well I missed writing last week but there's not too much to say anyway. Summer has gotten really hot again, more like what I remembered from last year and the school is busier than it's ever been before. I think this puts everyone around here a little on edge but overall we seem to be enduring it with relative patience. It's almost August which means another month or so of this and things will calm down and return to some semblance of normalcy. One thing that's quite exciting is the new form we'll start learning tomorrow: Tai chi straight sword. I've watched several students come learn this form and I've often been envious of them. It's a really beautiful form that combines two things I've fallen in love with over these past 2 years, straight sword and tai chi. I also think it's a perfect way to spend the second half of the summer.

A few weeks ago was my birthday which we celebrated well. I got many messages from folks at home and it really meant a lot to me that so many people were so kind. Thanks everyone!

When people come to visit this school, they often come with either experience in some other meditation-type tradition or preconceived notions of what meditation is. They want to know what we 'see' when we meditate, what Shifu teaches about spirit travel, or share stories of visions they've had.

I've often wondered where people get these ideas from. Meditation, at least for the first many years is pretty much a matter of sitting and breathing. That's it. Shifu tells us that learning to sit and learning patience are a beginners only concern. He also tells us that in order for any feeling from meditating to be "real" it must come from your body, not your mind. If it comes from your mind, it is a hallucination created to entertain you. Perhaps you read in a book about an ecstatic experience someone had and your mind thought you should be feeling the same thing.

I've started reading a book by Livia Kohn called Early Chinese Mysticism and in the introduction she explained perfectly to me why so many westerners that visit the school have these wild expectations about our internal practice. From the writings of Christian mystics, there is a fixation on "peak experiences", visions of the divine, ecstatic union with God. Chinese scriptures focus more on the transformation of body and mind. This comes from a completely different worldview. The Christian tradition has a god completely separate from us, who we can see only through his mercy and all of these experiences are otherworldly. Chinese philosophy, however, speaks of the Tao, within and without all of us. The Tao is completely natural and to be in union with the Tao is the most natural of states for every being, a more everyday kind of experience. From what I understand of Buddhism, the basics are quite similar, instead of searching for something outside oneself, the goal is to accept all as it is and without judgement. This early Christian mysticism has influenced us westerners in way we don't even realize. Even for those who are neither Christian, nor religious, our very identity has been influenced by our past roots. Very interesting.

There are many other traditions such as shamanism where one goes on vision quests and experiences sensual wonders and I don't wish to devalue those but I don't think they've influenced our cultural identity in the same ways as Christianity. One thing about living in a place so far removed from home is that it really gives you a new perspective with which to view your culture.

The other night during class Shifu gave us a bit of an impromptu lecture where he talked about a few random things. One of the topics he talked about for quite a while was fighting between kung fu schools.

When he was quite young he trained at Shaolin for 3 years and he said the inter-school violence was pretty bad. A classmate of ours also trained there and said it is even worse now. He mentioned standing alone on a street corner in the town and if a group of students from another school saw you they would come over and ask you if you wanted to change schools. If you said no, they'd beat you up.

Both in Shaolin and here in Wudang, they would send students to the train station and if a young person got off the train alone, they'd just grab them and practically drag them to the school to try and sign you up, whether you'd planned on visiting that school or not.

Shaolin is full of young Chinese students wanting to be the next Bruce Lee and learn to fight so a little violence is not a surprise, especially when there are literally thousands of people crammed together. Even here in Wudang though (internal style) fighting used to be a big problem. Back in the 80's and early 90's there were two very large schools who's students got in fights all the time. The two masters finally had to talk it over and decide to stop the fighting when one student was stabbed in the liver and was very critically injured. Not only were people getting badly hurt, both schools were paying hundreds of thousands of Yuan to the local police as bribes to keep the students out of jail and also to the hospitals. The townspeople as a result had a very bad opinion of kung fu students in general which is only now starting to change. Shifu has a class of local schoolchildren training at the school during the summer and on weekends which would never have happened before.

Even though I generally don't really enjoy the Sanda (sparring) training we do as much as the other stuff, hearing these stories helps me understand why Shifu places so much importance on learning to fight. He's seen first hand how you might need to defend yourself against someone with training equal to your own. None of us plan to fight competitively and Shifu doesn't encourage that either so I often wonder why we spend so much of our time on conditioning and stuff. What I'm really excited about is when we eventually move on to the traditional fighting. Basically self defense training with empty hands and weapons. Less sport oriented and in my opinion a lot more interesting. Shifu showed us a few straight sword techniques the other day...totally awesome! I can't wait!