The Journey Continues: The Dragon at 85
I wrote a bit about my own journey in my book “Of Fire and Water: Alchemy and Transformation” (Tambuli Media: 2023) and one essay “The Dragon at 75” summed up the years before. I do not know how many people who bought the book sit down to reflect on what I have said about life or even martial arts. The essays and videos in my website are possibly glossed over or ignored too. It’s the nature of the culture, the modern barrage of information overload and our busy lives. At least I have not heard anything much from the readers. As Philippine national hero Jose Rizal said, We plant a tree not knowing if we are going to sit under its shade. Just the same, we do our work, we sow the seeds, hoping they will land on fertile ground. I do not know if I will still be around to hear what people will say about my impact, if any, on their lives or at least their practices.
I do not know if I’ll have time to visit my country the Philippines again. It is difficult to travel for 17 hours straight even if it’s business class from JFK in New York to the Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila, which was what we did last time on PAL, not including hotels, transportation to the airport, security checks, TSA, long queues and hours of waiting time. I asked myself, what is there to do? I do not teach anymore. There isn’t much to do when most everybody has their own lives to live and work to attend to. Except for my youngest brother Roland, who offered his house to us to stay in, there is really nobody close to me there now. I also discovered that we cannot get medical coverage, not even if we are willing to pay for it. So we have to foot the bill for every medical appointment, hospital, surgeries, procedures and medications. I believe they do not provide the PT and OT either or caretakers, which qualified seniors get here in he US under Medicare. And of course, if we move back to the Philippines, we won’t have senior citizen meetings to attend. It’s true we can hire any number of help to cook and drive, etc. but they are not trained to assist Lola with her daily needs.
A reality we have to face: we are old (Lola is 84, I am 85) and we do not know how long we’re going to be around. I am happy that I am still healthy enough to take care of her. We’ve been advised to look into funeral arrangements in the Philippines and Easton. Since our family is here now, we’ve decided on the latter. We are planning ahead — LWT and power attorney, etc. — so that we will not burden our kids later on, especially if there is an emergency. Right now it is our son Al who takes care of our finances, taxes, electronic and tech devices, bills, etc. We do not know what we’ll do without him.
I’ve donated most of my books to the Carlos P. Romulo Library in Tarlac, my hometown.
A large collection of my acupuncture, martial arts and healing arts books and CDs (lectures of Daoist priest Jeffrey Yuen) I have donated to INAM Philippines c/o CPRL but nobody at INAM has bothered to pick them up. Up to this date (7/20/26) the 3 boxes have been sitting at CPRL for the last 10 months! I intend to send CPRL the bulk of my book, CD and DVD collection. The rest of my possessions — swords and weapons, tapestries, thangkas, phurbas, bells, dorjes, paintings, photos, tchotckes, medals, pendants, meditation rugs and prayer shawls, statues, petrified wood, ad infinitum – I’ll leave to my family to dispose of as they wish. I have already given away many of my “things” and at 85 I am too exhausted to look for deserving recipients.
Many of my friends have died: Salvador “Biuddy” Carlota, Frankie Llaguno, Heherson Alvarez, Nelson Navarro, Jose David Lapuz, Ed Maranan, Editor Nacpil, Carmencita Aguilar, Jose Maria/Joma Sison, Josue “Sonny” Villa, Chito Sta Romana. A few of them were colleagues in the elite Banana Club, an exclusive fraternity of male writers, BMOCs, intellectuals and lovers. We used to say in Tagalog: Parang dahon, isa-isa tayong nalalagas. Literal translation: Like leaves, one by one we are shedding. My closest friend in the Philippines, Ed Labitag. a law professor, with whom I went to law school in the early 1960s, e-mailed me to say he was being treated for pneumonia. A week later another friend Temy Rivera, a dean at the political science department of the University of the Philippines, wrote that Ed had just passed away. A week later I received the news that Temy himself had suddenly died from pancreatic cancer. Some of these people were prestigious: one was a senator, another was Supreme Court justice, still another was a famous writer and poet and another was a guerilla revolutionary who was killed in an exchange of fire with the military, two were ambassadors to China. They were my contemporaries in the University. I have memories of our times in college together, the late night adventures of healthy males, the sophomoric university writings, the activist demos in front of Congress and the US embassy, the rowdy student conferences in Baguio City, the intercollegiate speech competitions and the endless term papers in Arts and Sciences. Their deaths signaled the loss of a whole era to me. At 85, I feel terribly alone as if a whole company has vanished around me.
A Kungfu Lesson:
In Mark V. Wiley’s podcast with me as his guest (shown in the Video and Audio section of the website), I said that during my training in Dragon Tiger Fujian Temple Kungfu my teacher Lao Kim told me to do a single movement (from Kang Li) repeatedly for at least 30 minutes. I did not know why but I realized later on that there was a hidden code embedded in the movement, a key that one discovered only after many repetitions. What I found was not only the martial application of the technique but surprisingly an experience of energy/Qi. I concluded that repetition of a movement, whether it is Shaolin or Wudang, brings us beyond the physical to a level of vibration so that the whole body seems to have been transformed into an astonishing frequency. I tried to do each form as many times as I could. With Mantak Chia’s short Tai chi chi kung 1 form I could do10 times non-stop. With the Yang Tai chi chuan/108, which is a lot longer, I could only do 5 times before my knees got sore and I had to stop. But even at that point, I had a different experience altogether: an awareness of Stillness, as if time and space have dissolved and I am just pure Energy floating in the Void. Sometimes, it is not the number of forms one knows that is important and crucial. It is how many times one does a single form consecutively that really matters and gifts us with a mystical “high.” I do not know if Yang Sau-Chaung did it for that reason but I suggested this when I said in my e-mail that he did the form 20 times a day. I believe that if you do a Tai Chi Chuan form repeatedly over time, as I have, you’ll probably be able to access certain energetic and spiritual experiences, i.e., if – a big if – you are lucky to be blessed by the gods.
Another lesson I learned after studying the Tao Te Ching (and other religious texts) is that it is a book of concepts and doctrines and provides a philosophical framework but it does not lead us to an actual practice. It is an actual practice that leads us back to the Tao Te Ching. I realized this when I went back to the basics of Taoist practice like the Inner Smile, 6 Healing Sounds and the Microcosmic Orbit Xiao Zhou Tian/Small Heavenly Circle which, after my heart by-pass. I did 2-3 hours at night and 2-3 hours in the morning. Lying down during my recovery, I did nothing much except to do repetitions of those three formulas. They brought me the key to a different energetic experience and to a better understanding of the Tao Te Ching. Just different ways of doing them — like the Lightning Path in the MCO — made a huge difference.
Travels:
My granddaughter Ava wrote a lovely e-mail and sent photos from her sojourn in London and Paris before she flew to Milan to meet the rest of the family. My son Al sent us photos of their trek in the Dolomites and dinner in Venice. I told Lola, our kids are jet-setters! They made me feel nostalgic about our travels. But we’ve done enough in our lifetime: Egypt (including a Nile cruise), Indonesia (Bali and Java), China (Silk Road and a Yangzi River Cruise), Mediterranean (Italy, Greece (the Oracle of Delphi was a highlight for me and Ava and Isabel on Summer Solstice), Spain, among many others), Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar … It’s overwhelming to even think about it. Some were sacred places: Glastonbury, Stonehenge, Angkor Wat, Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca, Iao Valley on Maui, Avebury, Borobudur, stone circles in Scotland, St Catherine in Slovenia, the caves of Dunhuang, the peaks of Huangshan, Iguazu Falls in Brazil (the biggest in the world), Kilauea volcano in Hawaii, the Flaming Mountain on the Silk Road, Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, and of course Mount Banahaw in the Philippines …
On Tai chi Push Hands:
When I was training in Classical Yang Family Tai chi chuan, Medium Frame, Tiger Style, with Master Gin Soon Chu in Boston in the 1990s, students did not learn and were not allowed to Push Hands until they had finished and gone through 2 corrections of the 108 solo fist form, from beginning to the end. Meantime, they learned a form of Tai chi walking, solo or with a partner, and Dalu/Great Pulling and they learned to work with Chu shifu on their posture — described in the short essay “Developing the Tai Chi Chuan Body” in my book “Of Fire and Water: Alchemy and Transformation” (Tambuli Media:2023)*. I asked for 4 corrections of the whole form before I did Push Hands which took more than a year. Then in the actual Push Hands training, there were several levels: stationary, moving, basic movements, until it culminated in “Broken Flowers.” Along the way, the Master demonstrated different Fa Jing methods, starting with Ting Jing/listening, shoulder, Peng and its various techniques, etc. It is really difficult to describe. Some of it involved manipulation of the Qi. The Push Hands became more challenging as the student learned other forms: Staff-Spear, Dao/Saber 1, 2 and 3, Jian/Sword 1and 2, San shou/2-man sparring, Chang Chuan/Long Fist and San Shou/2 Person Sparring. In short, Push Hands was part of a curriculum and was influenced by and interfaced with other methods: the student does not jump into it at the start; s/he has to slowly learn and develop step by step. If the student does not go through this curriculum, they will most probably just use old habits and/or grappling and not embody the essential nature (“steel wrapped in cotton,” among them) and the unique fa jing of Classical Yang Family Tai chi chuan.
And Last-But-Not-Least Department covers Isabel B. Navarro, Ph. D:
We attended her graduation with a degree in Bio-Engineering at the University of Pennylvania. We had a toast at dinner. The next day we bought the Penn sweatshirts. We watched her defense of the dissertation on livestream. Midway through the presentation Lola fell asleep. When she woke up, she asked me: “Did you understand it?” Just yesterday I told Isabel it was brilliant but I did not understand anything! She went out of her way to explain it:
Thank you for watching. If you want to tell people about it:
I have developed an automation system for people who use microfluidic devices (very small plumbing/factory mixers, really!) to make special materials (mostly micro- and nano-materials, which simply means very small).
One of those materials was used in the COVID vaccine. (This is called a lipid nanoparticle. Drew Weissman, the Nobel Laureate who is a Penn faculty, helped invent them and is still researching them. The outside membrane of this particle is made of the same components our cells are made from. That is how they are able to merge with our cells and deliver their cargo inside the body.)
The automation system allows researchers (even ones who don’t know much about robotics) to make almost a thousand different formulations per hour, so they can test their effectiveness. This will allow more researchers to make and study these materials, which are being developed to treat many diseases, including dengue, malaria, and HIV.
I guess that’s a bit like the Trojan Horse method she was trying to explain to me when she was awarded a fellowship by the National Science Foundation for a research paper she wrote. This old Lolo is still having a hard time comprehending the concept! Anyway I could only quote her because I am just beginning to see where she is going. Her dissertation showed the different components of the machine she developed. It is definitely elaborate … and cheaper to assemble and I hope scientists can use it to treat diseases. That has been Isabel’s dream since graduation from high school: She wanted to find a way to treat diseases.
I am so happy to have a Ph.D in the family!
