What I did on my holidays, beware, many words, minimal content.

I’ve been away for nearly two months, about four weeks of which was spent in Penang with Master Yap, so I feel there really ought to be something to share.

And yet, for all that it was completely bloody marvellous, it was really just movement along the same extremely gradual trajectory of the last two and a bit years. Spending time with Sifu Yap certainly accelerates my progress, but I’m not sure if it was enough to provide discernible events to relate.

Penang, at least, I can talk about. It’s an odd mixture. Undeveloped green hills in the middle. Roads, extremely tall buildings and all the junk of civilisation round the north and east edges, and in the south, nearer to the airport. Nice beaches in the north. Rural bits to the west, I’m told. It’s an island, btw, for anyone who knows as much as I did a few years ago.

The population is a mixture of Chinese, Muslim, Hindu and “other”, roughly proportional to that of the planet as a whole. They seem to get on ok, despite the odd rumbling from mainland newspapers about Islamic law overrunning the general constitution of Malaysia. (Or something. Don’t quote me.)

I didn’t see a huge amount of nature. But there were monkeys, at the youth park and the botanical garden, lots of bright birds and butterflies, amazing whooping noises all about, and I saw one huge and very military looking black and yellow spider, which I was told, much to my concern, was common in some areas.

People were pretty universally mellow and friendly. I was walking through the night market at Ferringhi Beach (dodgy dvds and fake Rolexes aplenty) and heard a call of “Sir, sir!” I turned around wearily, expecting to have to politely refuse some godawful tat, but they were just warning me to watch my head on the corner of the next stall. I was delighted, and ashamed.

The food is astonishing, and incredibly cheap. Hardly anyone cooks at home, it seems, since there’s just no point, when lots of wonderful things on hawker stalls cost 2 or 3 Ringit (that’s less than a dollar to you folks). And the fruit! Durian, rambutans, mangosteens, jack fruit, water chestnuts, awesome coconuts. It is considered an insult to the island if you do not develop a “Penang belly” at high speed.

I did manage to squeeze in the occasional moment of meditation. The first two weeks centered around a seven day meditation retreat, the first that Sifu Yap has done. By my own reckoning I was easily the least accomplished meditator of the forty-odd participants, many of whom were from Canada, where his CFQ system has been taught for quite a few years.

So I can’t say much about the advanced levels of his meditation practices, mainly because he’d prefer us not to for safety reasons, but also because I was largely ignoring all that and endeavouring to just bathe in the transmission and feel my arse on the chair, as ever.

(See my previous article, as munch, if you wish, or haven’t before.)

What I can mention is a brief moment of insight I had while drifting towards sleep at night somewhere around day 4. For a few minutes I was poised between the pull of opposing forces, my “own” will to be with the reality inside my body, and the pull of my mind out into thought and abstraction.

This tenuous and temporary equilibrium, which was quite like the start of a well matched tug of war contest, allowed me to see the two realms/states/whatevers up close. It left me with an experiential certainty that the sensational reality inside my body is the true, real, valid one, and that the reality created, translated, filtered or presented by mind is a shabby fake next to it, however compelling it may seem.

So that was nice.


Shortly after the retreat I went to New Zealand for three weeks to visit friends. They have two girls aged 10 and 7, four cats, a most excellent dog, and the use of three horses. So I spent a great deal of time picking up horse poo and playing mildly acrimonious board games (it’s the parents you have to watch!) and, well, suffice it to say that I had a lovely time wherein my meditative discipline, such as it is, only just survived intact.

(Lest you think that I’m one of these chaps who swans around the planet squandering ancestral wealth and living for pleasure alone, I’m keen to mention that this whole holiday followed about two and half years of grim-ish virtue when I went exactly nowhere, and that the shackles of work are about to reclaim me. Not that that makes me a better person or anything….)

So, anyway, I returned to Penang for another two weeks, consisting of largely unstructured hanging about at Sifu Yap’s healing centre, trying not to be too much in the way. I was lucky enough to coincide with a local student who was coming around for an hour or two each day to learn levels one and two (meridian exercises and basic meditation, respectively) and was invited to sit in. This was the fourth time I’ve done this stuff, and I’m delighted to say that I’m maybe starting to get it.

Sifu Yap works seven days a week, from before I was getting there to five or six in the evening, sometimes coming back for classes or more healing appointments between eight and ten at night. A range of people come in for treatments, the majority Chinese, a few others, the odd westerner. Some children, some grannies, a few monks, all in states of mild to extreme disrepair.

So apart from the above classes, I would get to spend time with him on slow days, or if someone was late, over lunch, if he had time to go and eat, and when he insisted on driving me back to my hotel at night. So I had plenty of opportunity to ask all my daft questions and be frequently reassured that my meditation was no worse than one might expect. The rest of the days I spent “hitchhiking”, i.e. meditating nearby while treatments were in progress, and practicing movements out the back if the heat allowed.

The main changes in me that I can appreciate are physical. I have reclaimed much of my shoulders and arms, can feel my own speech, if it’s quiet enough, in some of my cells as far down as my ankles, and have had spontaneous (and very pleasant) pulsing of energy in my throat and perineum and various limbs. I twitch even more than before, as blockages release from my spine, neck and shoulders when I relax. Some of my skull tension has gone, although there’s plenty left. I have a somewhat improved communication with my eyes and jaw. I’ve been moved to give up sugar and use my left hand more.

I’m less interested in evaluating whether I’m calmer or happier, as that seems like a self-defeating process. But I kind of think I am. I do feel enormous friendship and gratitude towards Sifu Yap, who gives so much, and in such an ordinary, pragmatic and cheerful fashion, without allowing himself to be taken advantage of.

This post is not intended to promote his teachings or imply that they are better than anyone else’s. What I would like to reaffirm is that it has done me a great deal of good to find one teacher I’m really drawn to, practice his stuff consistently, and gradually stop doing everything else.

(I would also, while I’m on the subject, recommend finding a teacher about whom you feel positive, but you can’t, at least to start with, say exactly why. That way you don’t pick them because they pander to your intellectual preferences, but because you resonate with them in some degree at a non-verbal, non-mental level.)

So that’s about it. I’m back in England, and it’s freezing, and I have to go to work. Hope this was of some interest.

mmmmmmm. penang belly.
bet you aint got one.


Sounds all most lovely Ian, thankyou for writing about it. I liked reading it and it was a mini retreat to do so.