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I’m back from Bruce’s Bagua Mountain Palm Change event in El Cerrito, CA. Bruce taught the beginning stage of dragon body Bagua. I can’t say enough about how generous Bruce was with his teaching. What a fantastic and truly humbling experience!
Kudos to Isacc and Jess for making it possible.
I know most people who read the forum don’t like to post. I’m curious to hear from anyone who was at the Mountain Palm Change event. Is your whole body changed? The entire way I practice Bagua completely changed over the past week. Everything is working based on double helix spirals and opposites separated by space. Weirdest thing ever.
Unfortunately I was not at the event. But just to understand you better, how did the way you practice Bagua changed over the past week and how do you work on double helix spirals in the Mountain Palm Change?
Here’s the problem. Bruce has a 1,000 piece puzzle that is a treasure map. Going to one of his events is like getting a chance to reach into the box and take pieces out.
The problem is more complicated though. The pieces have two sides: 1) the overt public face and 2) the internal, hidden, closed door side. To date Bruce has only taught about 20% of what he knows, so, at most a student of Bruce might have seen 200 of the 1,000 pieces over the last 30 to 40 years. But it is more likely that they don’t even know which side goes up.
What was humbling for me at the Mountain Palm Change was once again realizing how little I know and how unique my way of thinking about his system is. That’s a polite way of saying there is always a danger that I’m full of BEEP. I have a ton of new insights and Bruce told me I was on track with some of them and he also told me I was dead wrong about others. I’m currently grappling with whether it is better for me to keep my mouth shut or to share my “unique” way of thinking about and organizing how all of this works.
Before I went to the Mountain Palm event, I was working on creating a still point (or series of points that might take on a geometric form). Bruce isn’t doing this in Bagua. He maintains the space inside no matter what.
I don’t know if I could have understood what he is doing without all of the work I had done prior to the event. I spent the whole time trying to adjust everything I had been doing to this new way of organizing all of the material.
You could try to maintain the space from the start if you wanted to and I’ve met Tai Chi players that do exactly that. The problem with doing that is that the space inside won’t fully open up. Without the space being cleared, you can’t connect through it and you can’t allow the energy flow patterns that are required to fully open the body, chi, and mind.
I believe that Bruce taught us how to use this space in the Water Palm event, but only in a very particular, one-dimensional way. When I arrived at the Mountain Palm event, I was able to do this at will. By the end of of the Mountain Palm, I had understood this in multi-dimensions, had a sense of how it applied to the three guas, and saw how the previous palm changes had built up to that point.
If you remember in the “Bagua Mountain Palm Promo”, Bruce said he would do exactly that “this one [the Mountain Palm Change] is going to go where the sixth finished and take it to where it can go”.
I’m still going through a huge change right now. Hopefully I’ll come out of this with a sense of clarity. There is one comment that might be useful at this time.
The most important is that there was only one person at the Mountain Palm Change event that knew what Bagua was, and that was Bruce. I still haven’t met a single student that knows a fraction of what Bruce knows. More than ever I would recommend to anyone who wants to learn these arts to meet Bruce in person and learn directly from him.
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