Keeping momentum through a class break
Hello,
We’re about to have a gap in classes, so today I mainly want to talk about ways to start and maintain a practice habit when we go a while between classes. But before that, some scheduling info.
I’m taking a few weeks off to visit friends and relatives, after which classes will restart as follows:
The new evening taiji classes will be on Thursdays, 5:30-6:30pm, starting on November 7th. They’ll run until December 12th, but skip November 28th (US Thanksgiving), for a total of 5 classes. Click here to register.
Morning taiji classes will be at 10:15am on Tuesdays again, running November 12th - December 10th inclusive, for a total of 5 classes. Registration is here.
Qigong will move to Mondays, November 11th - December 16th inclusive. Other details stay as before: 2-2:30pm, no registration required but you do need to join theDock as at least a $20/month community member.
All taiji classes are at the James Bay Community School Centre, 140 Oswego Street. Qigong meets at theDock, 722 Cormorant Street. I have a strong preference for training outside, but that doesn’t usually work out in November or December.
One other announcement: Sam Masich is coming back to Victoria for a weekend workshop on November 9th & 10th. He’s a great teacher, and his last visit in June was an excellent experience. He has confirmed that the November one will be complete beginner friendly. The material is very focused on partner work, and I find a day of Sam’s partner exercises a very good way to get deeper into the feeling of taiji than it’s possible to in a one hour class.
The venue has not been officially announced yet, but it will be in downtown Victoria.
So, on to practice. First I think it’s important to acknowledge that this is hard! Not so much starting, but maintaining a practice habit is harder than teachers often acknowledge. Personally, I have ADHD, and paradoxically taiji practice helps me cope but ADHD also makes it particularly challenging to keep good practice habits going. Eventually it becomes automatic, and these days I miss practicing if I’m pushed out of my routine for even a week, but it took a long time to get to that state. I want to share some of the things that helped me before I got there.
Before getting to specific resources, it’s important to think about what we’re practicing and why. To ground that, here is a little piece of Jewish lore:
One of the most influential rabbis of the 18th Century had a practice that when he saw misfortune coming for his community, he would go to a specific place in the forest to meditate. There he would light a special fire, say a special prayer, and the trouble would be averted.
Later his disciple had occasion to intercede with heaven. He went to the same place in the forest and said "I cannot light the fire, but I know the place and I can say the prayer".
Still later, another rabbi saw a threat and went into the forest, saying "I cannot light the fire, I do not know the prayer, but I know the place".
In yet another generation, another rabbi saw a need. Sitting in house, his head in his hands, he said: "I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is tell the story, and this must be sufficient". And it was.
I like this story so much that a slightly longer version is in my household’s readings for Passover every year. Of course the point is not that these were bad or inadequate rabbis! Each is an individual who is honoured as an influential teacher. But even they were able to forget sequences and details of rituals, and even so, they were sufficient.
How this relates to taiji is that it’s very easy to get too focussed on learning the sequence of steps we call a form. But the form is a training method, not the objective. We use it a lot because—just like any culture’s set of rituals or stories—it encodes a lot of our predecessors’ wisdom. But just as the historical rabbis didn’t all need to know the place and the fire and the prayer, there is a lot of worthwhile practice you can do without having memorised the sequence. At its heart, what really matters is to move every day, and practice keeping the movements well connected through the whole body and to the ground. Every exercise we do is a method for exploring and reinforcing those things.
So my most important advice is to start with the simpler practices. For general health and well-being, the warm-up routine can be a great help on its own. For stance, posture, and state of mind, standing meditation is a key tool: pick any of the basic stances, and hold it for a little longer each time, breathing deeply and watching for where you can let a little more physical or mental tension go. An exercise that is simple but never easy, and always time well spent.
As for practicing the movements themselves, any small segment can be made into either a silk reeling exercise or a walking practice, as a way to keep training the movement style without worrying about what step comes next. The “square drill” that we did in today’s class is a way to start practicing a few steps, covering all the core stances. And last, after all of those other things, practicing any fragment of the form is worthwhile.
For all of these, it still helps to have something to follow at first. I’ve compiled my favourite videos on the forms page of my website. I have links there to:
My teacher, Viola Brumbaugh, demonstrating and talking through her version of the warmup. Unsurprisingly it’s very similar to what we do in class, because I mostly learned it from her.
Another teacher demonstrating and describing a set of silk reeling exercises.
The current grandmaster of our lineage and one of his most senior disciples each demonstrating the 18-step form.
A list of the 18 movement names for that form, in Chinese and English.
You might find it helpful to follow along with any of the videos, and even if you don’t I encourage you to watch them once. Each teacher has differences in style and emphasis, and I always find I learn something new when I follow a new teacher’s interpretation of a movement I think I already know.
The final thing I want to say is that just like for learning any skill, you’ll get the best results from regular practice, even if each instalment is very small. It won’t necessarily be the same for you, but I find it much easier to fit practice in in the morning, before I do anything outside the house. I do the warm-up routine almost every day before breakfast, it’s become part of how I wake up. I join Sifu Viola’s classes on Zoom, and I try to always set some time aside for individual form practice every week, though in reality that doesn’t always happen. Every time I do manage, it’s because I put the time on my calendar in advance, before any work commitments for that day. But everyone is different - I encourage you to experiment and see what works for you.
Good luck, and I hope to see you in November!