The bridges are going fine. Despite falling behind a little while I was sick, I'm on my way to catching up and, just as I'd hoped, it's starting to get easier to do them.

I've also started studying Chinese again, after not studying AT ALL since last year. I can't explain why I've been so lax on that this year but whatever it was, it's changing now. I used to want to only study spoken Chinese because I thought it was more practical for someone living here in China and I didn't study characters at all. Last year I finally started learning characters and trying to catch them up with my speaking. Now I find all I want to study is characters. Weird. I'll just go with it though. In the future I'd like to be able to take a poem or Taoist scripture and translate it myself. The entire library of Taoist texts is huge and 99.9% of them have never been translated into English so if I want to read them, learning characters is a must.

Over the past month or so the structure of our class has changed a little and it's been more loose with a lot more self-direction.The training is almost exactly the same, it's just the atmosphere that's changed. I'm really enjoying it, after 3 years of intense discipline it feels great to follow my feelings more. I'm not sure I'd have created this bridges project for myself or started studying again if I still had that mental pressure on me. There's just no space for that stuff the way we were going before. I feel more like myself now and though I think those 3 years were invaluable, I'm ready to move on. I think in order to develop the super-human self control of a master it's important to have both external discipline and also to learn self discipline.