Over 25 years in the past, I attended boarding college and received to stay, work, and examine with some outstanding individuals. A kind of individuals was a classmate named Hui Neng Amos.
Neng was one in all my dorm prefects. And along with being a typically form and simple going man, Neng practiced this unusual and–to my provincial thoughts–mysterious factor referred to as Tai Chi.
All I knew about it was that it appeared to present Neng preternatural powers of grace and energy on the athletic subject.
On the time, it didn’t happen to me that partially, it in all probability defined his poise off the sector too.
A few years later, after I got interested within the meditative arts, I began to find out about a type of shifting meditation referred to as Tai Chi. In my thoughts, I at all times related this historical type of meditation with my outdated classmate.
So I used to be delighted when a number of years in the past, Neng and I reconnected by way of Fb. I used to be intrigued to see that he had created one thing referred to as the Conscious Arts Venture.
On this episode, we discover Hui Neng’s story, about how he grew up in a small rural New Hampshire college cum intentional group the place he began studying and training tai chi and seated meditation from the wee age of three.
After school, his travels took him throughout America to India and extra. Neng would journey away from his roots in contemplative observe, solely to return as an grownup, extra dedicated than ever and now educating these sacred practices by way of the Conscious Arts Venture.
However there’s far more to this story, as you’ll study.
Throughout the interview, Neng takes us again to the time of his grandfather, Albert Amos, who was a detailed pal of the nice civil rights luminary Howard Thurman, and a deacon in his church.
Thurman was one of many first main champions of Gandhi’s nonviolent rules within the West, imparting these highly effective tenets of peaceable resistance to Martin Luther King.
Albert Amos himself was a socialist organizer within the black Bay Space group. And as Neng says it:
Our household was definitely steeped within the concepts that Howard Thurman espoused; a large group of black intellectuals shared of their inception, and the Civil Rights Motion was arguably constructed there (within the Bay Space), outdoors the grasp of the Deep South, the place it was famously utilized. He was a unprecedented human being, and I definitely depend him as a forefather.
Certainly, Thurman was the rationale Neng’s father received to go to varsity. Thurman put in a phrase for him at U.C. San Francisco, the place he was very profitable. Hui Neng’s father then went on to proceed his research in economics at U.C. Berkeley.
However the extraordinary intersections in Neng’s household don’t cease with Thurman. All through the ’60s, Neng’s father was a pupil of the nice Zen Grasp Shunryu Suzuki, founding father of the San Francisco Zen Middle and the Tassajara Monastery.
At the moment, along with working the Conscious Arts Venture, Neng teaches English on the Foundation College in Ahwatukee, AZ. He’s married to Sonya Amos and has seven youngsters aged 5 months to 17 years. He teaches tai chi and his spouse practices Buti yoga. Neng likes to sing and paint and inform dad jokes.(-:
