Kenneth S. Cohen (Gao Han) is a world-renowned health educator, China scholar, and Qigong Grandmaster with more than fifty years experience. A former collaborator with Alan Watts, he is the author of the internationally acclaimed book The Way of Qigong: The Art and Science of Chinese Energy Healing (Random House), best-selling audio and video courses (Sounds True), and more than 200 journal articles. He offers lectures, workshops, and classes, as well as healing and consultations in Colorado and throughout the world.
Ken speaks and reads the Chinese language and is the author of various works published in the U.S. and China. He received his Teaching Certificate from the William C.C. Chen School of T’ai Chi Ch’uan in 1974 and studied classical Chinese and Taoism (also spelled "Daoism") with some of the luminaries of academia, including Professors Bernard Solomon. Michel Strickmann, Wolfram Eberhard, and Edward Schafer. He has a great love of Chinese cultural arts, especially the Art of Tea (Cha Yi) and ancient Chinese poetry. In 2003, Ken won the leading international award in energy medicine, the Alyce and Elmer Green Award for Innovation and Lifetime Achievement.
Ken Cohen’s teachers in cultural and martial arts have included some of the most highly respected Masters and Grandmasters in the world, including William C.C. Chen (Yang Style Taiji Quan), B.P. Chan (Chen Style Taiji Quan, Bagua Zhang, Xing Yi Quan, Qigong), Madame Gao Fu (Chen Style Taiji Quan and Hunyuan Primordial Qigong), Share K. Lew (Taoist External Qi Healing), Sunyata (Vedanta in the lineage of Ramana Maharshi), Swami Venkatesananda (Sivananda Yoga), and others. Ken was the only apprentice to Dr. Huang Gengshi (Henry K.S. Wong, 1910-1999), acupuncturist and Taoist Abbot from China’s sacred mountains. To advance his study of Comparative Religion and facilitate healing work in hospitals, prisons, and other places of service, Ken attended the New Seminary during the late 1980s and was ordained as an interfaith minister with an advanced degree in pastoral counseling (Master of Spiritual Therapy M.S.Th.). He also holds an honorary M.A. in Psychology and other academic honors.
Ken Cohen is a leader in the dialogue between ancient wisdom and modern science. He was able to demonstrate extraordinary physiologic states (evidenced through EEG, body potential, and bio-electric fields) as one of 9 “exceptional healers” studied in the Menninger Clinic’s Copper Wall Project. Probably the first Qigong practitioner in the West to treat physician-referred patients, his sponsors have included the American Cancer Society, the Mayo Clinic, Health Canada, and numerous hospitals, medical schools, conferences, and cultural organizations. In 1994, Ken was chosen as keynote and sole representative of Chinese medicine at the World Congress on Energy Healing in Switzerland. His work has been featured in USA Today, Newsweek, Time, Bottom Line, and on National Public Radio. He has taught more than 40,000 students.
Personal Note: In addition to Qigong, Ken has lifelong training in indigenous (Native American / First Nations) healing and cultural ways and both teaches and practices these traditions. As an educator and in order to do justice to the diversity, uniqueness and depth of these paths, he maintains a completely separate website at www.sacredearthcircle.com.
For most of his life, Ken has lived about 40 minutes from Boulder, Colorado, at the edge of the Indian Peaks Wilderness (elevation 9,000 ft., approximately 2,750 meters above sea level), where, as he puts it, "just breathing is qigong!"
