Feeling Defenisive. Time for explanations.

In reading over the entries to this point, I spend a lot of time talking about how I was unsociable, standoffish, and hard to deal with. Then I say I had health problems. I can see that a reader with a different background could develop the idea that perhaps I was actually troublesome, not just a person with problems. I need to address that for my own piece of mind.

Firstly. One of the things that I learned from Dr G. was about being humble. I think it is a Chinese cultural thing actually. Maybe emphasized more for kung fu reasons. The idea was always to present yourself as less than you were.

I also spent some time with another group of people who were very friendly and polite. These people were also humble. In addtion to that, they had the tradition that if there was some kind of trouble in a relationship between people, they would take responsibility. It did not matter if they were responsible or not. In order to smooth the atomosphere and make people happy, they would say they were responsible.

I have taken both of those ways of speaking and made them part of myself. I meet people that do not understand this way of behaving or have never encountered it. When I talk to these people, and for example, I take the blame for something so that people are happy, this group of people does not understand I am playing a social game. They believe I am really truly to blame for whatever I took the blame for. They do not see the psychological and sociological effects of my way of speech.

A person who is not familiar with this style of talking can read the first few posts here and think I am a big time jerk who deserved everything that happened. For those people, I am less at fault where I say I am at fault. Other people are more at fault than what I say about them. I try to take the edges off of whatever is under discussion by over emphasizing or under emphasizing as necessary.


Secondly, the health situation. It is pretty easy to say you are sick and that people should make allowances for your behavior. That could be construed as being demanding and rude. I feel the need to explain how I was sick so perhaps people will have a more realistic understanding of how bad off I was.

There were two parts to my ill health. I had a kung fu teacher who encouraged me to practice incorrectly, and I did breathing exercises incorrectly.

I signed up for a kung fu class with a Chinese man. I wanted a Chinese teacher because I felt they had better training than white people who had learned. This man was also a geniune Chinese from China. I felt they had a truer understanding of what kung fu is than any person in the west.

What I did not know was that the man was an angry sadist. Historically, the British had gone to China and forced China to allow the opium trade which turned many Chinese into drug addicts. There were various wars and of course there was the British rule of Hong Kong. I was not to find out until a few years later that this man felt that all white people bore responsibility for those actions.

What this Chinese man would do is, using his knowledge of kung fu, he would teach white people in such a way as they would make themselves sick. He would also help the process along using his kung fu talents. I personally witnessed 10 to 15 students join the class, then become either mentally ill or physically ill. One man I know became deathly ill, similar to my case.

There were a few things he did to make the people sick. It is very easy if you understand kung fu. If you have trusting students who do not understand kung fu principles, they would never know you were instructing them to hurt themselves.

One main effect of how he taught people was that they would lose their ground. If you do not understand grounding......all people have energy. This energy needs to be grounded like electricity needs to be grounded. If a person's energy is not grounded, they will go crazy and have many health problems. The Chinese man purposefully encouraged people to exercise so that they would lose their ground.

He also encouraged people to practice in such a way that they would get very very hard. A human body should be balanced between hard and soft. By forcing the body to become mostly hard, there is no balancing softness. The soft part of the body is associated with health. Besides not balancing the hard part of the body, the soft part of the body could not keep the person healthy because it was now less than it should be.

Finally the instructor would actually make people sick. He would suck the energy out of them. Basically he was a vampire. Not a vampire that sucks blood, a vampire that sucks energy. The effect on a person of having their energy sucked is that they get tired and weak. If they were in kung fu class and felt tired and weak, they would push even harder to do the work. This pushing of a drained body put stress on the internal organs that made them sick.

I did not know any of this at the time it occurred. I only figured it out after years of observation.

My personal health problems were that I had totally lost my ground. This caused my thinking to be very erratic. I had become very hard. The effect on me was that I felt stressed all the time. The soft part of my body never took over so I could relax. I was hard and tight all the time which put stress and pain on me physically and mentally.

The biggest problem was that the hardness or the specific way I was encouraged to train put stress on my heart. My body changed in such a way that it felt like any time I tried to do anything, my heart would be stressed. The rest of my body would literally crush my heart.

Most simply, I walked around all day, every day, feeling like I was going to have a heart attack at any minute.

In my mind, a person that feels like they are going to have a heart attack is not rational. If you have been around a sick person who needs help, they get hysterical, they don't listen and they talk or yell alot. They don't think very well because they are frightened or in pain. That was me. I felt like I was going to have a heart attack all the time. If something came up that exacerbated the stress and tension, I had to either ignore it, or ferociously chase it away. In my mind the added stress and tension would literally kill me.

This was the kind of mental attitude I had when I joined Dr G's class. This was the health problem I tried to tell him I had. This was the health problem I thought his experience enabled him to look at and instantly recognize. That is one of the reasons I could never understand the stress that Dr G subjected me to such as the sparring related in the last blog entry. If he knew I had pressure on the heart, as a doctor, why would he do anything that would increase that pressure on my heart?


I also mentioned breathing exercises as part of the problem. They made the heart situation even worse because, in addition to squeezing my heart when I used my muscles, I was also squeezing my heart when I was breathing.

I had read books about breathing exercises and how they were supposed to make a person strong in kung fu. The kung fu instructor had talked about how the proper breathing was necessary to do the forms. He would never say what he meant exactly by proper breathing. He would describe it but it made no sense. He would never explain either. He told us something, and that was it. You could not press him for more information.

Because of this, I decided to do the breathing exercises described in the books. I must have done them improperly because made the pressure on my heart and my general health worse.

I said up above that if I was under stress, my heart would feel pressure. I didn't know it at the time but by doing the breathing exercises, for some reason or the other I would react to stress by holding my breath. You can see how bad this would be. A person under stress needs to breath normally and get oxygen above all other needs. Right at the time I needed oxygen and the massage provided by breathing, my breathing would lock up and I would feel as if I was asphyxiating.

When I talk about this, people who are psychologists or psychiatrists like to say "it is all in your head". When I tell them they don't have a clue, they get angry. They don't know what they are talking about. Maybe there is some validity to their observation. It does not account fully for my health problems.

Certainly. If I was nervous, I would react as any other nervous person. My breath would shorten, I would be tense etc. The difference between me and a regular person was that the effect on me was about 20 times what it should be because of the improper kung fu trainging and the breathing exercises.

I felt that because these psychiatrists and psychologists spending all day in a chair had no idea about how the human body worked phsyically, or what the effects of kung fu practice on the body were. They were making pronouncements that might apply to a "normal" person. They refused to see that their pronouncements did NOT apply to a person who was physically changed by kung fu, yoga, or any other practice that enacts major changes in the body.

Well. I feel better anyways. That is about as accurate as I can make it. When I met Dr G., my daily life was feeling like I could have a heart attack every minute of every day. Any time I felt stress, like dealing with strangers, my breathing would lock up and I would begin to suffocate.

I do not see how any reasonable person, especially a person trained in medicine, could expect a person who is suffocating and feeling like they are going to have a heart attack to act normally and politely. I think that my behavior was exemplary for the pain and fear I was experiencing during my time with Dr G.