The story began about 40 years ago, early-to-mid 70’s in South-Western part of former Soviet Union. I am not sure what was the exact date since I was a kid and I had no idea I would be talking about it on something called Podcast. I was not into any sports or other outdoor activity. I loved reading encyclopedia, or doing any crafts at home. I was a complete nerd with almost no friends. I don’t even know if I had any friends. Just classmates and acquaintances. But I loved learning something new and interesting. And I still do!

For the First time I got introduced to the World of extraordinary by my Great Uncle. He was an energy healer, and periodically he was performing some healing on my grandma and my mom. I know that my mom did not really believe into energy healing, but I think she just did not wanna offend her uncle who was a great positive man.

My first lessons in energy healing I received from him. Well, I was a kid, I did not care about the healing at that time. But he showed me some exercises, like how to touch the moon with my hand and feel its roughness, or how to make a beam of energy coming out of my finger and project it like a flash light on the wall in a dark room, etc.

For me it was just… WOW!! I really felt like Harry Potter at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft!

However, we did not practice a whole lot. Later my mom told me that she thought that her uncle was a little off, and she was afraid that he could contaminate my thinking with some kind of junk information. But perhaps what he told me was already enough to put me on a path for the rest of my life.

For a while I did not do much with what I’ve learned. Perhaps, I would’ve forgotten all about it, but I think the life had different plans for me.

I was not a very healthy kid. I was catching cold very easy and very often. Also, I grew up with headaches at least 4 to 5 times a week, often even more. My mom has them too. So I was a frequent guest at the children’s hospital.

My headaches were one of the reason I dropped music class, though I studied an accordion for a few years.

Real Beginning of my Holistic Life Story

My life changing experience happened in early 80’s. I was placed at the hospital to get some extensive tests done to figure out what was wrong with my head. I was seen by neurologist, psychiatrist, cardiologist and several other specialists. They could not find anything wrong with me physically, and eventually they diagnosed me with some kind of neuro-vascular disorder. they used it as a generic diagnosis when nothing else matched.

My hospital bed I was sleeping on, was really old and awful, the mattress had so huge indent in the middle that I was literally in a V-shape laying on my back. I could not fall sleep on my back since I was used to sleeping on my side. But I could not roll on my side because I would have to make a sideway V-shape with my body. I was not used to doing that. It was uncomfortable, but there were no other beds available, and I had to sleep on my back.

I mentioned before that I was a nerd. Trying to count or do something to fall asleep in my hospital bed, I remembered that I read about something called Autogenic Training. This system was developed in Germany in early 30’s by Dr. Schultz. We will be talking about this technique in our future podcast. But basically this is a set of visualization techniques which induce the state of relaxation. It can be done lying down or sitting.

When I saw it first, I did not pay much attention. However, I kept enough in my memory to recall some of the techniques. I made my hands, arms, legs, whole body feel warm and heavy… and I fell asleep! Yes, that was wonderful! I repeated it next day, and it worked again!

After I came back from the hospital, I found several scientific magazines where I read about Autogenic Training. I memorized scripts and started practicing daily. I was spending some time in the shower letting the water run on my neck and along my spine so I could remember the warm feeling. Also I was filling up the sink with very warm water and holding my hands in it, so I could remember how warm hands feel. Then I was trying to reproduce these feelings when I was practicing. There are quite a few techniques to help develop these feelings I’ve learned over the years. Again, we will talk about them in our future podcast.

I learned that mechanism in Autogenic Training has a lot to do with meditation techniques used in Yoga. So this brought me to Yoga. Though Yoga was not really popular or even known in early 80’s, I still could find information and even a teacher. Since our country and India were really great friends at that time, there was nothing against my interest in Indian culture. However people thought that I was weird if they saw me practicing outside. This was definitely out of norm. I started with asanas, breathing, or pranayama, and meditation, or dhyana. Later I got more into all 8 steps of Hatkha Yoga. We will definitely dedicate more than one podcast talking about different aspects of Yoga. If we get lucky, I will even invite some teachers from local Yoga community.

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How I got into martial arts is still a mystery even for me. Can you imagine a young city boy who has no interest in sports what so ever, hates any physical activities, has no information about martial arts other than it is some kind of extreme exercises which take decades to master. He has no access to video or any martial arts movies or books, no internet existed at that time, and on the top of all that, martial arts were prohibited by law and controlled by the government. And one day this boy wakes up ready to make a commitment to dedicate the rest of his life to the study of martial arts. Yes, that was me.

Many of you perhaps know the famous The chicken and the egg dilemma. We are not going into that right now. What I cannot completely understand, is whether my holistic lifestyle was a result of my training, or was I brought into this World already destined to take the path of martial arts? If I don’t believe in destiny, I have no other explanation for my spontaneous, absolutely no common sense decision as a young teenager.

Anyway, One day I woke up with a burning desire to study martial arts. Like I said, it was prohibited by law, but I could only find, through somebody who knew somebody, a Karate group organized by either KGB or Internal Affairs, I am not really sure now. I know that it was for the agents, and it had nothing to do with sports, competitions, belts, etc..

That was not easy! Getting into full speed martial art training with no previous workout experience was a real life test. A survival. That was an environment where the words “I can’t” simply did not exist. That was the World where I had to demonstrate what I was made of. I was going home after my very first training completely exhausted, beat up and bruised, but I was not gonna quit. I was stubborn to the point when nobody could tell me that I couldn’t do it. I would do it just to prove that I could. I spent several years practicing Karate. I was totally fanatic about it. I was training every day, in the morning and at night. I did Yoga in the morning plus some karate moves, and I mostly did karate for couple of hours every night. I got pretty decent in my moves, and old timers and even our sensei started noticing me. He was inviting me periodically to spar with him. That usually cost me several new bruises on my body, but the learning experience was priceless!

The school of life is just like any other school: once you start getting comfortable, it’s time to go to the next grade. So it was with my karate training.

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One day my teacher came up to me and pointed at the man who was a guest in our dojo. That man was doing some weird slow moves I’ve never seen before, and my teacher suggested that I go and spar with the guest. Sure enough, I came up to the man and respectfully asked him to spar. He agreed. However there was one condition: he promised not to hit me, but I had to fight with full force. Otherwise – no deal. I agreed. We began sparring. For the first time in my life I was seriously confused. He was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. I could not hit him or do anything to him. One second he was in front of me, and next second he was tapping on my shoulder standing behind me with a big smile. After sparring HE THANKED ME for my time, and left. Nobody really knew who he was and where he came from. Nobody in the class knew what he was doing, though we had some long-timers in martial arts, people who had decades of experience.

He came in a couple of times more, and every time I had a chance to spar with him. Equally unsuccessful every time. I even asked him to teach me, and he promised to think about it. It took a while before this man came to the class again. But that time, he did not practice, he just came in and sat down on the bench. I knew he was observing the class. I took a break to talk to him. We talked about his art, about where I was in life etc. After we talked I asked him to teach me, and he promised to think about it, again. However, that time we exchanged phone numbers. And several days later I got accepted to be his student. Just me out of several people who asked. Why me? I found out later. He had very few students, and one of them was his own son. I was bigger than his son, and a couple of years older. A perfect punching bag, I mean, a training partner. Our class was rather small, no more than 5-6 people, and often it was just 3 of us only.

It took me a while to grasp this completely new concept in martial arts. Totally opposite of what I was doing before. Even though I saw the effectiveness of the system, I dropped karate in 89, 3 years later after I met my new teacher. I don’t regret I made this move. Though I think karate is a great system, Martial Art is like music: you gotta find your own stile that fits your personality. I was dedicating at least 5 hours a day to my training during breaks and weekends, and 3 hours a day when I was going to the university. That was when I learned that Martial Arts was not just about fighting. In fact, it is about avoiding fighting unless there’s no other way to resolve the conflict. I’ve learned about Taoism, various meditation techniques, vibrations, body conditioning, self programming, nutrition and even non-physical communication with the opponent. We will be talking about Martial Art I am practicing in a future podcast. You will learn about its relationships with other arts, like Russian Systema or Chinese Ba Gua.

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After I came to the US in 1995, I continued practicing martial arts and Yoga as a part of my daily routine. However at that time I started understanding that fighting techniques, meditation, music and some other disciplines are parts of one whole picture. I wanted to play music. I used to play an accordion as a kid, but I had to stop it due to my every day headaches. But with my practice and proper nutrition, I got them under control, and I wanted to get back into music. Not an accordion, but rather something small I could carry with me to my martial art practice in the park. The flute for example. I looked at several flutes, beginning with a recorder. I played a recorder and chinese bamboo flute di-tsu, but both of these instruments did not give me what I was looking for. I was trying to find Chinese Dong Xiao flute, however at that time I could not find any information about it on the internet. But I found Shakuhachi – Japanese bamboo flute. I won’t go into much details about my playing now, this deserves it’s own podcast, not just an episode. In fact, my non-profit project was build around my flute music. I called it Ancient Sounds of Peace. You can find it on internet at ancientsoundsofpeace.com. That is one word AncientSoundsOfPeace. Also you can find us on FaceBook at AncientSoundsOfPeace as well. There you can listen to some of my recordings, watch music slideshows  and download them for FREE. We will be talking about meditational music, ancient traditions etc. in future podcasts. The music for this podcast was also recorded by me.

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Bamboo flute opened the door into completely new World. The sound of bamboo brought me into meditation garden, Zen garden and tea garden. I got interested in oriental gardens and, of course, Tea. The whole new world of tea ceremonies and tea culture was opened to me. I felt like I was asleep all this time. Many things my teacher told me from the very beginning, all of a sudden started making sense. I saw how closely connected all this is! From that moment, gardening, tea ceremony, music and martial arts are parts of my training, and don’t go without each other. Each of these subjects will definitely make more than one episode on my podcast.

There are many other wonderful traditions I learned about, along the way. Besides shakuhachi, I play several other woodwind instruments, such as Native American flute, Armenian duduk, Australian didjeridoo, and several others. I am definitely not an expert in all of them, but I would like to bring other people to co-host some of my episodes with me, and talk about different wonderful traditions. Some of these episodes will be recorded on video, but I will also duplicate them on audio podcast as well. Just keep in mind that it is hard to demonstrate something like tea ceremony without video.

That’s the story. I can’t really squeeze 40 years in short talk. But hopefully you got some idea about where I am coming from. Hope you will be here for my next podcast.

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Peace!

Jin