I haven't written in a while and it's always hard to decide what to say after you've let blogging slide for a while.

8 of us went on a trip to Xian and Xiahe. Xian is a city I've been to several times but it's my favorite big city in China. It used to be the capital long before Beijing and it's just loaded with history. The terracotta warriors are here as well as intact city walls, ancient pagodas, a bell and a drum tower and some epic museums. This was my first time to the provincial museum there and it was amazing, I could have spent the entire day there. We ate a lot, the best thing I had was this pesto chicken sandwich:

We took a train and a bus from Xian to Xiahe which is a small town on the western border of Gansu province. We went there because there is a HUGE Tibetan Buddhist monastery there (second only to the one in Lhasa, Tibet) and tons of ethnically Tibetan people coming from all over western China. It's quite a pain to get a permit to go to Tibet so we figured this would be a cool way to get a taste of the culture and 'get away from it all' without the hassle, plus we only had 1 week. The monastery was like a town in and of itself with thousands of Buddhist monks, so much to see, I could have stayed much longer.

 We were at around 9000 feet so the air was pretty thin and it was cold too. The food was interesting, lots of yak. Yak meat, yak butter, yak yogurt, etc. It was tasty though, especially the yogurt. We went to some grasslands nearby with beautiful scenery, nomadic herders, what I think was an eagle, a sky burial site, and of course lots of yaks! It was great, my favorite part of the trip by far.

We stopped in Xian again on the way home for 2 days and mostly just ate and rested. Then we came back for 2 nights, I trained and did my laundry and some of us were off again to Wuhan for a T.V. performance. I don't have much to say about it, the usual waste of time that I won't bore you with but needless to say that we were exhausted when we got back. A few days later and I'm still recovering.

So a very busy few weeks. Very busy indeed.

Oh and today I got chin to toe on both legs!!!!! Yay!!!! 4 years of hard work has finally paid off. Yesterday Mel helped me into my lowest split ever too. And I finished the Chinese workbook I've been using and can move on to the next one now. Whew! Busy.......

I am currently reading this book by Yasuo Yuasa and it is AMAZING!!!!

I am only about half done but I was so excited about the book that I just had to post about it now. Every single person who is interested in martial arts, eastern philosophy, or meditation and who has both a mind and a body of their own should READ  THIS BOOK! I just know that I will re-read and study this book many times over the course of my life and I also intend to read every other book written by this author (of the ones that have been translated into English that is). Yuasa has a wonderful way of explaining the mind/body relationship that integrates and contrasts eastern and western thought. Such an intelligent and well written book, I highly recommend it!

We're almost finished learning Dadao (halberd) and that is the last form on our list. After that's done there are a few extra forms that are optional to learn but mostly it's qigong and internal stuff, Shifu doesn't teach these to many people so I'm really glad to get the chance to learn it. Our class is in a bit of a weird place now though, what will our training be like from now on? No-one knows of course but we're all thinking about it a lot. There's never been a traditional class here that also does the internal training so there's no precedent. I don't even know if Shifu knows what will happen or not, this school is a pretty fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of place.

I'm really excited, this stuff is a big part of why I gave up so much to come live here for 5 years. If I was only interested in forms or sparring, there were many places I could have gone to that would have been much more convenient. I really liked the combination of physical practice with self-cultivation that Wudang offered though. I love the idea of training every part of myself together instead of separating "me" into little boxes that I open and look at only one at a time.

So far this year I've been spending a lot more of my mental energy on things like attitude and understanding, rather than just endurance. Is it because the training is easier? I don't think so, I think the atmosphere of our class has changed, we're all aware that we're only here for a little over a year longer and we need to get the most out of it that we can. My meditation has also played a part in that, I've gone through a leap in progress that is hard to explain but I'll just say that I've been letting go of some negativity that I'd collected without meaning to and my emotions are becoming more and more stable as my body becomes more and more healthy. Good stuff!

This is just a random picture I was looking at. Mel and I for some reason were asked to take some pictures like these for a local student last summer. It was fun but pretty random. It's fun to dress up sometimes, we get so used to being grungy and wearing kung fu clothes everyday.

I also changed the look of my blog and I am ready to....post a link to my website:

http://brandibeckett.wix.com/brandibeckett

Whew! I actually made this last year but was too nervous to let anyone know about it. Weird, I know but it never seemed finished, it still doesn't actually. Well, it's rather bare bones but let me know what you think.

The longer I live here, the fewer the times that I enjoy being in China rather than at home. Today, hearing about the snow at home after a week of hot, sunny weather here, learning one of my favorite forms ever from Shifu and eating a big bowl of chopped banana, mango, and coconut for dinner is one of those times.

Don't begrudge me this, soon enough it'll be blazing hot and humid and I'll be miserable. Now is fine though, very fine indeed.

Last night some of us finished up a week long meditation retreat/herbal cleanse. We made our own medicine balls with chinese herbs and we ate them three times a day as well as drinking herbal teas and eating mostly fruit with some rice soup and veg some of the days. We meditated three times every day for seven days for anywhere from an hour to 2 1/2 hours. Shifu also taught us a bit, we started off with a lecture and he was very open with us about answering questions and trying to lay down some wisdom for our benefit.

It was very challenging and also very rewarding and although there were several points at which I wondered if I could make it through, I did! I'm proud of myself for persevering, journal-ling every day, and not cheating on the foods (though I didn't really feel hungry). The first half was definitely the most challenging but I got through that and days 5, 6, and 7 were awesome. We've done something similar before but only for 3 days and I think 7 is way better. It gives you a chance to really get into it and start to realize some of the benefits, not just feel a lot of pain.

At the beginning I decided that I would try to cleanse myself of desires as well as physical stuff. I chanted some of the scriptures each day pertaining to cleansing in general and getting rid of desires and during the week I tried to be really conscious of desires that came up and relax, trying to let them go. Funnily enough, Shifu also gave a lecture on the last day about desires that was perfectly in line with what I was trying to accomplish. Talk about synchronicity! Well I feel like I made some real progress and have a better idea of how to proceed too.

Just thought I'd share two of my favorite Shifu quotes from the week:

"If there's something you don't need, just throw it away"

and...

"Sitting is the hardest kung fu"



So true.

I came across something awesome this week, a book called Ninpo: Wisdom for Life by Masaaki Hatsumi. Hatsumi is the Grandmaster of Togakure Ryu ninjustsu and the book is just a series of essays written by him on a bunch of different topics. Some of the essays are a little strange or too technical but there are some real gems in there too. One in particular really stuck in my mind, about enthusiasm for training, he likens training in martial arts to creating pottery, you need some kind of heat to produce things and make changes, so for us enthusiasm or passion can be that heat. There's a lot of stuff in there that applies to any martial art, most of my favorites have the theme of training hard being the best way to progress. The person I borrowed the book from told me something else I really liked that Hatsumi says:

Takamatsu sensei (Hatsumi's teacher) told him that when we train hard, our bodies heat up and we sweat. The heat causes the sweat to evaporate, sending up steam to heaven reminiscent of the smoke from incense when we make an offering in a temple or shrine. Over time, we make many of these "offerings" and are eventually rewarded when heaven sends us the "martial winds".

Isn't that awesome?! I've really been enjoying thinking of training, and consequently sweating, as an offering to heaven since I heard this story. Shifu told us that we get too caught up in the physical side of our training sometimes and this imagery has really helped me to change my perspective over the past week or so.