Reflections from the Other Side of the Journey

I thought I would write more while I was in China.

Before I left, I imagined quiet evenings in Wudang when I would sit down and put the day into words. But there was simply too much happening. Too much to see, too much to learn, too much to feel. I was living the experience rather than analyzing it.

Now I’m home, and the reflection has begun.

I’m happy to be here. Truly happy. I came home to a life I love, to people I love, to work that feels meaningful, to all the familiar comforts of home-sweet-home.

And yet, there is a strange homesickness for the Wudang Mountains.

Maybe homesickness isn’t quite the right word... It feels more like the weight of unfinished business. Like I left something there—or perhaps something there is still waiting for me.

Coming home has been bittersweet in a way I didn’t expect.

Before I left for China, I wrote about my intention to arrive with an empty cup. I wanted to go without needing to prove what I knew. I wanted to be teachable. To listen. To observe. To become a student again.

Looking back, I think I honored that intention as well as my very-human-self was capable of doing.

Teaching is such a natural role for me that it would have been easy to fall back into it. Even in Wudang, people asked for my guidance frequently. When I was asked, I helped. But I tried to be careful not to let that pull me out of the reason I had come.

I was there to learn.

So, I kept returning to the empty cup.

That became important in another way, too.

I had told myself not to arrive with expectations. Expectations have a sneaky way of becoming demands: This should happen. I should be treated this way. This experience should look like the picture I created in my mind.

And then reality inevitably arrives.

A few times, I caught myself feeling disappointed or frustrated because something wasn’t unfolding the way I thought it would. Ego appeared. I noticed it.

I wish I could say I transcended it, but I didn't.

However, I did catch it.

And each time, I had the opportunity to empty the cup again. To stop asking the experience to be what I expected and to be present with what was actually in front of me.

It didn’t escape me that moments like these are part of the training, too.

There is one thing I understood very clearly while I was there.

As much as I loved Wudang—as connected as I felt to the mountains, the practice, my teachers and the people I met—I never felt that I was supposed to leave my life behind and stay there.

My life is here.

My purpose is here.

Everything I was learning in China was meant to come home with me.

There is something powerful about traveling to the source of a tradition. About standing on those mountains, practicing in the rain, learning from people who have devoted their lives to these arts, and experiencing a culture that cannot be fully understood through books, videos or even years of practice from thousands of miles away.

Most people I know will never have that experience.

They may never stand on those mountains. They may never train with a Tai Chi master there. They may never feel the mist moving through those peaks or hear the sounds of practice echoing through the courtyard.

But maybe they don’t have to.

Because some of us will go.

We will go with empty cups. We will listen. We will practice. We will make mistakes. We will confront our expectations and our egos. We will absorb what we can, knowing that we will never understand all of it.

And then we will come home.

Not pretending to be masters because we stood on a mountain. Not trying to recreate China in Virginia. But carrying something back with us.

A little more understanding…reverence…patience. Maybe a different way of moving, teaching, or seeing.

I think that is what I am beginning to understand about this trip.

I went to Wudang believing my task was to empty my cup, and to some extent it was.

But an empty cup is meant to receive something.

And eventually, you have to carry it home.

~~Rhiannon