Shocking Power

We got together again this week to train, meeting for the second time at our new home, which is a pavilion on public land near a school. We appreciated a thunderstorm from the wall-free enclosure last week, and when we got there today, it was hot and humid but certainly not raining. Immediately we kicked it off, getting in some good basic training and a little group turning before investigating together the methods of generating and using the shocking force, studying the Lion System strikes of that palm and trying to feel and find it carefully, sharing our insights with one another when we had them. It's weird to be hit with, that's one thing. For what we could do, which isn't much I'm sure, it is startling and off-balancing with kind of a residual desire to exhale when hit in the chest/shoulder area. Taking it in the arm fairly well hurts; in fact, it felt a bit like a concrete slab being dropped onto us, that discomfort seeming to build with repeated strikes, leaving the arm-under-fire feeling heavy and dead. The shocking strikes and our experiments with them were evidently our rain dance this evening.

Just as we were feeling like we made some progress with the the strikes, a thunder-bumper broke out around us, this time much windier than before. In fact, our concrete training floor was soon inlaid with streams and ponds from the wind driving the water in (I read online when I got home that roughly 1.25", 3.2 cm, fell while we were there). Then it calmed down, the lightning receding as we counted the brighter strokes off to estimate their distances: less than a mile... a mile and a half... just over two miles.... Then, all of a sudden, just as we really got back into investigating some of the forces contained in striking, sharing what nuggets we had each gleaned in previous workshops with He Jinbao in the falls past along with what we've come to understand since those times, what could only have been a microburst hit us. The wind and heavy rain came essentially from nowhere, and if I had to guess, the blast, which lasted probably for two or three minutes straight, was in the 80 mph range (130 km/hr), numbers roughly confirmed from another online weather map. It came from the east-northeast, and in that direction is a small hill that lays only feet from the pavilion, rising higher than the structure's approximately ten-foot roof. The wind and rain were so intense that they actually came in from that side, despite the hill, and blew straight through, coming out the far side, absolutely soaking us in the process. My shoes, in fact, are essentially a swamp, but I was soaked to dripping from head to toe. That ended our party pretty much on the dot, though we stood there together laughing our heads off over the sheer power and surprise of the thing, and, if you'll pardon the pun, we were all three feeling pretty charged-up by the whole thing.

The moral of this story, I guess, is that sometimes we should be careful about which rain dances we choose to do... or that we should accept what nature gives us and enjoy it!