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Wounded Warrior Project event

I want give a BIG THANK YOU to all of the families who contributed to my run in the Tough Mudder this past Saturday — Over $500 all together! Not only did you show your support to me, but you donated to a fantastic cause called the Wounded Warrior Project. This project ‘s mission is to reintegrate injured soldiers into society through therapy, treatment plans, and the provision of medical equipment. A person’s service to our country is a huge sacrifice – those deployed give up their family, a lot of their freedoms, and sometimes their lives – to ensure that we have ours. Thanks to all of our service members (police, firefighters, military members, and more) for all that you do!

So let me tell you: 11 miles through the mud, obstacles, and a severe thunderstorm was… Tough! Crossing the finish line was only possible with the use of  Teamwork, Courage, and Discipline — All characteristics that have been discussed at BLS as Word of the Month.

Teamwork is integral to the very foundation of the Tough Mudder course. “Teamwork and camaraderie before my course time” and “I help my fellow mudders complete the course” are some of the phrases pledged before and throughout the course of the race. The Mud Mile was an obstacle of a dozen steep slopes of muddy clay separated by deep trenches of muddy, clay water. It takes teamwork between all participants to push and pull one another over the slippery slopes to continue trudging through the mud. At the end of the 10th mile when you think all of your energy is spent, the Everest obstacle requires you to sprint with no hesitation up a quarter pipe ramp then leap upwards with all of your strength, and at the last second grasp hands with another mudder who pulls until you’re able to clamber over the edge. It really takes everyone working together to cross that finish line.

During the competition, I witnessed amazing displays of courage by some of the participants. It is a common understanding that the Tough Mudder is “not a race, but a challenge” and mudders commit to “overcome all fears.” Samantha, a teammate of mine, took a leap of faith plunging 20 feet down into cold and muddy water below. Although she has faced bigger challenges before, it always takes a renewed sense of determination to overcome a fear. Seeing so many injured soldiers participate was truly inspirational! The most courageous act I saw was from a fellow competitor making his way through the course on two prosthetic legs that he acquired after a deployment over seas. I struggled to keep my legs moving — I cannot fathom the internal strength and determination it took for that man to overcome those challenges.

All 24,000 Mid-Atlantic runners (a record registration number!) showed a great amount of discipline. It takes a lot of mental grit to complete that race. The promise of Tough Mudder sponsor merchandise and hot food at the finish line does not motive a person enough to push through 11 miles of rain and mud going over, under, and through a series of 16 obstacles (5 got closed down). As so eloquently relayed on signs posted along the path, Mudders “do not whine…” It takes a great deal of mental and physical discipline for each person to push themselves to the finish line – I watched my dad limp through over 8 miles on a bad knee without a word of complaint and smile on his face at each obstacle to overcome. That type of discipline is a commitment to yourself, which gives you the strength to is push a bit further. Internal discipline is putting mind of over matter, so you get done whatever it is you need to do.

Anyone who is interested in testing out their teamwork, courage, and discipline should consider registering for the Tough Mudder on April 20 & 21, 2013! Our military men and women serve, protect, and sacrifice for us; what are you willing to do to give back?

 

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Discipline

We had a lecture on discipline this week from Master, which dovetails nicely with my own recent reflections. While I was in Hunan teaching that summer program for kids, the effort of trying to get them to rise to an acceptable discipline level had me thinking about how discipline is taught. I think it is a great mystery to me still, but I am starting to get a few ideas.

There are, of course, two kinds of discipline: external discipline and internal discipline. External discipline is when someone else is yelling at you and punishing you when fail to meet expectations. China in general, and our kungfu school in particular, is a great place for external discipline. When one steps out of line, there are shouts, lectures, and ultimately a cane to put one back on course.

Internal discipline is the real prize, however. It is self-discipline, self-control that lets one do what one needs to do when no one is there to motivate you. This is what a human being needs to live well, and this is what we train kungfu to find. It is the superior kind of discipline; a self-disciplined individual thrives even in an external-discipline environment, but an externally disciplined individual withers without their discipliners.

I have come to believe that we in the West misunderstand the role that external discipline plays in developing internal discipline. It is logical that if one is always externally disciplined, one never develops the responsibility to be self-disciplined. This is certainly true. But I think this leads people to try to teach self-discipline with a kind of sink-or-swim approach. We throw ourselves, our students, and our children into deep water, trusting to instinct or chance to teach them the right self-reliance. If they sink, we drag them out, but just chuck them back in the deep water at the next opportunity. Without incredible luck, failure cycles downward into more failure, and discipline is lost altogether.

I feel that external discipline is like the shallow end of the pool. It’s true you will never truly learn to swim if you never leave the shallows, but there are valuable lessons to be learned there: comfort in the water being foremost, but also coordination. In terms of discipline, comfort in the water is just confidence and an understanding of the benefits of discipline.

Coordination means fidelity between the part of your mind giving commands and the part carrying them out. This is critical. When I first came to Wudang, getting up at 5:00 AM was a huge challenge. I would tell myself to get up, but the part of me receiving the command didn’t believe it would happen, and this lack of faith made self-discipline impossible. I didn’t believe I would do what I told myself to do. So I would be late for training. Punishment pushups and the humiliation of being punished are not fun at 5:15AM, and after a while I learned to get up on time if only to avoid them. But in that process, my lower mind began to believe that it would do what my upper mind told it, and this was an important step for me.

So I have come to believe that teaching self-discipline needs external discipline. Opportunities for self-reliance must be given, but the time in between must be used to practice the coordination that makes success possible.

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Cultural Blind Spots

I had a conversation with some of my classmates the other day about eating meals with our Chinese companions. The fact is, noisy eating doesn’t carry the taboo of bad manners here the way it does back home. Notice your own reaction as I describe this– lip smacking, loud slurping, and that “chuk chuk” sound you get when someone chews with their mouth open. How did you react? Did you crinkle your nose, or have a little involuntary shudder? It’s pretty ingrained in me to have a fairly strong reaction to these behaviors, and I gather that most other westerners feel the same way.

Change gears for a second. I once watched an lecture on TV about wine tasting. The instructor talked about essentially slurping the wine. Our sense of smell is such a large part of our sense of taste, so getting air into the wine and the bouquet into your nose lets you taste the wine more completely.

So what if our Chinese companions are experiencing their food more completely than we are thanks to eating habits that we won’t even consider because we have been taught to find them gross? Please don’t misunderstand, I am not arguing for slurping and open mouth chewing. But I think this example illustrates pretty clearly the idea of a cultural blind spot: an idea and experience that people of a given culture can’t even perceive because a cultural inhibition stops them from even looking in that direction. And I think this example also makes clear how subtle these inhibitions are. Coming to another country, living here, and being forced to deal with this culture as a daily reality instead of a holiday novelty has made me question many such customs that I had taken for granted before. I have been forced to reconsider the difference between being of a specific culture and being human.

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Teaching in Hunan

For the past three weeks, I was away from Wudangshan, teaching a summer program for kids at a new Wudang Kungfu school. My younger kungfu brother’s new school is located in Yiyang city, in Hunan province. The summer program is a 40 day session, but because I am still a student and need to continue to work on my own kungfu, my classmate and I agreed to split the time in half. I did the first three weeks, he will do the next three weeks.

It was a pretty interesting experience. Over the last few years I have settled into the rhythm of life in Wudang, where we have a nice expat community to take the edge off of the culture shock of living in China. This assignment in Hunan was my longest period spent alone exposed to China. For three weeks, I saw no foreigners, I had no fluent English conversations, and I had to try to be comfortable with Chinese culture in all its unblunted glory. To make matters worse, Yiyang’s local dialect is completely incomprehensible to me, and colors the local’s Mandarin so strangely that even that is painfully difficult for me converse in.

The teaching itself was fine. I taught basic kungfu and English to a group of ten kids ages 8-11 for four hours a day six days a week. I am growing more and more comfortable as a teacher, though starting out with a fresh batch of students is always hard. They have no experienced students for role models to imitate. Every detail of training and behavior that is so ingrained in me requires real effort to remember to explain them. For example, being ready for class. Often we would start class, and the kids would still be in denim shorts (to tight to stretch or kick in) with no shoes on, and have not eaten breakfast though they had been sitting around for an hour previous doing nothing. In Wudang, the standard is set and understood, that when class starts, you must be ready to train and if you are not you must live with the discomfort. To have to step back and teach that surprised me. This is something that the kids’ parents need to understand as well, but communicating with the adults was difficult for its own reasons.

Honestly, all my biggest problems were with the adults I dealt with down in Hunan. In my observation, mainstream Chinese culture seems at times to revolve around gaining face by pushing food, drink, and other indulgences on other people to demonstrate your own generosity and express your affection for them. The aspect of Chinese culture that I am studying, kungfu and Daoism, is much more healthy, restrained,  and disciplined. As a foreigner, it seemed impossible for me to make the adults I met appreciate these qualities in the way they treated me or the way they approached their children’s studies. I constantly walked a line, trying to be friendly and help promote the fledgling school, and still trying to avoid all the cigarettes, beer, rich food, and excess that was so insistently thrust at me.

As I re-read what I have written, I think it is funny that an American is complaining about the excesses of Chinese people, American life being what it is. What can I say, it’s the kungfu talking 🙂

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Squat Virtue

I’ll start this one off by saying that I hope no one minds a little frank discussion of bathrooms and their function. I am only writing this because in my own transition to Chinese plumbing, a little frankness might have saved me some trouble, and taboos aside, it is interesting contrasting two solutions to this most basic of human problems.

Many people in the US and elsewhere have probably never even seen a plumbing fixture like the squat toilet that is the standard in China. It is essentially a porcelain hole in the floor, rigged to flush (hopefully). I think most westerners, when they first come to China, are a little shocked by this and try to avoid using one as much as possible. Admittedly, China’s sub-par standards for plumbing installation further aggravate the issue, because the squat toilet room is frequently badly built and quickly becomes filthy as a result. But I believe that many if not all of us eventually come to accept the squat toilet for its virtues, and may even prefer them to western seat toilets. As the saying goes, “You know you’ve been in China too long when the footprints on the toilet seat are your own.”

Learning to use Chinese toilets is further complicated by social taboo. When we are children, adults teach us to use the facilities provided. When the available facilities change, however,  a little instruction would be valuable. But as adults the subject is not easily broached. I know I could have used the following hints: First, bring your own toilet paper with you, everywhere. In the West, if you need tissue, you can count on finding something in a public restroom. In China, only the fanciest hotels provide this service, and you don’t want to get caught out. Second, gathering your garments around your ankles gets in the way; gather your garments around your knees. Third, if a toilet brush is visible nearby, it is very good manners to clean up after yourself a bit, especially if you are someone’s guest (squat toilet design is a little inefficient in the flushing department).

As for the virtues of squatting, there are several, of which here are two. For one thing, regardless of the hygienic standards of the bathroom you are using, squatting means you won’t really be touching anything objectionable. You may find yourself in a closet that is a far cry from an interior designer’s dream of an airy, sunlit commode, but you are not actually risking infection if you squat.

Second, the daily repetition of the act of squatting is fantastic for the health, flexibility, and strength of the ankles, knees, and hips. The squatted sitting position is iconic of China; you can see people relaxing in this position on door steps, on the street, and in the park– just about anywhere. Think about the West, however. When if ever do we support our weight with our hips below the level of our knees? This kind of strength is crucial for standing up from sitting or lying on the ground, say, after falling down. But in our culture of chairs, we never exercise our legs past the range of motion defined by 90° angles at the knees and hips. So we reach, say, age 40, and getting up from the ground has become an exhausting 12 step process, prohibitively difficult. We chalk it up to getting old, but that’s just not right. Elderly people here get up and down pretty easily. And I think it all starts with reps in the bathroom.

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Ready, Set, Get Tough!

In 13 (short) weeks, I will be competing — and I use that term loosely — with a team in the Mid-Atlantic Tough Mudder Event. To give an overview of the obstacles I am committed to overcoming, I will submerge and swim through an ice tank, crawl through narrow, sloping pipes leading into frigid mud, slither under low-hanging live wires waiting to electrocute, leap over 4-foot high hurdles of kerosene flames, and so, so much more across the distance of 12 miles!

 

Why go through with this? Besides wanting to challenge myself and test my physical limits, the Tough Mudder raises awareness and funds for theWounded Warrior Project. This project is focused on reintegrating injured soldiers into society, and active lifestyles, with their programs.

If you are interested and able, please support me in the Tough Mudder event, on September 8th, by donating online here. The proceeds raised will assist many individuals and families struggling to deal with the injuries received in the line of duty. You contribution is greatly appreciated!