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.

At first I had contacted him on a lark, but as I considered the possibility of gaining a lot of power and health in a short period of time, I got seduced by the idea.

Kind of reminds me of a spam letter I got recently:

Anyway, so I decided to send Mr. Wilson a down payment, and waited eagerly for the DVD. And waited. And waited. And waited. Months went by. I kept e-mailing him every month, and sometimes it was weeks before I would hear back from him, only to have him say that the DVD was delayed.

Finally he got in touch with me, several months after I had sent him money (and the whole time I was wondering if I just got scammed). We talked on the phone and he spent a while asking me indirect questions about previous training I’d had. I couldn’t understand what he was getting at until finally he came out and said that he had been waiting for me to contact him to admit that I had previously trained under the Shaolin group, that my honesty was a test of character.

I found this bizarre considering that I had made that clear at the very beginning, and that that was how I found out him in the first place, which I had also made clear.

In fact, a number of things about him struck me as very weird. He talked a lot, and grandiosely, about his system and the wonders it could do. He said that his teacher taught him things before he went to Vietnam, things which saved his life by allowing him to speed up his reactions and slow down time. He said his teacher had challenged luminaries of the internal martial arts, like taijiquan master William C.C. Chen, and beat them.

I did not trust him from the beginning, but still I thought I would see what he had to give, because I was at the point where having power was that seductive.

So finally he sent me the DVD. It was basically a DVD of a bunch of exercises performed by some guy. The guy’s voice did not sound like the voice I talked to on the phone, and the picture did not look like the fuzzy photo he had posted on the Shaolin forum. I questioned him about it and he laughed and said that one of his students had made the DVD.

I practiced pretty intensively for awhile. The type of practice was a lot of accumulation of energy and a good deal of trying to speed it up and cause it to vibrate. After awhile I started to feel buzzed all the time. From the outset I had been concerned about this, because one of my problems in terms of energy cultivation has been feeling rapidly overcharged. This began happening quickly but, trusting that the practice would correct the situation, I pressed forward, despite the fact that it was beginning to have deleterious effects on my health.

The last time I talked to him was via chat. We had been in contact intermittently and he had made suggestions as far as dealing with the overcharging problem, none of which worked. This last time he strongly suggested that I take Miracle Mineral Supplement, some sort of fad product.

It was at this point that I finally decided that he didn’t know what the hell he was doing with me, and I quit practicing his system. It was several weeks before I shook off the effects of four months of intensive overcharging.

I forgot about him for awhile. Then, last month, I came across a forum post that referred to the website of qigong teacher Gary Clyman, on which this was written:

Warning! Watch out for Elijah (Eli) Wilson, “Wu Jing,” The Thundermind School. It’s all made up and most it is MY story from phone conversations. He ordered my Nei Kung Program and never paid me since 2007 (3 bad checks). He has been caught TWICE selling illegally copied and scrambled versions of my DVDs. This is not only copyright infringement and theft, but he says he is MY teacher. He’s stolen my character and acts like he’s special. He sucks money out of people and “acts” like he knows something. O.K., he followed my DVDs and had many phone calls with me. But he’s faking everything. Watch out! Contact me if you have had contact with him. It will help in his prosecution. If you are communicating with him, you are already in over your head. Copying is NOT the best form of flattery, it’s criminal.

So I went, huh. Somehow it doesn’t surprise me. I saw the picture of the guy, and it was the guy in the DVD I was sent, who was supposedly Elijah’s student!

Moreover, I found the account on Clyman’s website of his encounter with William C.C. Chen, which Elijah had said happened to his teacher.

A brief story about the well-known Tai Chi Grandmaster William C.C. Chen from NYC and myself. I was invited to a seminar he was doing in 2008. The short story is, I was asked to attend by my classmate from the mid 1970’s, Tom Wykle. Tom made me promise 2 things… I would not “up-stage or embarrass” William C.C. Chen. I gave my word and one of my 20 years students and I went to the seminar.

The back story… in 1980, William C.C. Chen screwed me when I went to study with him for 10 days in NYC. He sent me away broken hearted. I decided I would “get him” someday for stranding me in NYC for 10 days with nothing to do. Update… 28 years later here comes my opportunity. He did not recognize or remember me.

Immediately I saw he had NOTHING I wanted to learn, so I practiced by myself. About 4 hours into the seminar, Chen decided to demonstrate on ALL the participants there, including me.

I was the 6th person he got to. When he touched me to send me “flying,” he went flying instead. He did yell out, “Oh my God, you’re got more internal power than I do.” All this happened in front of everyone and without me doing anything but what came “natural.” That means, no planning, no set-up, no preparation, no getting ready, no projecting, no tensing, no nothing…

He just felt my JOLT, instead of me feeling his. O.K., he’s 74, but what would have happened when he was 46 and I was 29? We’ll never know. I can only guess…

So it’s pretty obvious at this point that Elijah Wilson is a fraud. I am still on the fence as to whether or not he has real skills. It’s quite possible that he does and did, after all, having genuine power and being an ethical person are not correlated except at the higher levels, and higher levels is definitely not what we’re talking about here.

Now, the interesting thing is, Clyman himself doesn’t seem like the straightest arrow either.

He emanates a lot of the same aggressive energy, arrogance, and grandiosity that Elijah did. His story about William C.C. Chen is a case in point. I don’t know that he’s ineffective as a teacher, in fact it sounds like his methods have a lot of power; again, though, moral development and genuine power do not go hand in hand.

I most recently e-mailed both Wilson and Clyman. Elijah tried to both apologize and sell me on more, audaciously enough; when I insisted I wanted nothing more than a refund, he stopped responding.

To Clyman I wrote what I had assumed would be a confidential e-mail. He replied asking for more details and then I saw that he had included Elijah in the CC! It was, essentially, a manipulation, using me to pressure Elijah, without my consent. I didn’t like that.

Add to that many of the derogatory statements he makes on his site, and his aggressive responses to criticism via comments on his Youtube videos, and I get a sense of a person who both takes and gives a lot of crap.

Here’s a story about Clyman on the Kung Fu Magazine forum. It’s the Internet, of course, so who knows what’s true, but it seems consistent with things others have said about him.

It was in 1998 or so I was competing in the Wing Lam Great Lakes Invitational. (which I won san Shou btw)

Anyway, Gary Clyman was the RUDEST DUDE! He was talkin’ smack about my sifu…none other than Wing Lam himself at his very own function.

I don’t care if it’s behind my back or over the internet, but do it to my face and we have a problem.

Gary Clyman was scheduled to do a demo as part of the masters exhibition…I’m pretty sure he was planning to do some sort of Iron Body and Chi Gong demo.

About mid way through the tourney, I see a crowd of people gathered around him and he is inviting ANYONE to strike him directly in the Middle TORSO area. (No neck or groin) Just a straight up body shot. People were volunteering to hit him. Most were unskilled types seemed like.

But Gary was being a jerk and taunting Pan Ching Fu (Mr Iron Fist of China) and his top female student (sorry I forgot her name) was there too.

To me that’s just messed up, trying to pick on Pan sifu that way. Pan is cool man, he’s got a great energy that he brings into the martial arts world. It would be boring w/o him. Plus, Pan has actually killed someone with his bare hands. I doubt Gary can say that, so he should have given him some face…man he’s rude.

He kept saying everyone at the tourney had nothing on him and he was trying to get Pan Ching Fu to hit him all day. He was really rude man.

Anyway, I wasn’t a sifu at the time so I stepped up and said, “Can I hit you”?
…Sure he said

So I did a little warm up and jazzed my energy and he braced himself for the hit. At the last second he could see that I was serious and he stopped me at the last second…”Hold it” he said. Then he REALLY set up for the hit.

Man I thought that was cheesy, I should have popped him right there. But I wanted to be fair since HE was the guy takin’ the shot.

Anyway, he kinda had a good size chi belly. So a basic reverse punch I threw and landed solid and he let out a LOUD “OOuuuII”. He smiled and said not bad.

I smiled and said, Not bad but you cheated. Then he got ****ed saying “no”. I said “you moved to absorb my energy”.

Then I described to him as an example of good Iron Body how SHI GUO LIN doesn’t move prior to someone hitting him. He just sits there calmly and takes it.

For a guy who claims to be an iron body expert and saying how crap my sifu’s knowledge of Iron skills was…he was not on PAR.

I told him, it was good kung fu to dissipate my energy, but that it was NOT WHAT HE WAS ADVERTISING he could do. That being the best Iron Body guy in the house.

Even Pan Ching Fu and his student (who were watching) stepped up and said yeah ..”You moved”

So he was not happy. And I really wanted another shot. So he said ok.

Man it was ON LIKE DONKEY KONG now.

So I decided to try to send chi directly into the top area (almost his solar plexus) of that Belly of his…albeit I did it a little differently from my school that is. I used an open palm specifically for this.

This time there was a big crowd of people watching.

Bang, I did the shot and he didn’t move, he took it. He yelled very loud again…”OouuuII”!

Outwardly I said, “Well, you got me, you’re ok man”

Inwardly I was thinking, “**** I wish I had more skill to drop him with just one shot”

Gary said after my hit, “I’ve been hit all day long by people, and I’ll give you this, yours was the best one”

Then we all separated to do our own thing and the people dispersed.

NOW FOR THE CRUX OF THIS LONG POST

Gary was scheduled to do a Iron Chi Gong Demo correct?

I didn’t know this until after, but my big brother Gene Ching was also at the tourney working his usually business and schmoozing (chuckle) and Gene comes up to me 20 mins later and said,

“Hey I just saw that Clyman guy you popped leaving out the door and he didn’t look too good, he seemed ****ed”

End result…Gary didn’t do his demo

Well, I may have not been able to Kung Fu him movie style with blood coming out of his mouth and dying a slow death…but it’s nice to know I was good enough to rattle his cage.

I took the time to write this about him because he was being a real A-HOLE. Normally I wouldn’t say stuff like this about anybody. But the dude is rude man…I don’t like him.

Elijah and Gary seem like two birds of a feather.

Recently, I was reading about this general type of qigong in Bruce Kumar Frantzis’ Opening the Energy Gates of the Body, and it gave some context to this general category of what he calls “vibratory” practices.

In many Chi Gung systems … there is a technique that deliberately tries to vibrate chi in the body. The breath oscillates rapidly, and chi is vibrated inside bones, tissues, brain, and so forth.

This type of practice may have a number of unpleasant side effects. It can make a person absolutely uncaring, and, as the vibrations get stronger, it can bring on a kind of megalomania, or other mental illnesses. It can also cause physical hallucinations, where sensations of shaking, opening, and closing continue after practice has stopped. And if these practices are continued long enough, they can cause problems in the internal organs. The lungs and liver are the most vulnerable, but the other organs are susceptible as well.

It is quite common in these practices for the chi to be incompletely or irregularly circulated, rather than fully awakened and circulated. When I first saw these vibrating practices in Beijing, it was very obvious that the way they were forcing chi was causing what in India would be called irregularly awakened kundalini.

My medical Chi Gung teacher in Beijing informed me that these types of vibratory practices historically had a high casualty rate. She had worked with cancer patients who had brought their symptoms under control with Chi Gung and then begun vibratory practices, which brought their cancer out of remission, and they returned to the hospital to die. The strong sense of power makes these practices addictive, and like crack, when the crash comes, it is too late.

When I was 21 I was taught a “secret” technique. I was told it was the Chi Gung that was the power behind Tai Chi. I practiced this technique diligently, two hours a day, until I was able to break bones with one slap simply by vibrating my energy. At the same time, I noticed an incredibly seductive feeling of energy in my head, and I began to realize that I was becoming psychotic. The stronger this chi got, the stranger my mind became, and hotter my body felt.

In a particularly raucous martial art incident in Japan, I found I was breaking bones left and right, and was almost unable to stop myself. At this point, I realized this practice was making me crazy, removing compassion from my makeup, and I stopped. When I later returned to Taiwan a few years later, I found I had been practicing the Tsung He form of Fukien White Crane, and that some of the practitioners of this art were either subtly or obviously psychotic. Many of the most humble-seeming masters of this Chi Gung were actually the most dangerous. Power replaced compassion, and while they might use their power for healing, it would be of little concern to them if they accidentally caused damage instead.

So, long story short, qigong seems as prone to quacks, frauds, posturing, and collision of egos as anything else out there. And, the type of qigong that is practiced seems to either attract certain types of people, or create them. Either way, if you look at your teacher and don’t really like what you see, maybe that’s a warning sign.

I dove in to something I knew from the outset was iffy, but I set my concerns aside hoping to get something out of it, only to later have them justified. Ultimately, it wasn’t even the contact with Elijah that made the practice not work for me—I followed the DVD religiously, and it was Clyman’s practices that threw me off.

And in doing the practice, I could see the beginnings of what Frantzis, in the above excerpt, described: power at the cost of compassion.

No thanks. I’m glad to be rid of all of that. Elijah Wilson and Gary Clyman deserve each other. Or at the very least, I have nothing to do with them now.

Still, it was an amusing episode, only made sour by the fact of the loss of a few hundred bucks. But sometimes that’s the price you have to pay for a valuable lesson.