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Sausages are like Laws

SL373197Last weekend I had intended to post a new blog, but it didn’t happen. Why? Sausages, that’s why.

How many of you really LOVE a good hotdog? Before I came to China, hotdogs were very low on my list of favorite foods. At a cookout, I would pick a hamburger over a hotdog 7 times out of 10, perhaps. But everything changes when we are separated from the loving embrace of our mother culture. When I was home a few months ago, and had opportunity to eat whatever western food I wanted, there was no single mouthful of food that so filled me with joy as a hotdog, on a bun, with ketchup, mustard, and relish.

So I decided China needed hotdogs. Maybe part of what makes hotdogs so enticing to me is the fact that there are hotdog imposters everywhere here. These things, called huotui (fire legs) look exactly like hotdogs should look but lack any of the flavor of their ballpark cousins. They are lengths of flavorless processed ham — even spam is better. But one sees them and is duped, thinking, “I could really go for a hotdog right now.”

So I set out to make some hotdogs. First, I looked at recipes online. They all looked simple enough. I needed sausage casings, meat, certain spices — “I can do this,” I thought to myself. So I poked around town, asked the cook at the school questions, and after a few weeks of dead ends, false starts, and re-thinkings, I eventually believed I had a workable plan. Continue reading “Sausages are like Laws”

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Relationship Premises

dogcatI’ll tell a little story about life here at the kungfu school. Our dormitories are located in a former hospital, in two buildings with a courtyard between. But when I first came here in early 2008, the kungfu school only occupied the front-most  of the two buildings. Shifu acquired the back building shortly before I started studying here full-time.

The rooms of the former hospital had been being used for residence for a while, and there was one occupant who would not leave when the kungfu school took over. In the spirit goodwill, I imagine, no big fuss was made and that man– an older, retired herbal doctor — has continued to live at one end of the dormitory hallway. As a matter of fact, he is my next-door neighbor.

For various reasons, tensions between the kungfu students and my neighbor escalated. Not the least of these was the intrusion of pervasive Chinese culture shock into our ex-patriot stronghold, the one place in China we hoped to call our own. Also, he did not share our training schedule, so when we desperately needed rest he might be having a loud and alcoholic card game with his friends or stomping down the hallway or loudly and revoltingly clearing his throat and spitting on the floor. For a while we even shared a bathroom with the guy, and finding the remains of his having cleaned fish for dinner in your shower drain is never fun. Things bottomed out with multilingual screaming matches in the hallway and hard feelings all around.

But for me there was a significant turning point where my relationship with the guy stopped getting worse and started getting better. That was the moment when I realized he wasn’t going away. I think subconsciously my fellow students acted on the premiss that they could choose not to have this relationship, that if they antagonized him enough, he would move out. When I accepted that he was not going to move out, and that I didn’t want to be the kind of person who would drive him out, the question became not if I was going to have a relationship with this guy, but what kind of relationship ours would be.

There is a degree of satisfaction to be gained just by committing to a thing, that can’t be found while we withhold acceptance of that thing’s actuality. New people or circumstances are like a new piece of furniture that surprises you by appearing in your living room; if you can’t fit it out the door, it is better to rearrange the furniture and make a place for it than to leave it sitting in the middle of the floor.

As for my neighbor, all I really did was smile at him when I saw him in the hallway and compliment him once in a while if I liked his clothes or something. More than my external behavior, my internal behavior changed. When I started acting on the premiss that he was part of my life here in Wudang, his noise, his smelly cooking, his loud TV, it all stopped annoying me because I acknowledged his right to be there.

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Another Turn Around the Circle

SL373145I have returned to Wudang, China, once more. I am in the agony of what I have previously dubbed “Week One Syndrome,” though it has been a light week and really not as excruciating as I was afraid it would be.

I had a wonderful time at home, though it was by far my most stressful trip home for work and family reasons I won’t get into right now. While I was home this time, I let myself relax a bit on my kungfu training and focused more on my internal training, trying to keep deep breathing and keep my emotions steady in the face of the above mentioned stress. And — and I hope you can understand what I mean — I tried to consciously unclench the fist of self-discipline I had going on and hold my emotions and will in a gentler grip.

I felt this was immensely constructive, and it got me thinking about another aspect of self cultivation. I think that, inherent in the ability to push yourself to be better is at least a grain of self-criticism. You have to be able to look at yourself and find your own weaknesses, find the things about yourself that are not satisfying to you. I spend a fair amount of time in this mode during my training, always looking for ways to improve. On the other hand, the best way to exercise the powers developed in training, and to find the satisfaction that is the goal of the training, is to accept yourself and, indeed, enjoy the fruits of your hard work.

The trouble is that we often get stuck in one or the other. Too much self-criticism makes us unhappy and stressed, too much self-acceptance makes us complacent and stagnant. This puts me in mind of something my kungfu uncle Zhou Xuan Yun said during his talk in DC in January. I paraphrase, but he said that life is what happens when Yin and Yang interact. So if self-criticism and self-acceptance are pure concepts defining the extremes of yourself, growth and life are only possible when moving naturally between the two, holding one but easily and regularly reaching for the other.

The challenge is to find real balance between the two in our subjective worlds. Our only guide is past experience, and if you have never pushed yourself hard enough or accepted yourself completely enough, moving toward balance feels so unnatural that you think you are actually losing balance. Disciplined effort seems too hard, and you think you just can’t do it. Loving yourself feels too alien, and you think it’s not real. Real hard work is required to understand the two extremes enough to accurately sense where the healthy balance really is.

I think this is a good thing to meditate on in times of transition like I am facing now. The only constant is change, after all.

 

 

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Chinese New Year/ Wudang Workshop in Rockville

Busy week this week. My Wudang brother Ben from Australia is in town to lend his presence to upcoming events. First among these is the Chinese New Year Celebration of the Chinese Embassy in DC. Martial artists, teachers, and masters from the DC area will be sharing their art as a cultural exhibition during the party. It should be pretty neat.

What I really want to get the word out about is the workshop on Saturday in Rockville. Many of those same teachers and masters will be speaking and teaching at an event open to the public.I am going to give a short talk myself. The theme of the day, as I understand it, is examining the definition of a martial artist in the modern world. It should be interesting to hear the thoughts of this group of people on the subject.

The workshop is from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM, at 9400 Key West Avenue in Rockville, MD. You can find more information on the event and registration for the event at http://wudangspirit.com/5.html.

 

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2013 Wudang Qigong Seminar

I am once again excited to offer a winter Qigong seminar at Balanced Life Skills while I am home in Maryland. I like to teach Qigong while I am home because I feel that it is a health practice that I can offer a student in a fairly short time, and if that student sticks to the practice they will find growth and improvement even without close supervision from a teacher.

What is Qigong? As I said describing it last year, imagine the practice of martial arts as a line. One one end is fighting, and on the other end is purely health oriented exercise. Qigong would fall near one end of the line, and it might look like this:

Literally “Chi Work,” Qigong is a kind of moving meditation. In a series of dynamic poses combining breathing, flexibility, strength, and mental focus, it seeks to nourish the internal health of the body. It is adaptable to the level of the student; a sedentary newcomer and a conditioned athlete will both find challenge and growth.

The goal of this seminar is to provide parents and students in the Balanced Life Skills community and anyone else a balanced and self-contained health practice. Is your kid in Taikwondo class? Come do something for your own health while you wait. All are welcome.

The seminar will be held January 21st through March 5th, on:

Monday 5:15 pm

Tuesday 11:00 am and 5:25 pm

Students should plan to attend at least one hour-long session a week, but are welcome and encouraged to attend additional classes for more guided repetition. Those interested are welcome to try a class in the first week for free. Seminar fee= $20/week. Come try the first week free.

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Reconciling Health Practice and Real Life

DaoistHealth
Link to Article on www.wudanggongfu.com

I am back! I have been back in Maryland enjoying the comforts of home for about a week and a half. As with every time I come home, I have been dealing with the challenge of balancing two conflicting urges. One urge is the desire to maintain the healthy lifestyle I have in Wudang. The other impulse it to abandon myself to the rhythm of life here at home.

It is always amazing to me just how difficult this balance is to achieve. Life at home generally means eating too much of the wrong foods, drinking too much, and staying up too late at night. But it is REALLY hard to relax and enjoy friends and family while remaining aloof from the unhealthy behaviors.

In this way, I think I am much in the same boat we all are in during the holidays: we want to indulge because that is the tradition of celebration, but we know that at some point soon we will have to do something to correct the holiday excess.

This is the frame of mind I was in when I read an article my Master wrote last month. He explained to my class his thoughts when writing it. Shifu believes strongly in Daoist methods and their ability to improve people’s lives. But he was concerned because only a few people, like myself, were able or willing to come to Wudang for a long time and learn the techniques. So he wanted to distill the most fundamental part of our health practice and provide it in a more accessible curriculum.

That is how this article and the associated course came to be. Reading it myself, a lot of the “why” information was new to me, but the benefits and methods themselves were familiar: this is how Shifu has taught us to live while we are training. I have been learning this by living it for the last few years. But this article is meant to reach out from traditional Daoist methods and appeal to the more analytical western mind. As a bridge, it may seem a little strange to those standing on either shore, but take a look.

I hope people will consider Shifu’s ideas carefully. Even if you can’t picture yourself hopping on an airplane bound for China in April, I think the article contains insights into healthy living that people in our crazy world need to have.

Link to Shifu’s Article: http://www.wudanggongfu.com/kungfu/2013.html