Hello!
If you are one of the people who comes here and reads my occasional posting, be aware that some changes to Laughing Ox are likely to take place in the near future.
The site will be moving away from WordPress to a much simple ‘static’ HTML site, once I can manage the migration. This will save me a considerable amount of money, and make the site a simpler and (hopefully) easier to navigate experience.
Hello, after a rather lengthy period away from posting here. It has been roughly a year since a last update, and well more than a year since Bob died somewhat unexpectedly. In that time, my practice of Taiji as a formal, solo art has been very sporadic.
Some of this is no doubt due to avoidance and grief, and I’m moving forward with that as best as I am able, given the broader circumstances.
Hello all!
While I did not precisely succeed in my goal of having additional material up for this week, I did manage to spend some hours editing the first four Jellyfish recordings. These are a series of audio recordings Bob created to walk beginners through what he called the “Jellyfish Exercise”.
This is a set of breathing and interoception exercises he developed over the last four or five years. The became a very important practice for him, a way of connecting with the act of being alive and embodied in the world. We sometimes opened practice sessions with them (not often enough, in my opinion), or took breaks using them.
As previously mentioned, I intend to keep things at Laughing Ox moving forward in some form or another. I have a number of possible options, the ‘simplest’ of which is to keep posting relevant material here.
To that end, I am beginning to process the large archive of email that was exchanged between Sifu Iden and myself over the last five or six years. There are perhaps 300 email threads from this time window in my GMail account, and some of those have 30 or so individual messages in them. Many are short things, of no real consequence to the work Bob and I have been undertaking. Others are many thousands of words digging deeply into topics.
It is with a heavy heart that I must report that Sifu Bob Iden of Laughing Ox Internal Arts passed early this month (March 2024). Bob was a very singular individual, the most cheerful of curmudgeons, and together we developed a very deep and exciting understanding of the inner workings of Taiji and their broader implications that I can’t imagine I would have stumbled into, practicing with anyone else.
The site is currently under construction, and will be in flux for a bit.
