Some Thoughts for the Wood Horse Year 2014

For the wood horse year I'm planning something really big, but I'm about to go into solo retreat for a month in the Sierra Nevada first.

The workshop last weekend went really well, basically my theory is that what I've been doing with kids will work even better with adults.  Conditioning not learning.

I have a bunch of links I wanted to share, so here they are.  

The first one is kind of whatever, but I learned that the classic Bruce Lee movie Fists of Fury (remade by Jet Lee), is called Jingwu in Chinese.  Jingwu means Pure Martial, it was the name of the political martial arts movement that was essentially an exorcism of all the yin stuff in martial arts like ground fighting and magic.  

Dog style is one of the surviviors of that purge.  Check it out.  Dogs and pigs were the very lowest status animals, so it is hard to imagine someone wanting to do such a style unless it was a joke, or they themselves were super low status in the society and they were claiming a kind of reverse awesomeness.

This was how some of it came back in a flood in the 1980's, great pictures of Qigong Fever.

This is an awesome return of the pre-20th Century martial arts narrative culture, unfortunately it got removed, a commenter says that seen from the other side there is a beaver visible.  

This is a fun idea for martial artists, con-men and actors alike.

If you are signed up with academia.edu you can get a copy of D.S. Farrer's $200 book Shadows of the Profit: Sufi Mysticism and the Martial Arts, for free as download.  It is about Silat, and looks very interesting.  So does the 45 minute video that goes with it!

And this is just a freaky image of the future for no particular reason.

Enjoy the ride!