The Shower

So living in China often presents many difficulties while trying to be environmentally conscious. There's no phosphate free soaps, all of the prepackaged foods have like 4 layers of packaging, the tap water is undrinkable, so any short term students just buy bottles of water.  There's so many things every day that really bother me, but I have little communication skills, and so I mostly end up bottling up a lot of the words I want to say.

Brandi and I do our best to be conscious consumers. I reuse bags, I buy very little of the prepackaged foods, and we've bought a water filter. I try to every day make conscious choices about how much clothing I'm going to wear and how often I'm going to wash it. It's summertime here now though and it's usually around 40degrees, and training outside you sweat a lot and don't smell too pretty. So in the past I've been showering twice a day, once after morning practice, and once in the evening. I wasn't satisfied with this, so I've exchanged my morning shower with a 'French' bath. Which is really just me washing myself with a cloth in the sink I just try to make it feel fancy.

You know it's funny. We're all so obsessed with our hygiene at home, it probably seems normal to many people to be showering twice a day, but it's something that I can't imagine I'll pick up. If I can more or less roll around on the ground and sweat all day, and not really smell too bad, then I can't imagine, while living at home in my nice clean house, going to nice clean gym, and sitting in some nice fresh grass, that I would be all that dirty. Now I'm not saying I don't intend to bathe anymore, but I think if we all just let go of our ideas of what clean is, we could really do the earth a favour. I just read an article, that's got some old school ideas that we might want to consider reusing.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jul/15/why-modern-bathroom-wasteful-unhealthy-design?CMP=fb_gu

The Struggle

So I've been struggling to think about things to blog about recently. My training's sort of in a place where I'm not learning anything new, but instead I'm learning new things about the old stuff I learned. I'm really enjoying having the time to review my forms, and to be conscious of my movement.

So much of my time here has been spent working on group forms and performances, that this opportunity to figure out my own movement is something I've been needing for a long time. It's pretty incredible how you can practice something hundreds of times, and then you come back to look at the details of it, and you don't really even know what you're doing. Mindless movement is sometimes in it's own way meditative. But it's hard to improve what you're doing without being truly engaged.

I've also been working on my emotions, and I feel like I've changed so much since I've been here. Just recently my class encountered some turbulence in regards to what we are trying to accomplish and what our Master expects from us. I was proud of myself for not falling into the emotional traps he lays out for us. I handled it very calmly and I feel even more confident in myself now because of it. I'm strong enough to deal with these situations.

Friendship

I've noticed something about a lot of the Chinese people that live in Wudang. Most of the adults here don't seem to have many, if any, friends. At first it's something that you don't notice, because most Chinese people are very friendly to one another, so you'll see complete strangers sitting around talking at the park together. But when you really get to know some of the people, you start to see a pattern. There's many people that are business associates, or other sorts of acquaintances, but it's rare to see friends spending a lot of time together.

So I expressed this observation to one of my classmates, and he said something that I found confusing. He said he didn't find it strange because many of us think that we have many friends, but then in a few years, how many of them will still be around? So are they 'real' friends?

I've made so many new friends over the past five years here and I consider myself lucky to have met so many people from around the world. During my time here, I've also lost some friends. People that I've bonded with but never seen again from home that I just can't seem to manage to keep in touch with. Maybe they've started families and just don't have as much time to spend with their ol' pal Mel.

But when this happens, I've learned to accept it. People grow apart, and they change, and sometimes that means that you lose a friend. But to me, that has never meant that they weren't a "true" friend. They were a part of my life when I needed them, or when we had something to share with one another. Maybe now, that part of our lives is over. But I cherish the love and memories of every person that has impacted my life and helped me to become who I am today.