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Question--I have been contemplating what Sifu said about feelings-- like, don't like, don't know. I noticed a facebook post from Alicia saying something about feelings aren't facts, and Sifu said they are optional. Honestly, this 'bothered' me, because I don't think I should just pretend like my feelings are unimportant or don't exist. So, I ended up looking up the definition of "feeling." I found several, and most of them related the word feeling with the sense of touch or some other physical sensation. Then I thought, well, maybe he means there are 3 kinds of judgments. Could you guys please help me understand this better?

Thank you all for your dedicated practice. As this Year of The Dragon commences let us all feel deep and abiding gratitude for the great treasure that is our lives and in our curriculum that helps to enrich our everyday experiences. I wish each of you the best of health and prosperity in the coming year. Train well and regularly.

The short answer is we learn how to pay attention to our bodies much more acutely by becoming aware of Tai Chi principles in the body.

Tai Chi has yin and yang, and yin and yang have distinct qualities. Yin has the quality of drawing, absorbing and condensing. Yang has the qualities of projection and expansion.

For the purposes of martial art, in the body we’re concerned with the ligaments, tendons and bones. The bones are neutral, and we have yin muscles and yang muscles. By learning to recognize which muscles are yin, and which yang, we can place our attention on them to balance out the body posture.

This practice improves your physical self awareness moment to moment, and this is Zen. Just be there, fully in this moment.

This last Saturday was the Brain Boot Camp event, which was essentially going all day doing periods of open awareness meditation, punctuated by shorter periods of walking meditation.  There were only a couple of short breaks for tea, and one longer one for lunch.  Other than that, we went all day from 8:30ish to 5:00 p.m.  I haven't meditated that extensively in one day in years, and it was an interesting and layered experience.

Open awareness meditation is a fairly new method for me.  I've only done it a few times before with Kelley.  Most of my years of meditation experience are based in Indian Buddhist methods, namely Anapana (breath awareness) meditation, and then Vipassana, sometimes called Insight Meditation.  This method is supposedly the technique taught by the Buddha.

I did Vipassana meditation most every day for years, including two 10 day silent retreats, and I liked the method quite a bit.  I think I was gaining a good bit if mental clarity and insight, and my mind definitely did quiet down significantly,

Yes and no. Although some kind of meditation is a part of all religious practices, the type of meditation we practic at Falling Leaves Kung Fu is a type of concentration practice, which is not in and of itself a religeous practice, but simply a skill.

Let's look at Mirriam-Websters definition of meditating and concentration -

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