Wonderstruck

Healer, author and world-renowned qigong master Robert Peng traces his singular journey and shares stories about the teacher that changed his life. Recovering from a childhood illness during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Peng started apprenticing with a legendary monk named Xiao Yao. Having witnessed and learned from his master’s extraordinary, and seemingly supernatural powers, Peng himself developed his own remarkable capabilities, feats of strength and healing which many would consider impossible. He did it, he says, by cultivating his qi. In a revealing conversation recorded last summer at Wonderstruck’s Symposium on Wisdom and Pedagogy in Guainville, France, host Elizabeth Rovere sat down with Peng to explore what qi really is, what it has to do with the energy centers of Chinese Medicine, and how we can cultivate our own. 

Emma Mumford is the best-selling author of Hurt, Healing, Healed, and Spiritual Queen, and host of Spiritual Queen’s Badass Podcast. There, she covers topics like manifestation, out of body experiences, The Law of Attraction and processing trauma. Emma’s own spiritual awakening came as a surprise. She had found professional success after years of personal struggle, becoming a popular couponing advocate and presenter in the UK. Nevertheless, she still suffered from depression and anxiety. A moment of surrender changed Emma’s life. “I remember looking out the window and saying, ‘Universe, help me.’ And that was it,” Emma tells Wonderstruck’s Elizabeth Rovere. As Emma let go of control and led more from her heart, she opened up to newfound teachings, therapy, and self-help tools. She began tapping into deep personal wells of agency and creativity, working through childhood trauma, developing her intuition and, ultimately, drawing upon her learnings to help others find happiness. “When you find yourself in the trenches of life,” Emma says. “There is a purpose to that. You may not know it at that time, you may not know what abundance or happiness or joy awaits you." 

What do you want? Who are you bound to? Who are you, really? And what will you do when faced with difficult decisions? These are some of the questions at the heart of religion and tragedy, dramas about extreme situations, impossible choices, and their consequences. William Robert, a professor of religion at Syracuse University, studies religion by studying tragedies, since both ask the same kinds of big questions about being human: questions about love and connection, about purpose and passion, about morality and mortality. And they’re persistent questions that don’t have final answers. In performance-based classes and workshops, and in print, William uses tragic dramas to rethink how religion works, what it does, and why it matters. His most recent book, Unbridled: Studying Religion in Performance, won the American Academy of Religion’s Religion and the Arts Book Award. On this episode of Wonderstruck, William and host Elizabeth Rovere discuss performance and pedagogy as practices of wonder that generate learning. Using teaching methods that draw upon embodied participation, earnest curiosity, props and disarming playfulness, William breaks down the barriers of academia to reach new and transformative conclusions. "When we're using our bodies, we are inevitably thinking and feeling together," he says. "The intellectual and the affective and the corporeal dimensions are all mixed together. And that's much more powerful than just the intellect."

Seeking relief from her migraine headaches, Dr. Sue Morter turned to meditation. As a new meditator, 24 years ago, she sat down to meditate as part of a group. As she followed along chanting a mantra, her mind was stilled and she was instantaneously transported into a higher state of consciousness, that she explains "was completely altered from where we operate on a daily basis." Dr. Sue shares with Wonderderstruck's Elizabeth Rovere, "I could see 360 degrees...I could see in every direction simultaneously...I was a ray of light. And I had always been there. I knew instantly that this was the truth of who I was. " Her life's work has evolved from this formative moment and the multi-dimensional experiences and understandings she continues to access as she works to embody this greater truth of who we are, teaching it and sharing it with others through her Energy Codes coursework, BodyAwake Yoga, Spiritual B.E.S.T. (Bio Energetic Synchronization Technique) and as a best-selling author. Dr. Sue is a transformational leader, teaching us how we're contributing to the expansion of human consciousness as "we're waking to the truth of why we're here and what we're capable of."