onebir

也可以说你终于"道"拉!

Hi all. I'm from the UK, got into BK Frantzis variety qi/neigong a few years back. But then got sidetracked into yoga, which fitted better with my exercise addiction. Since then I quit my job, sold up & left the country. I spent about 5 months in Beijing studying yiquan last year. But between the teacher's attitudes to money, & chronic shoulder problems, I got pretty disillusioned with that & fled to cheaper more temperate climes - Kunming in Yunnan. An opportunity to do a yoga teacher training came up, so I did that, & now teach a few classes a week here (for a monthly wage of around USD100 ). I also eventually found someone to teach me taiji - just finished learning the simplified yang 24 form. The first taiji form I've ever managed to learn ( 尚师傅,非常感谢你! ) I'm finding my situation is kind of frustrating. My Mandarin is good enough to communicate on general topics - but not esoterica like Daoism. (The one Daoist I've managed to find speaks such a heavily accented version of Mandarin I can't really understand him anyway.) I'd like to continue with the Frantzis material, but I'm pretty sure it's pretty rare here. I can't really read Chinese (menus aside). And while Amazon will ship here, it can't cope with Chinese characters, and the post office isn't terribly reliable with pinyin transliterations. Plan B is go to a kungfu school a friend's friend opened in Fujian recently. At least for the winter...

AKA peng lv ji an - the four in 'grasp sparrows tail', + four other I haven't had repeated at me about 100 times by my teacher as I practice Oh - those are called elements! I thought for a while maybe it meant meridian stretches for all the major meridians. I imagine it includes these too, but I haven't tried to figure out the details. Needle at sea bottom stretches the bladder meridian I guess - so that's water (if the name didn't give it away...) Still a heck of a lot of forms! I see it's there already

Thanks! I was a bit worried about this, but asked a taiji pal with a lot of experience. He said the 24 form was a great place to start taiji. & your comment reassures me further. Having said that, I've just been learning the moves, so I'm not sure what you mean by energies & elements... Eight energies = peng lu ji an + 4 others? 5 elements = earth wood fire metal water. But how can a taiji form contain them? For which style(s) of taiji? Must be a heck of a lot of forms...

Thanks! Actually I have heard a little bit of wild stuff. One of the few comprehensible things the lone daoist said was that he'd find places where people had been killed by lightning to practice. And my flatmate practiced 'mizong' (=secret religion) a fairly obscure (I think) branch of Tibetan buddhism, which culminates in the master opening disciples crown chakra with a sharp implement. Anyway, she stopped long before that bit - it was making her uncontrollably emotional... Then there was the fengshui master's visit to the yoga studio. There's a big round stone in the corner of one of the studios, and we can't close the window the wealth's flows in through