May 17, 2006

Dear Class Members:

            Even with so many activities going on simultaneously in the Chinese society in Saturday afternoon, we had 13 people attended our discussion forum. Originally a scheduled 西域之旅 special topic by Wen-Yen Wu was cancelled due to his personal schedule conflict he found out Thursday. We thus expanded our discussion forum to include one more Chikung school: 生命自救功 (Self-Saving Exercise) ( http://www.zijiu.org/ ) in addition to 長生學 (Longevitology) ( http://www.longevitology-usa.com/ ) to compare with our ChiKung school—MasterZhao ( http://www.masterzhao.com/ ) in our discussion. Program started with 生命自救功. Thirty minutes VCD overview about the first style of exercise, Q & A section with master Lee, the founder, and three pieces of testimonies from the students who benefited from it. After another DVD introduction for長生學 and two examples of success in curing disease, we started open discussion.  

            Jennifer Chou, 周樺, Class head of class2004, initiated with her personal view about the strengths and weaknesses of each of the three schools of ChiKung, complemented with her website photo collection and useful information. David Kin (金惠民), Amy and Joseph Hsiao (蕭冠英│符黛妮), Tseng-ying Fan (范增瑩), Pin Chen (陳品), Hsiyann Yu (余希彥) jumped in the discussion one after another. Jerry Yang (楊 又徵) then summarized his earlier knowledge and personal comments on these three schools of ChiKung. Although Tseng-Pu Wang (范增璞), Chung Teng (鄧中泰), Bill Yang (楊位剛) Lily Chen (任瑞麗) were not as verbal as the other participants, they were excellent listeners. Overall, the easiness of Chi exercise ranks Longevitology at the top and Self-Saving Exercise at the cellar. However, the potential risk at picking up “bad energy” from patients also ranks Longevitology at the top. Longevitology also was highly praised by Sunny and Eileen Lin (林三江│劉莉玲), and Nory Chou (周宗德), who were not able to join us but had had some chat with me earlier about their comments. Nory is also very kind to make several copies of CD of Longevitology for the use of our discussion forum. As for the effectiveness of each exercise, it seems to be somewhat goal-specific for each school with the Self-Saving Exercise being able to cure the terminal cancer patients most impressive. Another subject invoked vigorous discussion is whether our routine group exercise is good or bad for picking up bad Chi from the attendants. There is no consensus about the last issue and I have forwarded this issue to Master for his opinion. Master will not come back from China until June 19^th. He asked me to send his best regards to every class members. My wife and I won’t be able to see him during our trip to California from May 19 – 28. Since I will be out of town and the attendees of our forum voted for two-week break for group exercise, there will not be group meetings till June. I will contact everyone to resume our group exercise.

            Jennifer is willing to assist our class to set up our web page free of charge. I will ask Wen-Yen to contact her to set it up at their convenience. For your interest, Jennifer’s blog with UDN:

https://city.udn.com/v1/blog/index.jsp?uid=chouhwa

My city:

https://city.udn.com/v1/city/index.jsp?gid=2971

           I believe we had a constructive 2-hr session and learned more about ChiKung styles. If you like this kind of activities, we have Ellen Gong’s seminar about Chi and Jin-Lou (section II) on July 15 (or 16). Wen-Yen Wu will give his own seminar about the “Grand Westward Journey” at some other time. 余希彥 also recommended to invite a Dr. Sung to talk about “Spine exercise” for your health maintenance in the near future. Other suggestions are also welcome.

Best regards,