While the mercury looks like it’s broken on a day like today, I promise that spring is just around the corner, and spring means classes start up again at Shaolin Wahnam Twin Cities! This year is shaping up to be a great year and I’m excited about everything that is being offered. To give everyone a sense of what to expect, I’ll be talking about this over the next few weeks. So sit back, pour another cup of tea, pile on another blanket and read on.
This year we will be offering a few intensive workshops, with more to be added in years to come. These are offerings specifically for students who have already taken a course with Shaolin Wahnam, whether that’s here in MN or elsewhere. Intensive workshops allow us to focus on more specialized key skills and techniques which only get touched on in our weekly qigong classes, allowing students to deepen their knowledge and skill set.
The theme surrounding these workshops this year is cultivating internal force and mental clarity. If you’ve taken a class with me, you know I bring these concepts up again and again, and with good reason. In the era of 70-hour work weeks, two-hour commutes, screen time, fast food, short attention spans, a never-ending news cycle, and high cortisol, skills like internal force and mental clarity are more important than ever.
Internal force gives us substantial and insubstantial benefits, such as increased physical skill and stamina, improved immune system and better circulation (not a bad thing on a day like today), as well as the mental clarity that we derive from internal force training. Mental clarity gives us pristine calm which helps enhance our mood, our relationships, our decision-making, and the lens through which we view the world in a profound and life-altering way.
A selection of exercises that build on what Grandmaster Wong taught in his internal force class last October will be taught, as well as strategies and tactics for how to integrate them into daily training. Students who are signing up for this spring’s level one Shaolin Kungfu class will find these skills highly useful for their kungfu training and qigong students will be able to take these fundamentals into their practice in a way that will make their training deeper and more powerful.
Like all of our Shaolin skills, the reward comes with diligent and consistent practice. We are so fortunate in Shaolin Wahnam that we have the opportunity to train internal force which makes our kungfu and qigong alive and brings all the benefits with it that we get to enjoy. Every workshop offers early bird pricing so take advantage of the discount while it’s still available. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone for our first workshop in March!