Meet Herman. I met him about 3 weeks ago and from pretty much the first day, I knew that I wanted to study with him. After the second day, I realized two weeks wasn't going to be enough, so I extended my trip a couple of weeks to get more time. He's Chi Gong practitioner and well as a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine. However, he doesn't really like either of those titles, and prefers to think of himself as a person who helps people on their healing journey.
He is the most thoughtful, intelligent, solid teacher I've ever had. His understanding of energy is deep and vast. It is connected with reality on it's most fundamental level. We were doing one pose the other day and I asked, should my legs be completely straight or slightly bent. "Wrong question" he said. It's not about do you straighten your legs or do you bend you knees, but, where is the energy most flowing, where is there both strength and relaxation. Where is there groundedness and stability? Where is there energy connecting your upper leg to the lower leg?
There are rules in is Chi gong practice, though all of them point in the same direction and are based in the chinese concept of harmony and balance, yin and yang. Chi Gong takes these principles and applies them to the body, to the positions. Yesterday he said, the dhamma is the nature, yes? The law of nature. You can find he dhamma when you write, when you draw, and here, we are finding the dhamma in the body; in our bodies expression.
I work with him one on one 4-8 or even more hours a day. Sometimes we work on the Chi Gong forms, sometimes he teaches me about Chinese Medicine. Sometimes we talk about the nature of suffering or reincarnation or metta. He encourages me to question him. And I do so often. Whether it be reincarnation or western vs eastern medicine, we have healthy discussions. Yesterday we talked for an hour about metta. What it is and what it isn't. And the importance of choosing wisely where you give, and to whom you give and what your true intention is while giving. Just giving is not enough, in fact, sometimes it is wrong. You have to be intelligent, he says when and when not to give.
We talk about how to protect our energy and what that even means in a very real sense. We learn how to fall, how to catch someone falling, how to move the body when a car is heading for us and the importance waiting and not just reacting. We talk about how to work with someone with a painful back, modifications of the chi gong movements, teaching me and then other people the incredible subtleties of the breath, what it sounds like at the beginning, middle and end of a exhale and where the holding is, or the overexertion is, or the underexertion that loses energy.
I practice massage with him and he is teaching me how energy gets lost when my thumb is positioned in a certain way and how that energy bounces back into me and helps me clue into the tension it creates. We talk about how to walk and how to move from the Dantian and how when I kick up my knee, the difference between moving from the Dantian and moving from the joint, thereby stressing the joint and causing more problems.
You can see how this is a powerful practice that is directly connected to my massage practice as well as learning how to heal the body. In a way, I've been looking for a practice to compliment the Thai massage. I've been shying away from yoga for a number of years now, but haven't found a way to really work with people to help them heal themselves. Because no matter how good our bodywork sessions are, if people go back to their life and fall into the same old habits and have no tools with which to make real changes in their body, then the next time they see us, they will be in the same place they were previously.
I look forward to sharing these teachings when I return and into the future, as I slowly incorporate this practice into my body.
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