No, I don't mean heavy duty external exercise like jogging, squash or convoluted muscle building workouts in the gym! We are no longer a hunter-gatherers so there is no need to build excessive muscle tone. There are exceptions to this of course, as indeed there are to everything! What I am talking about is gentle internal activities that improve breathing and increase blood circulation that allow the body to heal itself, which is all it ever does anyway!

The exercises that I am talking about are by no means new. They have been around for a very long time. They first came to light in the medical treatise that was put out by the Yellow Emperor, which is now approximately three thousand years old. The "Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine" takes the form of a discussion between the Yellow Emperor himself and six of his Ministers and runs to 24 volumes. In actuality this treatise is a culmination of all the knowledge the Chinese had accumulated regarding medicine and took its form in circa 250BC. It is the first medical text-book known to man. It was translated into English in 1949 at a time when the West was becoming increasingly interested in Chinese medial practices, notably acupuncture.

The founder of Taoism Lao Tse also mentions these exercises in "Tao Te Ching" which appeared much earlier than the Yellow Emperor's work, so it seems they had even earlier adherents. My thinking is that if something like exercising one's way back to health has been around for such a long time it must have value otherwise it would have been long forgotten. He called, the "Exercises of Revitalisation" the "foremost of therapies". Today and have found new life in the "Do-In" clubs of Japan where members meet on a weekly or more frequent basis in order to work together and overcome the health problems they all face. In China the exercises are called "Chi-Kung" which translates in guess what, yes you've got it, "breathing and energising exercises!

Relatively recently Chinese Doctor Pao Lin published in the Gauolin Research Report a study he conducted using 2,873 supposedly terminal cancer patients. He used Chi-Kung exercises to treat these patients. Over a six month period 12% of the cancer sufferers demonstrated a complete remission of their symptoms, whilst a whopping 47% showed a considerable improvement. The remaining 41% seemed unchanged by their "revitalising exercise". Still, I think a 59% improvement rate is very significant particularly as this was without recourse to drugs and surgery.

Coming a little closer to home in 1976 American Doctor Cecilia Rosenfeld experimented with the exercises herself. These were taught to her by California practitioner and author of "The Complete System of Self-Healing" Dr. Stephen Change who has studied both Western and Chinese medicine. As a results of her studies she experienced an almost immediate benefit from the exercises she learned from Dr. Chang. In fact she was so impressed she decided to "prescribe" them to her own patients. After only a week 80% showed overall improvement in their health condition. This prompted her to hire eight nurses who were in turn taught the "Revitalising Exercises". Groups of patients were assigned to individual nurses. Again the results were stunning, with most demonstrating noticeable improvement without any side-effects or pain. The nurses themselves felt hugely empowered by spending their days demonstrating this energy based route to healing.

One nurse described her routine duties like this: "After working eight hours on our feet, we felt as if we were ready to die. But now we have started using the exercises a hundred times a day, we feel as if we are ready to jump through the roof at the end of the day!"

Sounds good doesn't it? Perhaps you owe it to yourself to discover how "The Tao of Revitalisation" might help you overcome nagging health problems and then move to a much better place in life. Take a look!