The Autobiography of Master Jan Silberstorff

Taijiquan

The autobiography, digital and live - be there from the comfort of your own home!

Starting in January 2024, Jan Silberstorff will launch a very special interactive live session on Zoom once or twice a month. On the one hand, it is about the transparency of his life. All the stories, adventures and reports that have led to everything we experience around Jan - will be told here in a surprising openness by himself!

An important aspect of these narratives will be not to let all the encounters with still living, but in many cases already deceased masters and grandmasters, as well as a China that no longer exists, be forgotten. Of course, this also includes the very private time Jan was able to experience exclusively with Grandmaster Chen Xiaowang over so many years.
 
However, his personal concern goes beyond this. He wants to bring out the deeper meaning of all the authentic stories. This should help and motivate the listener on his own path. In this way, he will try to convey the contents of his now almost four decades of learning and teaching from a completely different, very private and personal perspective: By telling (true) stories!

Many photos and videos from the time, some of which have never been published before, will additionally bring these stories very much to life.

For the entire period of this very extensive webinar, all episodes are also available to participants as video recordings. So nothing is missed, you don't have to be there live, you are independent of the date and everything can be reworked or repeated.

40 episodes of at least 90 minutes each plus questions.
One to two Fridays per month at 18:00 German time.

In 40 episodes he will tell everything about his life:

  • The inevitable childhood
  • Jan's youth as a punk and a drinker
  • Turning around: how and why Jan started Taijiquan and how it changed his life
  • Hamburg Taiji and martial arts time, Jan learns Chinese
  • His years in the People's Republic of China, when Mao suits were still worn there and the Beijing airport was not really more than a corrugated iron hall
  • His travels to China in the Trans-Siberian Railway and on a container ship, China in the 1980s and 1990s.
  • His martial arts trip to the USA
  • 25x Shaolin Temple and its abbot Shi Yongxin - at a time when he was not yet an abbot; Jan is the first to invite Shaolin monks to Europe
  • The Wudang Mountains 30 years ago
  • His life with Master Shen Xijing at home in the Chinese Opera Institute in Xian
  • Jan as almost the first Westerner in Chenjiagou
  • The Chenjiagou of the 1990s
  • Personal encounters with basically all known masters from Chen, Yang, Sun, Zhaobao and Wu Taijiquan, as well as many other martial arts
  • Personal encounters with celebrities from film and music
  • His private student Lou Reed - 'the beginning of a great career'.
  • Jan's first encounters with Chen Xiaowang
  • With Grandmaster Chen Xiaowang privately at home in Australia, learning together with his son Yingjun and Pengfei
  • Travelling worldwide with Gm Chen Xiaowang
  • Private life and learning with Gm Chen Xiaowang
  • The western master student of Gm Chen Xiaowang
  • His tournament career
  • Jan and the Reeperbahn
  • The history of the founding of the association
  • The structure of the WCTAG
  • The worldwide teaching
  • The structure of the federations in Latin America
  • Tour guide, translator, trainer and organiser: Jan leads 15 tour groups through China
  • His 'offbeat' film career
  • Worldwide screenings: up to 15000 spectators in the auditorium, millions of viewers at home in their TV chairs
  • The genesis of his aid projects: Sri Lanka and WCTAG-helps
  • WCTAG-hilft and its biggest project: The Island of the Children
  • Singapore and what it's like to be a star
  • Background and successes of his spiritual quest
  • Rigorous meditation retreats in Sri Lanka - the friendship with Bhikkhu Anālayo
  • Huizhang Ren Farong and the Louguantai - internal report on the birthplace of Daodejing and Jan's experiences with his DAO teacher who, like Gm Chen Xiaowang, is a state treasure of the PRC
  • One and a half years in a Catholic monastery, as well as worldwide pilgrimage
  • 12 years in Brazil
  • Street violence and armed robberies
  • Celibacy and Tantra
  • Jan's books
  • Spirituality, Joie de Vivre and Family: Bulgaria and a Cautious Look into the Future

We experience

  • A China that no longer exists today
  • Up-close and personal contact with countless masters of Taijiquan and the martial arts in general
  • The old Chenjiagou with all its masters
  • The old Shaolin monastery with all its masters
  • Wudang before it became famous
  • The old Louguantai with Jan's teacher Huizhang Ren Farong
  • A life that went from self-destruction to inner healing to healing tens of thousands
  • How to build Taiji associations worldwide, even in Cuba.
  • How to build an aid organisation
  • Chuck Norris, Jean Claude van Damme, Udo Lindenberg & Co. privately
  • Countless world travels
  • Experiences with world religions, as well as a serious spiritual search
  • How to write books
  • Silence
  • Action
  • Religion and sexuality
  • The Reeperbahn from the inside
  • Brazil, favelas and Taijiquan
  • Trying to combine monastic life and family
  • How to live wisdom without getting bored
  • Mysticism
  • Many different styles of kungfu
  • What it is like to be able to tell jokes in Chinese
  • How it feels to be under life-threatening threat
  • How it feels to have to stand on one leg on soft ground regularly on television and on stage in front of thousands of spectators
  • How to become a state-certified Taiji teacher as a Westerner in a 1980s China
  • What it's like to be the first foreigner to win medals in Chenjiagou
  • How to open a massage parlour in China
  • What it is like to present your own forms to the leading masters in Chenjiagou
  • The teaching of the DAO in East and West
  • Classical Chinese Christianity and how to teach Christianity as a Taiji teacher

An interactive platform opens up where questions can be asked directly into the time being discussed. Through Jan's stories, we will be able to experience places and times that are long gone and yet so important. Above all, of course, the time with his own teachers, some of whom he lived with for years: Gm Chen Xiaowang, Huizhang Ren Farong, Bhikkhu Anālayo, Father Daniel de Yzagoirre, Master Shen Xijing and many more. But we will also be able to enquire about our personal interests in these places and people, so that we can also relive everything ourselves.

We go on a world tour with Jan:

From Fidel Castro's Cuba to a life in South America to Las Vegas and Sri Lanka, the monastery in Mallorca and the kangaroos in Australia.

From teaching in Russia to the yurt of the Kassaks. And of course the focus is on ancient China.

Here we will experience the following places and many more: Chenjiagou, Yongnian (the village of the Yang family), Wudang, Shaolin, Louguantai, Huashan, Laoshan, as well as many Daoist and Buddhist temples and monasteries. But also many cities such as Beijing, Xian, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Taipei, among others. All in their condition of thirty years ago.

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Experience the fascinating world of Taijiquan, the Chinese martial arts, as well as deep spiritual insights, adventure and silence, the art of living and so much more, based on a human life.

Included are basically all the well-known Taiji masters and grandmasters of the last four decades, many famous masters and grandmasters of other martial arts/sports, Hollywood stars, famous musicians, well-known healers, actors, nuns and monks, priests, Daoists and a handful of neighbourhood greats. And, of course, Jan's companions and many friends.

Learn through vivid stories from one of the leading martial arts masters, who builds a bridge between East and West, but at the same time always remained authentic and, as we will see, as a Taiji master still follows a very special and unusual path.

And: as always, it will be 'instructive and entertaining at the same time!

Because the webinars aim to be entertaining and funny, but at the same time very serious and above all instructive. The aim is to impart a great deal of knowledge and experience that is not only very motivating, but can also help all participants on their own paths.

This biography therefore not only conveys life events, but also discusses and questions them. The multiple specificity of the experiences results in a multitude of assistance for everyday life.

Dates and registration:

One to two Fridays per month, each at 18:00 German time.
From January 2024!

The webinars take place on the Zoom platform. Access to this platform is possible at no additional cost from any digital device with internet access.

After the live events, they are available for unlimited video viewing until the end of all 40 episodes for participants of the complete package!

All further information and registration here in our WCTAG Shop.

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