Another two years has passed, and a few things are happening that has led me to write this update. I was actually inspired to do this because I had a feeling that I needed to edit the previous blog post and remove some of the details which were less directly focused on Give Freely Receive Freely, and as I was doing that I realized that I have a few things going on at the moment that might be worth posting about.
The main thing is that I am travelling overseas at the end of the month to teach some international workshops for the first time since before the pandemic (more on how that is specifically relevant a bit lower down in the post).
Dealing with my situation and some of the events that occurred in my personal life over the last few years has kept me in New Zealand for much longer than anticipated, and in many ways I have felt quite stuck here. It has been interesting watching how other businesses similar to my qigong teaching have developed across the last four years, both online and in specific locations that I had planned to operate from. Basically they have flourished – the plan I had was a good one, and the timing was good. There is every reason to suppose that my own business would have flourished similarly had I not been delayed and been able to execute it as planned.
An Update On Progress
My own teaching has gone well and grown to a significant degree, but not being able to operate fully in the way that I had planned and would have like to means that the growth trajectory has been much slower than it otherwise might have been. I estimate that my business is probably about an order of magnitude smaller than it would have been if I had been able to follow the intended plan and put all of the necessary pieces in place.
I now have three major 200 hour training courses that I offer online, focusing on principles and practices around each of the three major historical applications of qigong (the path of the healer, the warrior, and the sage). I has been a huge amount of work to put these together, but is quite fulfilling to be able to share these practices and principles with a broad range of people, who then go on to teach them to others. This leaves me with one more major course to produce and offer – on the direct healing application of qigong as a treatment modality, and I will also offer a variety of other shorter courses on specific topics over time.
So in many ways I have accomplished a lot in these four years – just on a much smaller scale than I otherwise might have. The format that I have produced these courses in is good and offers an excellent learning experience for course participants, but the ongoing running of the courses is also very time and administration intensive, limiting my ability to grow the courses beyond their current size – there are only so many people I can handle at a time on the courses in the current format. Being stuck in New Zealand during this time has also greatly limited my ability to offer live intensive training in the way that I would like to, but it now seems like I am on the cusp of being ready to start reshaping my teaching and business towards the original planned format which will allow me to grow my teaching much more effectively, and in many ways offer and even richer learning experience for people wanting to delve deep into the principles and practice of qigong.
Overcoming Inertia
All of the various issues that were keeping me in New Zealand now seem to be coming to a close. There is one that I am waiting on that should be resolved in a couple of weeks, so perhaps I shouldn’t count my chickens just yet, but things are looking good for me to be unencumbered with nothing restricting my ability to travel next year to teach and explore possible locations to base myself from in the medium term. I am also at the stage with course development, where even though I have one last major course to put together using the format I have been using, I will also look to produce the first of the courses in the original format I had planned, which will be much more scaleable – enabling me to reach many more people with the practices, and in the longer term as I am able to produce more courses in this format – freeing my time up so that less time is needed to be spent on running existing courses and more time can be spent on developing other aspects of teaching as well as having more time available for my personal life.
So it is an encouraging, but also quite daunting time in some ways. It feels good to be able to hopefully finally move forward with some of my previous plans – but also the world environment has changed quite a bit over the last four years. It does not seem to be nearly as straightforward or easy for me to execute those plans as it would have been prior to the pandemic – a few things have become a bit more complicated in the world.
I also feel like I personally have quite a bit of inertia. I have been so enmeshed in dealing with some things here in New Zealand, and in just getting on with and keeping up with my work with the online courses in their current format, that I feel like my horizons have narrowed somewhat. I think that maybe it feels more difficult for me to organize travel, and workshops, and retreats etc than maybe it actually is – just because I haven’t done anything like that in so long… I do think there are some additional challenges in organizing and running these sorts of things now compared to before the pandemic, but also I am just out of practice.
Overseas Workshops – and GFRF
And that is where the overseas workshops at the end of the month come in! I will be making just a short trip to Melbourne in Australia to teach 3 short qigong workshops while I am there. They have come about in a somewhat impromptu way – inspired by a friend who is going there for business and suggested I should come while he is there so we can hang out. I thought about it for a bit and decided that if I also ran some workshops while I am there it would be a worthwhile trip.
I think this will be a really good way for me to start breaking out of the inertia I have had. It’s just a short trip, and while travel costs are certainly higher than before the pandemic, they are manageable for a trip to a nearby destination like this, so there is not too much riding on having to have a certain number of people attend the workshops in order to make it viable or anything like that. I think this will help me to get comfortable with travelling and teaching, and organizing all the logistics involved in running events again in a very manageable way, and will help me to start to build some momentum towards travelling and teaching more extensively next year.
It will also be good to simply be out there connecting directly with people again, and supporting some of the qigong instructors who have done some of my online qigong courses. I’m kind of cautiously excited about it.
In addition to this – I am planning on running one of the workshops completely Give Freely Receive Freely as well! While I have continued to use GFRF from time to time in small ways over the last 4 years, this will be the first time I have done an event completely on this basis in a loooong time, and it feels good to do that . So two of the workshops will have set prices, and the last one will be GFRF. It will be interesting to see how that all goes.
Other notes:
Prices and Inflation
Another thing I am having to deal with at the moment is increasing prices. As you are probably aware, inflation had been very high all around the world over the last few years, but the prices for my courses have remained the same since the early stages of the pandemic. One of the things with having set prices is that you do need to adjust them to the changing economic and financial environment from time to time. It’s an interesting time to be making these kinds of adjustments because even though there has been a lot of inflation and therefore increased costs to run the business, potential participants are also having to deal with a wide range of increased personal costs, making it harder for many of them to afford things like qigong training. It’s a bit of a balancing act – needing to increase prices but not wanting to make the courses unaffordable. Amongst other things, I want to be able to pay the people that help me with teaching the courses more, and they are currently priced in a way that there isn’t a lot of room to do that without increasing the prices. So – for now I am going to be increasing the prices for the next time the courses run just a little bit for now. Not as much as I need to in order to bring them in line with other increased costs, but enough that I can make a small increase to the rates that I pay my support staff – and I will probably need to increase the prices again in the not too distant future.
My Financial Situation
I wrote a bit about this in the last post – laying out the broad view of the position that experimenting with GFRF for so long had left me in with regard to both income and an asset/capital base. So as an update on that, I have continued to make progress in recovering from this over the last two years. I am still not quite all the way to where I would say I am fully financially stable and secure, but much as with the other things I have mentioned earlier in this post – potentially on the cusp of breaking through in this area into a much healthier state of being. So encouraging progress there.
Conclusion
Much as I predicted – the disruptions to my earlier plans would take several years to recover from and get back on track – they have, but I am now at that point where I seem to be close to moving forwards in a way similar to my original plans. This has largely been made possibly by giving myself the stability of operating using regular pricing during this time, and it feels good to be in a much more positive position now. As part of this, I am now also at a point where it may be possible for me to start to use Give Freely Receive Freely a little more again – as I am for one of the workshops in Melbourne at the end of the month. I look forward to doing this, but will do so cautiously so that I can maintain the progress in sustainability that I have achieved over the last several years.