A world in a grain of sand
Hello friends,
We’re at the start of a two week class break, so after the usual schedule updates I have some quick thoughts about practicing alone.
But first, scheduling. There are no classes this week or next. We’ll have Wednesday morning taiji classes on December 3rd & 10th, and then the winter break starts. The whole regular schedule of classes starts back in the first full week of January:
Short qigong sessions at theDock, 3pm on Mondays from January 5th onwards.
Morning taiji moving back to Tuesdays at 10:15am, starting January 6th.
Thursday evening taiji classes at 5:45pm, starting January 8th.
And the next instalment of the Five Animal Frolics evening workshops will be Deer, on Wednesday January 14th.
In last Wednesday’s taiji class, I was asked if I’ve ever used what we were discussing for real. I took the question to be about fighting, so my first answer was “no, I haven’t been in an actual fight since I first started learning martial arts”. Which is true, but also leaves a lot out. So my second answer was to focus on the body mechanics of the exercise we were doing: every time I have to push hard to open a recalcitrant door, I’m using this. And it occurred to me after the class that this is a useful framework for practicing alone when we don’t meet for a while.
If you know even a small chunk of the sequence, it’s good to practice that whenever you have time. If you can remember a single movement, that’s also great. And if you find it helpful to follow a video, I have a couple on the forms page at my website. But people often worry about practicing bad habits, or just not knowing how to start, both of which are valid and understandable concerns.
The whole form is itself just one practice technique. Taiji is not the form itself, it’s the way of moving with the whole body integrated and relaxed. Every day-to-day task that needs a little bit of physical force is a chance to practice those qualities. So if you want a practice assignment, try this one: each time you need a little force to do something, use that to test out how much relaxation you can maintain, and how much you can connect your whole body to the movement, and feel how much easier that can make the task. Maybe it’s a sticky door, maybe you need to move something heavy, maybe you have to pull something apart. If you can connect your whole body to the movement, and you feel that helping, you are practicing taiji.