Another rambling news update

Now that Craig and Rii, our documentary film makers and video shooting/editing instructors have departed, life at the center returns to its normal, albeit frenetic and busy, routine.

It's been unseasonably cold and rainy for the past week. Shifu said May is usually hot and dry, but we've rarely had days above 60 degrees, and its been raining more often than not.

That's actually been great, training wise. Since so much of our routine revolves around outdoor activities, we took advantage of the weather to stay inside and focus intensively on technique. Last wednesday was the first time we have spent the entire 4 hour afternoon training block on technique, and I loved it. In the first year, going through so much shit, doing so much conditioning, it's easy to lose sight of what our purpose here is. Four hours of intense technique training was a much needed reminder how much I enjoy learning martial arts.

We started learning Lian Bu Quan, the first Northern Long Fist sequence. Now, a week later, we have finished, and it will soon be time to start refining and practicing with more speed and power. We have to keep track of how many times we practice each sequence, and we must practice each one thousand times. We went on to practice some white crane fighting forms, which are patterns of one or two movements to build muscle memory and reaction speed for basic fighting movements of the white crane style.

While fun, it's definitely been humbling. I gained a healthy appreciation for how much I suck, how foreign these complicated, coordinated movements are to my body, and how long a path stretches ahead of me. Still, I'm excited to get to work at it and start to make real progress. Our general training routine still includes 2 hours of daily conditioning (includes a short run, jumping, leg speed training, dan tian staff pushing, upper body on bars and ropes, trampoline training, hitting bags and logs, dropping and catching a 30lb cinderblock, and staff swinging for the wrist). After that we have an hour a day for sequences/technique. Over time, that will increase.

Saturday, we spend the latter half of the day cleaning and working around the property. We are building a chicken coop, and we needed dirt to flatten out the ground on the intended location. This required 4 of us to stand out on a steep, muddy, hillside loosening dirt from the ground with pick axes and shoveling it into wheelbarrows. We did this for about 7 hours straight, while the weather alternated randomly between sun, rain, and hail. It was a pretty miserable day. At one point, my foot slipped in the mud, and before I could catch myself, my face landed on a stick protruding from a nearby bush. It went directly into my eye, so hard that it tore my contact lens in half. Somehow, my eye was not injured. I count myself lucky!

Sunday morning, I attended the community Taiji/Shaolin class that Jon set up at the local school up in the mountains. It's really fantastic. About 15-20 adults and 4 or 5 kids showed up. The adults were there for Taiji, and the kids for Shaolin. Since I have so little Shaolin experience, I helped out with the Taiji. The community out here is great; everyone is incredibly warm and friendly. Some of my favorite kids from the hiking trip last week were there, and I spent a while chatting and playing with them on the playground before and after class. I continue to be impressed by their intellect, vocabulary, creativity, and knowledge of world affairs. I'm looking forward to going to these classes regularly. This connection to the local community is really wonderful for the center, and helps to alleviate the sense of isolation and loneliness out here in the woods.

Other than that, after a long period where Shifu did not spend much time correcting us during Taiji, we had a good critique session the other day. It feels strange to be learning anything but merely practicing for months on end without any extensive instruction. Shifu always says that traditionally, 1 day of learning requires 10 days of practice. For our critique, Shifu observed us all performing the Taiji form, marked down movements that needed attention, and had each person perform selections in front of the group for analysis. It was very helpful, and I'm excited about working on the feedback.

I have been trying to push myself harder in meditation as well. I have attained a level of comfort and calmness that has definitely improved from the beginning, but my mind still has a tendency to wander. For most of the year, when I was really exhausted and burned out, I actually fell asleep during meditation probably 80% of the time. Now I rarely ever do, which is great. I love meditation, and being too tired to do it properly frustrated me. For the past month or so, I allowed my mind to wander, but just relaxed with it and didn't pay much attention. Now I'm focusing on actively emptying my mind and intensely feeling the subtlest sensation of my breath and qi. It's hard to maintain that focus, as sometimes the mind starts to wander without me even realizing it, but when I can maintain it for a few minutes, it's a pretty incredible feeling. There is a whole universe of subtle sensory information and energetic flow bombarding us at any given moment, but we are too absorbed in our conscious thoughts to notice. Emptying the conscious mind allows you focus all of your attention on feeling everything there is to feel.

During meditation last week, while doing that, I randomly thought of my old roommate from San Francisco, with whom I was very close. I felt a strong need to call her and see how she was, before refocusing on being empty. When I got back inside, I had a text from her boyfriend saying that her father had just died. It was pretty trippy.

I shall conclude there for now!

Thanks for reading