Health and Fitness

The Bodhidharma Is Your Teacher   I've been studying martial arts for more than twenty years and I've been a teacher for more than ten years. I make my DVDs, and write these posts because I want to pass my experience and love of martial arts to people, like myself, who also love martial arts. I am a Shaolin Master living in the West, and I am saddened to see so much myth and magic surrounding the Shaolin Temple. My aim is to clear away the myth so that you can get to the heart of the practice. Whatever your view of The Shaolin Temple, this is not important. It's the teachings that are important. The teachings originate from the founder of Zen, Bodhidharma.  The Buddha said, do not rely on the teacher, rely on the teachings. When we take up the teachings, we owe a debt to our ancestors, and we must respect them for passing such great teachings to us. In many ways, I see the Bodhidharma as my teacher more than the Buddha because he showed me how to use martial arts as a med...

Powerful strategies for optimzing your body and mind I believe that practicing martial arts or going through your life without practicing Qigong is like driving a car and never topping up the air in the tyres. The air is our Qi, it gets us places. Take the air out of the tyre and the car will go nowhere, take the air out of our bodies and we die. It is as simple as that. On a basic level Qi is breath, it flows where the blood flows, but on a deeper level it is the energy matrix of the body and when we do Shaolin Training we optimize it on daily basis to get the most out of ourselves. This is what the Shaolin Temple mean when they emphasise the importance of internal and external. The external is the kung fu , the things we can see, the internal is what is going on inside of us, and to optimize our energy we mix internal and external together. Shaolin Steel Jacket A good example of this is Shaolin Steel Jacket. In order for me to be able to do this, I have to have good stamina but I al...

Extraordinary techniques for unleashing the power of the body and mind When we practice martial arts it’s vitally important that we train our minds as much as we train our bodies. We believe we are the boss of our minds but when our mind says it wants chocolate, even though we know we shouldn’t, the next thing we know we are eating a bar of chocolate. So who is in charge? We can’t blame it on the bar of chocolate can we? More than two thousand five hundred years ago, The Lord Buddha said, “It is our mind which makes the world.”         A positive mind has a positive impact on ourselves and in turn our family and friends and this trickles out to the world at large. I don’t know if there was chocolate in the Buddha’s time but I can guarantee that our mind was the same then as it is now. At the Shaolin Temple we use powerful techniques that have been passed to us directly from the Buddha to aid us in our martial art’s training. This doesn’t mean that...