wudang summer camp 2024

july 4-8

Naramata, BC

just a little summer camp…

So we were planning on having a little something out on our land this summer for our local students, but we’ve had some international interest so we are opening this up, just eight slots to anyone who might be interested.

We’ll host this five day event over an extended weekend, from the evening of Thursday July 4th to the morning of Monday July 8th

Introduction to San Feng Lineage

We’re going to make this thing a little introduction to our lineage in its three aspects 三乘: qigong, martial arts, and meditation.

For the qigong, we’re going with the classic Five Animals Qigong. It’s just the best. Especially for the summer. We will be covering the full qigong in all its glory, including movements 身, breath 口, and visualizations 意.

For the martial arts we have decided to go with the straight sword, jian 剑. We will be using it as a gateway to explore how we do martial arts in general in our lineage. We’ll mostly be covering sword basics, and through those the fundamentals of hand technique 手法, eye technique 眼神, body movement 身法, footwork 步法, and partner training 对打, also exploring the internal dimension of the practice 内功 and the spiritual dimension of the sword 神功.

For meditation we will be teaching the basic method of San Feng meditation, sitting in stillness 静坐 and how that is instrumental to the first stage of inner alchemy, establishing the foundation 筑基.

It’s not on the curriculum but we’ll also teach you some Daoist music. There are some great little ditties, magical songs, for when you’re wandering through the forest, which we’ll do plenty of as well.

schedule

To that end the schedule will look a lot like how our daily training schedule went when we were living in China:

Morning (6:30-7:30 a.m.)

• Five Animals Qigong 五型气功

Breakfast (8:00-9:00)

Mid-Morning Training (10:00-12:00)

• Kung Fu Basics 武术基本功

• Sword Basics 基本剑法

• Internal Sword Training 剑内功

Lunch (12:30-1:30)

Afternoon Training (3:30-5:30)

• Sword Basics 基本剑法

• Sword Partner Training 剑法对炼

Dinner (6:00-7:00)

Meditation (8:00-9:30)

• Sitting in Stillness 静坐

• Establishing the Foundation 筑基

accomodations

I’m going to be very real with you here, this is like a beta test of a summer camp. It’s going to be rustic. We bought this land a few years ago and in that time we’ve made our home here, a well and a yurt and off grid power system and everything, and we have plans to expand our capacity to host people in the future, but as of right now all we can offer are campsites. But I’ll be developing them this spring, putting up platforms and we’ll provide the tents and sleeping bags and sleeping pads for any out-of-towners who make it all this way.

Our property is 14 acres that back up directly onto Okanagan Mountain Provincial Park. We see tons of bears on our land and a fair number of rattle snakes and the occasional mountain lion. I’m from Texas where the cougars are small, but up here they are absolute beasts, and the bears are serious business too, so absolutely no food in your tent.

It’s also going to be the height of summer in the driest region in Canada so forest fires are a serious threat, so no fires or fire-making devices of any kind.

food

So the accommodations will be rustic, but this camp will probably have the best food of any summer camp we’ll ever have because my mom is coming up from New Mexico to do all the cooking. She has spent most of her career in positions where she was cooking regularly for huge groups of people, so the ten-or-so of us at this camp will be a walk in the park for her. I’ll post the prospective menu when she and I come up with it.

On top of that we’re also partnering with Naramata’s own Puzzlegrass Farm who will provide organic veggies from healthy soil, harvested with love.

location

Our property is 30 minutes from Penticton and 15 minutes past Naramata. We have the uniquely BC advantage of being in a mountain forest but simultaneously only 15 minutes from a number of beautiful lake beaches. July can be kinda hot in the Okanagan, Canada’s hottest region and its only desert, but it always cools off in the evening up where we live, about 1,000 feet above the lake and halfway up Okanagan Mountain. And we have a three main training spaces on the property: the hill (most exposed), the meadow (mostly shaded), and the creek (fully shaded, right next to our snow-fed creek), so we’ll train wherever the weather pushes us.

If you’re flying in I would advise coming through YLW (Kelowna) or possibly directly into Penticton (YYF), whatever’s clever. In either case if you can make your way to Penticton we can pick you up there and bring you the rest of the way. Our land can be kinda hard to find. Google will lead you on a wild goose chase. We kinda like that though.

catastrophe disclaimer

BC is beautiful but it is treacherous and we’re often visited by forest fires. In the event that something like that happens, we’ll refund your money, but, if you’re flying in, we’d also advise getting a refundable ticket just in case it comes to this. All our training will be outdoors, and you’ll be camping on our land, so it would be super miserable if you were just huffing smoke the whole time. So we won’t hesitate to cancel the thing if the weather takes a turn for the worse. Not super likely, but definitely a possibility. So just a heads up.

price

So this camp is $750 CAD for 4 days and 3 nights of training, room, and board. You can reserve your spot by clicking the link below and putting down a nonrefundable $250 CAD deposit: