Ken Cohen

[treelizard]

Greetings,

This morning I had the privilege and honor of drinking tea with Mr. Ken Cohen, author of The Way of Qi Gong: The Art and Science of Chinese Energy Healing, as well as Honoring the Medicine:The Essential Guide to Native American Medicine. Mr. Cohen is truly a master in every sense of the word, and many of the stories he told brought me to tears. He is humble, balanced, polite, passionate and kind. His knowledge and wisdom is phenomenal and I just can't even describe how thankful I am to have met him. I also attended a qi gong workshop he did, and my favorite part was hearing Mr. Cohen's stories. I would really encourage anybody interested in the study of qi gong to check out his books and attend his classes. His web page is http://www.qigonghealing.com/ and has extensive articles and FAQs as well.

I met with Mr. Cohen for an interview, and will post the link on here once it's transcribed and edited and he's had the chance to look over it as well.

Yael

[Sagacious Lu]

I'll have to explore his web-site when I have a little more time. I'll be looking forward to reading your interview

[treelizard]

The site is great. And thanks!! Please be patient because transcribing is time-consuming and I promised he could look at it before I print it to make sure there are no errors.

Some people you meet and just wonder what you have done to be blessed enough to break bread (or mooncakes, in this instance) with them, you know what I mean? Oh yeah, and a little known factoid; Mr. Cohen studies FMA!

I'll have to explore his web-site when I have a little more time. I'll be looking forward to reading your interview

[Sagacious Lu]

I'm glad it went well for you, he sounds like a very interesting guy. I'm a little surprised that he teaches qi gong but practices an FMA... cool stuff. My Shr fu teaches qi gong as well as kung fu. A couple summers ago our school rented a cabin in the mountains (GA) for a retreat. The cabin had a deck that faced east so we all got up just before dawn to do a qi gong form as the sun was rising. What an amazing way to start the day. After we finished it was like everything around me was much crisper and more vibrant than usual. Unfortunately so much happened that weekend that I didn't remember a lot of the form. I should make it a point to revisit it though.

[blitz]

Looking forward to the interview hehe. Just curios how much does transcribing an interview take?

[treelizard]

Transcribing an interview takes...uh...all day and all night. Sometimes longer. I am a bit of a workaholic and have trouble stopping once I start, so I haven't even started. It is hard to estimate because it depends on how long the interview was, how fast people spoke, how clearly they spoke, and how passionate I am about the material (it takes longer if the material isn't as good). But it is basically playing a sentence or part of a sentence, typing it up, hitting rewind, etc. in five-second increments. Then trying to figure out spelling of names, last names, any words or phrases I'm unfamiliar with or are in other languages. In other interviews I've had to do quite a bit of fact-checking to make sure I'm not printing misinformation. In this instance, I promised Mr. Cohen I'd mail him a hard copy ofthe interview before I posted it anywhere to make sure there aren't any corrections he wanted to make. I don't usually do this, ever since comic artist Peter Bagge made me delete my favorite sentence in an interview we did for my zine, but we were having such a lovely conversation over tea and I wanted Mr. Cohen to feel at ease saying whatever came up without worrying about how it might look in print.

As far as Mr. Cohen studying FMA as well as being a qi gong master, yeah he's very good at going very deep into different traditions but also keeping them separate. I had asked him about stillness vs. movement in different martial arts styles.

[treelizard]

Yes, yes, it took me three months, due to letters lost in the mail and other such concerns. I do think that this interview is good enough that it is worth the wait, though. Check it out:

http://www.dirttime.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=24&Itemid=28

[Sagacious Lu]

Nice work, that was a pretty good read. Are you familiar with Joseph Campbell at all? A lot of Cohen's ideas about the over lap of spiritual traditions sound very similar to Campbell. If you haven't read it I'd highly recommend "The Power of Myth". I think there's a lot of truth to what he's saying about the internet; it's a great tool but there are too many people who hide behind it and use it as a buffer between them and life. I strongly disagree that we're devolving though; there are always negatives that can be focused on but IMHO the truth is that humanity is wiser than ever.

[treelizard]

Glad you liked it! He is brilliant. I love Campbell and Jung. I'm a mystic at heart. I'm not sure if we're devolving or not. The internet doesn't bother me, my friend's seven-year-old having a cell phone does, though. lol