At Budding Spring Healing, our focus is on health. Our mission is to help people strengthen the natural, inborn connection to the creative Life Force, Qi. We want you to know how to acquire, increase, and use this energy wisely in order to manage stress and live with greater purpose and contentment. Grand Master Nan Lu has given us permission to bring these programs and services to you; healing really is in your hands.
Grand Master Nan Lu and Wu Ming Qigong
“The invisible is more powerful than the visible” — Grand Master Nan Lu
At Budding Spring Healing, our focus is on health. We bring you healing methods that have been refined over thousands of years. We offer them to you in ways that are relevant to modern life. It is our hope that you will learn how to use energy wisely to gain strength, rebuild your health and become more content. Closely associated with Grand Master Nan Lu and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) World Foundation, we carry Grand Master Lu’s healing message to you, so you discover your healing gifts and that healing really is in your hands.
Our Team
Larry Stoler
When you have a symptom, whether it is physical, like a sprained ankle or chronic digestive problems, or emotional, like anxiety or a Post Traumatic Stress reaction or a lack of self-confidence, the remedy must take into account who you are as a whole person. I believe that body, mind, and spirit can’t be separated.
I founded Budding Spring Healing on the principle that when the starting point of our healing journey is illness, the focus of therapy has to be to promote health. Illness is limited but health is unlimited.
In order for deep healing to occur, we must address hidden, invisible factors as well as the known visible ones. The most important invisible factors are your Qi (your lifeforce energy), and your consciousness and beliefs. Each of these have a powerful effect on the expression of overall health. Naturally, healing with qigong helps create this shift.
Your healing journey has to be inspirational, hopeful, doable and promote self-love. Love is the ultimate healing force! Medical Qigong and integrative psychotherapy, qigong programs and other tools are your bridge to see these concepts in action in your life.
My clients cultivate the awareness that everything is connected and we are all part of Nature. This is a liberating and exciting discovery that helps you move easily through life’s challenges, and from pain and limitation into an experience of freedom, creativity and self-love. Learn that healing is really in your hands.
My work is a central passion in my life. Since my teens, I’ve believed it was my mission to help people. I found that my point of view was different from my peers. I wanted to know what allowed people to thrive when faced by apparently crippling life challenges, like coping with severe trauma, loss or catastrophic illness. The idea that we had to be permanently limited by illness and life circumstances never clicked for me.
My early work experiences solidified these beliefs. I worked as a social worker in a small town that suffered a terrible terrorist attack and saw resilience in individuals who rebuilt shattered lives and in the community that committed itself to rebirth. I was part of the Free Clinic movement; I worked providing services to sexually abused women–one of the few men who were invited to work with this population. Again, I saw resilience, courage, commitment to personal change in these women who were betrayed and violated. I was involved with the Cancer Wellness Center from its inception and led their first men’s group. I saw how peer support, humor and a loving community helped people outlive dire prognoses.
I needed to learn more about how healing happens. I studied healers and healing to validate that healing was possible even when it wasn’t understood by current materialist science. I learned the latest mind-body healing practices and integrated them into my work as a social worker and then psychologist.
I worked for 15 years at WholeHealth Chicago, one of the country’s leading integrative medicine clinics.
The work I do today traces directly to my learning energy psychology (EP) in 1996. EP refers to methods that use the body’s energies to promote transformation. I treated clients and saw them recover from severe trauma in 1 session. I was so passionate about energy psychology that I became president of The Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology, an international non-profit organization.
It was clear that I needed to learn more about energy. This led me to study Qigong. After 10 years of practicing Qigong, I met Grand Master Lu and became his student.
As a result of my intensive and personal training with Grand Master Lu, I’ve been able to deepen my healing gifts and share them with others. I see how fortunate we are to be living now when the discoveries of modern science and ancient secret wisdom closely parallel each other. I know that oneness, consciousness, energy and Love are the real foundation of our lives.
After all these years, I remain curious and passionate about our capacity to heal ourselves. It is my greatest honor to help you discover that you too have the power to heal yourself.
Aside from work, I live in Skokie, IL with my wife, Amy. We are proud parents of 3 and now grandparents of 3 amazing children. I love jazz, trumpet music, and ecstatic chant. I enjoy photography (I’ve taken many of the pictures used on the site) and visiting sacred sites. And I am a dog person!
EDUCATION:
- BA: Oberlin College, 1974
- MSSA: The School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, 1981
- PhD: College of Health Professions, Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, 1990
Jenny Merdinger
We live in a world where chronic fatigue, anxiety, and other conditions are becoming normal. By the time we reach mid-life, we’ve shouldered stresses, and often trauma, that weighs down our ability to enjoy life, be playful, and look forward to the future. Our bodies show us the impact in chronic fatigue, anxiety and depression, weight gain, headaches and low-functioning digestive systems.
Yet we refuse to give up a core belief that life is meant to be lived with joy, creativity and purpose. .
I came to Wu Ming Qigong in 2009 on a journey of personal healing. The amazing outcomes I received far surpassed anything my doctors or I imagined could be possible. Looking back, I see this turning point was the first of many transitions on my path back to taking my health and healing into my own hands. Chronic fatigue, Epstein Barr virus, crippling depression, fibrocystic breasts, hypothyroidism, lower back problems, cloudy brain fog and dry mouth and so much more became conditions of my past. Partnering with experts and doctors using a new understanding of my body’s innate healing ability.
It was natural for me to want my friends and others to also experience these deep fixes to their issues. It had to be the most simple, doable and beneficial practice, adaptable for each individual’s life and lifestyle, and not require a belief in or understanding of Traditional Chinese Medicine to be successful!
These requirements were met by Grand Master Nan Lu’s Wu Ming Qigong framework.
In 2014, I received Grand Master Nan Lu’s permission to offer the Dragon’s Way Qigong® program. Since then I have added several other Wu Ming Qigong programs for women and men with his authority and am a Tao of Medical Qigong practitioner.
Every student and client will walk their own path, and every one will need guidance and support to get to sustainable healing and change. I’m honored and thrilled to be offering this diamond of wisdom and practical application for anyone to take!
Jenny Merdinger is a lifelong student of energy healing, motivated by a profound desire to understand the nature of the world, modern human existence, and personal health. It was her own crisis of health that opened the door to healing changes that her doctors and therapists had been sure were unlikely to ever happen, erasing a long list of chronic and persistent emotional and physical conditions from her life.
For the past thirteen years, Jenny has exclusively studied the Wu Ming Qigong system brought more than thirty years ago to the United States by Grand Master Nan Lu, OMD. She began as a student in the Traditional Chinese Medicine World Foundation in 2008 and has been a direct student of Master Lu since 2016. With his guidance, permission and certification, Jenny offers several different Qigong programs for men and women, and is among only a few dozen people authorized to offer 1:1 Tao of Medical Qigong treatment sessions.
Jenny offers 3- and 6-month courses in her Real Women, Real Healing coaching program for women in “energy recovery” who are interested in sustaining breast, reproductive and metabolic health at all phases of life, and addressing the root causes of chronic and seasonal pain, exhaustion and illness.
The growth of Jenny’s energy healing practice occurred simultaneously with her full-time work as a nonprofit development professional and fundraiser extraordinaire. The beautiful alignment of these two purposes support greater balance in the world, connect individual and communal needs and resources, and nurture and enhance the visible and invisible activity from long-term dedication to all that is possible for women, families, educators, and children. Jenny is honored to have served both of these movements for good life in the world.
