Lee Holden

Lee Holden (1972-present) is an American qigong teacher, a student of Mantak Chia, who has become one of the most visible popularizers of Chinese energy practice for a mainstream wellness audience through widely aired PBS specials, online courses, and his Holden QiGong platform.

Trained in the Daoist Healing Tao lineage, Holden simplifies and adapts qigong—gentle movement, breath, and attention practices for cultivating and circulating chi—into accessible routines aimed at stress relief, energy, flexibility, and emotional balance.

He frames qigong as “acupuncture without the needles,” emphasizing how directing attention and breath can move life-force energy to relax the nervous system and restore vitality. For the mind-power lineage, Holden represents the mass-market mainstreaming of the qi/energy paradigm.

By bringing Daoist energy cultivation to broad Western audiences in a secular, wellness-oriented frame, he helps embed the subtle-body model—that a felt life-force can be sensed and directed by breath and intention—into popular health culture, where it overlaps with the “energy” and “vibration” vocabulary of contemporary spirituality.

His accessible teaching makes the experiential claim of moving and feeling chi available to ordinary practitioners, reinforcing, at the everyday-wellness level, the broader lineage premise that mind, breath, and attention can influence a subtle energetic dimension of body and experience.