Garden of Eden, tree of knowledge & the serpent

The Kung training session went really well for me this morning despite the freezing temperature and the brief snow fall (I practice outdoor on the patio all year round). A good Chi Kung session always makes such a difference to the form which I leave to the end of the training session:- it makes the form much fuller and more substantial because there is abundance of Chi within; there's a lot more sensitivity and awareness and you feel you can hear the Chi coursing through each single cell of your body. There's more connection with the outside environment, the cosmic energy as you feel almost transparent (the division between your own body and the outside world is diminished). At times like this, joy simply wells up from within and it by no means stops at the end of the form session; the fullness, bounciness and joy carries you through the rest of the day.
However, without the painfull or even back-breaking (especially when I first started) Chi Kung work, there's no way I could get so much pleasure out of my form practice. So it's a case of 'bitterness followed by sweetness'. In this particular case, it's 1 measure of bitterness followed by 10 measures of sweetness! The abundant Chi I get through my Chi Kung practice is giving me a perfect health, stamina, healthy appetite, good sleep, a peaceful mind, general contentment independent of material circumstances and, touch wood, a probable longer life.

This makes me think how most people would rather chase transient pleasures just for the moment while sacraficing their well-being in the long run:- getting drunk tonight only to suffer a vicious hung-over the next day; overeating or eating junk food only to get over-weight and numerous health problems to go with it; not taking due caution in keeping themselves warm in cold weather only to suffer the pain of chronic athritis later in life... Given the choice of spending the hour doing painful Chi Kung exercises in the cold or putting the feet up in front of the fire and TV, 999 people out of every thousand would go for the latter because people would rather have the pleasant and suffer the trully unpleasant later in many folds.