Door III · Part One · Entering: Of the Threshold of Return
«Whoever returns changed does not return to the same place».
Touch the door to open it.
The Fierce Tiger Pushes Mountains
I mean Pushing Mountains, from the Eighteen Lohan Hands: standing, pushing both palms forward.
My intention in practicing it is to order my strength, without confusing it with the need to win.
The book describes this form step by step. The description accompanies learning with an instructor and, afterwards, helps you remember the movements.
«I have decided not to teach these arts to anyone under eighteen». Common Guide to the Practices.
- Opening
- Sense, soften, and smile from the heart.
- Learning
- Learn this sequence with an instructor.
- Closing
- Leave room for the flow and for stillness. Finish with the common closing at the lower Dantian and the facial massage.
- Care
- Avoid tensing your shoulders or pushing with muscular force.
To carry into the day
To carry this door into the day, you can pause before seeking another thrill and recognize how you are. There is no need to resolve it at once.
Seven days
Each day, before seeking another thrill, pause and recognize how you are. Then mark the day.
0 of 7 days
«If something does not serve you, let it go». What you mark stays on this device.
Write from there
Remember a recent time when you sought an intense thrill. Stay with what you remember of that day: how you were before, what you felt while it happened, and how you found yourself afterwards.
There may be satisfaction, weariness, calm, sadness, or something you cannot yet name. What were you seeking in that experience? Did you find any of it?
It may be a place, a person, or a way of being with yourself. What do you find there? Is there something of that shelter you miss today?
If the home you remember was not a place of welcome, you can ask yourself what you would need to feel received today. There is no need to return to a place where you do not wish to be.
Stay for a moment with that tension. You can feel different desires without having to resolve them right away.
Choose one of these questions and write from an experience of your own. Leave room for what you do not yet understand. When you finish, notice whether something appears that you would like to tend, take up again, or ask for in your life today.
If you can, write on white paper with a graphite pencil. If you don’t have them at hand, write here and then print your notebook.
What you write here is neither sent nor saved: it is erased when you close the site or reload the page. Print it before you leave, and read your journal again often.
More about this door
«No está la cosa en pensar mucho, sino en amar mucho».
Teresa writes to her nuns about the difficulties of prayer. Reading her, I think of those years when I mistook intensity for joy. I had left my homeland; it took me eight years to return.
St. Teresa of Ávila · The Interior Castle (Las Moradas) · “Let nothing disturb thee”
St. Teresa of Ávila in the book- Eighteen Lohan Hands
- A series of eighteen Chi Kung exercises of the Shaolin tradition, taught in the author’s school; from it come the practices of Doors I to V: Lifting the Sky with Both Hands, Looking Back to Carry the Moon Upon and Within Me (Holding the Moon), The Fierce Tiger Pushes Mountains, Plucking Stars, Changing Galaxies (Harvesting Stars), and Shooting Arrows to the Left and Right. The book’s thirteen practices do not form a single traditional series.
- Chi Kung
- The Chinese art of cultivating energy through posture, movement, breath, and mind (qigong in pinyin).
- Lower Dantian (also spelled dantien)
- “Field of cinnabar”: a center in the lower belly, in the energetic language of this tradition. In the book, attention returns there before the closing facial massage.
- Mansions (Moradas)
- The rooms of St. Teresa of Ávila’s interior castle (The Interior Castle, 1577): the soul as a castle of many rooms, with God at the center.
- The Miami years
Dives by starlight and, in the morning, John Pennekamp, in Key Largo.
- 1992
Returns to Venezuela, to his father’s company, after eight years in Miami.
The full story is in the book.
A letter every month
Once a month, a short letter from Sifu Carmine «Tony» Colarusso, in Spanish, English, or Italian. You can unsubscribe from any letter.
Of the Voice That Leads Unto Silence
«Some words exist to die in peace within the silence».
Enter through Door IV«You can read one door a week, or stay longer in the one that asks for it».
How to walk through the doorsBack to the thirteen doors