I spent a month in the Wudang mountains of China learning to move slowly, and it was one of the hardest things I have ever done.

Six hours of training a day, five days a week. We started at six in the morning, and if you were late you paid for it in push-ups. Tai chi and qigong at dawn, then a second session, then a third. By the end of the first day my whole body hurt from simply standing, because a stance you hold correctly uses every muscle you own, including the ones you have spent decades ignoring.

I went there to learn an art. What the art actually taught me was something underneath it.

The lesson I did not come for

On the first day I wanted to learn fast.

I am forty-seven, I was the oldest one in the room, and I could feel myself reaching for the thing I have always reached for, which is speed. Get the move. Get the next move. Stack them up and call it progress. There was one sequence where I had to do the footwork on its own first, and then bring the hands in, and I kept trying to do both at once, and I kept failing at both.

Shifu watched me struggle and told me to slow down. Take it step by step.

That instruction sounds gentle until you actually try to follow it, because slowing down on purpose goes against everything that gets rewarded in the world I come from. In my work, fast is a virtue. Ship it, post it, move. Wudang does not care about any of that. The body learns at the speed it learns, and trying to rush it just teaches your nervous system to brace instead of absorb.

What the body knows that the mind skips

Every move in kung fu is a real thing: a kick, a punch, a block, a dodge.

You are not performing shapes. You are building muscle memory for combat, which means the move has to be right at a level the mind cannot fake. How deep you sit in the stance. Which way the arms turn. Where the hands land. There are a dozen tiny corrections inside a single motion, and your brain can understand all of them and your body can still get it wrong, because understanding and embodying are not the same skill.

This is the gap I have spent my whole career watching in other people without naming it in myself.

You can know who you are and still not move like it. You can understand the idea and still not carry it in your body. The mind learns in an afternoon and the body learns over months, and almost everything that actually matters lives on the body’s timeline instead of the mind’s. Wudang just made that impossible to ignore, because there was no shortcut available and no one to perform for.

The sandbox

The thing that made the month work was that I had built a container for it.

You cannot half-train kung fu six hours a day while running a normal life on the side. I created a sandbox, a stretch of time with the edges drawn deliberately, where the only job was to practice and recover. Train, eat, sleep, work in the cracks, train again. Five days of that, and then the whole weekend went to recovery before my body could face Monday.

Inside that container, something shifted that I did not expect.

I started to feel my own system more accurately. I could tell when my nervous system was hitting its stress point and learn to balance it back down, rather than push through and pay for it later. That awareness is not a martial arts skill. It is a life skill, and I only found it because I had built a space quiet enough to hear it.

Why I was emotional leaving

On my last evening I packed up my room and got unexpectedly emotional.

A month is nothing. A month barely scratches the surface of what kung fu is, and I know that. But I had done something new, failed at it daily, tried harder, and put a hundred percent into every single day, and the body remembers that kind of month even when the mind tells you it was short. I filmed everything so I would not forget the sequences, because I wanted to keep practicing long after I left.

That word kept coming back the whole time. Practice.

A practice is something you keep integrating, the way I integrate strength training, the way I want to integrate the slowness itself into how I work and live. The point was never to finish. The point was to keep returning to it, a little deeper each time, which is the only way the body ever actually learns anything.

The discipline of slow

Here is what I brought home, and it has very little to do with fighting.

Most of us treat mastery like an event and practice like a phase you graduate out of. Wudang teaches the opposite. The masters there have been refining the same handful of movements for decades, and they are still refining them, because the refinement is the art itself. What looks like the obstacle in front of the art turns out to be the medium mastery is made of.

I think the creative life works the same way, and I think most of us are training our minds and starving our bodies of the slow repetition that actually integrates a thing.

You cannot rush embodiment. You can only show up, build the container, and let the body learn on its timeline instead of your ambition’s.

FAQ

What does martial arts teach you about practice?

That the body learns at its own pace, always slower than the one you want it to keep. In a month of kung fu training in Wudang, the central lesson was to slow down: understanding a movement with your mind is not the same as embodying it, and almost everything that matters lives on the body’s slower timeline. Mastery is the ongoing refinement itself, a practice with no finish line.

Why did you train kung fu in Wudang, China?

Wudang is where kung fu originates, and the Wudang style combines many practices, including tai chi, qigong, wing chun, and Shaolin forms, balanced across yin and yang. Training there meant learning across six different styles rather than a single one, six hours a day for a month, in the place the whole art traces back to.

What is the hardest part of learning a martial art as an adult?

Slowing down. The instinct is to rush, to stack moves and call it progress, but the body cannot be rushed into accuracy. The hardest part is letting go of speed as a measure of progress and trusting that repetition over time, rather than intensity in a single moment, is what builds real muscle memory.

How does martial arts connect to creative work?

Both reward embodiment over understanding. You can grasp an idea in an afternoon, but carrying it in your body, moving and creating from it without thinking, takes months of slow repetition. The discipline of returning to a practice, a little deeper each time, is the same whether the practice is a kung fu form or a creative life.

Three things I carried home from the mountain:

1. The body learns at the speed of honesty. Ambition cannot rush it. You can understand a thing in an afternoon and still need months to embody it, and the things that matter almost always live on the body’s timeline.
2. Build the sandbox. Real practice needs a container with the edges drawn on purpose, a space quiet enough that you can finally feel your own system and stop pushing through it.
3. Slow is the medium mastery is made of. The refinement is the art, returned to again and again, the practice you keep instead of a finish line you cross and leave behind.

I send a weekly note on building a creative life where who you are and how you live are the same thing, and you can join it below.