Where does the rubber hit the road? Where is the crossing actually made? How is this bridge actually built? It's

a great question.

The first one I want to just say is that even though they're all connected, there's some compartmentalization in my life.

I still run a Tai Chi school in the Boston area.

And when I go there, I intuitively integrate what I've learned all day and my research, talking with all my smart colleagues, reading papers, finding results.

But then also what I've learned from all my teachers and my own practice and watching my students.

And there I'll really go back and forth.

How are you encouraging to be interested in getting involved in this kind of bridge building activity and not to be so... enmeshed in one particular, on one side of that bridge or one particular viewpoint? How do you encourage people to open up these possibilities? I'm asking that both as a fellow human being who's interested in these things, but also as a teacher, I teach undergraduate students and I'm always thinking about how to unlock these multiple viewpoints for them as well.

Peter has a great way of talking about what that means for the practice and for what Qigong is actually doing in the body.

Here's a metaphor that I use a lot in my teaching, which is you have a block of ice that's got some particulate soot in it, and you wanna get the ice to be clean, right? You can go at it with a pickaxe and whack it and then pull out those particles.

Lot of work, very messy.

You can melt the ice and filter it, or you can steam it and distill it, and all the molecules come apart.

And in that higher energetic state, you have access to the things that are blocked in there, and they're easy to remove.

And then when that steam condenses back to water into ice, it's clearer.

I think that's what we're doing in Qigong.

It's just the, the way in which you utilize the resources given to you, but having also some deeper, um, sense of purpose or what-- why you're here, and that's probably defined a little bit more by Shen.