MY JOURNEY OF MASTERING METAPHYSICS (I)
QUESTION: Is it easy to learn to be a Chinese Metaphysics practitioner?
MY ANSWER: That depends on what caliber of Feng Shui Master you aspire to be.
With the Internet, it's easy to learn anything. But the trade secrets will never be found online but from an accomplished Master.
That also means it is an awful idea to figure out your Bazi and Feng Shui through online reading all on your own.
Learning is easy, mastery is another issue.
How far are you willing to go to earn your credentials?
I first wrote this post last March. I added more content this time, so here's a glimpse at how I began my journey into this fascinating and magical world of Chinese Metaphysics.
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Ten years is a long time to be learning anything.
I read that in the internet marketing world, it takes only 6 months of total immersion in your chosen niche to make yourself an expert and gain authority.
I had spent a decade. Learning Buddhism and Chinese Metaphysics.
Shifu gave me a name for my practice in 2009. I was reluctant. I don't think I am 'there' yet.
Shifu had high hopes for me. I was to be his second disciple, out of the fifteen he had, whom he felt is qualified to practice.
I half-heartedly registered the domain in 2011 and let it expired after a year.
After years of merry-go-round around bright shiny objects, last month, I bought the domain again, got the hosting and installed the Wordpress theme.
The next logical step would be to write the About Me page.
But I got stuck for months. Every imaginable material that teaches how to write a snazzy About Me, I probably have it somewhere in my laptop. Yet my brain throws up a blank screen, every time I use the search function. I could not even hand up the three articles that I promised Tavia. Even this post took me a week to write.
What a cruel joke for my brain to play on me. Perhaps all it will take is some random FB posts, for my brain to rewire its circuitry.
I was a very poor teenager student. I lived in a one-room flat for a decade. My family struggled to make ends meet. So I had this fancy ambition of making it big in life. Don't know how big but I was convinced I would be somebody who can give my family a better life.
Then one day, my parents got a Feng Shui master in to audit our home. Our home had gained a notoriety of having bad Feng Shui. Throughout the audit, I hovered around my parents, listening to every word the Master had to say.
What is this strange thing that promises to change our lives for the better? It sounded so magical. How does it work? If it is so powerful and effective, why are there people still suffering? Why can't it help everybody? Then nobody has to be in poverty!
My parents did not know how to answer my 101 whys.
The Encyclopedia Brown in me was determined to find out.
I maxed out my library card to borrow eight books, every weekend I was at the library. I poured over books on Feng Shui, Bazi and divination. This went on for a good 4-5 years.
The new-found ancient knowledge fascinated me. If this has the immense potential t o improve my family's and my life, I am going to learn it well.
Fast forward to my working life, I was delighted when I had saved enough to afford the courses conducted in Malaysia. But the thought of travelling alone to Kuala Lumpur and staying there for a week unnerved me. Ironic, when I fly for a living.
I was mulling over Lilian Too from Malaysia, Master Li Kuiming from Hong Kong and...
While scouring the net for alternatives, I found Master Raymond Lo, a professional Hong Kong practitioner who would be in town to run a Four Pillars of Destiny course.
I had never heard of him before, but he had a very credible profile. And within a month, I found myself sitting in a seminar room of 30 odd students, listening attentively to Master Raymond Lo. At 24, I was probably the youngest student there. My classmates flew in from all over South East Asia. Many of them were graduates from courses by other Masters like Joey Yap and Lilian Too etc, and a few of them were practising on a small scale.
The middle-aged lady, Sally, who sat beside me was from KL. She told me she had spent almost Ringgit $76K in her years of learning Chinese Metaphysics, yet she still felt ill-equipped to read a Bazi very thoroughly.
Such passion and dedication to learning. I was so inspired.
I bought my first Luo Pan (Chinese compass), tons of (expensive) books and wrote so many notes, that my right hand cramped.
It was weird to see English characters on a Luo Pan, but I guess it facilitated usability for the international students.
I had this tinge of sadness when there were more non-Chinese students than Chinese ones. Not that I think such wisdom should only be taught to the Chinese though.
I was also that irritating student who asked the most number of questions in class, holding back everyone from their breaks. I started understanding the world with a whole new perspective.
It was INTENSE.
I did not stop at learning only Bazi. I lapped up the I-ching divination and Feng Shui courses. I threw down thousands and thousands of dollars to learn it well. It wasn't easy to switch my flights around so that I can have that many consecutive off days in Singapore, but by a stroke of luck, everything fell into place.
I must have been so hungry for knowledge that the Universe had to grant me my wishes.
With my new-found amateurish divination skills, I tried my hand at predicting soccer results for the boyfriend-now-husband and had some small success.
(Bad bad thing to do, and I eventually learnt a lesson the hard way.)
Then, I got into my first food business and all those long hours of learning got thrown to the wind.
When my business closed after a brief three months, I remembered this forgotten interest of mine.
One fine day, I called Master Dai Hu, while waiting for the train at Jurong East station. He came recommended by the Husband's colleague and I was told that he was looking for a disciple.
What a dumb idea of mine to call someone important for the first time, at a busy and noisy station platform.
In that phone call, Shifu told me how my Chinese name wasn't favourable and that I should change it.
I had, honestly speaking, never bought into the Chinese name thingy. I told Shifu that I liked my name as it only had one Chinese character instead of the usual two.
That was despite him telling me that my name boded of hospitalisation and operations in my upper body before I hit 20 years old and poor inter-personal relationships.
Shifu was amazingly accurate, even though he didn't have my Bazi but just my name.
In the course of five years, I had landed in hospital twice and underwent two eye operations on separate occasions.
I was always the odd one out during schooling days. I didn't fit in anywhere much.
During my SQ training days, I was also the one who didn't have a lunch buddy and in my flying years, I was once bullied badly by a senior crew for a period of time. So badly that even our flight supervisor noticed and held a team meeting during our stay in LA, just to address this bullying issue.
Poor inter-personal luck also affected my entrepreneurial efforts. My first business failure led to a legal tussle between the landlord and a few of us tenants.
I learnt early in life that blind diligence does not mean I will succeed. Fat hope if I think my customers will acknowledge my hard work sooner or later and buy from me. Strong sales numbers will not last from empathy.
Yet despite the truth in what Shifu said, I rejected firmly his good intentions twice in the phone call. I assumed he was trying to do sales.
#yayapapayame #不知天高地厚
It was a call that moulded my next ten years.
What a nice fairytale ending it would be to say I finally found my life-calling. But life rarely happens perfectly.
To be continued.
