Hello! I'm so glad you joined us at The Monkey Temple. It's been a while in the making but now its finally here. Please feel free to ask any questions you may have and feel free to discuss amongst yourselves. Get to know you're fellow students. I would be interesting for you to share your own journeys if you like. I will answer any questions you have as quickly as possible. I will also set up a WhattsApp group specifically for all of us at The Monkey Temple. You can use this to talk to me and ask questions during the Live Stream Classes. All very exciting!

I’ve always like martials arts and Kung Fu movies. As a child I was drawn to the courage and invincibility of its hero’s. Stories that would tell of a single person, who would come up against someone else of greater power and often evil intent who would confront them, possibly hurting a family member or dear friend and leave them beaten, broken and filled with a sense of injustice and righteous anger. This was often the turning point for the lead character. A place where they realised that either they changed and overcame the problem standing before them, or they would become a victim and justice could never be done. Obviously, this could not be allowed to happen, plus someone getting beaten up and then living their life in misery would not sell as a great movie! So, the character in this movie goes on a quest, a journey of transformation. They look to find a great Kung Fu master that can teach them the skills they require in order to confront and utterly defeat their enemy. Upon finding their teacher they dedicate countless hours to this study, going through great pains and passing the many tests that are laid before. They go through hardships and sometimes nearly quit. With the best hero's it's not just the body that is transformed but the mind and the spirit too. They become the positive reflection of their past selves; the caterpillar transformed into the butterfly. The victim into the warrior and the warrior is out for justice! We all know what happens next. Our hero finds and defeats the enemy. Often after being pushed to their limits and having to dig to great depths and using skills that they were previously incapable of reaching before they had studied Kung Fu. It’s the transformation we love to watch. We don’t like the beginning where the hero is beaten, we enjoy the hard work where we see them undergoing change but it’s the transformation that holds the most power and interest. Not only because it’s great cinema but because it's completely relatable to all of us. We see conflict on many levels in our lives and have all experienced the feel of defeat, shame and wanting some form of justice, to set the wrongs right. Perhaps playing out in our heads what we should have done or said. It’s relevant to us all. There are many points in my life that when I look back, I see that I was knocked down and often didn’t really get up and over the years these ‘knocks’ sat one atop another, slowy weighting me down. This had the effect of changing the way I saw the world and led to a lot of self-pity and an anger that was held deep inside of me. As you can imagine this was not good. So why do I practice Taiji and Xing Yi Chuan? This has been a very drawn-out path to answer the question at the top of the page. I think it’s obvious. They offered you a chance to change, to improve yourself and not just on one level but many. With proper study we can see our health improve, keeping us healthier and stronger into old age. But also, we have to opportunity for introspection, we get to look at ourselves, look at our trauma’s, at why we act the way we do, at what makes us tick and what can be done to improve our lives. We get the chance to confront, accept, to grow and move forward. To be better and generous, not only to ourselves but to those around us, be they friend, family or someone pasted in the street it, matters not. Everyone is deserving. So ultimately, I guess you could say that I really started studying to help me resolve the conflict in my life and learn to have the courage to do and be better and to properly engage with the world around me. I continue with this every day. This is of course all very high minded and I completely understand that there is nothing wrong with just doing Taiji to improve you balance or strengthen your body or perhaps calm yourself down. There are a hundred reasons to practice, everyone is on their own path. This is just my reason. No more important than anyone else's. The most important thing in my mind is that we all do something, that we aren’t sedentary. Someone once said, ‘Flowing water never goes stale.’