Community Engagement Isn’t Always a Verb

In Kathy Yep’s classes, students learn to breathe. 

During 20 years as a professor of Asian American Studies at Pitzer, Yep has introduced students to qì gōng in her classes to help them develop their sense of self and social justice practice. 

Qì gōng (pronounced “chee-gung”) is an ancient Chinese practice that focuses on breathing, meditation, and flowing physical movements to cultivate qi, the vital life force or energy that is in everyone and everything. Even for those already familiar with it, Yep’s approach offers something unexpected—she shows us that qì gōng provides another way of thinking about community and one of Pitzer’s educational objectives: social responsibility praxis.
 

“Whenever we speak of civic engagement and service learning, we tend to focus on individual actions in relation to the state and civil society: voting, marching in protest, tutoring in schools,” she explained. “But I’ve always explored counter-narratives. I’ve always explored alternative ways that we can move together as a community, and qì gōng is one of them. It gives us another way of understanding what action means.” 

Loneliness and Oppression

At a recent conference organized by the UC San Francisco Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Yep presented her research on loneliness, college students, and qì gōng. 

“The U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared loneliness a dangerous, nationwide epidemic,” she said. “Murthy warns that loneliness increases the risk of depression, anxiety, heart disease, stroke, dementia, premature death, and suicide. The mortality rate of social disconnection is about the same as smoking daily.” 

Yep noted that recent studies show that one in three responding college students have had severe psychological distress with many LGBTQIA and POC students reporting that they experience loneliness. 

Yep’s research and teaching shifts community engagement to look at the interconnected roles of being and doing. Feminist scholar activists Margo Okazawa-Rey and Gwyn Kirk call on us to not only examine and study oppressions and liberation but also to understand them through our minds, bodies, and hearts.

Qì gōng, according to Yep’s research, is about more than belly breathing and eliciting a relaxation response. Qì gōng has an ontological and epistemological dimension. “If qi is everywhere and in everything,” Yep said, “students are never alone. They are never separate.”  

It doesn’t matter what their major is, Yep believes every student benefits from this practice. 

“There are many forces and systemic inequities that are isolating, that seek to dehumanize and break us apart,” she said. “Qì gōng deepens our ability to move the other way, to reflect on being a human in the world and interconnected. In my classes, we break down all the scripts that students write about each other and rebuild what it means to think about liberation and engagement together. We do this through breathing and moving in class and through teaching others foundational moves as a type of social responsibility praxis.” 

Yep said that qì gōng provides a theoretical framework and embodied practice that remind students that they are interconnected with all beings and all others—even if they radically disagree with them.

Her students want to make society better and engage with social issues head-on: reproductive justice, mass incarceration, climate catastrophes, domestic violence, the killings of George Floyd and Sandra Bland, human-made starvation, poverty, and military occupations.

“There are many forces and systemic inequities that are isolating, that seek to dehumanize and break us apart. Qì gōng deepens our ability to move the other way, to reflect on being a human in the world and interconnected.” 

— Kathy Yep

But, she added, they often struggle to balance engaging with the world and can feel overwhelmed, hopeless, and paralyzed. During the recent protests and encampments across the country, she recalled how one of her students flip-flopped between closely monitoring current events and staying in bed with a blanket over her head. Practicing qì gōng in class and teaching others provided her with a realization that she was not alone.

The Classroom Experience

While some qì gōng practices can be found in most of her classes, Yep has focused on it specifically in courses about the social theory of Vietnamese monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh and the course Qì gōng and Embodied Learning, which she co-teaches with Organizational Studies Professor Barbara Junisbai.

In these classes, students fulfill the social responsibility praxis graduation requirement as they practice qì gōng and help each other. Yep said that Pitzer’s social responsibility praxis shows students how to engage in a space between contemplation and social justice, between ideas and actions. 

Illness and Discovery

A fourth-generation Chinese American, Yep was raised in a family that practiced both qì gōng and tai chi. As a child, she said she followed these practices because her parents wanted her to—and her true discovery of their importance didn’t occur until she was a student at UC Berkeley and was diagnosed with cancer. 

Yep said the cancer affected her thyroid and that—even once it was removed and Western medicine declared her cured—it drained her energy so much that she didn’t think she would be able to finish school. Desperate for help, she spotted a flyer at the Berkeley Bowl grocery store advertising an eight-week qì gōng class and decided to go. The teacher, she recalled, instantly sensed her energy level was depleted and approached her.

“He said to me, ‘you’re ill,’ without any hesitation,” she said. Yep decided to work with him, and she said she had a clear sign that it was working: She was able to sit through her typical three-hour-long graduate seminar. 
 

Yep has gone on to become a practitioner and has trained with Paul Li and Dr. Bingkun Hu, important foundational figures in bringing Da Yan (Wild Goose) qì gōng to the U.S. The transformation she experienced in her life is something she’s passionately committed to sharing with Pitzer students. She said she’s hopeful that a continuing interest in qì gōng among students will lead to textured ways of approaching collective loneliness on the one hand and community engagement on the other hand. 

Until then, she said she simply hopes that what students take with them about the practice is a new way of seeing and doing as they tackle current issues. 

“My hope is that students will move from feeling lonely and nourish their resilience, social connection, and sense of empowerment. I hope they develop and use a nuanced analytical toolkit as a result of this practice,” she said.  

“From the principles of qì gōng, what does it look like to interrogate, reflect, and act from the framework that everything is interconnected? How does knowing and understanding a social phenomenon shape our ways of being and doing? I hope they’ll see the relevance of what this means for their college careers and beyond, and for what they can do to create a society where everyone’s needs are met with no one thing, being, or place feeling left out.”