255. Practicing baguazhang 八卦掌 when the humidity gets too much & jingong 勁功
Today is not one of my better days. The humidity is up and it is reminding me of why I do not live in the tropics. Everything else I can reasonably handle but just not the humidity. And so, just before the humidity really started to hit at around 9am, I made sure I had already done most of my baguazhang sets. But there is still one form I still must do, but I am wavering on it because on the days that I do it, I have committed myself to doing 15 sets per day. So it is 15 sets or nothing, and my willpower is slowly crumbling. On the upside of all this humidity is that I am slowly getting a craving for Malaysian or Singaporean food. But, then again, to go out and get some would require a bit of effort on my part that would drain some of my energy beyond what I am willing to accept. But (and yes, this is another counter but…) I am also willing to adapt to the changes brought on by the weather, and just see where it takes me on my baguazhang journey: What I cannot do physically, I will do mentally with a bit of baguazhang revision. Even I don’t know everything. There is a lot of theory around baguazhang that requires a practitioner to sit down, open a manual and study. Traditionally in China, martial arts was a gentleman’s pursuit. And as such, it meant it had scholarly endeavours attached to it. Without it, martial arts in the wrong hands would degenerate into nothing more than thuggery. Every baguazhang master taught this. If not through theory, then through technique. And if that didn’t sink in, then through the legends about them. With me, I do it through my podcast, qigong class, and publishing six easy-to-read books around the topic of baguazhang. And now I am learning how to transmute this wisdom through just being in close physical proximity to me. This skill is something I allude to in my sixth baguazhang book about jingong titled “The Baguazhang Jin of War”. 👉 (八卦掌的戰勁) I won’t go into further details about it, because if you are not there yet, you will reject it outright as total bullshit. But if you are there then you will understand and move on to wherever it is you are going. And that for me means moulding my true Dan Tian in harmony with this humidity so that I can go out and get my Roti with Kuri Ayam!