12/06/2021
I am often contacted by young men asking me how to develop in the internal arts. They proclaim to be serious and dedicated and so here is my advice to them as a collective group:
1 - write a dedicated timetable of personal practice and stick to it so you get into a routine. Make sure you get up at a decent time and go to bed early enough to be refreshed when you awake.
2 - eat well, healthily and enough. Reduce sugar, don’t drink much alcohol if you drink any at all.
3 - get off your lazy backside and get out of your bedroom and go seek a teacher. Chances are, you will have to hunt around and see what you can find. The first teacher you come across may be awesome, but it is highly unlikely.
4 - don’t just make s**t up. I have lost count of the ‘energy guru healer masters’ who contact me via social media telling me how they just stumbled across some great inner power or developed their own system. Just stop it already! Find a system and a teacher.....and John Chang doesn’t visit you in your dreams, I promise!
5 - stop watching Manga you oddballs. Cartoons are for children. Dragon Ball Z is not an instructional video; it is a brain-rotting waste of time.
6 - drop the video games or, since they are now a part of normal life, restrict your usage greatly. Every hour spent on a video game is an hour of your finite life wasted.
7 - use the natural energy of youth to drive towards and hunt out what you want.
8 - develop the quality of kindness for those around and combine this with humility to help you develop in a healthy manner.
9 - do not ignore the practical sides of life. Make sure you are able to earn money at the same time as train. There is nothing admirable about totally ditching society and becoming a bum in the name of fighting back against the system. This is something you will regret.
10 - look beyond cosplay-style systems that overly focus on the outer look of what they do. Go deeper than this. Look for substance, not nice outfits.
11 - avoid all the books about sexual practice. The world doesn’t need any more Ta***ic, sexual, conscious coupling Instagram types. It needs people with actual substance.