Teaching, Guilt, But the Shows Must Go On

My regular readers deserve some sort of explanation about why I haven't been blogging much. I do hope to get back to regular posts soon.

First of all I'm busy teaching.  Lots of kids classes.  My advanced students are doing a mini-tour of schools and centers with a DeYoung Museum sponsored show for the public on Thursday May 13th at the Band Shell in Golden Gate Park around 1 PM.  It looks like we are head-lining because my kids put on such a good show last year.  Or maybe it was just an accident.  Anyway it should be fun.  Part of our show is a group fight scene and... we have 10 year olds with swords.

I'm also presenting a paper and teaching a workshop at the Daoism Conference in LA, June 4th... at the moment my paper is titled: Theater, Exorcism, Ritual and the Martial Arts.

Also I've been doing nothing but reading and sleeping on Saturdays for the last two months.  At 40 I realized that guilt was a primary motivator for me.  As a self-employed enthusiast, I always have something I feel guilty about not having started or finished yet.  So I decided to invert that.  I committed to doing absolutely no work on Saturdays.  Now I feel guilty if I try to do even a little work on my day of rest.  It's like, my job to lay on the couch.

I'm still looking for a space to teach evening classes and I'm looking to create my own after-school program for next school year.

I started taking a Physical Theater class.  I haven't been in a class like this for maybe 20 years, but I thought I should test my ideas about the relationship between martial arts and theater training in a more immediate way.  The class is called The Flying Actor. At the first lesson we learned two stances which were used together.  The names for those two stances in martial arts are Bow stance and Horse stance.  The way they do Bow stance is with the front heal up and the arms are in what I would consider a basic shuai jiao or "throwing" position.  The horse stance has a high and a low version.  One of the things we did a lot was to put a hood over our heads.  The hood makes it hard to see but not impossible.  I'm used to moving with my eyes open (of course) and also with my eyes closed, but moving with disrupted vision messed me up a bit.  Good exercise.  We also worked on some basic mime and I realized that I've trained myself not to look at anything close up.  My fighter mind doesn't want to narrow my focus to "show" the imaginary object.  But I also realized that one of the beginning shaolin instructions is to slowly look into the distance and then draw your vision back to yourself before beginning.  It never occurred to me to do it as a mime exercise before, but it fits.

Rory Miller is doing a workshop called Responses to Ambushes and Breaking the Freeze, on May 9th, I'm attending with a few of my students.  I will not be wearing my pajamas.  Check it out.

Oh, and I actually wrote a really long blog post which I might still put up, but I don't know how to finish it.  Maybe just a summary is enough:  Traditional exercise routines were not for weight loss because in the old days people didn't have Trader Joe's or even McDonald's.  Anything claiming to be traditional would have been designed to work without consuming very much food, duh.  If anything, a traditional form of exercise would have helped you put on a little extra fat for leaner times. (Wrestling, by the way, is an extreme example.)

And lastly, I've had some stimulating time with George Xu lately and my practice has been really empty, in a good way.

New Home?

Lately I've been looking at studio space to rent or buy so that I can teach children's classes in the afternoon and adult classes in the evening.  The dream is to make my business better.  I'd like to have more opportunities for my students.  I'd also like to have a place I can call my own and do what I want with it.  I'm drawn to the idea that building or making a home is a basic human appetite that if left unfulfilled starts to creep up inside us like a giant wolf.

For years now, I've been getting cards and letters from students.  Thousands of thanks.  Most of the time students in the schools where I teach are telling me they want more lessons.  Schools budget a certain amount of money for classes and when it runs out that's it until the next year.  It isn't the way I want it to work but it has worked so far.

Here is one letter from a stack of about 60 I got the other day:

Dear Master Scott,

Thank you for taking the time to teach us kung fu.  I had fun with you.  The exercises were painful.  Thank you.--Sebastian

Obviously this 4th grader has been studying irony.  Here is another one.  This one is a card with a collage of a wolf, some trees and some bushes:

Master Scott,

In the trees, wolves lurk, glaring at their juicy lunch, and then they attack.  So be careful!  And your slim body will move as fast as lightening.  Thanks for sharing that power with my class.  I practice every night.  It is a lot of fun.--Alyssa

This next one has a cute cat drawing, lots of color and flip up tabs, with pictures and messages.  Here is one of the messages:

Thanks, Master Scott!  Before we started Kung Fu, I thought Kung Fu was some lame marshall arts for losers.  Kung Fu is really fun.  I wish you could stay.  Thanks times 1,000,000.--Jenny

And here are a few choice quotes from others:

...We will miss you a lot.  Now that you taught me Kung Fu I can flip my Dad.  Thanks again...

...I had a very good time going to your kung fu class.  You taught me how to break a wrist and a bunch of fingers.  You were the best teacher ever...

...My favorite part was when you brought the sword.  It was cool when you did the "5 Tiger Sword."  I though you were going to slice my head off.  Thank you for being so committed and devoted...

Kung Fu Rocks!!!

So if you live around San Francisco and you want to help me look for a dojo I'm looking for at least 1600 square feet with high ceilings.  At the moment there are spaces renting at $1 a foot.  A mixed commercial/dwelling arrangement in the 2500-3500 square foot range would be great too, so would a neighboorhood on the West side of town with parking.  An existing space that is willing to rent out two or three evenings a week and three to five afternoons a week could work too.

Weak Legs

A 9 year old student asked me during class the other day if I did any strength training.  I did my teacher thing and screwed up one side of my face while bulging out my eye on the other, "No," I replied,  "Do you do any strength training?"  This kid admitted that he didn't but I could see by the way he looked at the ground that someone had been trying to breed a feeling of deficiency in this kid's head.  Now we aren't talking about just any old 9 year old, this kid can walk across the room on his hands and he can do a press handstand from a straddle position on the floor.  So I said, "OK, you stand in a low horse stance and I'll put all my weight on your shoulders and you try to lift me up."  I leaned down on his shoulders and lifted myself up on to the very tips of my toes so that he had about 150lbs on his shoulders.  He then stood up with out even a second thought, lifting me into the air.  "That was easy right?" I asked.  "You could lift two adults couldn't you?."  "Yeah," he said, looking a little brighter.  "So you're strong enough already right?"  He just looked at me, unsure what to say.  "Now you have to figure out how to transfer the force of your legs to your arms.  That's what you need to work on."  And then we got back to the two-man form we had been working on when he asked the question.

If any of my readers doubt the above anecdote I challenge you to do the experiment yourself.  Find a small healthy kid, 5 to 8 years old.  Show them how to do a horse stance and then try putting all your weight on their shoulders.  As long as the kid's back is straight and her legs are aligned to take weight she should have no trouble lifting you up.

Why is this relevant?  Why now?

On my last trip to China I wandered all over Ching Cheng Shan mountain in Sichuan.  The "trails" are mostly steep stone stair cases that wind up into the clouds.  If you are lazy and have a little cash, you can hire two guys to carry you up three miles of stairs in a litter made with some cloth and two bamboo poles.  The guys who do the carrying all day long during the tourist season have pencil thin arms and legs.  They are skinny enough to be run-way models at a fashion show.  Their leg muscles do not bulge.

Likewise, I studied twice with Ye Shaolong, the second time I trained with him everyday for three months.  He is probably the world's greatest master of what George Xu calls "the power-stretch."  He uses low, slow expanding movements to develop explosive and suddenly recoiling power.  In his 70's, Ye Shaolong is one of the skinniest people I have ever met. He has no muscle.

In my early twenties, with ambitious winds blowing, I took to standing still in a low horse stance with my arms horizontal to the ground out to the sides, for one hour. I did this everyday for a year.  (20 years later, I still stand for an hour everyday but not all of it in a horse stance.) For the first few months, my thigh muscles got bigger, but then a funny thing happened.  As my alignment and circulation improved, my thigh muscles, my quadriceps, started to shrink.  After a year of this kind of practice my thigh muscles were smaller than they had been when I started.  And by the way, I wasn't just standing, I was training at least 6 hours a day and I didn't have a driver's license so I was also riding my bicycle up steep San Francisco hills as my sole form of transportation.  I'll say it again, my muscles got smaller.

Ouch! That's got to hurt

Most people who practice martial arts actually never learn this because they don't have the discipline to pass through that first gate.  At the time, I was just like everyone else, I believed that I needed to improve my strength.  I now understand that strength itself is an obstacle to freedom.

The internal arts of Qigong, Daoyin, Taijiquan, Baguazhang, Xingyiquan, and some of the the mixed internal-external arts like Eight Immortals Sword, all have ways of training that do not require building strength.  Some Shaolin schools have these methods too.  In fact, under the proper guidance of a teacher, with a natural commitment to everyday practice, anyone can use these arts to reveal their true nature.  A true nature which, like that of your average 7 year old, is already very, very strong.

On this blog I have explored many justifications for the cultivation of weakness.  For instance:

--it makes you more sensitive,

--you need less food (making it possible for more people to eat in times of food scarcity),

--you need less energy to exercise leaving more energy available for other pursuits,

--it's better for circulation in times of less activity (which is what we are doing most of the time anyway),

--your movement is less conditioned to a series of set responses (spontaneously agile),

--and you don't need to wear spandex.

But the number one reason for not developing strength is that healthy human beings are already strong enough.  Even 5 year old children are very strong.  The problem is that normal human beings have disrupted the integration of natural, untrained strength, into their everyday activities.  This happens first of all in the arms, which develop both fine motor coordination and repetitive patterns, both of which leave the arms disconnected from the natural strength of the torso.  Also, adult hormones, particularly male hormones, produce muscle really easily if we prime them with lots of food and reckless exercise.  By reckless exercise I mean games or athletics that cause injuries.  Small injuries to the legs will instantly cause a healthy male to develop big thick quads, it can happen overnight. Once these arm and leg problems are established they become habits.  But natural strength doesn't go away, it's waiting for us just under the surface.  The real problem, the only real problem, is the fear that we need to be strong to face life's challenges--the notion that we need strength to prevail.

The likelihood of injury from strength training, by the way, is the reason that people who do strength training have to create all sorts of schedules to "cross train" the various muscle groups.  These people are now arguing that all training is actually in the recovery! Weird.

And don't get me started on core strength....  OK, it's too late.  Core strength is just a marketing scheme, like Green architectural-design-dog-walking-nanny services.  It just sounds good or something.  It plays on peoples feelings of insecurity and guilt.  There is no core that needs strengthening to begin with, but even if such a core existed, the market is saturated.  Every type of movement training from Yoga to tiny-tot-tap-dancing now claims to be good for your "core."

Here at North Star Martial Arts we specialize in Core Emptying!

That's Right! All negativity is stored in the inner "core"--known traditionally as the mingmen or "gate of fate."  Sign up for this once in a lifetime offer of 12 classes for only $99 (that's a $1 discount) and you will get a bonus "card" to keep track of your first one hundred days of Cultivating Weakness!  Empty your Core Today!  (Say the words "relax your dantian," or Tell them you heard it here at W.W.A.T.)

Like aggressive advertising, strength obscures our true nature.

Martial artists who try to develop strength are preparing themselves for some future attack, the nature of which is yet unknown.   I'm not against strength, heaven knows people love it, I'm just against the argument that we need it.  Anyone who says Chinese Internal Martial Arts require a person to develop strength is confused about the basic concepts.

note: (If you are a bit of a sadist and want to watch some people squirm, I'm about to post this at the unhinged Internet forum Rum Soaked Fist! check it out.)

Mistakes

Elaine Scarry's book On Beauty and Being Just begins by explaining that there are two types of mistakes we make about beauty. The first is the mistake of thinking something is not beautiful and later realizing that it is. The second mistake is thinking something is beautiful and later realizing that we've been duped. She then goes on to argue that it is our experience of these two types of mistakes which gives us our sense of justice. It's a sweet argument. (I'll come back to this.)

What is the role of the artist?  This question has been bugging me lately.  Recently an experienced arts teacher, who is a director of an organization I work for, came to observe and evaluate one of my kids classes.  He gave me a stellar review.  Saying that I'm doing everything right, that my teaching is nuanced, that I inspire creativity, kinesthetic awareness and critical thinking, that my classes produce results, and draw on a deep knowledge of art and culture. He even wants to bring beginning teaching artists to watch me teach, as a model of great teaching.  But, I learned... and this is a kicker... that I'm terrible with other adults and lack professionalism in relationships with other artists and administrators.  For instance, I show my annoyance at meetings by putting my head on the table and groaning quietly to myself, I start arguments and I make shocking comments that no body understands (cognitive dissonance).

Is this what being an artist is for me?  I'm not apologetic.  I dropped out of high school because I didn't want to sit in chairs anymore.  I get a guilty conscious if I think I've been too nice in a situation which required bluntness.

The arts organization I work for used to have a Japanese Artistic Director.  She had a deep respect for artists.  It now occurs to me that part of that respect may simply have been her Japanese upbringing.  In Japan, artists are expected to be outrageous, unusual, spontaneous, unpredictable and moody.  Japanese culture has enormous tolerance for non-conformist behavior from artists.

I hear sometimes from my left leaning friends that artists aren't rewarded enough for their art unless they "sell out."  That it would be a better world if artists could easily find monetary support for making their art, even if what they do doesn't sell or isn't saleable.  I wonder if the opposite is true.  Does our society try to pay-off good artists so that they will be less disruptive?  That is, in effect, what I'm being told, "You get paid to come to meetings, can't you just be more like everyone else?"  No, I answer, it isn't worth the pay.  But I worry that some day someone might pay me enough to be nicer than I want to be.

Then I start to question that list of things in the second paragraph which I'm supposedly doing right.  My teaching is nuanced? Really? More like boldly physical and deeply respectful of natural aggression.  I guess I do inspire creativity, "Invent a new way to break your partner's arm. You have 30 seconds. Go!"  Critical thinking?  I think that was an accident.  How about, I expose people to the profoundly irrational nature of the heart mind connection.

Getting back to the first paragraph, what is the relationship between an artist's role in society and beauty itself?  I believe it is my duty to point out mistakes about beauty.  I believe that recognition of the enormous number of mistakes I've made about beauty inspires me as an artists and as a person who seeks justice.  I feel a missionary duty to make beauty, whatever that may be, available and accessible.  And also to protect beauty from forces which might destroy it.

It's overwhelming to contemplate all the mistakes I've made in my practice as a martial artist.  I look back at the years and I see so many mistakes, things I thought were correct, things I thought would lead to greater beauty, but which later turned out to be distractions or wrong turns.  It's almost as if my practice is simply the process of discovering and correcting errors about what's beautiful.

As a teacher my job is, my calling is, bringing out beauty that otherwise would go unnoticed, unclaimed, uncreated, or unfelt.  In that sense, I am armed and dangerous.

The first time I met George Xu, 22 years ago, he said to me, "What's the point of punching if you don't have enough power to break bones?"  At that moment I realized that there was something beautiful about breaking bones that I had been missing.

The Contentious Origins of Baguazhang

I started a new debate thread on Rum Soaked Fist by linking to a blog post I did last year challenging the common disregard for Dong Haichuan's claim that he learned Baguazhang from two Daoist hermits in the mountains.  Most people claim that Dong Haichuan invented Bagua himself by putting together some common martial arts scraps he found laying around.  You know, like those scientific contraptions with spinning coconuts and flapping palm leaves The Professor from Gilligan's Island would put together.

One person, Josh, acknowledged that Daoist ritual and ritual theater are possible sources of martial prowess which have not been explored yet, the rest of the crew have devolved into arguing about whose lineage is the most authentic.  One guy, using my favorite metaphor of the car, says that Dong Haichuan was driving a Model T Ford and that our baguazhang machines have been getting steadily more complex until now in 2009, we are driving a Lexus.

We could just as easily flip that metaphor.  Dong Haichuan drove into Beijing in 1870 driving a Lotus tricked out with every imaginable James Bond contraption.  He was happy to let his students watch him put gas in the tank and he would pop the hood and let them check the oil.  But his car died with him.  His students were left trying to reverse engineer a working car.  Some of them studied engineering and some of them were able to find working parts from other cars.  But everyone had to build their own car.  And each of the cars look quite different.  Now-a-days, there are people saying that cars don't need gas, because they've tried it and it doesn't work.  The reality is that their spark plugs are fouled or they need a new alternator.  Yet they seem content to push their car on the hills and tell everyone else they aren't working hard enough.

I may be driving a beat-up 1981 Toyota pickup truck art car, with feathers and fake tiger fur glued to the body, and green onions growing out of the flat bed, and yes, the brakes are a little squeaky, but at least it has an engine that works!

Perhaps the car isn't such a great metaphor.  Baguazhang was a flag ship in a fleet of ships that got caught in a horrible storm.  70% of the fleet when down to Davey Jones locker.  Each ship had to decide what to throw into the sea.  Now that the storm is over, Jetsum (the stuff that sinks), if it was thrown overboard, is now lost forever.  Floatsum (the stuff that floats), can be pulled back aboard by whichever ship gets to it first.  Most of the captains are dead, and most of the crew can't read.  There are a few ships' logs being passed around and pirates are arguing about what lays on the bottom and which floatsum belongs to whom.  Most of the fleet is hobbled and lashed together.  A few boats are getting tows, and no one seems to know where they are going.

Isn't it obvious at this point that we are looking at the wrong thing?  Dong Haichuan wasn't teaching a method.  It isn't clear whether he developed a curriculum or not.  He was teaching a view, an approach, a feeling, a way of understanding what a human being is. Yeah, he shouted, "Bu hao!" (no good) a lot, then he would slap his students with a "Ho, ho, ho, and a' feel my Dantian."

Many martial arts teachers have lineage disease.  If your lineage has become just a method, it needs to be treated with a coarse of anti-biotics and then flushed down the toilet.  The reason I've kept my relationship with George Xu all these years is because he is the best reverse engineer I've ever met.  He's been taking the methods and pulling them apart to see how they work.  His baguazhang lineage is quite unremarkable, but his single palm change is undefeatable.  He understood from the beginning that he had to make his own car.

But I have a different task.  My task is to recover the original ideas and world view which inspired the creation of these arts in the first place.

Anyone in the teaching profession today knows that there are a number of different standard forms used to evaluate and compare classes:

1. Class Plans (An outline of what happens in a given class built around a teaching objective)


2. Class summaries (A narrative description of what actually happened in a given class)


3. Curriculum Overviews (A phrase or sentence for each class in a given semester which describes the objective and/or activity of that class)


4. Curriculum Standards  (An external measure of teaching results or goals that everyone in the field can agree on)


5. Coarse descriptions  (One or two paragraphs that describe the topic, feel, and content of the course)


6. Teaching outcome goals  (What students are expected to learn and how the teacher will varify that they have learned it)


7. Syllabi  (A week by week description of class activities)


8. Program integration analysis  (How what is learned in the class is meaningful or useful in relationship to the other classes in a program and the program as a whole)

If you are going to argue about whose teaching is better, you would do well to use the same standard form, otherwise your arguments will be incoherent.  But people! if you can't tap the original inspiration for the accumulation of your particular body of knowledge in the first place, well, you're going to have to use charisma to keep your students around, because methods are hooks without a worm.

The big problem, and I mean huge, is that people bring their own story, their own view, their own inspiration, or their own paranoia, to the method they have inherited.  When you do this the results, the fruition if you will, becomes skewed.  Inspiration creates methods, methods produce fruition.  If you don't know the original inspiration that created your method, you may have already achieve it's fruition and you might not even have noticed. You could be staring the perfect fruition in the eye and think it's a failure.  If you don't share the same inspiration as the founder of your style, you are likely missing the fruition, but you are also probably working with a method that isn't doing a very good job of producing the results you want.

And that me hearties, is why connecting with history matters to our everyday practice.

Are the Gods Real?

The World in an Incense Burner

Are the Gods real? This is simply not an important question.  A horror movie, no matter how fake, can still make your skin crawl.

As a teacher of internal martial arts and qigong I often give instructions to students which they find incredible.  For instance I might say, "Move your skin up but your body down."  Or I might say, "Spiral the bones inside the tissue."  Sometimes I'll describe a feeling outside of the body, as if the we were moving in water or mist.  People often ask me, "Should I visualize what you are telling me?"  Or, "Should I just try to imagine what you are telling me? because I don't know how to do that."

What will "work" for the student at this point varies a lot from student to student.  Sometimes it helps if I have a student put their hands on me while I do the movement.  Some students will learn by watching closely.  Some students will simply figure it out with time.  Some students will require a different exercise, or a different description, or a different metaphor, or a different context, or a different type of pickle in their porridge (yes, I do make these sorts of suggestions).  Some may even get it and not realize they have gotten it.

But the answer to the question, "Should I visualize? should I imagine?" is simple.  Yes, you should imagine to the exact extent that imagining actually makes your skin crawl.  We tend to think, in our "agency driven universe," that imagination is not real.  Imagination is real.  No movement happens without imagination.

Here are two posts I wrote in 2007 which deal with this question as philosophy and cosmology:

Understanding Chinese Culture (Part 1)

Understanding Chinese Culture (Part 2)

Should You Have Sex With Your Qigong Teacher?

September being Yoga Month, I happened on an article yesterday in Common Ground called, "Should You Sleep With Your Yoga Teacher."  It's hardly worth linking too...and sorry it's not on-line yet.  In a few words; it was wishy-washy.  The majority of Yoga teachers quoted the precept, "Do no harm."  Which is of course a fantasy, not a precept.  But it makes an interesting contrast with the Martial Arts precept, "Do maximum harm."

Neither precept gives us much to go on.   The article retreated to the standard American office protocol; people in positions of power should not abuse their power.  Do not coerce your students to have sex with you.  Duh.

I was disappointed.  Had I been writing the article I might have said something about how Yoga classes generally have a hypnotic quality.  All the Yoga teachers they posed the question to talked about the importance of creating something elusive called "Sacred Space."  In a Yoga class the teacher will go through a series of requests.  Do this, now do that, now relax, now take a breath (as if you would forget) now do this progressively more difficult thing, now relax, now do this, now do abracadabra-vinyasa (half the class doesn't know what this means but they all pretend they do and just follow someone else).  In short suggestions followed by compliance followed by more difficult or unusual requests.  Hypnoses.

Until recently, perhaps because of  my contrary nature, I have had an aversion to thinking about hypnosis.   But no more.  I'm into it (more blog posts coming up!), and I think it's an important tool for learning.

In the context of Yoga as hypnosis, the question comes up, do Yoga students have conscious will?  If they have given over their conscious will to their teacher, then how can they consent?  Notice I didn't say "free will," I said "conscious will."  Hypnosis probably requires that the person being hypnotized freely give over control of their conscious will to the hypnotizer.

This is possible because conscious will is probably an illusion.  You can wiggle you foot four different ways--

1.  you can plan to wiggle it and then wiggle it,

2.  you can think "I'm wiggling my foot" while you are wiggling it,

3.  you can think, "wow, I just noticed that I was wiggling my foot unconsciously,"

4.  or you can wiggle your foot and not even know you wiggled it (but a machine can measure it).

We usually prefer to believe we are having sex because of a conscious decision, certainly that is the legal requirement, but in reality we may be acting on mostly unconscious "factors," like hormones and smells and conditioning.  We may be just telling ourselves that we are entirely free agents.  I don't know.

Daoism is clear about this.  Sex is OK if you are trying to have a baby.  Otherwise it's a really inefficient use of jing and qi.

Most martial arts classes are not too hypnotic, but there is a continuum on the one hand between;

•  classes where students independently run most of their own workout and come together to do two person routines or competitive activities and...

•  classes where a teacher guides the students through a slow series of suggestions, many of them about illusive qi flow and the visualization of colored clouds.

So my, my dear readers, I leave it in your hands to answer the question:  Should You Have Sex With Your Qigong Teacher?

UPDATE:  (I've decided I'm going to start teaching Taoist Yoga sometime this Fall.)

UPDATE:  Here is a weird blog on Sexy Yoga from China.

Pure Internal Power

I'm hoping to create a little controversy with this video as I get the hang of my new editing software.

The first part is an attack on application demo's we see all the time on Youtube-- without shaking power most of them are useless.

The second part is a challenge to all the people who make a distinction between long power and short power.  The issue came up in Taiwan talking to Marcus Brinkman and Formosa Neijia, and it is in Nam Park's bagua books too.  It's a pretty common way of talking about internal power.  The distinction between long power and short power certainly is effective for fighting, there is no conflict here.  My challenge is for them to explain how they can do it without creating an on-off switch in their power.  I argue that short power needs a root and is thus vulnerable to uprooting.  In short, the theory of long and short power does not conform to the Internal Classics idea that, "I know you, but you don't know me."

In putting out this challenge it is my hope that I can learn more about my own limitations, no doubt they are legion.  Let the sparks fly.

The Latest Stuff

A lot of us would have appreciated not having to sit in desks all day at school, somebody is trying it here.

On that note, I wrote about the problem of ergonomic crime here.

It is so windy in San Francisco, I have a wind burn from teaching outside for 5 hours.

My movement, physiology, anatomy and bodywork expert friend Rebbecca has her new website up, it begins modestly with a quote by yours truly.

My honey half-wife acupuncturist now has an interesting and well written blog, Acupuncture Healthcare.

I saw George Xu this weekend.  He always says something funny.  He told me, "You are like very intelligent furniture."  I took his correction and thankfully fixed the problem.  He said it with a tone like, 'man.... you are the dumbest of the dumb.'   But if you think about it, who would be willing to risk fighting with an intelligent couch?  Or an office desk that can kick, or a piano that can jump?  He also came up with a great description of what makes internal martial arts unique, "First I throw a 100 pound bag of rice at you, then we fight."

Here is a picture of me teaching some 4th grade students last year.