Hello friends,

Most of this email is going to be about scheduling changes which I need your feedback about.

First, short-term updates and reminders:

• Qigong is taking a break this Monday, May 25th. After that it will be back to 1pm most Mondays through June, and I’ll update the page with other days off.

• We have two weeks left in the current taiji session, so the last classes will be Tuesday & Thursday June 2nd & 4th respectively.

For the summer, thing will change around a bit:

• The Monday qigong will get less consistent because of travel, and skip the whole month of August. I won’t send an email for every update, but I will keep the schedule up to date on the web page so check there if you’re thinking of dropping in.

• There will be one evening qigong workshop: Monkey, on Wednesday July 29th.

• Taiji will switch into informal mode: no registration, no indoor venue, just meeting in a park roughly every couple of weeks. These summer sessions are for current students only because it’s too hard to get started without weekly classes - if you’re thinking of starting it’s better to wait until September when we’ll go back to a regular schedule. I’ve emailed current students directly to coordinate this: if you’ve been coming to classes at all this year and haven’t received that email, please reply to this and ask me about it.

Then the part I need your feedback about: taiji schedule changes from September onwards. The September session will start the week of Labour Day, September 7th, and I may need to make some changes for it. I have opposite problems with the two weekly classes.

The morning classes have outgrown the small room we’ve been using! A very nice problem to have, but unfortunately the larger gym is not available on Tuesday mornings. If we move the class to Wednesdays, we can have the bigger room for days when the weather sends us back indoors.

The evening classes have remained so small that it may not make sense for me to continue them. Unfortunately Thursdays are the only evening I’m consistently available, so I can’t try a different day, though I am thinking of a small time change. My current plan is to give this another try in September, but set a strict minimum of three registrations: if we don’t have three registrations the week before the session starts, I’ll cancel the evening classes.

So, I’d like your feedback about the schedule options. If you’re a current student please let me know if any of these possible options would be better, worse, or impossible for you. If you’re not a current student but interested in [re]starting, please let me know if any of these possible changes would make it easier for you to join:

• Keeping the daytime class at its current time, 10:15am on Tuesdays (but we’ll be stuck with the small room).

• Moving the daytime class to 10:15am on Wednesdays.

• Moving the daytime class to 11am on Wednesdays.

• Keeping the evening class at its current time, 5:45pm on Thursdays (acknowledging a high risk that it will be cancelled).

• Small time change for the Thursday class, to start at 6pm.

• Moving the Thursday evening class to a different location (in Victoria or Esquimalt).

And finally, as a little thank you for sticking with me through all that, here are a couple of videos I found recently that I thought worth sharing. The first is Zongqin Lin, a teacher I don’t know, but I really like the approach and energy he presents in this one about how to walk:

The second was a real treat for me to stumble across: it’s my teacher’s teacher’s son, talking about really fundamental practices for rootedness and balance. Like his dad he’s primarily a Yang Style teacher so the specific movements he demos are a little different from what we do in class. But the principles are the same, and also like his dad he’s a very good explainer and demonstrator of those principles: