Phew: I made it to the meditation group at work today. This is actually the first time I’ve been since… blimey… June? I always meant to go during the summer and autumn, but I was always just too damn tired. It was great: even after such a long break, I got back into it. I could feel myself getting warmer, and a bit sticky as my body started to detox – always a sign that the meditation is working. For a brief time, I got really deep in to it; the world vanished, thoughts were absent, and there was just the breath… Man, did I feel better afterwards!
Also back into the zhan zhuang these last few days. There’s always something new. One of my fellow-students on the tui na course had commented on part of my right foot being really stiff – and it was too, I just hadn’t noticed, and was unconsciously compensating with my posture. So, I’m working on that and, slowly, painfully, it’s stretching and opening up. The standing is generally going well, though the creaking of ligaments and popping of tendons (or is the other way round?) remind me of the ground I’ve lost. Not to worry, I’ll soon be back to where I was, and then onwards…
Might be an opportunity coming up to get back into acting; that’ll be good, I was really missing the creative flow of those improv workshops in Beijing. Couple of other things in the pipeline, too, but I won’t mention them in case I jinx them. Systema classes starting soon; that’ll be cool.
Wow, it’s like a logjam, isn’t it, sometimes? You need dynamite to clear the blockages but then discover there’s a lot of cool stuff waiting to flow down to you….
JEB CORLISS: Well, you wanna know what I think is crazy? I think waking up at 6:00am, eating breakfast and getting in a car and sitting in traffic for 1.5 hours on your way to a job where you then sit in a box for eight hours, get a 30 minute break to eat some lunch get back in that car and sit in traffic for another 1.5 hours on your way home where you eat dinner and watch the TV then go to sleep. Repeat that until you’re about 60, you retire, and then you die! I think that is absolutely insane!
Phew. Well. That was a tough summer. After the fun of North Wales…. dunno. I fell into a ‘slough of despond’ led there by a combination of things but in particular, I guess, by the… smallness? of life in the UK? The lack of interest and vision? The acceptance of the lifestyle Corliss talks about above, and the assumption that it’s both right and normal? While all the time, events loom large and the storm gathers on the horizon that might sweep it all away… Meh. Took me a while to remember that I’m bigger than this. Getting back on top of things now.
That said, there have been a lot of positives as well. Still with the girl I met on the CELTA course; her and her little boy. It teaches you a lot about yourself, accepting the trust of a child. Dealing with an indefatigable 5-year-old when he’s playing up? That teaches you a lot about yourself as well. I got the qualification, by the way; can’t remember if I mentioned it, but I’m a qualified teacher of English now.
After a last-minute effort, I also submitted the paperwork and assignments for the meditation course. This was the follow-up for the training weekend I took back in June, so I’m now also qualified to run meditation sessions (which I could do anyway, but now I’m able to join an industry organisation and get insurance, which is so important these days).
For the last few weekends, I’ve been travelling up to London for the training course in tui na at the Asanté Academy. I’m really enjoying it, and my course-mates are a really sound bunch of people; some are working acupuncturists, some are martial artists, some are just interested. A good mix of people, all of them interesting. The gf has been accompanying me, so no time yet to catch up with other London-based friends (readers of this blog included) but that’ll come.
A lot of the theory we’ve been covering has been discussed in terms of acupuncture rather than tui na, and I’m finding that really interesting; it’s definitely getting me more curious about that course in Tianjin. Not sure how I would pay for it (the year’s living as a student, rather than the fees as such), but I’m looking into it now as a serious option.
My martial arts training has been largely on hold, what with everything, apart from zhan zhuang and some xingyi, but as I’m getting back into a more focused state of mind I’ll be trying to ramp that up again…
Interesting times, and all that…
Oh, and a software update broke the blog theme, thus taking the site offline for a while, and leading to yet another new look and feel!
Well, I’ve just finished my intensive, 4-week CELTA course. When you apply for a place, you are warned that it’s intense; I was told that it would be best if I had someone else to do my cooking and washing for me, and that I could expect to routinely work into the small hours on assignments. As it happens, I don’t have anyone to do my housework for me, and I have commitments that sharply limit the hours I could commit… so it was a very hard slog indeed! I was routinely falling asleep at the keyboard, and basically only just scraped through. Still, a pass is a pass, and the qualification should be very useful indeed. I have plans… I also met a rather special woman…
So, where am I at? I managed to get a few training sessions in with the spear. I’ve now got that xingyi spear set down, on a broad-brush level. I need to spend a bit of time now working on the fine detail, to make sure I’ve got that right. After that, I’ll move on to a bagua spear set. The Sun Zhi Jun spear form that I’ve been discussing with Kim here is pretty complex; the more I work with the spear, the more I realize how tricky that set is. So, I think that as an intermediate step I’ll work on this form:
I’m still really enjoying working with the spear; it’s been a revelation to me. So much so, I had to acquire a Hanwei Yari. Apparently there’s been a fire at the Hanwei factory and all their inventory was lost, so all of the UK retailers are out of stock, and I had to get it from Kult of Athena (who were great, by the way: HIGHLY recommended). It took a while but it’s arrived, and I’m really pleased with it. It’s not as flexible as a waxwood Chinese spear, but hey… On that note, two more clips:
Jet Li vs Donnie Yen in Hero:
Yari vs Chinese spear:
My zhan zhuang went completely out of the window during the last month; I was far too tired and pushed for time. I’ve started again as of today and will be very regular, if only because I have to complete a 6-week diary of twice-daily meditation sessions. This is part of the ongoing requirements I need to fulfill in order to obtain the qualification as a teacher of meditation; you may recall that I went to Brighton in early June for the initial weekend training. At that time, I hadn’t even thought of doing the CELTA course, which was very much a last minute decision… Anyhow, the plan is, zhan zhuang standing meditation in the morning, sitting meditation in the evening. I also have to do two book reviews, which I’ll probably post here as well. That’ll take me to mid-September, at which point I’ll be off to Switzerland to visit the aforementioned young lady… After that, in October, I plan to start that course in tui na – weekends in London for so months or so…
Re-reading (once again) Robert W Smith’s account of his time in Taiwan, Chinese Boxing, I note this passage in the chapter about the policeman Paul Kuo:
Kuo told me also of Wang Hsiang-Chai, famed but not liked in Hopei. Wang loved to fight and lost only to Shang Yun-hsiang. His method consisted entirely of circles; every block was an attack.
Heh. Wang Xianghai keeps on cropping up in books that I’ve had for ages, but I’d never noticed before…
I’ve just got back from a couple of days in Brighton, where I was taking a foundation course in leading mindfulness and meditation training. As I’ve mentioned before, once I’ve completed this qualification, I will be able to register for professional insurance, and to run training sessions for the public, as well as for patients referred by GPs (though at this point this latter isn’t something I plan to do).
It was a small group: myself, another bloke, and four women. We were a pretty mixed bag, from very different backgrounds, and with varied reasons for doing the course. We all got on very well, though, and I think that some of us got very involved with the experience.
It was certainly interesting, and definitely challenging. Although I’ve had a fair bit of experience in meditation since 2004, it has always been a personal thing; apart from here on the blog – which has a certain feeling of detachment and distance, since I’ve met so few of you in person – I rarely talk about it in real life. In Singapore and China, meditation was well understood, and even close to the mainstream; and abiding memory is New Year’s Eve, 2007, when I attended the 108 Bells ceremony at the Bright Hill monastery – where there were hundreds of people. Here in Wales… it’s not the same; I tend to not talk about it, since meditation falls into that extremely broad category of ‘weird’, as far as most folk are concerned…
Still, I was very surprised at how difficult it was to stand up and act as a leader in the practice, even when the ‘students’ were also course participants. Talking about the benefits of meditation in front of a group of strangers was surprisingly tough. However, I got into it fairly quickly, though all weekend I found it tough to control my voice in the way I’m used to doing as a lecturer. There you are, the mind-body connection in action…
We went through a fair bit of training as a group, learning how to explain the benefits of meditation for both mental and physical health, and ran through a number of “3-minute convincers” – exercises designed to demonstrate rapidly the mind-body link to people who might be sceptical. We also went through a number of group meditation sessions. There were also, of course, sessions where we had to lead people through a meditation exercise and into deep relaxation. The first two were 1-1 with another student; the second was to lead the whole group. For the first, I used a qigong visualisation that I learned in Singapore; while I was talking the other student through it, I felt that it just wasn’t working, but when we’d finished, she said that it had been really effective. For the second 1-1, I used a basic yiquan visualisation exercise tied to zhan zhuang. It wasn’t a great success, since I hadn’t checked for contra-indications. Fortunately, that session was only for a couple of minutes, and she was straight up about telling me she couldn’t do it. For the final session, with the whole group, I had ten minutes, and took care to point out the options for hand and arm positions; I then went through the ‘standing in the water’ visualisation for the holding the ball exercise. Again, I felt as I was doing it, that it really wasn’t working – but, when I finished, it got really good feedback. Even the course instructor mentioned that it anchored her in the body in a way that no other exercise she knew was able to do. Just goes to show: yiquan rocks
Another exercise was where the instructor, using her experience of working with patients referred by doctors, gave us an example of what it’s like to work with non-cooperative participants. In my case, she play-acted an agoraphobic woman, who hid her face under her jumper, and wouldn’t look at me or even talk. Blimey. That was hard. It showed me how complex it is it work with the genuinely ill, rather than simply those who have disposable income and are looking for help with relaxation…
It was a pretty stressful weekend overall. I was staying in London on Thursday and Friday nights; on Friday I got back to the hostel at 20:15ish, to discover that they had made a mistake on the computer, deleted my booking, and given my room to someone else… And no, they didn’t have another… I can now tell you with absolute certainty, that trying to find a room with no booking, late on a Friday night in London, really is not what you need if you were looking forward to a night out, or even for a quiet, relaxing evening….
There were other issues too… but nothing to do with the course itself. Very glad I did it; I learned a great deal and met some wonderful people. It isn’t over yet; I need to keep a daily meditation diary for a few weeks, write some book reviews, and record myself running a meditation session with ‘real’ people before I get the qualification. I may post the book reviews here.
It was a great confidence-booster, though; I start to believe that yes, I can teach this stuff – not just blog about it….
And so my plans make progress… Big job losses are happening in communities in my area… It looks like a wave of redundancies are coming in the organization where I work… Catching up today on the last few days’ news, it’s clear that changes are happening more and more rapidly, and none of them are good. Got to be ready…
I also met a rather special woman…
