I'm back from my trip to Germany and the UK with twice as much work to do than when I left. Fun, great people, challenging questions, new research, and lot's of teaching.  I'm pushing forward with creating a production package to fund my next video. I'm helping plan the martial arts and theater part of the Daoist Studies Conference in Paris (May 17-19). I'm writing another ground breaking paper on Tai Chi (the publication date for the last one has been pushed to January 2017).  I've got marketing to do for workshops in San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, and Virginia.  The print version of my book is

This week I did a guest blog over at Cook Ding's Kitchen.  Check it out.

After spending a week in Berlin teaching and lecturing, I'm hanging out at Marnix Well's house in London.  We are pulling all nighters talking history, theater, art, religion and music.  

If you are around London and want to meet up (or get a private lesson), get in touch. My regular contact phone number sends and receives texts and of course my email works fine too.  

The video and the book are finally here!  This is so exciting!  And the positive reviews are so positive I might explode.  Where are all the haters?  Will it be rainbows and unicorns from here on out?  Click to see everything!

A Free Public Lecture-Slideshow in Boulder

Hosted by:  

WEST GATE KUNG FU SCHOOL

3005 Sterling Circle, Suite 150, Boulder, CO 

Friday, June 24th 6pm-9pm

"The Cultural History of Baguazhang, Dance of an Angry Baby God."

Here is my travel schedule:

Berlin from July 6th-13th.

London from July 14th-25th

Cardiff, Wales from July 19-21st (check out the conference)

San Francisco from August 18th-29th (open "adults" and scroll down x3)

Chicago from Sept 15-20th (Daoyin Seminar)

A picture is worth a thousand words!  The first image is from the 1920s. The one below it is from a tour of Germany around 1900 I think.   What have I been saying?  Asian martial arts have been presented and conceptualized as performance from the beginning.  

Two and a half years ago I wrote about Snake Daoyin and its likely connections to Monkey Kung Fu.  Check it out. I'm reposting this amazing video below of a female Snake Master.

Now compare that to this new video, also from Vietnam, of Snake Kung Fu.

I'm been thinking about a powerful idea; marketing has become storytelling with images.  When I started to think about explicitly telling stories with images using webpages and videos I realized that storytelling is at the very heart of what I do.  

This brings to mind a conversation I had with Rory Miller

I'm putting the finishing touches on the sound for my video "Cracking the Code: Taijiquan as Enlightenment Theater."  And I'm headed to Portland to give a talk on the History of Baguazhang, to teach Dance as Self-Defense, and to teach Unlocking Internal Martial Arts.  So here are some interesting videos, the first one I call Heavy Metal Chinese Opera.  (If you have adblock, it takes 40 seconds to open, and it doesn't want to embed so click here.)

And this one is the latest attempt at Shaolin Monks crossing the line into pure dance.  Pretty good!  But put on some different music, this is the "Let if Go" of martial arts performances.  (This one won't embed either, click here).  

...We really do not know the ultimate causes of things, much less the ultimate causes of our own behavior. We do, as a habit of mind, tend to ascribe agency. And, of course, we can use rational processes like deductive or inductive reasoning to walk back, or walk around, discrete causation. Within the boundaries of a closed system of logic, these processes can become praxis.  That is, they become a "way of seeing, doing and testing," like engineering, or ballet. The dominant versions of this are