Seeing as it’s Chinese New Year, pretty much the whole of China is on holiday. Most people who aren’t native Beijingers have gone home, and the shops and restaurants are mostly shut. My Chinese flatmates are amongst those who’ve gone away, so I have the place to myself for a week, not many people left to hang out with, and not many places I can go to – so it’s an excellent opportunity to catch up on a lot of things.
Number one, of course, is job applications. Nothing in China this week, because no-one is working, but I’ve applied for several in Singapore, a couple in the UK, and even one in India that looked interesting. I still have a few more to send off in the next day or two.
As part of the general theme of personal brand development, I want to develop an e-portfolio of work I’ve done, to expand this site and supplement the blog. I have a number of things I’ve written here in hard copy, but not the original Word files, so I’m typing them out. First is a report I co-authored back in 1997: “The Welsh Assembly, Electronic Government, and Participatory Democracy in the 21st Century”. Should be online soon.
I’m also taking the opportunity to restart working on Qigong and Vipassana meditation. The two go together very well, so I’m spending about an hour on each in the mornings.
A few of my Kung Fu teachers here in Beijing have taught Qigong, but always the Eight Brocades of Silk form, or Ba Duan Jin (great pictures here). While this is a really good form, it focuses mostly on stretching the ligaments and joints. I do need this, but I wanted to do more of the forms I learned with Nam Wah Pai in Singapore. The form of qigong taught by Mister Sim is more about using vibrations to massage the internal organs, encouraging them to detoxify and regenerate. I still remember a lot, and have my notes, but I was a bit concerned that I was forgetting details. It’s similar to some of the Nei Gong taught by Mantak Chia, so when I was in Singapore a couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of Bone Marrow Nei Kung. This book has a lot of the techniques I know, such as stimulating the acupuncture lines by hitting them, but also a lot of techniques that I know nothing about – and I’m not going to try, such as the “weight lifting” (if you’ve read the book, you’ll know what I mean!).
Still, it turns out that Mantak Chia is based in Thailand, which was news to me. Given that Thailand is also where I’ve attended two Vipassana retreats, if the job hunt doesn’t work out, perhaps I should head on down to Thailand for a while….
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