I'm new to the concept of blogging, but I'm told it's kind of the thing to do. So, I'm willing to give it a go and hopefully you find it valuable.

As many of you know I'll be teaching the first Instructor training in Europe starting next week. The subject of Dragon and Tiger is appropriate for many reasons, but primarily because I see it having tremendous value in terms of the looming healthcare tsunami I used to get booed off the stages for talking about in the early days.

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States and I imagine the numbers are mimicked in Europe and other developed countries. There are several important benefits to this relatively easy chi gung set, but its potency in fighting cancer, and all the gunk that comes with it, is particularly useful given the statistics. I have students who've used it to get well and I think most of you know by now that Bill Ryan is really trying to make some headway with Moving Tiger, his method for teaching Dragon and Tiger.

Recently, the question keeps being brought up about how exactly I came to study Dragon and Tiger. I had been a Chi Gung Tui na doctor for many years and after I was studying in Beijing for about a year and completely socked in with Liu, I thought that it might be good for me to do some other things. Liu's other disciple, Bai Hua, had a friend in Beijing who I also became good friends with. This guy came from a fairly famous family in Beijing, so I told him that I'd really like to see if there was any more training I could get to finish up my training in medical chi gung.

This friend went around and around trying to find out for me. You have to realize, this was only a few years after the Cultural Revolution. So he starts looking around and I believe he also had a relative who was in the field, so he knew who was who. The one name that came up that-possibly-I could talk to was Jiang Jia Hua. There were other people, but the odds were low simply because of the political situation.

Eventually, I met with the "old lady" as my wife and I dubbed her, and I had one stroke of luck that helped the situation. Her husband, who was an engineer in a major firm in Beijing, had received his education in the States, somewhere in the Midwest. He only had great things to say about the people, so she found it somewhat amusing to meet me.

Later she saw that I could do chi gung and that I wasn't blowing smoke. Seeing that I was really skilled was one thing, but then for some reason the subject of the I Ching came up. She said she was interested in it and then she had her mind blown because I really knew about the I Ching. She started on a line of questioning: "How come you know so much about the I Ching?" etc. I said I learned it in Taiwan and Hong Kong and when I mentioned who my teacher was, she replied, "Your teacher is...who?" Liu-in the real community-was pretty famous. He didn't consent to teaching just anybody.

We went back and forth and although I was studying with her, she was indecisive about what to do with me because she had put away Dragon and Tiger three or four years before I met her. After her husband died, she just didn't want to engage the masses any more. She trained 20,000 teachers by about ‘81 or ‘82. She had been Vice President of the All-China Scientific Chi Gung Association. Her political ties were what allowed her to run a cancer clinic and teach. Bear in mind, Mao Tse Tung was really down on chi gung as one of the "Four Olds" during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1974).

She thought my level of skill was equivalent to that of her better students, but she was still on the fence as to what to do with me. This went on for a couple of weeks. Then Liu caught a flu of some sort and I happened to mention the old lady to him. He said if I wanted to bring her over, maybe she would give him some herbal meds. Liu wouldn't go out and see anybody-he was an absolute hermit. I got the two of them together and then, you know the way it is with a child, "Look son, go out and play while the adults have a talk."  Basically, I was told to leave! I came back once or twice and they sent me away each time.

When I saw her the next time, she said, "If he'll teach you, I'll teach you." And that was it. She then made me her formal disciple and taught me the whole bit including Dragon and Tiger. I got to work in cancer clinics even though it was very dangerous for me to be working in those clinics. At that time, it was the equivalent of a subversive act against the State.

I ended up studying Dragon and Tiger with the old lady for about a year and a half. She was a little fireball. This woman was in her late sixties, early seventies and she was a little dynamo, running all over the place and what not. She was also one of the main students of a person called Guo Lin, who was known as one of the big chi gung cancer doctors. So, she was also teaching me on that level. Dragon and Tiger was just one piece of the puzzle. Most of what I learned was folded inside of it, which is why I wanted it to be a part of my core program even though it didn't come from Liu's material.