I found this interview with a martial arts master named Master Fook Yeung. I’ve never heard of him, but the interview gives some interesting perspective on the old culture of Chinese kung fu schools, which tears down some of the romance of it.
“The training was brutal, beyond what practitioners are willing to endure today. If you fought, your life was on the line, you could be crippled or killed. Now-a-days it doesn’t matter how skilled you are, you can’t defend yourself against a bullet. Today practitioners compete for prizes, first places and better health, the reality and training is very different than if your life depended on it.”
Mr. Yueng, being in the Opera, had the opportunity to study with many martial artists and has learned many styles. Tai Chi, Pa Kua, Wing Chun, several Mantis systems, Crane, Monkey and many more (he practiced with Sun Lu Tang’s students and also played the part of the Monkey King in the Opera).
I asked him if there was one instructor that stood out above the rest that he looked up to, or was a model for him.
There’s a problem I’ve been trying to solve that’s been very difficult to articulate, define, or even perceive. There are two ways it manifests. The first is in the energetic overcharge I keep mentioning. The second is in my lack of more intimate engagement with the world around me. They’re two sides of the same coin, like a dam keeping the lake separate from the desert. The lake stagnates while the desert withers.
I’ve tried any number of exercises and energy manipulations, to no avail. What I return to is that any energy issue is at root an issue of character development. So the question is, where am I imbalanced on a level of character, morals, or beliefs?
For the purposes of solving this problem, the answer requires thinking of my “self” as more than the property of me, the individual. It’s a matter of understanding the process by which this “self” interacts with my environment, i.e. what keeps my qi compressed close to my body on the one hand and evacuated from its surroundings on the other.
Actually, when I look at it, this sort of division is in keeping with the pervasive division and specialization I see all around me. It exists to such a depth that few people really see it.
I’ll simplify the types of specializations that pertain to my experience into four:
A guy named Chris Martenson has put together a video series on the coming collapse of the economy, energy, and environment. It’s pretty understandable and a good primer for understanding the dynamics driving current events. He doesn’t get as in-depth to many of the individual details as others do, but he’s put together a very comprehensive overview and outline of all of the intertwining influences that drive his central thesis: The next twenty years will be nothing like the last twenty years.
Qigong and tai chi instructor Gary Clyman, who I mentioned in my previous post, followed his visitor stats back to my blog and took umbrage at what I had written about him. Here’s our exchange:
Note: I decided to leave this post as it was originally written, but please also read the follow-up post, A Response from Gary Clyman.
Last year I mentioned that I practiced a nei gong system for a few months. I think it’s time I talk about how I started it, why I abandoned it, and the sordid details about it that I’ve discovered recently. It makes for an interesting little drama. This really hasn’t constituted very much of my time or energy lately, in fact there are so many other important and complicated things happening right now; but maybe that’s why this makes for a simpler and more amusing thing to write about as a blog post. So, enjoy.
I hadn’t named names before; now I will. I was browsing on a Shaolin discussion forum a couple of years ago when this guy started posting, who called himself Wu Jing. His real name is Elijah Wilson, and he was purportedly the lineage holder of the “Thunder Mind” school. He had the most incredible stories about what he could do with his qi, and made me curious. I contacted him and he said that he’d be willing to train me by sending me a DVD and giving me assistance by phone, but that the first level would cost several hundred dollars.
