The weather really cooled off last week. We were all really excited and I was sleeping so well and actually enjoying training again.....then it got hot again. ARRRG! When will summer be over?!

I've been fantasizing about snow.

I'm overdue for an update.

I've been dealing with some problems with my neck and shoulder (a result of all those kip-ups a few weeks ago) and thus have fallen waaaay behind on my bridges. It's a bit disappointing but these things happen. I still intend to complete the project but doing so before the end of August is starting to seem unlikely. My intention was only to motivate myself to practice more and that has already happened so it is not a failure or a waste of time, just a challenge to work through.

Something I've learned here is patience. In the west we say "patience is a virtue" but it doesn't seem as if it's a quality that people try to cultivate in themselves or expect others to have. We value efficiency, hard work, intelligence, and a load of other things, patience......not so much. Living here I have learned to be patient. It was a tough process though. Basically I've had to deal with tons of frustrations, complete powerlessness, total ignorance of situations, and little guidance. Patience is sitting in meditation posture every day for 3 years with very little information or teaching. Patience is learning that things will happen here when they happen and there is nothing you can do to expedite it, so you'd be better off to not get frustrated and just find a something to do while you wait. I was raised to do things "right" and expect that from others but here, nothing is done "right" and culturally it's just not important so it's impossible to change or to force others to see it your way. You just have to accept it.

I'm not saying I love Chinese society and culture, in fact, living here has made me appreciate certain western values like honesty and forthrightness so much more, but patience is something you can really develop in a place like this.

So I'm rambling but basically my point is that even though I can't practice bridges when I want to, I've developed enough patience to accept that and just plug away slowly when I can.

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.

I'm sitting in my room with a cold today. I hate having a cold when it's hot outside but what can you do? I've got some vitamin C, lemon and honey, Vicks vaporub, and a huge pile of used tissues; Should be feeling better soon. It comes (as always) at an inconvenient time because I recently set a goal for myself to do 124 bridges (from standing position you bend backwards and put your hands on the ground) by the end of August. It works out to about 5 each training day with a few less on Wednesdays (half day) and though I managed to squeeze out 3 yesterday in spite of the cold, I think today will be a bust. Luckily, I started 2 days early so I got a bit of a head start and I have some breathing room. A month or so ago when we did our stretching test, I was one of only 2 people who didn't pass on the bridge because I couldn't get my hands close enough to my feet. I decided to do some extra work on it but it was hard to motivate myself because...well..it's hard. I suddenly realized the other day that I've done this kind of thing once or twice before and I have the perfect method for setting goals that are clear and measurable, making it public, and not quitting. So 124 bridges it is. I sure have learned a lot from Shifu Jeff Brinker. My advice to everyone in the UBBT now.....listen to him, he's done this before and he knows what you're going through.