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Pizza from Chen Xiao Wang (internet post)

I found the following post on the internet by wujimon and I share the same experience with him as we may have been at the same seminar. My editions are in italics.

From wujimon:

Got a chance to taste some pizza from Chen Xiao Wang (CXW) over the weekend and man was it good. I’m not sure I could handle anymore since my legs are pretty much shot right now. For those who haven’t been to a seminar with CXW, he has 3 ways to teach corrections. He calls them Soup, Spaghetti, and Pizza. If you ask for soup, you’ll get some light posture corrections, more like a general idea. With spaghetti you’ll get a bit more on the structural alignment in a pretty high stance, enough to make you feel the burn in the legs.

With pizza, it’s the whole nine yards. Master Chen asks you to get into a posture and he then proceeds to tweak EVERYTHING. With me, I had some tweaking in the angle and placement of my hips, shifting some of the alignment with my arms/shoulders/fingers.  He ran his fingers down my spine and adjusted the neck, mid back and mingmen area.  Master Chen then walked behind me and shifted my hips just enough to send a rushing pain down my right leg. I’m assuming his shifting released the tension in my hips sending it all down into my thighs. I expereienced a rushing of warm feeling from upper body down the thighs like someone just turned on a tap

When I had asked for corrections in one of the silk reeling exercises, Master Chen first corrected alignment of the 6 harmonies (knee/elbow, shoulder/hips, hand/feet).  Then while I’m holding the posture in agony, he starts to guide me through the silk reeling exercise noting all the places the qi should be during each count (hand, elbow, should(er), waist, dantien, down and to the back etc). Master Chen like to  breaks the exercise down into 4 counts.  At each and every count, he’ll adjust again to make sure weight is not being shifted to compensate for the pain… he has a pretty good eye for these kind of things. On top of that, if anyone asks a question, he asks them to come up and he demonstrates the corrections in front of the whole seminar audience. I literally had to look “into the distance” to keep my mind strong so that I would not collapse due to the pain in my legs.

There were three brave souls who held a posture for so long while Master Chen tweaked them that their whole body began to shake and tremble.  Just when they were about to fall to the ground Master Chen would catch them. Quite a sight! It was a great seminar and I really felt I learned a lot more about silk reeling.  Believe it or not, it was a 2 full day (around 6 hrs/day) of just silk reeling and standing meditation, but the amount of detail Master Chen covers and his teaching method and corrections are just phenomenal!