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That is quite a blog title huh? You are probably wondering what the motivation behind it is, aren’t you?

Once upon a time I was a student of Michael Guen. I was there for three years because of what Michael Guen said was the main emphasis of his Yin Fu Ba Gua Style. The basics of Yin Fu Ba Gua according to Michael Guen were “Dignity”, “Integrity”, and “Loyalty”.

Now who can honestly say those qualities are not appealing? Who really wants to be “Undignified”? Doesn’t everyone want to feel like they have “Integrity”? And what person can honestly say they think “Loyalty” is a bad thing? Just about anyone would be pulled into any activity that empasized those three qualities, and I was triply attracted to them. At that point in my life, loyalty was about the only thing I was interested in from anybody. The thought that here was a man teaching a Kung Fu style that had “loyalty” as one of it’s basic principles was just what I was looking for.

I left Michael Guen’s Yin Fu Ba Gua class years ago. More than a decade has passed actually. One day I was ambling around the internet and I came across a Kung Fu forums that had a reference to an internet nickname I have used for years. Curious, I clicked the link to see what it had to say.

I clicked the link and was not too surprised at what I found. It was a post saying negative things about me. The post in question is reprinted below.

“Holy shit, HAPPEH is Guen’s ex-student?
I’ve known *of* that guy for years now, seen him on every single goddamned martial art forum and been on his website.
That guy really *is* a psychopath as far as martial arts stuff goes.
Actually I wouldn’t want to meet him in person because the crazy sob might just be insane enough to stab someone to death who disagreed with him.”

The reader may or may not find that shocking. I did and did not find it shocking. It was shocking to me because I did not know the man who posted it, nor did I know anything about the forums. It was shocking to see an anonymous stranger saying bad things about me to people I did not know in a place I had never been before.

What was written was not shocking because I have heard it a million times before. In my time wandering the internet I have found that maybe 10% of the people I read really know anything about Kung Fu. The other 90% have read books or taken classes for a few years and really don’t know much.

I would interact with these people and try to talk to them when I discovered that not only did they not know Kung Fu, they were unable to admit when they were wrong, or that they did not know something. Their reaction when it became apparent they were wrong was to go on the attack and say things like what was said above.

So I read the post and thought “I wonder who this guy is. I obviously exposed him as someone who did not know Kung Fu, and now he is getting even by telling strangers what he is telling them about me. Oh well”. Then I read through some of the replies to see how people reacted to this man’s negative description about me.

Imagine my surprise when I come across a response from Michael Guen, whom I have not seen nor heard from in a decade or so. I eagerly began to read what Michael Guen had written. Then I almost fell out of my chair. See for yourself what my ex instructor Michael Guen had to say about me.

“I thought I’d make an attempt here to put to rest curiosity and speculation surrounding my relationship with “Happeh”:

Jalon (Rue) Anderson was a member of my men’s martial arts class for 2 years from 1993 to 1995 in San Francisco and Mill Valley.
Like others who came from martial arts backgrounds Jalon (wing chun) struggled tremendously with the foreign nature of ba gua quan’s principles.

Perhaps it is because I am a psychologist (Ph.D. Boston University), but back then many students I attracted suffered from histories of family dysfunction, addiction, and abuse.  The desire to learn martial arts was in my estimation oftentimes a cover for a deeper unconscious need to heal unresolved authority issues through creating drama with a father-type figure. Even to this day, 15 years later, I believe I continue to play this role in Jalon’s mind, who refuses my invitations to travel the 1 hour distance to meet and seek reconciliation.”

Have you ever read such evil in your life? Written by anyone towards anyone else they know? I see terrible things written by strangers to strangers on the internet every day. But I can’t ever recall people who knew each other, people who were friends, people who were acquaintances, or people who had a teacher/student relationship ever say anything so vile about one another.

Here was Michael Guen, who told me every week for three years that his style of Yin Fu Ba Gua was based on loyalty, trash talking an ex-student! It was truly mind boggling. You would have to know Michael Guen personally to know just how shocking what he wrote was. The man will smile in your face, put good energy on you, and tell you that you can count on him because he  was taught loyalty by Gong Bao Zhai, who was his instructor in Kung Fu.

I am thinking Gong Bao Zhai is turning over in his grave thinking that someone he taught loyalty to could talk about a student the way that Michael Guen talked about me in that message reprinted above.

What made the situation so egregious and intolerable was that there was no reason for Michael Guen to say anything. He did not have to respond to the first posters hate. Michael Guen could have just laughed and said “That is an interesting description you have given about my ex student”.

Michael Guen did not do that. Michael Guen, who teaches his students that his style of Yin Fu Ba Gua is firmly anchored on the principle of loyalty, of his own free will, said some of the nastiest things one person could say to any other person, much less a teacher saying those things to a student who had placed his trust in said instructor.

That is why I feel it is necessary that some honesty and truth about Michael Guen needs to be put out in public. Not only are the words Michael Guen says about loyalty not true, Michale Guen breaks one of the most basic rules of any student / teacher relationship.

Michael Guen has sex with his students.

In addtion to being a Kung Fu Instructor, Michael Guen is a licensed doctor of Chinese Medicine and has a degree in Psychology. Both of those disciplines also have very strong taboos against sex with patients. In medicine I believe they have to pledge that they will not take advantage of sick patients to have sex with them.

But that is what Michael Guen does.

That is a strong charge. And after reading about the situation above, many people are probably thinking I am making it all up just to give Michael Guen trouble. For those people I will tell you my experience and let you decide for yourself.

The first day of class I arrived excited and looking forward to what was going to happen. I had severe health problems at the time that I had been told Michael Guen could help me with. There was nothing I wanted more in life than to get my health back, so I was very excited.

When I showed up at the practice area my jaw almost dropped to the ground. I discovered that the class consisted of six other male students………and THIRTY FIVE (35) female students! I am emphasizing that to highlight my sense of shock. I had been taking Martial Arts classes for well over a decade and they were overwhelmingly all male or male dominated. I had literally never been in a class where the women were a majority, and certainly not a class where there were five women for every one man.

Then, before class starts, Michael Guen comes over to me all serious like he has something important to say just to me. Michael Guen says “The men and the women practice separately. We had a problem where one of the men and one of the women were dating. Then the broke up. It was so uncomfortable for the woman to remain there with everyone looking at her thinking “That man had sex with her and then got rid of her” that the woman left the class. To prevent a re occurence of that the men and women practice separately”.

I honestly could care less. Every Kung Fu class I had ever been in that had women present was a joke. The men spent all their time ogling with and trying to flirt with the woman. There was no training. It was like going to a dance club and not a Kung Fu class.

For some reason I felt like this was very important to Michael Guen. He was looking at me in a very serious way as if to say “and don’t you forget you better stay away from the women!”. It wasn’t until later on that I understood that what Michael Guen was doing was warning me away from his harem.

Those thirty five women were not Yin Fu Ba Gua students. They were a pool of women who he had his pick of to have sex with. No one else, especially not a student, better flirt with any of the members of Michael Guen’s private harem!

The reader at this point might think to themselves, “That is not really evidence that Michael Guen has sex with his students. His words to you and the way you interpreted his body language does not prove he was having sex with those women students. You could be wrong about your conclusions”.

That is a reasonable though to have. But only with the information that has been provided so far. Allow me to continue the story.

Three years went by and one day one of the other male students called me. He said “I HEARD THAT MICHAEL GUEN HAS SEX WITH THE WOMEN!” And he said it just like that. He was stressed, he was practically yelling in the phone, and it was obvious he was upset.

I said “Yes. I have heard that”.

He said “WHAT! YOU HEARD THAT MICHAEL GUEN HAS SEX WITH THE WOMEN!”.

I said “Yes. That is what I heard”.

The poor man practically blew a fuse. He was overwrought and distraught. You are probably thinking it was because his trust in Michael Guen had been broken. After all, everyone knows that sex between teachers and students is wrong. That wasn’t why the man was upset though.

The man was upset because his wife was one of the women students.

This man was like all of us. He and his wife had a good and bad relationship. Sometimes they were lovey dovey and sometimes they fought with each other. The man and his wife were both very worldly people who had seen alot. The man knew how easy it was for women or men who were having marital problems to slip into an affair.

The poor guy was about to have a heart attack because compared to the Doctor Of Chinese Medicine, Psychology degree’d, Yin Fu Ba Gua Kung Fu Master Michael Guen, he was nobody. A nothing. And the poor guy knew that to a woman, a man who was a doctor, had a college degree, and could perform Kung Fu assisted sex was the dream of every woman on the planet.

The man told me he wanted to confront the women at our next class. He wanted to ask them point blank if Michael Guen was having sex with the women. I said “Sure. No Problem”. I completely understood the man’s alarm because I had heard for all three years I was there that Michael Guen was having sex with the women.

The man also called the other male students and asked them to participate in what was going to happen. Two of them agreed to but to my mind they seemed reluctant. They were the elder students and were more inclined to suppress anything about the class or Michael Guen that could be construed as negative.

Another man was more open to the idea for what to my mind was a humorous kind of reason. His wife was not only in the women’s group, she was the leader of the women’s group. I thought it was humorous in a dark sort of way that he was interested in what was going to happen because to me, who would Michael Guen make the leader of the women’s group? Of course one of the women he had dominated by having sex with them.

Class day arrives and we all gather in a circle as was traditional. The man is practically jumping up and down while he is sitting because he is so upset that his wife could be having sex with Michael Guen. The man says point blank to the women:

“We have heard that Michael Guen is having sex with so and so”.

The women don’t say anything at first. They can see the man is upset and distraught. They are also probably embarrassed that we are all talking about sexual activity out in the open and in plain sight. And then one of the woman says in a wistful voice.

“She is not the only one”

Every single one of us men rocked back on our bottoms! That women just confirmed that Michael Guen did have sex with the women students, but she said it in a way that showed that she was jealous because he had not picked her for sex yet!

I don’t know about you, but that is “sick in the head” to me. This woman had supposedly joined the class to learn Yin Fu Ba Gua, but the only thing she seemed concerned about was that Michael Guen had not yet picked her for sex.

I know there are some readers who are thinking, “That still doesn’t prove anything. Maybe the women lied to you. Maybe they told you what you wanted to hear. Maybe you were imagining you heard longing and yearning in that women’s voice”.

All of that is possible. But it is not true. And I will tell you why I am so certain of that.

I had left the class after Michael Guen told us he was going to another state to start up new classes, but he wanted us to continue paying him tuition. I thought that was crazy talk and would not do it. I would not pay for Kung Fu lessons unless Michael Guen was there to teach them. When I said that it was made clear to me I was no longer welcome in class, and I should leave.

A year or so later I get a call from none other than Michael Guen. He suggests I meet him and the other male students at one of the students house. I agreed to go because at that time I was still full of “Loyalty, Dignity, and Integrity”. I drove out to the house at the appointed time. The other male students are there, but not the male student whose house it is. He is out of the country in Europe on a job assignment.

The other male students and I are taken on a tour of the outside of the house by the owner’s son. It was a very nice house and took some time to look over. Then we headed for the inside of the house. We go in through the front door, through a foyer, and into the living room where I see something that literally makes me stop dead in my tracks.

Michael Guen is sitting in the owner of the houses chair in the living room, and the owner of the houses wife, who is the leader of the women’s group, is down on her knees massaging Michael Guen’s bare feet! I felt like I had walked in on the two of them performing sex, which if you know anything about Kung Fu, is what they were doing. The stimulation that man’s wife was providing to the feet of Michael Guen also sexually stimulated his genitals.

I managed not to fall down when I stopped dead in my tracks and kept on walking. Michael Guen did not flinch, and neither he nor the owner of the house’s wife moved a muscle. He sat there with a pleased grin on his face and the owner of the house’s wife kept rubbing his feet.

Can you imagine? The owner of the house, who is also Michael Guen’s student, is in Europe on a business trip, and Michael Guen, the man’s instructor who has told the man he is about trust, loyalty, dignity, and integrity, is in the man’s chair in the man’s house with the man’s wife massaging his feet.

So you decide for yourself. Michael Guen had access to a harem of thirty five women to have sex with.

Various women in the women’s group said that Michael Guen did indeed have sex with women from the women’s group.

I saw with my own two eyes a wife of one of the male students on her knees massaging Michael Guen’s feet.

Maybe it is all a circumstantial evidence. I never saw Michael Guen’s penis inserted in any orifice of any of the women. I cannot swear on a stack of bibles that Michael Guen did have sex with the woman.

But I think a reasonable person, in light of the evidence that has been presented, would believe that Michael Guen, Doctor Of Chinese Medicine, Doctor Of Psychology, and Master of Yin Fu Ba Gua, does have sex with his students.

If you are man and your wife, your sister, your daughter, your mother, your aunt, or your niece comes to you and says “I want to take Yin Fu Ba Gua lessons from a man named Michael Guen”, you better be very certain they have the strength to resist a sexual predator, because Michael Guen has a history of preying on his female students for sex.

http://www.emptyflower.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=8282&st=20

That admin’s name is “Northern Victory” He says:

“Holy shit, HAPPEH is Guen’s ex-student?
I’ve known *of* that guy for years now, seen him on every single goddamned martial art forum and been on his website.
That guy really *is* a psychopath as far as martial arts stuff goes.
Actually I wouldn’t want to meet him in person because the crazy sob might just be insane enough to stab someone to death who disagreed with him.”

Mike Guen responds by saying:

Greetings Northern Victory!
I thought I’d make an attempt here to put to rest curiosity and speculation surrounding my relationship with “Happeh”:

Jalon (Rue) Anderson was a member of my men’s martial arts class for 2 years from 1993 to 1995 in San Francisco and Mill Valley.
Like others who came from martial arts backgrounds Jalon (wing chun) struggled tremendously with the foreign nature of ba gua quan’s principles.

Perhaps it is because I am a psychologist (Ph.D. Boston University), but back then many students I attracted suffered from histories of family dysfunction, addiction, and abuse.  The desire to learn martial arts was in my estimation oftentimes a cover for a deeper unconscious need to heal unresolved authority issues through creating drama with a father-type figure. Even to this day, 15 years later, I believe I continue to play this role in Jalon’s mind, who refuses my invitations to travel the 1 hour distance to meet and seek reconciliation.

I’d be happy to answer any further questions for you if I can.

Best,
Michael

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Still taking advantage of the fact that people are trained to acquiesce to those that have learned to project authority huh? How many sheep still fall to their knees in front of you when you say “I am Ba Gua Master Michael Guen, Trained Psychologist”?

Why don’t we inject some honesty into Michael Guen’s response?

Michael Guen said:

“Perhaps it is because I am a psychologist (Ph.D. Boston University), but back then many students I attracted suffered from histories of family dysfunction, addiction, and abuse.”

(1) – Why not be factually accurate Mike? Because it goes against everything you are as a Ba Gua practitioner?

I became Michael Guen’s student after I was recommended to him by an Acupuncturist I had been visiting. I had health issues that I had been trying to overcome for years. My Acupuncturist who I would trust with my life, told me that Mike Guen could help me.

Mike’s mentioning of all of that psychology stuff is his Ba Gua style in action. He smiles at you and then spews poison. “Hi I am Ba Gua Master Michael Guen, Psychologist and trained Chinese Medicine Doctor(The smile), I attract people with psychological problems, emotional problems, and drug issues”(The poison).

That is a verbal version of Michael Guen’s Ba Gua training whose principles can be boiled down to  “Trick someone into looking the other way, then hit them when they are not looking”.

Michael Guen does not make direct accusations because he is a coward who is too weak to take responsibility for what he says.

If Michael Guen was to say “Happeh has psychological problems, emotional problems, and drug problems” Michael Guen’s career as a Psychologist would be over. No one who found out Michael Guen the Psychologist went around talking on the internet about what he was told in the sanctity of his Psychology profession would ever pay him a dime again.

Anybody reading this should take warning. If you tell Michael Guen anything in the privacy of his Psychology practice, he is likely to print what you told him on the internet like he is doing with me here.

One of my fellow Ba Gua students happened to be an ex prostitute. That student told Michael Guen in the privacy of his psychology practice that one day he had performed sex 10 times as part of his prostitute job.

You should be asking yourself how I know that fact if the man told Mike during one of his private Psychology office visits.

I know because Michael Guen was so shocked this man had sex 10 times in one day that he told all of us in class! He said “Ya. Steve told me that he had sex 10 times in one day!” Then he got this big grin on his face and we all looked at Steve and started laughing and joking at him.

I never even knew that Steve was a male prostitute! And he had been in class for one and a half years! That information was so private to Steve he had never told me before. But I sure knew what Steve used to do after Michael Guen opened his big mouth and told me!

If you want to be ridiculed for the things you want to see a psychologist about, then by all means go see Michael Guen. He will tell his friends and they will all laugh about you.

(2) – “Even to this day, 15 years later, I believe I continue to play this role in Jalon’s mind, who refuses my invitations to travel the 1 hour distance to meet and seek reconciliation.”

Michael Guen is a liar.

After 8 years of no contact I wrote an email to Michael Guen asking him for assistance with a health problem. Michael Guen told me he would have someone contact me.

3 months went by with no contact.

I emailed Michael Guen again and I said “I wondered if you still had my email address. I have not heard from those people you said would contact me”. Michael Guen’s response was “Yes I have your email address”. That was it. Nothing about why no one had contacted me for three months. No questions about my health problem, if I was OK, or if I would be OK in three more months.

Another 3 months went by with no contact.

I sent another email message. I said “Hi Mike. I have not heard from anyone for 6 months now. That health problem is extremely egregious and I could really use some help”.

I never heard from Michael Guen again.

In light of that incident, do you really believe Michael Guen “wants me to drive one hour to work things out”? Or is he once again making himself look good by “accidentally” forgetting to tell people all of the facts involved in a situation?

Michael Guen is a liar because that is what Ba Gua is all about. Ba Gua is about getting people to believe your lies so you can take what you want from them.

You believe anything Michael Guen says at your own peril.

I had no money. I could barely afford to pay class tuition and still have a roof over my head. After hearing the non answers of my fellow students about what the office visits were for, I ignored the expectations that I would also go for office visits. I kept that attitude for a full year.

Sometime during that year a new student joined. He had actually been chased down by the men’s group as a prospect to join. Much was made of how this individual was not a very good or trustworthy individual. Listening to all of that made me wonder why the other group member’s thought he was such a good prospect, but they did.

Mike was all over this guy. You would have thought that he was hounding the new student as a prospective love interest. They were best buddies and talking all of the time. I had been at class for months and had no personal relationship with Mike. He spoke to me very little personally and had very little to do with me in the class.

My breaking point was reached the day I say Mike literally chasing the new student like a girl he was desperate to have. The two of them had been having some conversation and the new student walked away. He made it 100 or so feet away and Mike felt there was something he needed to say to the new student. Mike actually chased after the new student! If you knew Mike that was so out of character it was mindboggling. Mike was about controlling others. He had other people kowtow to his demands. So to see him chasing after a student was enough to make my jaw drop with surprise. And envy and resentment.

I have expectations of how an instructor is supposed to behave. They are supposed to be attentive to the student and do an honest job of helping the student advance. None of that had happened in my first year with Mike. Mike basically ignored me.

When I saw Mike chasing after that new student I felt wronged. I had been a student for months and had been ignored by Mike. This new student had been here a few months and Mike was chasing him across he exercise area to be with him!

I resolved then and there to sign up for office visits with Mike. I didn’t know what they were for and I could not afford them, but there was no way I was going to allow some new student to move ahead of me in class when I had already been there for months! After Mike finished with the new student I walked over and asked about the office visits. Mike said he would check his calender and let me know. He then told me later on when he had an appointment available and I began going to see Mike at his office.

The office visits were an hour long. What took place during the visits is of no consequence to this particular blog entry. The payment for the office visit was $70 for me. Apparently there was some type of sliding scale depending on your ability to pay. If you were well to do, then you paid more. I attended the office visits for the next year or so.

One day Mike comes to class and sits down with the group. The tradition was that everyone would gather in a circle before the class began and Mike would talk about this or that. Mike tells everyone that “You are taking advantage of me”. You could feel the fear and consternation immediately. The attitude of the group towards Mike was a fawning one. To have Mike say they “were taking advantage of him” shocked and frightened all of them. The fear was a palpable thing in the air.

Mike then says “I don’t think anything is happening in the office visits. I think you are just coming to be with me instead of coming to work.”.

Everyone is either looking at each other, looking at the ground, or simply putting out fear at high level in response to that statement.

Mike then says “From now on, instead of office visits being one hour, they are going to be cut down to 45 minutes. If you have less time available that should motivate you to get more use out of it”.

That is not what I heard at all. At the time Mike was about money. Mike made no secret of the fact he wanted to make lots of money as fast as he could. I was also about money because I didn’t have any. I had to watch every single dollar I had to make certain I could get by. So my immediate reaction to Mike’s statement was not one of guilt as many of the others seemed to feel, it was one of calculation.

There were around 35 people in the group at that time. As far as I know, all of them went to visit Mike at his office. It was stated earlier that better off individuals were charged more for office visits. I have no idea what that charge might have been so to be fair I based the calculations on what I paid.

There are eight hours in a day. So eight times $70 per person per office visit = $560 a day

$560 a day times 28 days per month = $15,680 a month just from office visits! That does not include class tuition!

That $15,680 figure was based on one hour office visits. If the office visits were cut down to 45 minutes each….

Eight hours divided by 45 minutes is approximately ten. By limiting people to a 45 minute office visits, Mike was going to be able to squeeze in two more people per day. That meant…..

10 people per day times $70 per person = $700

$700 per day times 28 days per month = $19,600

$19,600 for 10 visits per day – $15,680 for 8 visits per day = $3920 extra per month

By reducing the visit time from one hour for each student down to 45 minutes for each student, Mike was bringing in approximately an extra $4000 a month! And that is based on the lowest tuition paid by me, the down and out broke college student! If the higher tuition fees paid by the better off students were included, that $4000 dollar figure must have been higher!

To this day, 15 years later, I still cannot get over the gall of that man. He inculcated an atmosphere of worship in his students. He knew when he looked them in the face and told them there were taking advantage of him, they would all fall down groveling, begging him “to tell them what they could do to make him happy again”.

And Mike knew exactly what was going to make him happy again……..

An extra $4000 plus a month in his bank from the same group of people who were already putting $15,000 per month in his bank.