Sausage Fest

Amituofo!

Hello My Fellow Kung Fu Dorks!

This is my first official post! Please let me introduce myself! Amituofo! I am Leo! (ROAR!) More Chi! Train Harder! You might have seen me around if you train Level 1 at the USA Shaolin Temple. I only started to train at temple 9 months ago and I'm the youngest blogger here in terms of Temple Age. Okay! Now on to my first entry!

For the first time, there were no female chi! Not even Heng Xu or Mei Mei! Well, that's not exactly true. There have been classes where it has been all guys, but those classes were usually very tiny, probably less than 7 people. But today, we had 16 people. And even Shifu mentioned it has never happened. Especially, since, today was not a holiday or a weekday.

I know the reason why. It's because most of the KF girls were celebrating Heng De's 21st Birthday far too late into the night/morning. I could have sworn before I left the party, I got quite a few half-hearted promises to train. ;) But, alas, I was the only one that made it to temple.

Training today was totally invigorating! When I first got there, I gotta admit. I was tired. My warm-ups consisted of me walking around the circle trying to keep my eyelids up and extended. But after 5 minutes of basics, I was ready to rock. Anybody else have that issue? My body just needs that Shifu-induced-wakeup to be able get the chi up. Once it's up, I'm fine the rest of the class. I probably should come as early as I can to get my chi up so I can start class at full chi. But...the darn bed yoga training was just too inviting... :)

Oh yeah! Joshua was there. For someone who hasn't trained at temple for a long time, he still led the line, and had awesome chi and perfect forms. He's very good about training the basics and forms outside of temple. He's self-motivated while currently, I'm Shifu-motivated. This is one of the things that I will be working on before testing in April. More Chi!

"Temple is in the heart, we take it everywhere with us."

-Shifu Shi Yan Ming

Amituofo, Everyone! So Why This Blog?

So the other day I was telling Sucheela how I wanted to start a blog loosely documenting my progress everytime I go to class because it seems like I learn so much, so it's easy to forget and repeat mistakes sometimes. I want to be able to look back and remind myself of what I've learned, and perhaps how far I've come...so now Mo, Sucheela and I are gonna make this a group thang! :)

Basically, the idea is to write down something new you've learned, be it a new movement, some attention to a detail you didn't realize, or even something as simple as someone's name, or, in my case, something that Shifu has yelled at me for doing, which happens all the time! :) So, I'd like to remember to extend better, or to raise my arm properly, or whatever. This is all.

Whatever we make of it, this is what the blog will be. You feel the chi, that's the chi. Or something like that. CHI!!

And if you feel like commenting, go for it. Or if you have something you'd like to contribute and have us put up (like a good link or even a guest post), drop us a line. Maybe this will inspire you to think about class in a different way as well! :)

(Image taken from the Buddha Project at Lens Culture, a site containing many images of Buddha from around the world.)