Intermission

The last post was pretty intense, and I have another intense post I wanted to share. I thought I'd break it up with some of the more mundane happenings lately.

I've decided to make it a priority to post regularly. The act of expressing myself with words has always been cathartic, and has helped me to process my life experiences. It is of course also nice to have a written account of my experience in this program to look back on later, and I'm sure outsiders who are interested in the program enjoy the insight offered by our blog posts.

We've had a few visitors over the last month.

Manu came to us from Germany, though he lives in Canada most of the time. I really enjoyed having him around. His sense of humor, lively energy, engaging conversation, and warm presence were a welcome addition to our family. He cooked us a dish he called "reisflinzen." We had a lot of fun with that word. It sounds so harsh and angry, so stereotypically German. We enjoyed clenching our fists and yelling "REISFLINZEN!" with the best accent we could manage. While counting repetitions during staff training, he normally counted in German. One day I asked him to count in Canadian. Without missing a beat, he began "1, eh? 2, eh?" all the way to 45. I couldn't stop laughing. Despite being 33, he had the energy and spirit of someone 10 years younger. After all the people I've met in offices who seem to be aging and losing their youthful spark before even that age, it was an insight into how much your lifestyle affects you. Sit on your ass in a chair all day, and you start dying earlier. He's lived an interesting life - full of physical activity, travels, active work, and interesting projects, and you can see it in his eyes. I'm glad I got out of the office before it was too late.

Manu had a lot of experience with chainsaws, and Dr. Yang coerced him into taking down some trees for us. I did not enjoy that experience. Not only does using a chainsaw freak me out, but it just doesn't feel good to kill a tree. It looks so sad once it falls. After it's been chopped up, the ground littered with branch fragments, leaves/needles, and sawdust, it looks like a helpless creature has been butchered. After an afternoon spent chopping up 4 50+ foot trees, I had some disturbing dreams that trees were conscious and not at all happy about us cutting them down.

Manu left yesterday, and he will be missed.




As much as I enjoy the company of the full time residents of the retreat center, it really is nice to have guests. If you're reading this and thinking about visiting, you should!

We also have Dr. Wittman visiting, our surrogate mother from Germany. Trained in conventional medicine, she's spent the last couple decades focusing on acupuncture, TCM, and energy medicine, and her skills are pretty impressive. She diagnoses by feeling your pulse and waving her hand around your body to feel your energy field. I had been prescribed some herbs by a Chinese doctor in San Francisco, and I showed them to her without letting her see the bottle or telling her what they were for. After waving them around my body for a second, she told me what they were doing and what organs they were helping, quoting exactly what the other doctor had said. In addition to being warm, loving, and full of laughter, she tends to our medical ailments with treatment that must be considered torture by any civilized definition. I thought acupuncture was supposed to be painless, but with Dr. Wittman, its an exercise in masochism. She's been very helpful to me in my physical and energetic development, despite the painful treatments. She'll be with us for a few weeks (her first visit was in October) and it is great to have her back!



In other news, we had about 12 young children from a local elementary school visit the center for a demonstration. They were interested in having us teach a class up at their school, but the looks on the kids faces as they watched us perform didn't bode well for that plan. We demonstrated Qin Na (joint locks) and Shuai Jiao (take downs), both of which are pretty intense. I don't think those kids have ever seen grown men visiting violence on each other in person. One of the kids started crying by the 2nd or 3rd technique. It probably didn't help that all but one of them were girls.

Also, our little Meowgi caught and ate his first mole! He savored the entire thing, skin, bones, and all. Except the intestines, he somehow managed to eat everything around that. Good kitty =)