Drop by drop into 2024
Happy new year, friends!
I hope you've had some rest over the past few weeks. As I ease back in to my work routine, I have some quick schedule reminders and then a couple of practice tips to share, responding to conversations I've had with some of you over the past few months.
But first, a heartfelt thank you. It's been a great honour to get to share this art I love with some of you over the past few months. You've put your trust in me as a new teacher, and each question helps me to clarify my own understanding. I hope I can repay that!
Schedule reminders:
Five Animals Qigong at theDock has moved to Thursday afternoons, and is starting back up tomorrow, January 4th. The schedule got a bit chaotic in December, but is now set to be a reliable 2pm every Thursday for at least the next few months, except the last week of February.
Chen Taiji at the James Bay Centre has moved to 10:30am on Tuesdays. There are two sessions currently scheduled, and you can register at these links: January 9th - February 20, and March 5th - April 2nd. The Centre tells me we have enough registrations to confirm the Jan-Feb session already - thank you to everyone who's signed up so far.
I know that not everyone has the work schedule freedom I do! If you are interested in learning taiji but can't make weekday working hours, please drop me an email. If I hear from enough people I am willing to add an evening class.
Easy practice tip: mirroring videos
I've had conversations with at least two students recently about how it's hard to practice along with a video because most of them face the viewer and aren't mirrored. I have the same problem, and I just found a technical solution for this, at least for YouTube videos: mirrorthevideo.com. Simply replace "youtube" with "mirrorthevideo" in the URL, and everything gets mirrored. For example, here's Chen Zhenglei demonstrating the 18 step essentials form that we use for the Tuesday classes.
There are also browser plugins available that mirror videos, at least for Firefox and Chrome. I can't recommend specific ones as I haven't tested any properly myself yet.
Hard practice tip: self-compassion
A thing I've heard from almost every student is that it's so easy to be frustrated in the early stages of learning any new sequence. This is especially true at the very beginning, when the whole way of moving is new. I'm sorry to say that I don't have a neat technical solution for this one (and you shouldn't trust me if I claimed to), just a few meandering thoughts about patience and self-compassion. I am talking to myself as much as to anyone else here, but hopefully this is helpful to you as well. Not just with taiji, with anything hard. I find I especially need the reminder around the turn of the year, when people talk about resolutions and hopes as if things can change overnight.
I was born in Turkey. While I didn't grow up speaking Turkish (I was very young when we emigrated), I have learned a little as an adult, and my cousin and I keep a list of interesting idioms. One of my favourites is "damlaya damlaya, göl olur", which can be literally translated as something like "by a drop, by a drop, it becomes a lake". In other words, each drop might not look like much, but given time they add up.
There are many water images in taiji and qigong, and I find this one particularly helpful. Some classes or practice sessions have clear, sudden insights: "oh, that's how I'm supposed to do X", or "I don't lose my balance at step Y any more". But most of the time progress isn't so clear in the moment. But every time we repeat a movement or a set of movements, we're adding another drop or two. The drops feel like nothing, then one day we look over our shoulders, and realise they've added up to a lake. Different things can prompt those realisations. Lately for me it's been trying to learn the 18 form mirrored: each step that feels like second-nature the usual way round is a new challenge mirrored, and that's when I realise that it only ever started to feel natural because I repeated it enough times.
In the moment, it's very hard to maintain patience and self-compassion. It's so tempting to compare ourselves to others, particularly others who are ahead of us on a path. When I watch Chen Zhenglei his mastery can feel unattainable, but I also read his biography, which makes very clear how many hours of practice over so many years it took him to get there. In truth, I'll never rival him for the simple reason that I have a day job which isn't taiji, but I can add another drop to my lake each day. And when I get judgemental about my own mistakes, I can look back and remember how much harder the same movements were a year ago.
I think the last thing I want to say about this is that I have no natural talent for martial arts whatsoever. At school, my clumsiness was the butt of jokes. And in my first ever martial arts class, I managed to fall so awkwardly that I injured a knee and needed months to recover. To the extent that I'm any good at these things today, it's only because I managed to keep practicing them over and over again. And that means that whatever skill I demonstrate today is attainable by anyone else just as clumsy I was when I started.
So, when you get frustrated with needing to be shown the same movement again, as everyone does at least sometimes, please go easy on yourself. Remember that we often can't feel the drops accumulating until they've added up to something big enough, which takes time and repetition even for the Grandmaster. The kinder you can be to yourself, the easier it will be to keep going, and in a few months you'll be able to look back and see how much you've learned.