I’m excited to see that folks are already signing up for the workshops being offered this year! When it’s cold and blustery out my mind naturally starts to imagine fairer weather projects, so getting to write about all of the opportunities this year at Shaolin Wahnam Twin Cities takes my head to greener and warmer times! As I mentioned last week, the theme around the 2019 workshops is cultivating internal force and mental clarity. In September and October, I will be offering a two-part workshop on the jewel of internal force training, One-Finger Shooting Zen.
This skill really is the hallmark of our force training in Shaolin Wahnam. While I have learned many methods of internal force training from Grandmaster Wong over the years, this is easily the method that I practice the most. Why is that? Simply put, it the most cost-effective exercise not just for training internal force, but also for spiritual cultivation and expansion.
One-Finger Shooting Zen builds internal force and trains students how to channel that force into their hands for powerful grips and strikes. Indeed, it is the force trained here that makes our kungfu alive and not just an external form that cannot be applied in real life. For this reason, Shaolin Wahnam students learning kungfu are taught this skill very early on in their training, because it is so fundamental to their training. I should note here that internal force and muscular strength are two different things. It is internal force that allows smaller people to handle opponents larger than them, with sufficient time and training.
But let’s say you’re not a fighter, you’re a lover, and training a kungfu grip just isn’t your jam. How could this skill benefit you? Through breathing and pointed focus, One-Finger Zen trains powerful clarity and calm, strengthens the mind, and gives those who train it abundant energy and joy. So while it is one of the ultimate skills for developing martial power, that same internal force also infuses our lives with vitality that we can use for peak performance. Fortunately, most of us are never going to need to harness martial power, but all of us want to feel our best and live our lives to the fullest. One-Finger Shooting Zen gives us the energy we need to do just that.
As we continue to train and cultivate internal force, which continues to give us greater clarity of mind, this then takes us to deeper levels of spiritual cultivation in the rest of our training, whether that’s qigong skills learned in our weekly classes, learning kungfu, or any other skill we’ve learned in Shaolin Wahnam. Grandmaster Wong likes to use an analogy of qi flow and cash flow. The more money we have, generally the larger our cash flow is, both in and out. The more internal force we have, the stronger our qi flow, the more readily it breaks through blockages, and the more healthy and vital we feel.
One-Finger Shooting Zen will be taught in two parts, to make learning easier for students. While students can get so much more from taking both parts of this workshop, part I may be taken on its own. Part II does require part I and there is bundle pricing available for both. If you’re brand-spanking new to all of this, then I invite you to sign up for Qigong for Health and Vitality, our weekly class starting in April, to give you the foundation to help you succeed in learning this incredible skill. If you’ve benefitted from taking our classes before, then you won’t be disappointed by this offering!