On rituals
Hello friends,
I have some scheduling updates and questions, and then a few thoughts about the rituals we start and end classes with.
First the routine schedule updates:
There’s no taiji tomorrow, Wednesday September 30th, because it’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. I’m planning to spend a couple of hours at the South Island Powwow, and if you haven’t been to that before I highly recommend it.
Taiji picks up as normal the following Wednesday, though we’ll be skipping October 28th and November 11th - full schedule at https://taijiwitheldan.ca/classes.html#taiji
The short qigong sessions at theDock continue on Mondays as normal, but will skip October 26th and November 1st.
The scheduling question is about the evening qigong workshops. I’m having trouble finding an appropriate venue, and one thing that might break the logjam is switching from Wednesdays to Thursdays. But I want to make sure that works for people. So, if you are interested in these workshops—whether you’ve been to one before or not—please reply to this email and let me know two things: if either Wednesday or Thursday evenings work for you, and if both do then whether you have a preference.
September always gets me thinking about the rituals we start and finish things with. We’ve had the High Holy Days, which mark the end of one year and the start of the next. The Powwow is all about rituals, including big set pieces for the formal opening and closing. And there are always more new taiji students at this time of year, so I get to thinking about the little rituals of our class and how to explain them.
Starting and ending rituals are very important to me. I think some of this comes from Jewish tradition, which is full of these ways of marking the transition from routine to focused/community time and back. There’s also an ADHD piece: one of my biggest challenges is with task switching, and little routines like changing my clothes before and after even a very short informal practice session help me get into the right frame of mind.
The rituals in classes I lead serve the same purpose. They are mostly things that I’ve adopted from my teachers, but they have evolved. So I thought it might be worthwhile to break them down a little.
The first piece is to all face the same way and bow together, ideally towards a big tree. The bowing together part comes from the Chen family, and when we get together for big symposia they often bring portraits of the ancestors who played key roles in formalising Chen taijiquan, so we bow to them. The use of a tree as an alternative altar is directly copied from Sifu Viola, who appreciates trees even more than I do. Since my version of the ritual also serves as a land acknowledgement, it feels fitting to connect it very directly to the land like this.
We bow to thank three groups of people:
The lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking people and their ancestors, on whose land all of my classes meet. If I were to teach elsewhere, I’d modify this to fit the place.
The ancestral teachers of whichever practice we are doing. For Chen taijiquan it’s specifically the elders and ancestors of that family. For qigong there aren’t always readily identifiable individuals, but we still recognise the people who developed and stewarded the art.
Our own ancestors.
The second piece is to bow to each other. The form this takes is how Chen Zhenglei teaches it, but a twist on it has emerged in my classes. The bow is with the right hand as a fist, to honour the fact that taiji is a martial art (and qigong is related enough for this to still be relevant). The left hand is open and obstructing that fist, as a reminder that we’re not learning this in order to do violence.
The twist is that I was taught this as a two-way thing: the teacher faces students, and students collectively face the teacher, but that’s changed. Very early in teaching taiji here in Victoria, I introduced this ritual, and a couple of the students interpreted my stage directions as asking everyone to take turns to face each other. That wasn’t really what I intended at the time, but it feels like an improvement, so now I frame it explicitly as thanking each other for sharing the time.
If you are one of the people who started that, thank you. It’s an improvement on how I’d originally planned it to go. And if you’ve joined since, there’s a general lesson here: these rituals have roots and a purpose, but they are also flexible. We end up with something better when let it adjust to our collective needs and this moment in time.