Yesterday I released a video talking about and demonstrating some internal martial arts and a variety of different chi gung moves taken from different sets. In my writing and on my videos I have talked about how tai chi and chi gung helped me rebuild not only my physical health but my mental health as well. This was the work I did to heal.

During my healing journey I studied with a variety of teachers and practiced a variety of methods. When I first started this blog I posted about my martial arts experience and the connection between my post traumatic stress induced obsessions. You can read my martial arts *resume* here.

For the rest of this post I will use the word nei jia to substitute typing out tai chi, chi gung, etc etc.

When I say I went on a *healing journey* it was really a journey in the fullest sense of the word. Everyone starts off as a newb in this business. It takes to time to develop a strategy to self train. Every teacher seems to be selling something different by degrees both minor and major. Not every teacher knows what they are doing. Some teachers know really useful stuff and it takes awhile to both find those teachers and to come to the realization of what the real stuff really is.

In my experience I have met more than one tai chi teacher whose tai chi instruction could actually hurt you. Hurt you as in exacerbate old issues and problems rather than repair them. They simply did not know better.

I’ve met teachers that basically only know how to teach a form or forms. They know the names of every move and they teach it by rote but there is nothing there. It’s been said by some teachers that the design and ingenuity of some of these disciplines is such that even with little or no in depth knowledge of the material one could attain some level of benefit, physically and mentally simply by practicing the forms as directed over and over.

On the other hand if you are lucky enough to find an instructor that is teaching these detailed, usually supposedly *secret* trainings or methods than your options for inner growth and achievement increase significantly.

My first two tai chi teachers had absolutely no idea what they were doing. In the grand scheme of things they taught me some forms but that’s it. They were form technicians and had no other functioning level of knowledge pertaining to the physical, mental or spiritual aspects of tai chi to impart. They were nice people which you find in tai chi circles a lot. They just had no idea about how deep the study went and they had been training in tai chi specifically for 20 years.

During my first year of tai chi training, within literally days of learning some of the *real stuff* from the real deal instructors I could do more with my tai chi and applications than my then-current teachers. Upon demonstrating these advanced methods to those teachers and proving their effectiveness I realized that the time to part ways with them had come. They were learning from me at that point. I did not want to waste my time in fealty to teachers that did not have the goods.

Training with real masters is expensive when you work blue collar. Unskilled manual labor has long hours and low wages. In the late 1990s I could usually keep a roof over my head and stay well fed but to attend a seminar or retreat took months of saving every dollar and cent. I lived in thrift and relative poverty because whatever money I had that was not spend in living expenses or drug habits was spent on my *habit* of wanting to train with quality teachers.

For those viewers and subscribers to my vlog and blog that wondered about the appearance of the material that I espouse so enthusiastically this video is a talk covering some of my physical problems and the solutions to them. I demonstrate small portions of the different things that I tried.

In so many ways this material saved my life. It helped me physically to repair from ingrained tension and unhealed injuries. It balanced my *chemicals* and helped to stabilize my moods thereby warding off depression. It helped me slow down my thoughts. The so called racing thoughts and flights of ideas of mania or manic episodes were largely mitigated through these practices. With a calmer mind, body and heart, nei jia practices enabled me to get really deep into sitting meditation practices. It was in sitting meditation practices that I usually tended to process things like emotionally traumatic memories.

I have never tried to market myself as anything other than a passionate student. The breadth and depth of the material that I was exposed during the first four years of my healing and internal martial arts studies was profound enough for several lifetimes of study. If I had two or three hundred years then perhaps I might master some of the things I learned but in this case I will be learning and refining until the day I die.

At first all I wanted to do was learn the martial stuff. I was fixated on it, no obsessed fanatically with it. But as time wore on I realized that what I needed to heal was to focus on healing. The thought process went something like this.

I want to get powerful and competent at applications and self defense. It turns out if I really and truly was serious about that than I was better off study basic power training exercises as opposed to learning a multitude of mediocre techniques. So it was off to do basic power training until further notice. In the process of doing the power generation basics like circle walking and standing chi gung I came to know more about how much healing my body really needed to do. I was limited to how much *power* I could actually and meaningfully extract from these methods so long as my body remained disconnected and messed up.

That led to focusing more and more on healing techniques. Ostensibly I was now healing myself in order to do power training in order to do real internal martial applications. The longer I worked at healing my body the more intimate I became with my inner world which did translate into the meditation aspects. So now I was finding myself involved more and more with meditation until I found the triggers and glitches that kept me so obsessed with the martial side of things.

On that day I lost my insatiable implacable need to train in martial arts and was able to give myself over to meditation. Then my personality really started to change and I became a person with other interests and capabilities then just martial arts and self defense. Although I lost that obsessive fear driven need to train in martial arts all the time I did not lose my love of them or my appreciation for their healing and defensive capabilities so I continue to practice them.

At the end of the day I can make a strong case that Chinese medicine, chi gung and martial arts had the greatest effects on my mind and body hands down compared to any other treatment or combination of therapies. Chi gung and Nei gung were stronger medicine than the ineffective drugs, herbs, crystals, essences or diets that I had subjected myself in order to heal my spirit.

I passionately endorse the practice of these methods. The real deal teaching will transform your inner world, heal your body and mind and grant capabilities you did not have before. I have passed the first ten year mile marker as an internal arts practitioner. I can point to my more knowledgeable peers and elders in various systems that I have learned from in the past. However due to the many levels of personal success with these practices I am confident I can offer some level of useful training to prospective students and inquiring minds.

To give an honest self assessment my meditation skill set is ahead of my healing skill set which is currently ahead of my martial skill set primarily due to the fact that I hardly ever train rigourously with other people these days since I am wrapped in my book and doing research.

When the book is out and I have had some time to get back in shape I will in all likelihood begin teaching publicly. What I teach then will be entirely dependent on how confident and comfortable I am with whatever I am working on at the time. I can’t practice every method I know simultaneously so some of my techniques will always be more polished than others.