about Kinthissa

 

Kinthissa was apprenticed for ten years to Gerda Geddes who pioneered the teaching of T'aichi Ch'uan in the UK. Gerda (Pytt) Geddes had lived in Shanghai in the period leading up to the revolution in China.She discovered T'aichi Ch'uan during that tumultuous time, but as a foreigner and as a woman, she found no master of the art to teach her. A few years later in HongKong, she was given an introduction to Choy HawkPang, a disciple of Yang ChengFu's who had fled mainland China. She was taught the Yang family's long form by Master Choy in the presence of an older unnamed master. After her first master's death, his son Choy KamMan continued to guide her.

Kinthissa encountered Pytt in London in 1974, where Pytt was the one untired-looking person in the entire School of Contemporary Dance. There began her apprenticeship in T'aichi. For some ten years, Kinthissa assisted her teacher and passed on Gerda Geddes' Yang Style T'aichi to students in London, Basel and Reykjavik.

During this time, two teachers of Vipassana, from Kinthissa's home country Burma, sensitized her to the arena of the mind at work within the frame of the body. Sayama Daw Mya Thwin and S. N. Goenka had been students of U Ba Khin at the Abode of Peace in Yangon together with Kinthissa's great-aunt Daw Mya Sein. Goenkaji, born in Burma of Indian descent, was charged by his teacher to bring back to India the great gift which India had given to the world, the Buddha Dhamma. Vipassana trains the awareness, as in the satipatthana sutta taught by the Buddha.

In China during the winter of 1986 - 1987, Kinthissa had her first encounter with Qigong when she learnt the Flying Crane, he xiang zhuang, created by Dr. Pang HeMing.

In the coming decade, popular "t'aichi" in the West was confronted by the discipline as practised in China, with the standing meditation ZhanZhuang at its core. Meeting Chen XiaoWang in 1995 and being trained intensively by him irrevocably changed Kinthissa's experience of her chosen discipline. Her book Turning Silk : A Diary of Chentaiji Practice (2009) documents her discovery of an inner cohesion forged and dredged by the currents of Qi.

In 2021, Zhineng Qigong surfaced in the foreground of her life. Dr. Pang Ming's all-embracing system meticulously crafts the initiate's passage from body through qi to mind and spirit. Her research into Zhineng Qigong led her to Dr. Pang's student, Xie Chuan. Since December 2021, she has been organizing for her friends and students to learn from Xie Laoshi.