Introduction to embodied flow

A lot of us understand our phones and our tablets better than we understand their bodies. But the embodied flow state is both energy conserving. It's literally like turning off apps that we didn't even know were running, right?

They're just on, these programs that are running. And a lot them are, yeah, they're they just in our subconscious. So it could be from previous trauma, it can be form the healing journey.

A of it is emotional. But as you know too, right, that physical stresses, chemical pollutants and inflammatory foods and infections, all of these things can also dampen our stress response.

So they also contribute to what we call this allostatic load. We have all these, this load of programs that are running, trying to keep us protected and safe, but ultimately draining our energy.

Hello and welcome back to the podcast. This week we speak to Dr. Cynthia Lee. She is a functional medicine physician, integrative doctor in the San Francisco Bay Area.

And what you're going to hear today is little bit of the background to her new book, The Medicine of Flow. How did she come to it? What is her own healing story?

I'm sure it's going vibrate with many of you who have been on the same journey, but I also think we got into some very interesting conversations we've never really had on the evolution of medicine about language and rightness and community coherence.

And it was just a really special time, so enjoy. So a warm welcome to the podcast. Dr. Cynthia Lee, welcome. Thank you, James. Wonderful to be here. When I'd known your career previously, you had been an expert in autoimmune disease and followed a little bit along that journey and you've had a functional medicine practice for a long time.

You have a really interesting background and I'm excited today to talk about the new book about flow. and the medicine of flow and because that's just something that really is hot for me right now.

Dr. Cynthia Leeu2019s healing journey

And I think maybe hot, for all of us, as we start to really understand what causes health or cause disease and what's the root cause of all that. So yeah, maybe let's start on your journey to flow, and how you got here and that educational path that you've taken and life path.

Yeah, so like many of us who are in integrative functional medicine, I stumbled into it because of my own health journey. And almost 20 years ago now, i was first diagnosed with Hashimoto's thyroiditis after my pregnancy.

And it quickly devolved into dysautonomia, the autonomic nervous system, really in disarray, and also chronic fatigue syndrome. So for those who aren't familiar with those syndromes, it's kind of like a really severe case of long COVID, but this is pre-COVID.

For me, was associated with Epstein-Barr virus. It was that associated chick-borne illnesses. So it was a very, very long journey. I did not know functional medicine, integrative medicine even back then.

And I was very very conventionally trained as an internist and that was my world, that my framework. So, it is a long 10-year journey from debilitation to full life.

But I really learned what I needed to learn stepwise and somewhere about halfway in there. I discovered functional medicine. It was through talking with another doctor.

And I should say also, acupuncture was a huge part of that. So in acupuncture, functional medicines, I began to explore so much of the holistic paradigm of how do you support health?

And so I begin to do all these things, what I call the spokes of wheel of functional and integrative medicine, right? your diet, you know, what do you eat, how do eat?

Your exercise, I was very limited, but there's still exercises that I could do, or I'll say movements I can do. And then mind-body practices kind of fell in there and that's when I came into Qigong, which is It's very, very closely related to Tai Chi, which a lot more people have heard of.

It is a foundation of martial arts, foundation acupuncture and herbs, and it's an embodied consciousness practice rooted in ancient China. So, you know, and then there's the addressing infections.

There's reducing environmental toxins with detoxing, cleanses. So all these different spokes, I was doing that and I steadily getting better, significantly better.

And then I had a second health crisis. This is about a decade afterwards. In the second crisis, I was already at the forefront of all these frameworks of holistic medicine and conventional treatments.

So it was a different kind of crisis for me because the first time I knew there was one I didn't know. I also was very young doctor, just a few years out of residency.

So here I am now, there was a lot that I knew, but I understood how little I know. Like it was like an embodied sense compared to the universe of information.

So I was just lying there on the couch. you know, and barely kind of hanging on. It was very much, you, know kind, of staring death in the face. And there was nowhere to go except I went deeper into my qigong practice, initially just as a coping mechanism.

I was just trying to cope with the symptoms. I ended up dropping into the energetics and the consciousness dimensions of qigong. Before, I'd been using it as like a rehab.

It was physical, but I was also understanding, oh, it's rehabilitating my nervous system, is rehabilitating my hormones. So, we're still at the very physical level, even if it was internal.

I ended up going into these deeper dimensions of Qigong, which I really didn't know. And that's really where the power lies. So that, you know, together with different, I was still doing my diet.

I still was doing stretches as I able to. Going to my acupuncture. Still doing things around this wheel. Not discounting what's around there. But what I realized was that these practices are, they're doing something to my energetic state.

And so what it's doing is, so I'm in the middle of that wheel, right? All these things are kind of supporting my health. It was actually working at the level of the center of wheel.

not it wasn't on the spokes. And so it was transforming my inner state and harmonizing it later. Of course, I went into the science and I discovered what was happening.

From functional medicine to qigong

But I came into this activated calm state. So this is what I call embodied flow. I use the modifier embodied because we usually think of psychological flow, right, when we think of flow states.

But we can bring that into the body. And when the bodies in this state of, flow and harmony, coherence, so I kind of I'll use those terms interchangeably, is the cells, the organs, they function optimally.

And over months I realized, oh my God, I'm actually experiencing a really, really fast healing. When I was lying on a couch I had sort of anticipated it would take years again.

For me, what was also part of the process was I realized how effortful those previous 10 years had been. So the other part of the crisis for me in that moment was I do not have the freaking energy to do that again.

I just didn't. How could I do it again? So there was a real surrender. And that's been a key difference. When I look at psychological flow states, it's really associated with peak performance and striving for a particular goal.

And this one, rooted in ancient Chinese wisdom of qigong in the body, is very much an act of surrender. So you surrender into something and the flow state is that default state that's there when we sort of get out of our own way.

And I think that's the hardest thing, you know, as a doctor, a human being, is to surrender the thinking mind into thinking that we know exactly what we need to do and what's best thing.

So in the flow state, It's not that we don't think, it's that the mind goes into this state, this energy state where all the different parts of the brain sync up as one.

So we call it coherence. Coherence means to stick together. All the parts in the brains sticked together and function as a one, so it was just like kind of humming, right?

It was like an orchestra where they're all in tune with each other. instead of everyone as an individual trying to listen and trying tune up with each other.

They're just flowing. So the brain is flowing and so in a flow state we learn new things faster, we intuit things better, and we're more creative, make better decisions and observe.

So observation is one of the foundations of of mental flow state is like we're in a state of observation as opposed to thinking and analyzing and judging.

So you begin to actually see more possibilities. You also see the same things like I might see this same diet plan very differently and relate to it differently.

And then what happens is because coherence is about sticking together, the primary systems in the body that are these big energy systems, namely the heart and the gut and respiration, They all have these flow waves.

And so a lot of electrical impulses that are creating these energy fields is that the brain, the heart, and the gut, like the breath, everything syncs up as one.

The body is just humming as a single organism. Instead of often what happens if we're having very uncomfortable symptoms is the mind kind of ends here and we want to leave the body.

and then the body's kind of doing its own thing. And so, yeah, so what happened with me was just this very, very swift healing. It was almost as if it was happening to me.

Like, I'm doing stuff. I was getting IV infusions. You know, my parents were driving me there. So I mean, was still doing things, but the whole experience felt as it it just kind, kind floating through it.

And then the effect is that, whoa, yeah, it can be fast. It's interesting that journey because over the last how many years of being in the functional medicine world, I've sort of seen that functional medicines has become like a gateway for most practitioners to give themselves permission to think differently about medicine.

That's just the gateway and then these further journeys that they go. So for some practitioners, they recognize that, okay, there's more leverage in other questions than just sort of like the physiological makeup of the body and the health of system.

Really going into the person, hey, what's going on in your life? But this is another journey that you've been somewhat forced to go on. You have to understand how is rapid healing available to people?

Is it available in a more rapid way than the classic functional medicine operating system? And it's interesting, I called this thing the evolution of medicine at the beginning because I recognized that we would probably end up going there.

being brought up with bio-energetic medicine. And I recognize that there was a need for functional medicine as a bridge to help physicians understand that sort of like the systems biology is like a foundational element, but it's really cool to hear your own journey.

So then how does that now show up for you in the way that you interact with people and patients particularly? Yeah. And I've been practicing functional medicine for a long time now.

In the beginning, it was relatively straightforward. It was like nobody had tried anything. You could put someone on an anti-inflammatory diet and heal their gut, and they would improve.

Embodied flow and energy conservation

Now, a lot of the patients who come to me, they've tried everything. A lot them know more about specific diets or protocols than I do, right? Because there's so much information and there is so many choice now with functional medicine and other complementary therapies.

they also have that exhaustion around healing. Like, I don't know if I can do anything more. I was like, okay. Well, so, and you spoke about, you know, your background in bioenergetics.

One of the ways in which I like to explain it, because a lot of us understand our phones and our tablets better than we understand But the embodied flow state is both energy conserving.

It's literally like turning off apps that we didn't even know were running, right? They're just on, these programs that are running. And a lot of them are, yeah, they're they just in our subconscious.

So it could be from previous trauma, it can be form the healing journey. A lot it is emotional. But as you know, too, right, that physical stresses, chemical pollutants and inflammatory foods and infections, all of these things can also dampen our stress response.

So they also contribute to what we call this allostatic load. We have all this load of programs that are running, trying to keep us protected and safe.

but ultimately draining our energy because we don't even know they're running. So in the flow state, it's almost like, okay, you know what, how do you transform and heal those patterns at the energy level?

You don' even have to go into the story. You just transform it. Okay, your gut is acting up. or let's say something a little bit more tangible, let say you've just got like a really, really tense shoulder and neck, as like, oh, you can you go in there, do these practices, open up, transform the energy patterns there.

It doesn't matter if that tension is from, stress when you were a child, a car accident when were in your 20s, or that you slept wrong last night. They all transforms, it can all heal in concert.

So then it's also a very energy efficient state to be in, right? So as I mentioned earlier, not only are all the organs in your body sort of just, it is like all of the apps syncing up and becoming one major app, where all data is in there, just kind of working together.

So there is a lot of energy conserved that then can go into healing. So, I just want to take a minute to talk about the incredible mission partners that we have here at the Evolution of Medicine that have made this possible.

So first and foremost, a lot of thanks. Fullscript and FullScript Journeys. Foolscript has been an amazing partner for 10 years. We only pick partners who can help us achieve our vision and help you achieve your practice vision.

And Fulescript have been incredible partners for a decade, but their new offering journeys, this is why we called it the evolution of medicine journeys.

is allowing practitioners to combine the relationships that they have with the newest technology to sell direct-to-consumer lab testing and use it as a funnel to bring into your practice and it's a game changer for the whole industry.

So go to goevomed.com slash journeys and you can get started on building the journeys for your practices an optimal way into practice. We're going to have some conversations about it.

This is a Game Changer. Next, Jenova. Janova have been fans of the Evolution of Medicine for a long time. We're big fans with them and they now have a lot more specialty testing.

They have lot of more tools and it's a key part of understanding the body ecologically. So go to goeomed.com slash Jonova to find out more. Come on over here and I want to show you about the other mission partners.

If you've been following us for a while, you know that these are organizations that we trust, that add a lot of value. Freedom Practice Coaching, I have been supported by them since the beginning.

And so many of the issues that practitioners face in building a successful practice, scaling a success practice come down to having the right support with people who have being there and done that.

Go to goevomed.com slash FPC. Big boost marketing. Uli and his team are the best in the business when it comes to really understanding how to market your functional medicine practice.

Go to goevomed.com slash big boost and see how they can help you. And then what you're going to be hearing a lot about is the formation of clinical networks.

Ultimately, True Neura is our first effort at that, which is to build an integrated clinical network combining independent practices from across the country into a network that can reverse cognitive decline.

And if you go to goevomed.com slash True Neura, you can get a demo. You can see what it means to be part of an integrates clinical networks. That's mentorship, that's software, and that making it easier for you to get incredible outcomes in a disease state where there are no other options.

So thanks to our mission partners. Let's get back to the content. That's so interesting and probably right on time for your patients like you recognized how much work it took to get back to where they are now and they've had a setback and then looking for something that isn't going to be as energy intensive.

Is this the beginning of the healing journey that people take when they work with you now? Is the first thing that you start with or do you still sort of give them functional medicine as an entry point for their own healing?

Collective coherence and group healing

Yeah, it's very individual. That's what I always encourage. But it is not for everyone. And for some people, because it a practice, right? It's a practiced that ideally is done every day.

Could be 10 minutes, three times a day for people who can do it longer, ideally 30 minutes in the morning, 30 at night. It feels in beginning, like another thing.

Right? Because reprogramming the interstate, you know, it's not something that just automatically happens. It can be easier, of course, to take a supplement protocol.

But we can start often with very, very small and accessible practices. Here's one for five minutes. So with this book, actually, it's structured in seven simple steps and written as letters.

I was trying to find a sincere voice, you know, that I writing to the reader. And so I ended up initially writing it as letters to my younger self in that moment of crisis, like what I wish I had known in And then I ended up, of course, extrapolating it to the reader in a more general sense.

And so at the end of each of the letters, there's a method. So let's say that there is a letter about opening the heart. there's a practice, a method based in Qigong to how do you open the heart?

And so people can start with that. And each of those has an accompanying, either an audio or a video, depending on what's helpful. So that's an entry point.

But some people will just say, yeah, you know what? I just want another opinion. Because again, the spokes around the wheel irrelevant. They're not irrelevant." What happens when we harmonize our inner states and come to this more flowing, open state is that we can examine, we could observe, okay, what are our choices more clearly, really relaxing some of the fear and anxiety that often are behind our decisions so that we're actually choosing from a place of compassion, a true place, of openness, uh, place proactively embracing health as opposed to trying to run away from our symptoms.

And so it feels different to people. So now when I'm working with people, I do encourage them to at least try. There are great biofeedback devices now.

Most of them run between $1 and $300. But there are free apps, too. And you can even go on YouTube. You can find, for example, coherence breathing. So it just depends on what what draws people in, and it's going to be really different.

And so for me, I did try the coherence breathing for a while, it was really helpful. Then after a little while it became really roped, then I continued to deepen into the qigong.

It's really a time where you had mentioned your entry was bioenergetics, It's where ancient wisdom is now converging with modern science. And so it's really cool.

So it makes, I would say, for me, and when I work with patients, the modern sciences, not just the tools, but the concepts, they make the ancient teachings much more accessible.

much more ordinary. It's not some abstract, you know, esoteric philosophy. And then the ancient wisdom, I see it as, these practices have been around for millennia, so I really see really, really long longitudinal observational study, right, where practitioners have been honing and refining and practicing and seeing amazing results.

So there's a lot of science now on the health benefits, at least the measurable outcomes of qigong and tai chi. And there are studies now also looking at qi gong and practitioners coming into coherence.

So they're measuring heart rate variability. They're also measuring subjectively how do you feel. One thing I didn't mention at the beginning is that the flow state is a third state.

We often think in terms of healing, we often hear sympathetic, parasympathetic stress, fight or flight, or rest and digest. Flow is the third stage. Relaxation itself can be a low energy state, so flow is both activated and calm.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I'd love to just go a bit further into an understanding of the collective coherence, because obviously I wrote a book on group visits and I can't get the vision out of my mind of driving through China and seeing parks full of people doing Tai Chi and Qigong together, this sort of like proactive creation.

And obviously everything that I've done has been about trying to create communities of practitioners, group visits, like there's something special about the group coherence.

I'm wondering if you have an opinion on that. Yeah, no, it's huge. And I mean, you're bringing that into functional medicine with your background of bioenergetics is super cool, right?

Because we can talk about it in a very tangible way, like, oh, group visits. We're kind of supporting each other and all that. But what we're really doing is building this collective energy field.

There's an invisible dialogue that's happening that a lot of us are not aware of. And so going back to the root of that word, coherence, right, to stick together.

So not only does one individual's systems sync up and cohere function as one, we can cultivate coherence with each other. So the science on it, which is still emerging, is really looking at when one person is in coherance and practicing coherency, aware that they are cultivating the state, They can bring someone who's blinded, you know, who is not aware of what's happening.

It's like, it's a controlled experiment. And this person who isn't aware can come into coherence without even practicing, right? Because the system, they're kind of attuned to each other.

it seems to happen first is on the practitioner's capacity to stay coherent, right? But also the relationship. Is there trust between the two people? And so there's an openness and a receptivity and sort of a mutuality between two the people.

And then so another person can come into coherence. So like a mother-child is a really prime example. two people practicing Qigong together in a park over time.

Amazing. And then, you know, the group visits. So people who are developing trust, they're building this together, a relationship, even if they don't personally hang out or know each other.

What happens with group coherence, and if you can imagine the electromagnetic field of a person, right? It's like a torus, so it's kind of like donut-shaped fountain just flowing from the heart center around the body.

spanning several feet out. That's what's been measured. And so if you're sitting or standing next to someone who's incoherence or not coherent, it doesn't matter what the state of their field is, they have a field.

So we're literally standing in each other's fields. And so we can affect each other, you know, and most of us have had that experience where like, oh, we kind of, rush off the street, sit down and have lunch with someone.

And we just suddenly feel, Oh my God, like I feel really good. It's possible that that person is just totally incoherent and helped bring us into it. And the opposite is true too, right?

When someone is really agitated, someone who's really in a contracted fearful state, we can sense it as well.

Activism, ripeness, and surrender

So then if you look at that from the superior view, it's like a Venn diagram. You have this overlap of your fields. And then, if It kind of looks, and again, it's not 2D, It's 3D.

So it is kind like a bunch of soap bubbles just co-hering, sticking together. And so let's say I'm not in a coherent state. If I enter a group of people and they're all in coherence, It's a very stable state.

So I can very quickly come into coherence through their support without even being aware of it. And so I feel like it's very ripe for these times, not only because of the challenges and so much of what people are feeling in terms of collective incoherence around the globe, But the opportunity is that we are more connected than ever, either through travel or through digital connection.

And so what the Qigong practitioners and a lot of these other ancient lineages have been practicing for a long time is, that coherence is not local. Right, so we're measuring EMF fields, which are, they're measurable, or at least their effects are measurable.

And they are saying, no, there are subtler energy fields and we've been doing this for thousands of years and so it's not local. And so I can bring you help, support you, come in coherence, we can practice coherents together, and we don't have to be connected.

And I've been part of a global Qigong community since COVID, basically. So five, six years. We've practicing collectively, but non-locally, you know, for a long time.

You can experience it. Well, this is probably the direction that evolution medicine would have gone in different ways. But for those of you who don't know the story, my partner, who I started Evolution Medicine with, Gabe Hoffman, he came into this work because of his own cancer when he was like 19 and 22. you know, towards the end of his life.

He passed away in 2019, but in 2018, he got really into Qigong. In fact, at the of 2017, He was into Dr. Mingtong Gu, who actually used to be in the Bay Area, But then moved to San Francisco.

Yeah, Yeah, yeah. I mean, I only have two teachers. My current teacher is the same lineage, same grandmaster. Yeah. Absolutely. And so we went down there in like January of 2018. We went to Santa Fe, did the training, and Gabe was really into it, like doing it multiple times per day, every day.

Ultimately, we talked a lot about the future of medicine was like, trying to create these like coherent clusters, you know, ways to do it and really realizing through the functional forum that we sort of discovered a way by which groups of people could come together where the wisdom was coming through, the TV, but the experience could be very like viable between the people in the room.

and we talked a lot about how can we use this combination of technology and groups to be able to facilitate what we wanted to see. When he passed away in 2019, it took the wind out of the sails for me as far as following it on the Qigong, but it's always stuck with me because I know that that was his vision and he saw how powerful it was.

I'm really glad to becoming back to this conversation. It feels very timely. Because a lot of what I've been thinking about is you know, his networks and understanding how through networks of the sufficiency of networks, the insufficiency of network and thinking about different chronic illnesses through that structure.

And, uh, you just, just this morning I was, I with the True NeuroMastermind and I showed them this video of a patient, a guy online who had reversed his own Guillain-Barré syndrome, um, from doing Falun Gong, similar to Qi Gong.

And his neurologist had said, just keep doing what you're doing, because it had gone away. And in that way, it feels like a miracle. What you experience feels a like miracle, but in a certain way it's actually predictable.

There's a predictable nature to it. If you can cultivate that inner coherence yourself, the predictable future is healing and health. Absolutely. And we tend to use the word miracle or like radical healings as things that kind of defy nature's laws.

We're accessing different laws that we weren't quite aware of before, right? It's the energetic, it's more subtle. Yeah, and for me, You know, it was another really hard lesson.

And it's been an incredible awakening. To your point, It's not extraordinary. It is ordinary. So much of this book is like, no, this is not about radical healings.

This is about ordinary healers that are accessible from exactly where you are. Because I couldn't get off the couch. And so, no, it's not about being a prime athlete.

You don't have to be a top notch musician to access this kind of float. No. I was struggling to get to the bathroom. And it happened. So it is very, very accessible.

And including functional medicine. I mean, I don't see them as either or. And again, it's this wheel. It's the whole thing. There's a piece that can transform the many, many different things that we do, the choices that have, to make them less effortful.

Yeah. Well, I think there's a lot of exciting implications of that because one of the sort of things said against functional medicine, well, it's elitist, is expensive.

And so now we're talking about something that is literally like available to anyone at any time, you know, on their sofa or wherever they are. Yes. I think you shared something before we came on about how your thoughts about activism have changed, you know, through going through this work.

And I'd like to understand that too, because I feel like myself as an activist, right, in a certain way, just looking for efficient ways to facilitate the change that i'm looking to see in the world and that's come through starting businesses and organizations or otherwise because that seems to me like a structure that can actually facilitate change in certain way but um but i know that you know and i was drawn away from activism early on uh because the activism that I felt in my heart because I was, my mind was revitalized about building systems that, you know, make existing systems obsolete.

And that was very obvious to me with medicine. Like if you could build something that keeps people healthy, You don't need more hospitals. You know doctors, right?

You just, have health there. Yeah. So I'd love to get your thoughts on how it's affected your own mind and your activism. Yeah, I mean, you know, in the Bay Area, California, there's a lot of activism here.

I also have activists in my immediate family, including one of my kids. And I've been doing workshops with activists and leaders in this who are totally burned out.

So it's very similar, right? It doesn't matter if we're burned from trying to heal or burned-out from heal the world. That sounds really, really lofty, but to heal our communities.

But there's burnout, and a lot of it is because of the interstate. We're not understanding how to regulate our energy. So, one of the things with collective coherence is, which we haven't really talked about, is that it also, because the mind is empty, right?

So one the steps in my book is like empty the minds and then open the heart and you inhabit the body. we might have our own agenda, and it could be completely, completely well-meaning.

And so usually, you know, in activism, there's a couple of leaders, or a group of readers, then they kind of set the agenda and whatever. What happens with collective coherence is that we all drop our agenda.

and we come into a mind empty state, and then we observe from that state. And because we're attuned to the collective, we end up sometimes making choices that would not be what we would think we'd do.

I experienced that in my own healing journey, too. Like, wait, what? I don't know if I would have done that. But there's a guidance. It's like the Collective Mind.

sort of does the guiding. And so I think of it kind of like a beehive, right, or a bee colony. They're flying around, they're swarming, and they are trying to find a new hive.

There's some kind collective intelligence. So it begins to sort-of guide itself as a collective rather than just one person thinking what might be the best thing.

So it's more like a collect emergence. You're continually observing. And then because also we're in this energy efficient state that people tend to be much less burned out.

The Medicine of Flow and closing reflections

Now, one of the hard parts, most of steps in the book about coming into this state and I think this is why it's hard and it can feel effortful for some people is because most of them are acts of surrender, of letting go.

one of the things is letting go of this specific agenda that we think that is our goal, because what serves the collective, it actually might be something slightly different or very different than what we thing is out goal.

And so, a lot of our structures are set up that way, of a very specific goal right. Go ahead. Yes, missions or measurable outcomes. How much money are you generating?

Give us your productivity report. Now again, in flow state and in collective flow, and they've also even looked at it in businesses, right? In workplaces, where actually people, that in one study they looked that people were 500%, so five times more productive when they practiced coherence than when we didn't.

So people are still trying to measure these things and yet there's something also that's not quite measurable. So, I call it peak activism, right? So we're talking about peak performance and all that.

This is really peak of activism. Part of it is also, and I think that this is something that is not really talked about in our Western culture, or any culture that I'm aware of anyways, is modern culture.

I'll say that, patience, ripeness, R-I-P-E-ness. Sometimes we're not quite ready. One example is I was doing a consult with a patient yesterday who was sharing how guilty she felt because she couldn't sort of participate in the greater community and what was happening.

And we actually did a lot of coherence work with that. We did some harmonizing practices. how can she release that, right? Kind of go directly into the body instead of just trying to think it away.

But we really spoke about ripeness and like, you know, maybe this just isn't your time, and if we understand the energetics of collective coherence, her healing will benefit the whole.

If she does nothing else but her own healing, and she comes to harmonize her state, she's benefiting the whole because she is supporting collective coherence.

So we spent some time on that, but it's a big thing, is rightness. It's like a Jedi saying, oh, I'm going to go into battle right now, even though my training's not done.

It was like, well, yes, you can. And there's a wisdom to waiting for your time. So some of it I think is, and that's also practice and surrender. Well, look, I think this has been very timely.

So show us the book cover, pull it up so I can share around. You've got a forward there by Mark Hyman, the medicine flow, harmonizing your inner state for effortless healing.

I could see how that would appeal to people there. Dr. Lee, thank you so much for coming on and sharing. This, really feel an urgency, not an emergency, but I feel a ripeness.

to this conversation moving in this way. It was gave in my vision 12 years ago that we call it the evolution of medicine because we knew that functional medicine was the starting point.

We had to create a bridge for doctors and other healers to understand systems biology, but there was a whole another field that was coming that more potent and more easeful And ultimately, I think you're shining a light on that.

And I'm sorry that you had to go through that journey, but ultimately to come on the other side of it, to realize that and be able to have the energy, the wisdom, and also the platform now to make the impact that I am sure you are here to take.

It's wonderful. You know, it was great to reconnect as well at the San Francisco Functional Forum. One of the highlights of doing that, bringing practitioners together was to come across you again in this new era.

I've been following a little bit along on Instagram and seeing you stepping into this. And I hope that you can come and bless the Functional Forum with this information at some point soon.

Thank you. And yeah, and thank you for reconvening that. It's so important, more important now I guess than ever. One thing before we close, I was wondering if I can invite you because you self-corrected is just to say the word urgency and then say word ripeness.

Yeah. I don't know, there's a different quality in your body. I don't know why, but you can ask my wife my whole life, and ever since we've been together, I know that I'm here to do something and that thing hasn't happened.

And I feel an urgency towards doing it because I also look out into the world and be like, ah, we're not going to be too late. It seems to me like falling apart.

But it's interesting in that, as I've been going through this journey now of working on this new project about networks and network sufficiency and connection, seeing that actually it is just the right timing and it has got nothing to do with me and I can't really affect it anyway.

Rightness does feel, it feels like there's a rightness right now to talk about the great reconnection. I was early on because I'd seen it for myself and the way that I grew up in community.

But yeah, I'm going to change my language about that because, there is no need for urgency when it's already happened. Yeah, yeah. And that word also is, I have a little interlude.

I've a couple of interludes between my letters. One of them is actually about word substitutions and one of then is changing, substituting right for ripe.

So one of them feels kind of there's like a judgment to it and kind a rigidity. The other one, ripeness, just as you were sharing it, it's, like, you know, because you're talking about the beginning of the evolution of medicine and with Gabe, that there is a ripeness.

There's a flow to, right? It's kind like spiral. It comes back at a time, I would suppose, Because you are a riper now. It's beautiful. It gave me a structure to be in group coherence and experience it.

I'm going to talk about it in this next project. Like I wrote a book on group visits, having never been in a group, participating really in that group.

Growing up in community, yes, and experienced what life could be, in way, but not actually actively put myself in the group and experiences it for six years, right?

And seeing how that changed over time. It's funny you say about the word in the spiritual tradition that I was brought up in, there was a word called evolve and it was like evil, right?

But it's from the, the world like evolve, like, evolve. And evil was just like truth that was not ripe yet. It was like, we're in a state of evolve, not evil.

And it was sort of like changing the mindset around what you see and that it's just, and I don't claim to know, like I'm not going to defend that, you know because I, I didn't know enough about it to do it, but it always struck me as interesting that was just like the right thing at the wrong time could be seen.

as something bad, quote unquote, but actually it's just a part of a dynamic whole. So anyway, I love the way that you're thinking. I look forward to reading the book and I looked forward more group coherence sometime in the future.

Thank you so much. Great, thank you. Yeah, Thank You for being part the Evolution of Medicine podcast. And yeah, if this resonates with you, If you've left, listening to this at home and you are interested in this evolution, Right to me.

Let me know what's up for you. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm your host James Maskell, I've been here with Dr. Cynthia Lee and we'll see you next time.

So we are here asking practitioners about their practitioner journeys and the reason why is because Journeys is a new product from Fullscript. Journeys allows you to set up your own lab offerings as the top of the funnel.

give the patients what they want, they wanna know about themselves and it's the easiest way to bring them into your practice. We have all types of practices from across the country that are building their own unique lab panels for their unique practices, selling them to their community and acting as a great funnel into their practice, this is a massive innovation, I think this will accelerate the evolution of medicine, you can go to goevomed.com slash journeys to find out more, set up your own journeys in half an hour and transform the health of your community.

Go get it. So that was the podcast. What an epic session. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Evolution of Medicine podcast, we'll be back again next week.

And thanks so

Cynthia Li, MD

The Medicine of Flow: Healing Through Coherence, Qigong & Collective Energy