Hello friends,

I have some quick things to share today. First some updates about qigong, and then a video clip that I promised a few of you in Tuesday’s class.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for the Tiger workshop yesterday. I hope you had as much fun as I did. I’ve just confirmed the final instalment of this series: Monkey, on July 29th. The format will be similar, except that weather permitting this one will be outdoors, in míqәn / Beacon Hill Park. I have a rain site booked in case that becomes necessary, but at that time of year we should be able to just enjoy the evening in the park.

I also realise that that’s a long way off, and it’s helpful to practice and get pointers more often than every few months. If you are free on Saturday mornings, my teacher Viola Brumbaugh does a Zoom qigong session from 10-11am, and this quarter she’s focussing on the Five Animal Frolics. Viola’s whole schedule is here, and if you’re interested you can register online.

And finally, while Monkey will be the end of the current series, I’m starting to think about how to organise qigong workshops after that. I love teaching this material, and everyone who’s come to one of the sessions seems to enjoy it, but attendance has been low enough that I don’t think I’ve found the right format yet. So if you have suggestions, please reply to this email - especially if you’re interested but so far haven’t been able to make it to a class. I’m open to trying different times, venues, class lengths, and so on. I can’t promise that you’ll get what you want—experience suggests that if 3 people reply, there will be no time that works for all 3—but consider this your chance to maybe get a class at a time and place that suits you.

Now on to the promised Bruce Lee clip. I’m always very self-conscious about quoting Bruce Lee. It’s such a cliché, especially for a white boy whose first teenage interest in martial arts was heavily driven by Hong Kong cinema. But the fact is Bruce Lee wasn’t just an actor, he was a genuinely accomplished martial artist: one of the few people to start their own martial art, and come up with something worthwhile enough that it lives on decades later. He put some of himself and his own encyclopedic martial arts education into every movie, no matter what character he was playing. So sometimes I have to accept the cringe and quote him.

To make things worse, I misquoted him significantly on Tuesday. I remembered the line as “don’t watch the hand…”, but here’s what he actually said, in Enter The Dragon:

Don’t concentrate on the finger, or you’ll miss all that heavenly glory

So I am now doubly embarrassed.

But I think it still works for what I was trying to explain in class, in an only slightly less direct way. In taiji it’s very easy to pay too much attention to where our hands are, but if we do that we miss most of what’s going on. The hands are like the pointing finger. Where they point is an outcome of the structure we build with our whole bodies, and the more we can keep attend to that whole structure the better each individual part works.