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!

Sometimes I am so tired that I have almost nothing to say. This is one of those times. I'm looking forward to September when my parents come to visit. Summer is definitely the worst time of year here.

Things have settled down here and we've gotten back into a weird routine. It's been raining for about a week straight which means 2 things. We get to sleep in because there's no early morning training so we wake up around 7....yay! One the other hand we have to train inside and there's not nearly enough space for everyone so our options for training are really limited....boo. Hopefully the rain stops soon, I'd really like to practice forms this week.

I have really had a terrible week. There's not one thing that happened but lately one thing after another has built up and this week was just the pinnacle of crappiness.... and it's not even over yet. The worst thing of all is that about half of our class feels really down and depressed about our training lately but no one feels like they can go to Shifu with their problems. He has been really distant and also harsh this week and he has zero patience for any of us. It's really sad. I feel so full of doubt, maybe the worst I've felt since I got here. It's not just that I'm tired, though I am, I like to train hard but it feels like most of what we've been doing is either a waste of time or taking us in a direction that I don't want to go. I've been really down in the dumps for days now and I've tried lots of different things to cheer myself up and stay positive but then I go to class and it all comes rushing back. I keep remembering how good I felt a few weeks ago before our schedule changed and it makes me so sad! I was so happy with my progress and now I feel like our entire class has taken about 10 steps backwards. I feel old, I feel tired, I feel alone, I feel bitter.... The only thing I can think of is just to try and wait it out, hopefully things will get better. I wish I had something else to look forward to. Right now all I can think about is how much I wish I was at home.

We started practicing hard qigong or iron body training. It consists of making little bundles of bamboo sticks and beating each other's torso's with them to first kill the nerves in the skin. It's pretty painful because the bamboo really stings and gives you little red bruises that can be itchy and uncomfortable. We have also got bigger bundles (about the size of a baseball bat) that we use to train the deeper tissues. There are very specific breathing exercises and you have to really flex all your muscles very hard. We will eventually be hitting each other with bags of sand and rocks but not for another few months and then maybe we'll be able to break wooden sticks on our bodies. The point of it is to learn to protect your organs from impact like a body shot in a fight, you learn to isolate an area to absorb the strike with your muscles instead of allowing it to to penetrate too deeply and cause internal damage. Eventually we will also be able to isolate our muscles to the point of actually being able to move the organs around a little inside. That's really advanced though but a big part of why I am excited to be doing this training. You basically have to go through this 'hard qigong' in order to do the higher level internal cultivation that comes much later. Well anyways, here is a picture of my back after about 4 days of practice. Pretty cool, huh? Actually this doesn't look too bad. Some people's skin marks much more easily and as a result they look way worse than I do. It's funny how many of the guys look worse than the females. You just never know how each person's body will react I guess.

whew!

Sorry about the 2 week silence, the firewall has been getting stronger (or higher?) and I haven't been able to sign in to blogger even using a proxy site. Problem is solved now though, we bit the bullet and got a VPN for our computer. This should make blogging a lot easier and more interesting. Now I can upload pictures and such so it's pretty exciting.

Speaking of pictures....here's a good one from our trip to Chengdu. This is Mel and Shifu with some pandas.