Over 25 years in the past, I attended boarding faculty and bought to stay, work, and research with some exceptional folks. A type of folks was a classmate named Hui Neng Amos.
Neng was considered one of my dorm prefects. And along with being a usually variety and simple going man, Neng practiced this unusual and–to my provincial thoughts–mysterious factor known as Tai Chi.
All I knew about it was that it appeared to present Neng preternatural powers of grace and energy on the athletic area.
On the time, it didn’t happen to me that partially, it in all probability defined his poise off the sphere too.
A few years later, once I took an interest within the meditative arts, I began to study a type of transferring meditation known as Tai Chi. In my thoughts, I all the time related this historic type of meditation with my previous classmate.
So I used to be delighted when a number of years in the past, Neng and I reconnected through Fb. I used to be intrigued to see that he had created one thing known as the Aware Arts Undertaking.
On this episode, we discover Hui Neng’s story, about how he grew up in a small rural New Hampshire faculty cum intentional group the place he began studying and working towards tai chi and seated meditation from the wee age of three.
After faculty, 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 instructing these sacred practices by the Aware Arts Undertaking.
However there may be rather more to this story, as you’ll study.
In the course of the interview, Neng takes us again to the time of his grandfather, Albert Amos, who was a detailed good friend 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 ideas 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 actually 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), exterior the grasp of the Deep South, the place it was famously utilized. He was a rare human being, and I actually depend him as a forefather.
Certainly, Thurman was the explanation Neng’s father bought to go to school. 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 scholar of the nice Zen Grasp Shunryu Suzuki, founding father of the San Francisco Zen Heart and the Tassajara Monastery.
At this time, along with working the Aware Arts Undertaking, Neng teaches English on the Foundation College in Ahwatukee, AZ. He’s married to Sonya Amos and has seven children 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.(-:
