BACK IN ENGLAND sooner than expected

Sorry for the long silence; blogging censored in China. And no internet at the temple anyhow.

I left the Taoist temple in the mountains. After nearly 2 months. 

It was mostly a physical martial-arts training, and not what I expected nor what I wanted. That's what it boils down to: I (re)discovered that martial arts aren't really my thing. The temple setting was very beautiful, however, in gorgeous forested mountains, and the masters genuine.

I guess I had hoped for a lifestyle of Tai Chi-type forms, chi-kung type exercises, and meditation, and a gentle pace of life with much depth and silence. Daily ceremonies and a sense of spiritual community.

Instead, it was mostly a hard physical training. Which is fine, it's just not what I came for. It included daily strength training (push-ups, sit-ups, jumps, etc), kicks, punches, and kick-sequences. And 'da gong', which is basically hitting yourself and being hit by others, harder and harder, every day, till you graduate to being hit with bamboo switch, benches and logs, and so on. It's great if you want to be a martial-artist. It's supposed to be very good for your immune system too. It hurts a lot. You start off being hit in the stomach and move outwards from there to other parts of the body. Very strange....though you get used to it after a while. Mostly, I didn't enjoy it.

I also didn't enjoy the fact that everyone, including the masters smoked, often almost chain-smoking. Except for 3 of us, who passive-smoked instead. And the TV was blaring most of the time in the only shared space, including during meals. The atmosphere was just not conducive to the kind of meditative mind that I was interested in developing.

There were some chi-kung type 'longevity' exercises. I liked those. Eventually we started learning some Tai Chi-type forms, and there would have been more of these if I'd stayed. But:

No meditation hall. No meditating together. No daily ceremony together. Not even at meals. I had no sense, on an average day, that we were living in a spiritual community, because nothing 'spiritual' was going on. There are lots of reasons for this, and I don't really blame anybody. It just wasn't making me happy, and it wasn't really my thing. So, after staying very open-minded for as long as I could, and putting up with a fair bit of suffering, I left. It wasn't an easy decision.

I can see that if you like a 'hard' approach, it could work. The masters are clearly highly skilled in martial arts and apparently highly advanced in spiritual practices too, though I didn't get much contact with that. It's reasonable to imagine that if you stayed and suffered long enough, you might be led toward enlightenment and Immortality (the aim of Taoism). If you're very, very lucky. 

I started to see it as a trade-off: 5+ decades of very hard, bitter training for a slim chance of Immortality which is partly fate-determined anyhow, or, 5 or so decades of lay life in Samsara, or as Taoists call it, the World of Red Dust. In the Red Dust, I might be captive to my ego, but I will probably live a relatively balanced life of joys and sufferings, and have a good chance at relative happiness. In the temple I was not happy. So I've taken my chances in the choppy seas of Samsara. If the storm really brews up, I could always swim back to the temple.

Now I'm trying to work out what to do next. And dreaming of going to South Africa to pursue tracking.