How Qi Gong Frees You From Burdens
Master Steenrod explores how Qi Gong helps release hidden stress and energetic burdens, offering relief without needing to understand or fix everything in your life.
Study Guide
🧠 Main Idea
Emotional and psychological burdens—like stress, resentment, and trauma—have a real energetic cost. These burdens can trap or deplete your qi (vital energy). Qi Gong offers a way to gently release these energies, improving your mental and physical well-being.
🧩 Key Concepts
Burdens Are Energy-Heavy
Emotional baggage consumes and traps energy, causing mental and physical fatigue. Even small issues—like road rage or financial worry—add up.Qi Gong as a Tool for Releasing Burdened Energy
Qi Gong helps you access and move stuck energy, giving your system space to reset. It’s a physical, energetic, and emotional clearing practice.Not All Burdens Are the Same
There’s a difference between temporary stress and long-standing trauma. Qi Gong can help with both, but deeper wounds may need additional approaches like therapy.Modern Problems, New Qi Gong
Traditional qi gong methods were designed for older, less psychologically intense times. Today’s energy burdens are more complex, requiring a gentler, more adaptive approach.
🔑 Important Takeaways
Your body and energy field are weighed down by unresolved emotion.
Qi Gong doesn’t fix the problem—it releases the energetic residue of the experience.
Relief comes when you let go, not when you obsess over solving or understanding everything.
Some burdens are too large or hidden to access through qi gong alone.
Regular qi gong practice builds resilience and lightness by reducing energetic clutter.
🧘 Practical Advice from the Video
Don’t try to fix burdens directly—practice releasing them.
Be gentle with yourself; avoid trying to “power through” deep emotional pain.
Make room for relief and rest by offloading mental and emotional weight regularly.
Use movement, breath, and awareness practices to clear energy—not just to “perform” Qi Gong.
💬 Quotable Moments
“You’re not going to solve the burden. You’re just going to relieve the energy of it.”
— Master Mikel Steenrod
“It’s like carrying a backpack that’s slowly filling with bricks—eventually, you need to take it off.”
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Qi Gong do for emotional burdens?
Qi Gong helps release the energetic weight caused by emotional stress, allowing the body to feel lighter and more balanced without needing to "solve" the problem.
Do I need to understand my trauma to release it?
No, understanding isn’t necessary. Qi Gong can help release stored energy even if you aren’t consciously aware of the source of your burden.
Can Qi Gong help with modern stress?
Yes. While traditional Qi Gong wasn't built for modern pressures, updated methods focus specifically on relieving today’s unique psychological and energetic burdens.
What kind of relief does Qi Gong offer?
Qi Gong offers energetic relief—a sense of lightness and ease—by allowing stuck energy to move and leave the body without requiring resolution or intellectual clarity.
Is it okay if I don’t feel “fixed” after practice?
Absolutely. The goal isn’t to fix everything, but to relieve the body and energy system. Even small releases can make a significant difference over time.
Transcript: Releasing Burdens – How Qi Gong Frees Stuck Energy
Speaker: Master Mikel Steenrod, Water Mountain Virtual
Introduction: The Hidden Cost of Emotional Weight
One of the issues with trying to exist as a person in the modern world is that there are a lot of psychological and emotional costs to it. There are a lot of burdens that exist. You know, maybe you got to work and it was rush hour. That’s a burden. It’s not a huge one, but it’s a burden. Maybe you had to deal with someone who was not well-socialized. That’s a burden. Maybe you had some sort of social interaction that triggered something that you were working on. That’s a burden. Maybe you’ve had something happen in your past that was intense, that was a burden.
Qi Gong and Energy Systems: The Role of Release
So all of these burdens have an energy cost. It’s not that they may have an energy cost. They have an energy cost. One of the most important things to be able to do is to be able to release that burdened energy. When you’re doing qi gong, one of the things that it allows you to do is to reach into that system and to allow the energy to start to shift and move, and to begin to fall away and peel away.
Modern Life and the Energetic Load
Now, sometimes it’s a big burden. It’s a major burden. And a major burden, you may not be able to fully release it in the qi gong. You may have to go through other processes, or you may just need more time with it. But there are a lot of small and medium burdens that come up and you carry those. You carry those through your day. You carry them on your body. You carry them in your chest. You carry them in your eyes, in your face. You carry them in your gut. You carry them in your back. And that weighs you down. It fatigues your system.
Relief Is a Release, Not a Solution
And one of the things that’s difficult to do, and it’s always been difficult, is to allow relief to happen. I’m not saying solve it. I’m saying to let relief happen, to let your system lighten, to let your system open up, to let your body move more fully. This is one of the reasons why we do qi gong. It’s one of the reasons why Water Mountain exists, is because in the modern world, the energetic burden on people is so large.
Traditional Qi Gong Wasn’t Built for Today’s Stress
The traditional qi gong systems were not designed to deal with the modern burden. The stuff that the masters faced 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, was very different than what we face now. So there has to be a new method, and a new process, and a new approach to being able to lighten the burden, to allow the relief to happen.
You Don’t Need to Fix Everything—Just Let Go
You’re not going to fix the burden. You’re not going to solve the burden. You’re not going to find a resolution. What you can do is you can release the energy of it. And you may not even know what you’re releasing. You may not be aware of what the burden is. It may be something you’re not ready to see yet. And that’s okay. That doesn’t mean you can’t release the energy. That doesn’t mean you can’t have some relief from it. You can.
Letting Go Without Needing to Understand
You don’t have to have clarity of thought in order to get the burden out of your chest, out of your neck, out of your arms, out of your body. That’s one of the things that’s beautiful about qi gong: you don’t have to understand it to get it out. You just have to be present and you have to be working in the right way, gently, slowly, persistently, and that burden starts to lessen.
Final Thoughts: Make Room for Lightness
So, today, tomorrow—if you’re doing your qi gong or doing your movement—allow that burden to be released. Make room for the lightness. Make room for the relief. You don’t have to carry it all. You don’t have to hold onto all of it. You don’t have to solve it. You can let it go.
