I was eighteen years old the first time I understood what practice was actually for.
Not technique. Not strength. Not even discipline, though discipline was certainly part of it. Something quieter and more fundamental than any of those things.
I was sitting around a large ornate dinner table in a room full of lacquered Chinese furniture, surrounded by a vast library of books, next to a teacher I respected more than almost anyone I had ever met — and across from a man I had never seen before. A man who was, without any visible effort, the most at-ease human being in the room.
His name was Pedro Zhang. Zhāng Dàoshì 璋道士. A formal practitioner of Xiu Dao in the Quan Zhen Pai — the Complete Reality lineage of Daoism. He was also, improbably, a mathematics professor who had lived most of his life in Mexico and written a math textbook in Spanish.
He smiled at us over his glasses like he already knew something we were going to spend years figuring out.
“Let’s learn about Spiritual Warriorship,” he said.
He unrolled large sheets of paper, picked up a brush, and began.
The First Character: Skillfulness
士 — Shì
Pedro drew the character slowly, explaining as the brush moved.
This, he said, is an image of a person who has found or made something from the Land that is now more effective. A spear. A tool. Something that extends what the Human Being alone can do.
More practice. More skill. The spear is not dangerous on its own.
He looked up. “Having a powerful weapon — or becoming a powerful weapon — is a great responsibility.”
We all had ink and paper and brushes. We began to try.
I remember the feeling of the brush not doing what I imagined. The characters coming out lumpy and uncertain. This was already a teaching. Skill is not wished into being. It accrues through repetition, through failure, through the quiet persistence of showing up again after showing up badly.
In Shaolin Nei Gong, Skillfulness is not just physical. It is the willingness to become competent — truly competent, not just fluent in the vocabulary of the practice. It is the commitment to close the gap between what you know and what you can do, one session at a time, for as long as it takes.
Most people who begin inner cultivation want the fruit before they have grown the tree.
Skillfulness is the growing of the tree.
The Second Character: Willingness
志 — Zhì
Pedro smiled impishly and continued.
“This character,” he said, “is for when skill needs a heart.”
Same person. Same ground. But now there is something underneath — the radical for your Heart (Xin 心).Set featured image
Zhì is often translated as Willpower. But Pedro was pointing at something softer and more durable than willpower. Blunt willpower burns out. It turns practice into a performance of effort. It confuses strain with progress.
What Pedro was pointing at was Willingness — the patient, open-hearted commitment to a direction. The ability to let your practice shape your life, rather than forcing your life into the shape of your practice.
Life — and certainly the life of a practitioner — is never a sprint. It is a long relationship. With your body. With your teacher. With the tradition. With the Mystery that lives at the centre of all genuine practice.
I felt it in my body when he spoke. Willingness has a different texture than willpower. It is quieter. It has more room in it. It can hold both the session that goes beautifully and the session that goes nowhere, and keep showing up with the same fundamental openness.
That is a very different quality than grinding.
Sometimes, every skill needs a heart.
The Third Character: Authenticity
眞 — Zhēn
“This means truth,” Pedro said. “But not the kind you argue about.”
He showed us the middle of the character first. Zì 自 — a human face with a thumb pointing at it. The Chinese gesture for Self. “This is you,” he said. “Not your name. Not your story. The personal experiences and sensations of being you — right now.”
Then he showed the fire beneath it. “This is practice. Meditation. Breath. Discipline. Repetition. Sitting still when you don’t want to.”
And at the top, a hand carved utensil — or, some believe, flowers. “Refinement and Beauty. What grows when you stop fighting with yourself.”
Authenticity is not a destination you arrive at by thinking harder about who you really are. It is what emerges when you apply consistent, honest practice to the stuck and defended places in your experience — when you let the slow heat of Nei Gong do what it does, without trying to control the outcome.
At eighteen, this was a revelation. That I would never be in control of the process of becoming an authentic person. That the self that would emerge from this practice was not a self I could plan or design in advance.
Pedro paused before continuing. “Make sure your practice can be playful sometimes. The only thing you can choose is how — and how often — you practice.”
The fire does the rest.
The Fourth Character: Measured Resolve
正 — Zhèng
“This,” Pedro indicated, “is solving problems in a measured way.”
An image of a skilled person with a carpenter’s square and a plumbline. If you want to build something that lasts, the foundation needs to be lined up just right. You have to measure the process at every important step.
This is not stubbornness. It is not rigidity. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, Zheng Qi 正氣 is the expression of Qi that fights infection, that heals from injuries, that holds the body’s integrity against whatever is trying to compromise it. You need inner resolve to resolve anything.
Pedro talked about how the real battles in practice — like the real battles in life — are rarely about defeating an enemy. They are about finding a resolution. Measured Resolve means you bring both strength and adaptability. You are upright without being righteous. Steadfast in your meditation today, never rigid about how or why things will need to change tomorrow.
What I remember most is what he didn’t say. He didn’t say: follow the rules, stay the course, white-knuckle your way through. He was pointing at something more like a master carpenter — someone who has internalized precision so completely that it becomes a quality of attention, not a quality of effort.
This was not a calligraphy lesson. It was an initiation wearing the clothes of an afternoon invitation to try some brush painting.
What He Actually Gave Us
Decades later, I still return to these four qualities. Not as a checklist. As a mirror.
Skillfulness — am I actually closing the gap between knowing and doing?
Willingness — is my practice open-hearted, or is it grinding?
Authenticity — am I letting the fire do its work, or am I trying to manage the outcome?
Measured Resolve — am I building on a true foundation, or performing stability?
These are not qualities you achieve and then possess. They are qualities you practice, the same way you practice a form. You return to them, again and again, and each time you see something a little different — because you are a little different.
This is, I think, what Pedro Zhang was quietly pointing at the whole time. Not four virtues to acquire. Four mirrors to practice in front of.
The extraordinary thing about Shaolin Nei Gong — and about any genuine inner cultivation tradition — is that it does not ask you to become someone else. It asks you to become more completely yourself. More skilled, more willing, more authentic, more resolved in the particular and irreplaceable way that only you can be.
The lineage holds the form.
You bring the Life.
And if you are willing to show up — consistently, playfully, honestly — the practice will do things in you that you cannot plan, predict, or manufacture.
That is the potency Pedro Zhang was smiling about, that afternoon, over his glasses, in a room full of beautiful books.
It is still available.
It is, in fact, waiting for you right now.
The Dreaming Elephant Daoist Studies Institute offers training in Shaolin Nei Gong grounded in classical lineage, 40 years of lived practice, and the understanding that every genuine practitioner begins exactly where they are. If these four qualities speak to something already moving in you — that is not a coincidence. [Explore the training →]
