“Argh,” one of my sisters scream in the house “who have stolen my pins” she screams so loud I would believe she was beside me, even as she is currently in the loft. I can hear her rummaging around up there. “No one has stolen your stupid pins you stupid cow” my other sister screams back, she is in the kitchen where she is currently looking a dinner working over the flame. “They are in your stupid hair.” I hear her screaming not after long.

I and mother are listening to the sounds upstairs and I try to not listen. We are in the sitting room waiting on everyone else to come for dinner. Mother is feeding my youngest sister mushed up paste to wean her off breastmilk. The older men are out in the forest working, don’t know what they are doing today and I do not care too much. Lu and Li are earning money to put away for their future and dad are supervising while working.

Outside a thick layer of snow covers the ground and forces everyone not working to stay inside. The cramming, boring food and cold causes tempers to flare and today it is my older sister, Hu, who is having a fit. I see my mother making a face, but she will not intervene, not yet. Having a fight from time to time and then making up is easier than having resentment brew in the walls is her logic. And when they are fighting each other they are not fighting with her. Hu is having a tiff at the moment since she wants to look pretty tomorrow in hope to catch herself a man. She has her sight set on old man Ca, he is fifty years old and a widower. If she marries him she will inherit his farm when he dies, then she can marry someone younger later on. I don’t like it too much, I want her to be happy, not have to marry because it makes sense. I have decided to support her as I can, nothing more or less.

“Hi mum, would you like a massage?” I ask her after some more hollering upstairs. She looks up from her needlepoint and smiles at me. “That would be lovely.” She says and I begin putting out the different implements to giving my mother a good foot rub. She has worked all day, with my help, and now we have some downtime. I also know that later my father and brothers will be home and then I need to take care of them. Also, I have some new insights into how the esoteric energy work here and wish to test on my mother before I do so on the others. Not because my mother is easier to convince, but because she has more control than any other in the family.

I have a small tub with lukewarm water and is rubbing my mother's feet when the girls come down. The see what I am doing and want in on it. “Have you made up?” I ask them and they tell me they have so I let it slide. They will be quiet for another month now so I don’t make a fuss of it. In a bit, I am working on the feet of my older sister and manages to just finish with the other when I hear the “menfolk” arriving outside.

“Ah brother, I see you are on your knees again.” My second oldest brother ribs me when he has gotten in the door. “Foul Mouths get no relief,” I tell him and see my father giving the shit a slap in the head. What started as good-naturedly teasing before the summer has changed over the year, I think it is jealousy. “Hard day?” My mother asks my father when she takes her coat. He nods, gives her a kiss on the cheek and stumbles over to his favourite chair. “The new foreman is a slavedriver,” my oldest brother tells us and sit down on the bench by the table. “He drives us” my other brother agrees “I see little reason for it, but his own greed.” My father agrees with a grunt from his perch by the fireplace.

“Well,” I stand up and smile at them. “I think I have a remedy for your aching bodies if you would like to try,” I say and the men perk up. Their subdued enthusiasm is squashed by my mother and sisters. “Food, then fun.” She tells us with a bite to her voice and we all agree. There is fish soup for dinner made with smoked fish from the fall. After several days with fish and rice, something different is good, fish soup is not good. Made from the leftovers from the other meals it is healthy and heavy in the stomach. After dinner, the women wash up and I am sent to carry water. When we finally are done I coax my father up on the table.

“Off with the shirt I need skin contact to make this work,” I tell him to the amusement of the family. But after months of good massages, I hear nothing from him in protest. Not like the first time when it was “unseemly and unnatural.”

I sit down on his ass and begin my own preparations. I need to get in the right mindset, so I mostly meditate and run my hands over his skin to warm it up for the massage. This is hard, not like the first time I meditated to find my own energy and absorb it from around me. Now I need to not only find my centre but also his.

Breathing in rhythm and with a fixed pattern helps me guide my mind. When I have control over my mind I can control the forces in my body. And when I find my own centre I begin finding his. It is slow work, but since I know myself I have an incline of how he is put together. It is more made up than my massage skill, but really not by too much.

After an eternity for me, maybe five minutes for him I find it and begin work. I pull energy along the meridians in his skin and help it spread and infuse in the cells of the muscles. I knead and stroke the skin and muscles beneath and hear the grunts of pleasure and pain beneath me. After what seems like hours of work and when all my own energy is gone do I let go of my father and with weak legs lay down on the floor beside the table. The others in the room are deathly quiet.

“How are you?” My mom asks me after some time and I look up at her. “Good, just exhausted. Need some time before I can do that again.” I tell her and smile. “How is Father?” She looks up and I wait for her to answer. “Sleeping.” She tells me and I smile. “That is good, let him sleep and then wake him before putting him to bed.”

After about an hour of meditation, I repeat my performance twice with less use of energy. Meditation helps me replenish the energy since it is not a feeling or a sore muscles. It is energy in the air I absorb and it is work to replenish it. With each new patient/subject I can feel the possibilities with the technique and when I fall asleep that night I dream of moulding my own warriors that can protect me on my own adventures.

It all started months before when I had some free time I finally got the quiet needed to try cultivating heavenly energies. It took me weeks before I could in any way even think I sensed something different about the air around me. After working hard for a long time, both with my body and mind. I found that there are more in the air than I am used to. There are these particles that I imagine are white and black. The white ones are light and give a good feeling when absorbed by breathing them in. When I don’t work at feeling them they seem to just pass through my body and disappear again. The black particles are different, I think they are bad or toxic for me, they give a full and a bit queasy feeling when I focus on them and breath them in.

Having established a difference between these two particles I began looking at how they moved through my body. Even here I found new things. Most of the particles I breathe in pass through the tissue and into their own canals following the bloodstream. It follows the blood around with only a few lodging in the small canals out in the tissue. There is a different circulatory system at work it seems. Beginning in the lungs and following it owns channels passing through tissue, muscles, organs and bone with no regard for the different materials it is passing through, only the skin seems to “catch” it. After having looked at this for a long time I work out where I have seen it before. It is similar, not like, some of the “meridians” or “energy canals” Asian or new age philosophy talk about. I begin calling these canals “meridians” because of this.

Having established these “facts” I construct the first of many iterations of my cultivation over the years. It is the first and far from the last, but the basic of it I have kept for all time. Since just absorbing heavenly energy while meditating and through my lungs seem so inefficient I instead decide to use my whole body. I begin in my forehead, the point where most Indian cultures place their cast mark. I choose the place since I know very well where it is and can concentrate upon it with little issue. The first step is to absorb energy from this point, it takes me weeks to do. The next step is to stop tainted energy to be absorbed, I do this by imagining a centrifugal force taking in the absorb energy and throwing all the “heavy” tainted energy out again only letting the “clean” energy through. The process is far from effective and throws away as much pure energy as it absorbs, but I can keep it going all day. The next to last step is to circulate this energy around my body to the point in my stomach where I designated my “dantian” where I compress the energy until it is a liquid, not loose particles. The last step is to let this liquid be absorbed into the flesh in my body from the inside out.

Finding a use for the energy was no problem after all this work. Helping others has always been a goal of mine and doing so in the most pleasurable way I know is a plus. This is massages, hard body to body contact where I can use my energy to both works into the other person and influence their own energy. The first experiments were giving foot massages and then last night I moved on to the whole body.