissolve in water. You can sip it a little bit at a time, which will help you avoid dumping a ton of magnesium into your system all at once and therefore help you avoid hitting bowel tolerance. (You'll know when your bowel movements become loose. You want to back off on the dosage when they do.) The best advice I read was to start with about 200mg/day, hold at that level for 3-4 days, then up the dosage by 100mg, keep taking that for 3-4 days, and so on, until your bowels tell you that you've hit the right level.

For some people, bowel tolerance happens long before symptoms go away, so in that case you might look into transdermal magnesium (magnesium baths with epsom salts or magnesium flakes; magnesium oil).

There are also magnesium supplements that claim to have a lesser impact on the bowels. You can read more about those at Carolyn Dean's website.

MY EXPERIENCE
I exercise a lot, so muscle soreness and tenderness is a familiar friend to me, and something I accept as a sign that I got a really good workout in the day before.

More disturbing are the muscle tics and pings that would sometimes come up. I am familiar with the eye tic that comes with stress. (No big deal, I'm stressed, eye is ticking, it will go away, right? It always has before.)

The idea I try to work with isn't okay or acceptable health, though: it's optimal health. I'm not talking about absolute perfection, just the best health I can access at any given time, including where it's worth putting in effort to include something new into the routine.

Background: I've become aware in the past several months that I am not dealing as well with my stress as usual. I had a few back-to-back stressful incidents that each were okay on their own, but all put together seemed to be wearing me down. My usual tricks and tools - giving myself Reiki, making sure I get my meditation in, paying extra attention to my sleep and relaxation - were not working as well as usual.

Basically, feeling "uptight" didn't begin to cover it.

I began taking magnesium on a Tuesday, starting with 200mg that I sipped over the course of about 4 hours. Within twelve hours, the black cloud that had been following me around totally lifted. In very short order I went from feeling like I was in a profound and uncomfortable fog to a state of mental clarity and a rational perspective.

I am continuing to supplement with extra magnesium (I was already taking about 300mg in my multivitamin, but clearly it was not enough). I'm very happy with my results so far. Muscle tics and pings are down, my mood is up, and my energy levels are way up. I can't wait to see what it will do for me in the long term.

SOURCES
A new edition of Magnesium Miracle is coming out on March 7, 2014, so if you want to read a whole book about it, I'd look into that.

A video talk with Carolyn Dean and a nice summary of the magnesium issue is here at Dr. Mercola's website.

An interview with Carolyn Dean at Radio 314 is what got me interested in all this.