Dr. Li on Awakin Calls: Healing by Letting Go

Awakin Calls is an initiative of ServiceSpace, a global, all volunteer-run community dedicated to inner change and outer service. In Awakin Calls, we engage in deep conversations with individuals gently shaking the world, and inspiring us to transformative action.

In this conversation + guided practice, Dr. Li talks with her long-time mentor and friend, Michael Lerner, a pioneer in integrative healing and environmental health.

The promise of effortless healing and flow, if we want to call that a "medicine", is that it's easy. We just have to consciously connect. That's also the challenge, is that to consciously connect requires us also to surrender what we think might be the best path forward for us.

After Cynthia's first daughter was born, Hashimoto's disease deepened into chronic fatigue syndrome that left her housebound for two years -- normal by every lab measure, invisible to the system she'd given her career to. She had spent her career skeptical of such conditions -- unmeasurable, therefore not quite real. Now she was living inside one.

What followed was a decade of rigorous healing: functional medicine, gut healing, treating hidden infections, and practices that reached what protocols could not. She returned to practice asking not what is wrong, but why. She wrote it as Brave New Medicine (the theme of her first Awakin Call). That felt, at the time, like the whole story.

In 2017, finishing the memoir's last pages, her body gave way again -- the same bone-deep fatigue, the same vertigo -- while everything around her was stacking up: toxic mold in the walls, her daughter's concussion, California wildfires turning the sky orange. "Healing was to me a strategic campaign that happened by skillful calculation and sheer force of will," she would write. But that willpower-based healing had reached its ceiling. This time, she had no choice but to surrender. She deepened into her practice of qigong, an ancient mind-body practice from China, and dropped into an embodied flow state. What followed was something she couldn't have imagined: she was well within months, not years. And as if effortlessly.