Move Into Metal Season Feeling Clearer and Renewed
Build a Daily Qi Gong Practice in Just Five Days.
Five days of breath, release, and renewal. Complete one short guided lesson a day, with optional live practice parties, support inside our learning platform, and a workbook to track your progress.
Is The Art of Letting Go Challenge for You?
In Qi Gong and Traditional Chinese Medicine, autumn is known as Metal Season. Just as nature begins to shed what it no longer needs, this is a time to release what has accumulated, strengthen your resilience, and make space for what comes next.
See if any of this feels familiar:
Metal Season invites us to follow nature’s lead: release what has run its course, recognize what still matters, and create space for renewal.
Over five days, Lee will guide you through a complete Qi Gong sequence built around this natural process. Through gentle movement, breath, and focused attention, you’ll explore what you’re ready to let go of, what you want to carry forward, and how to feel calmer and more grounded as the season changes.
You can practice standing or seated, from wherever you are and at whatever pace your body allows. By the end, you’ll have a simple, repeatable five-day sequence for releasing built-up tension and creating more space in your body, mind, and life, one you can return to throughout the season ahead.
Save My Free SpotOver five days, you’ll learn how to:
Use your breath to feel more present and connected.
Pay attention to the air moving in and out of your body and use that awareness to step out of your thoughts and reconnect with the world around you.
Use longer exhales, sighs, and sound to release tension.
Practice extending your exhale and adding a natural sigh or sound to help your body soften, clear some of the heaviness you’ve been carrying, and feel calmer afterward.
Use gathering and pushing-away movements to practice holding on and letting go.
Experience the physical difference between the two, then consider what you may be ready to release and where you may need a clearer boundary in your own life.
Combine breath and movement into a sequence for releasing stress.
Bring the techniques you’ve learned together into a practical routine you can use to interrupt tension, reset, and return to a more grounded state.
Move from gentle motion into quiet stillness.
Gradually make your movements smaller and your breath quieter, learning how to shift out of effort and allow your body to settle and rest.
Adjust each practice for standing or seated movement.
Adapt the pace and range of motion to suit your energy and mobility, so you can continue practicing without forcing your body or pushing through discomfort.
By the end of the challenge, you’ll have a complete five-day Qi Gong protocol for releasing tension and letting go, with practices you can return to at home whenever you need them, including on days when motivation is harder to find.
Lee Holden
One of the world’s most trusted Qi Gong teachers, known for making ancient energy practices simple, accessible, and useful in modern life.
Lee first discovered Qi Gong as a collegiate soccer player at UC Berkeley, when injuries threatened to end the sport he loved. Looking for a way to help his body recover, he found more than a set of exercises. The practice helped him rebuild his strength and reconnect with his energy and resilience.
That experience changed the direction of his life. Lee began to understand the body as an intelligent system that responds to breath, movement, awareness, relaxation, and flow. It led him into decades of study with renowned teachers, including Mantak Chia, and into Taoist practice, Chinese medicine, acupuncture, meditation, Tai Chi, and Qi Gong.
For more than 25 years, Lee has translated those ancient practices into teachings people can use in modern life. His work has reached audiences through public television, books, online programs, retreats, workshops, and teacher training. More than 50,000 students have learned with him, his videos have been watched 24 million times, and 670 certified teachers now share the practice in their own communities.
The Art of Letting Go grew from that same mission: to give you five days of gentle movement, breath, and focused practice that help your body release what it no longer needs.
Sign Up for the FREE Challenge Now
Here’s what’s included when you join:
A new guided practice each day from Sunday through Thursday. Watch when it is released or return to it later, whenever you are ready.
Practice alongside Lee and the challenge community in real time. Sessions rotate throughout the week to accommodate different time zones.
Join Lee and the community on Friday, October 9 at 10am Pacific to close the challenge, reflect on the week, and reveal the prize winners.
Share your response to each day’s reflection question, read what others are discovering, and connect with people practicing alongside you.
Available as soon as you register, with space to follow each day’s lesson and record what you notice throughout the challenge.
A short guided practice focused on bringing greater awareness and ease to your breathing, giving you another way to return to the breath beyond the daily challenge lessons.
A gentle supporting practice focused on the upper back and neck, created for the areas where many people notice tension building throughout the day.
Explore how mindful attention can be carried into movement, helping you stay present with what your body is doing rather than simply following the motions.
New to Qi Gong? This foundational session introduces the practice and helps you feel more comfortable with the breath, movement, and awareness used throughout the challenge.
Your Practice Could Win You One of These Prizes
A lifetime Holden QiGong subscription, so you never pay again, plus a private one-on-one session with Lee where you can go deeper into anything you’d like to learn.
One qualifying participant will be selected at random to receive one free year of the Holden QiGong Video Class Subscription.
One non-teacher participant who consistently helps, encourages, and supports others throughout the challenge will receive one free year of the Holden QiGong Video Class Subscription.
The participant with the boldest, most creative, or most entertaining response to the week’s practices will receive one free year of the Holden QiGong Video Class Subscription.
Additional prizes will be awarded throughout the week for thoughtful questions, helpful insights, courageous participation, and supportive responses.
How to Qualify for a Major Prize
You don’t need to attend the live practice parties or post on social media to qualify. Each participant may win one major prize.
The Art of Letting Go 5-Day Agenda
Connecting to Breath: We Are One with Nature
You start where every Qi Gong practice starts. Slow down enough to feel the air moving in and out, and let that be enough for today. The air moving through you now recently passed through forests, seas, and open sky, so you are already in exchange with the world.
The Exhale: Letting Go and Purging Through Breath
If the inhale is for receiving, the exhale is for releasing. You lengthen it into a sigh or a sound and let it carry whatever is ready to go. Emotion sometimes surfaces here. If it does, there is nothing to explain and nothing to push away.
Refining What Stays
Letting go is only half of it. Today is discernment. You practice one pushing-away gesture and one gathering-in gesture, so your body learns the difference, and then you notice which boundary in your life could use that same clarity.
Building and Integration
Everything from the week moves together into one flowing practice. This is usually the day the whole arc clicks into place, when letting go stops being a single moment and becomes a rhythm you can return to, breath after breath.
Seed: Carrying It Forward
The movements shrink, the breath quiets, and stillness becomes the practice. Nothing gets built today. What the week refined is planted, and left to rest until it is ready to grow again.
Bonus: Celebration and Prize Reveal
The whole group gathers at 10am Pacific to celebrate the people you practiced beside, share what the week grew in you, and find out who won. Whatever you are carrying forward, we hope it feels a little lighter and a little more your own.
This practice works at any time of year. It carries a particular resonance during the Metal season, when nature moves through the exact cycle we do: release, refinement, and renewal.
What People Are Saying About Lee
Release, Refine and Renew.
Move through Metal Season with five days of breath, gentle movement, and intentional practice with Lee Holden.
Release what you no longer need. Refine what matters. Create space for what comes next.