It was no longer about disobeying my parents to make them upset at me, but trying to tell them why it was important for me to do what I needed to do to survive. Movie actors ask, “What’s my motivation?”, I’d ask myself what’s my motivation in everything I did; telling jokes, practicing martial arts, did that make me a better person or not, and how did all of this make me feel.
The Chi Whisperer
Dr. Craig: A Martial Journey to Understanding Oneself
In 1977, while at Cornell, where practicing marital arts was never so intense, I became more self-aware during thousands of conversations in my search to understand what makes other people tick, listening to what they want to do in life and how they planned to do it, while recognizing how one’s background or culture shaped who they were, and I tried to show support for those who were down and out. To me martial arts is about training not to fight and learning to heal. By 1979 it was time to learn how to heal myself; nine years later how to heal others.So often we are told to understand someone is to put ourselves in other people’ shoes. This is just a small part of understanding that helps us to develop sympathy and empathy. True understanding is not just “putting ourselves in other peoples’ shoes” because we only feel how we feel when we are in their shoes.Days later in high school an English teacher told the class something about to understand a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That irked me. In silent defiance, I thought, “Forget walking a mile in my shoe, spend a minute in my mind.” No one can. That’s why I decided to commit suicide, plus I also didn’t want my parents to see me waste away. Without meds, I’m dead in two weeks.July 20, 1973, devastation. While driving with dad, the radio said Lee died in Hong Kong. How can a man in perfect shape suddenly die? Am I that vulnerable? Spirit deflated, I silently cried for a week. It’s as if something wanted me to die. Then I thought about something I read in high school Latin Class, Virgil’s Aneied, where homework was translating a page a night into English. I recall a sentence, “When you’re in pain, it makes you think and with thought comes wisdom.”The key take away from Sun Tzu’s above quote is that if you at least understand yourself, regardless of any situation you face in life, you have a better chance of surviving or having a positive outcome. What’s the Chi connection that comes with understanding yourself and others?Then I saw Bruce Lee in The Big Boss (1972), and went from being depressed and waiting to die, to wanting to live and learn what Lee was doing. Days later in a drug store I stumbled upon a magazine about Lee that was paired with a magazine about kung fu featuring Sun Tzu’s opening quote and how Shaolin monks saved abandoned children dying from disease by teaching them kung fu and chi kung (the spelling back then). I knew then that I must dedicate my life to martial arts and somehow get to Shaolin. I understood from Sun Tzu that I indeed had an enemy that I wanted dead, cystic fibrosis (CF). Since I knew my enemy, I needed to understand myself.So how did martial arts allow me to understand myself? Bruce Lee noted that it was important to be honest with yourself. I began developing a deep awareness of my greatest fears, what made me angry, happy, self-reflecting on why I was weak, and how to rectify that, and most importantly my decision-making process was become more self-assured.I then saw Lee’s death as a test to see if I had the will to continue to seek, find and climb the kung fu and chi kung mountains that physically don’t exist, yet esoterically might be revealed in my journey. Nothing worthwhile is easy, so why would saving my own life be any different? Maybe it’s not about the value of the pursuit but the worthiness to learn. Understanding is crucial in various aspects of life and plays a significant role in personal, social, and academic or professional domains. We all want to be understood. When we are understood, it makes us feel that we matter! Same with Chi! Chi awaits to be understood.
Sun Tzu’s (aka Swuin Zi; circa 544 BC – 496 BC) book, The Art of War, is a concisely profound treatise that explores various aspect of military tactics and strategies that emphasizes the importance of understanding one’s enemy. In Chapter 3: Attack by Strategem, one of his most important paraphrased quotes cites, “If you know yourself and your opponent, there is no fear in a hundred battles, if you know yourself and not your opponent, you have a 50% chance of survival, if you don’t know yourself or your opponent, you will always lose.”
