ShinNa: Spiritual Blog

Spiritual Freedom is Discipline – part 1 In many spiritual circles there seems to be a special admiration for the free spirit.  The people who can just go with the flow and wing it.  The spontaneous ones. They are the people who are supposedly most plugged in to life.  But the question is, do those people truly experience freedom? I have lived a lot of my life trying to be that free spirit, and from my experience, it does not really give you true freedom.   In fact, I was experiencing a lot of stress below the surface because there was nothing I could count on and I was often less prepared to get the most out of myself.  If you think about it, true freedom or aliveness comes from the interplay of flow and structure. Water flows powerfully in pipes and music has both notes and space.   We often mistake structure as something that will keep us rigid, but if used properly, it gives us a powerful way to create. We are amazed by sports figures li...

Spirituality and the Ideal There is an old joke you may have heard about a man who lived in an area where there was a flood that rose to just below the roof of his house.  So he climbed on the roof and asked God to save him.  Soon after, the police came by in a row boat and told him to hop in.  He said “No, God will save me.”  Later, a helicopter hovered over him and he sent it away saying “God will save me.”  After he sent away a canoeist who came to help him, the flood got worse and he started to drown.  He cried out to God, “ Dear God, I have always believed in you, but when I asked you to save me, you never showed up, and now I am drowning.  Why did you ignore me?” And God said, “You idiot, I sent you a row boat, a helicopter, and a canoe.” One way we can trip ourselves up in our quest for enlightenment is that we can hold some ideal of what enlightenment should look like.  I always thought that I would really have arrived when in every se...

Looking back, I can laugh out loud at my spiritual journey because I believe I missed the obvious. The brother of my best friend in high school studied personally with the Dali Lama and he tells a story about the first time he saw the Dali Lama speak.  To the best of my memory, the story goes that after his talk , the audience was able to ask him questions.  A student asked the Dali Lama what the secret was to living a spiritual life.  Everybody took out their notebooks and with baited breath waited to write down the profound words of wisdom that they were about to hear.  The keys to the kingdom.  They were ready to write down many words and many sentences.  As the Dali Lama was about to speak, everyone focused in , not to miss the the pearls that would change their life forever.  And then came his answer.   “Be Happy”.  It seemed too simple.  Was that all there is? Now I can't say for sure this story is true because I wasn't th...

In spiritual quests, at least for me in the past, when something “goes wrong”, I would find myself doubting and even getting angry at God.  That has changed greatly since practicing Tai-Chi on a serious level. For the last few weeks, I have had a tender knee.  In the past , I would have been mad about that , thinking from a spiritual perspective that my body should  be without pain, or should heal extremely fast. It would be my measure of  how spiritual I had become. So in the past I would be feeling unhappy about my injuries, never noticing how miraculous my body is.  Think about it, broken bones heal, wounds stop bleeding, etc.  How wonderful our bodies are.  I never realized how full my life can be no matter what the state my body is in. From practicing Tai-Chi, I have developed a great respect and trust for my body that is undeniable and filled with joy.  I am using my tender knee to learn more about my body.  I have discovered that m...

We often think and speak about spirituality as a far away mystical place or as an abstract intellectual idea.  In both cases, it is easy to miss the beautiful spiritual world we live in right here on earth.  It is easy to disconnect our physical life from our spiritual life.  We have heard many times that the physical world and the spiritual world are interconnected, but we don't have many tools to teach us how that is true, so we often get stuck in our knowledge and lack understanding about our own connectedness and true nature. Tai-Chi, in my experience gives us an opportunity to intimately examine our true nature.   We get to experience our miraculous nature and our child like nature.  It allows us to practice spiritual principles with our own body where we can see those principles work in the physical world.  This practice allows us to develop deeper faith in our creator and allows us to learn more clearly what we are passionate about.  Whi...

It seems that spirituality becomes important to a human being at some point in their life.  Even if someone decides that there is no God, it seems they have to go through some deep thinking on the issues of life to come to that decision.  At least all the people that I have met so far seem to go through this.  Maybe it is just the crowd I hang out with. One thing that I often encounter is that most spiritual practice lacks a physical component, and I don’t mean rituals.  This beckons the question, can you have a spiritual experience without the body?  Even if you had an intellectual epiphany, don’t you still need the body to have the ‘Ah-Ha’ experience?  All that spine tingly sensation and the pleasurable joy you feel is a physical reality.  When we are seeking a spiritual experience, it’s not possible is it?    We’ve all had spiritual experiences by accident in some point in our lives.  We were either in nature and were captu...

Yesterday was the 5th Memorial of my teacher, Gabriel Chin.  We got together at The Cube at 4 o’clock to practice Tai-Chi and then we all went over to TK Wu for dinner (a Taiwanese Restaurant.  Gabriel was personal friend with the cook and owner of the restaurant.  He help the owner set up the restaurant.  They are family). It was great to see all the people.  Before we started the White Crane Chi-Gong and Tai-Chi, we were catching up with each other.  Before it was time to start, one of the original members came up to me and said “Isn’t it interesting that it been 5 years since Gabriel left us, and we are still getting together here to celebrate the legacy he left us.  Makes you think about what’s important in life.  I think you should mention that before we start.”  (This was Joseph Staron blaming the idea on Jeff Nofts.  Between the 2 of them, you can never know.).  It does make you think about life doesn’t it?  I was ch...