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Over 25 years in the past, I attended boarding faculty and bought to dwell, work, and research with some exceptional folks. A kind of folks was a classmate named Hui Neng Amos.
Neng was certainly one of my dorm prefects. And along with being a usually form and straightforward going man, Neng practiced this unusual and–to my provincial thoughts–mysterious factor referred to as Tai Chi.
All I knew about it was that it appeared to offer Neng preternatural powers of grace and energy on the athletic discipline.
On the time, it didn’t happen to me that partly, it in all probability defined his poise off the sector too.
A few years later, after I got interested within the meditative arts, I began to study a type of shifting meditation referred to as Tai Chi. In my thoughts, I all the time related this historical type of meditation with my previous classmate.
So I used to be delighted when just a few years in the past, Neng and I reconnected by way of Fb. I used to be intrigued to see that he had created one thing referred to as the Mindful Arts Project.
On this episode, we discover Hui Neng’s story, about how he grew up in a small rural New Hampshire faculty cum intentional neighborhood the place he began studying and working towards tai chi and seated meditation from the wee age of three.
After school, his travels took him throughout America to India and extra. Neng would journey away from his roots in contemplative observe, solely to return as an grownup, extra dedicated than ever and now educating these sacred practices by the Conscious Arts Undertaking.
However there may be far more to this story, as you’ll study.
Throughout the interview, Neng takes us again to the time of his grandfather, Albert Amos, who was a detailed good friend of the nice civil rights luminary Howard Thurman, and a deacon in his church.
Thurman was one of many first main champions of Gandhi’s nonviolent rules within the West, imparting these highly effective tenets of peaceable resistance to Martin Luther King.
Albert Amos himself was a socialist organizer within the black Bay Space neighborhood. And as Neng says it:
Our household was actually steeped within the concepts that Howard Thurman espoused; a large group of black intellectuals shared of their inception, and the Civil Rights Motion was arguably constructed there (within the Bay Space), outdoors the grasp of the Deep South, the place it was famously utilized. He was a unprecedented human being, and I actually depend him as a forefather.
Certainly, Thurman was the rationale Neng’s father bought to go to varsity. Thurman put in a phrase for him at U.C. San Francisco, the place he was very profitable. Hui Neng’s father then went on to proceed his research in economics at U.C. Berkeley.
However the extraordinary intersections in Neng’s household don’t cease with Thurman. All through the ’60s, Neng’s father was a pupil of the nice Zen Grasp Shunryu Suzuki, founding father of the San Francisco Zen Middle and the Tassajara Monastery.
Right this moment, along with working the Conscious Arts Undertaking, Neng teaches English on the Foundation College in Ahwatukee, AZ. He’s married to Sonya Amos and has seven youngsters aged 5 months to 17 years. He teaches tai chi and his spouse practices Buti yoga. Neng likes to sing and paint and inform dad jokes.(-:
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