To begin at the beginning
This is an introduction and also a placeholder and will probably also be the last long message I send to this list for a couple of months. I'll start with the most important thing: I'm teaching a Chen Taiji class for beginners, soon.
The rest of this update is about how I got to this point, and it's going to be quite a ramble which is why I put the bullet points first. I wrote the formal bio for the website yesterday, which does what it needs to in terms of situating me in a lineage and telling potential students why I might be someone they would want to learn from, but it doesn't tell much of a story. So here is that story.
It started with the end of high school. I had a close knit group of friends, many of whom I'm still in touch with 25+ years and an intercontinental move later. We all went to different universities, but in the holidays we'd meet up at a couple of our parents' houses, watch films and play video games. There was a wide variety of Hong Kong Cinema, and a lot of me losing at Tekken 2. It was all good wholesome fun, without any real appreciation of the contexts these things came from. But the more I got into the movies, the more I found myself wanting to learn more about that cultural context and what it would really feel like to learn kung fu.
A dear friend started at the same university as me a year later, and it was that friend who noticed that the university had a kung fu club. So we talked each other into joining, and went to a first lesson together. That first lesson didn't exactly go as hoped. I injured one of my ACLs by overexerting in a roundhouse kick, and being young and foolish I convinced myself it was minor and got back up and kept going. The next morning I couldn't stand, and it would be a few months before I could return to training (or ride a bike, or walk up or down stairs without pain). But even that unlucky, truncated experience felt like opening a door just enough to see that some things I was going to really like were on the other side, and my friend kept training which also helped me see that there was a Good Thing there.
I went back as soon as I could, and learned to take better care of my joints. The workouts were energising, and sparring became fun once I got over the fear. The two instructors were great examples and welcoming guides, and they introduced bits and pieces of the surrounding culture, around ways of showing respect for each other, simple techniques for calming the mind, and most excitingly of all this weird thing called "qigong". It was a revelation to me that such deceptively simple breathing and stretching exercises could do so much to clear the fog that was often in my head.
I didn't really understand the appeal of form practice at the time, but I dutifully put in the work to pass a few gradings and get my green belt. I would describe that as not a particularly impressive achievement, but enough to show serious engagement and not be a beginner any more. In the end, this first club wasn't quite the right fit for me, but it started me on a journey. Half of the people I'm still in touch with from university I met through that club, and every evening I still do some stretches they taught me, so it's fair to say that they gave me a lot.
One day I noticed a relatively new club in a different style happened to meet around the corner from my house, so I thought I'd check them out. There I found the first martial arts teacher who I really connected with, and the training system that really got me deeply committed. There wasn't just one qigong, there were multiple types with different goals. The forms weren't just for gradings, they were a core training method. As well as the high-exertion, muscle building hard techniques there was a whole "soft art" similar to embodying relaxed, smooth movement, which I quickly realised was much harder than it looked, but so very rewarding. The grandmaster would sometimes visit from Singapore, which was occasion for formal dinners and long talks about history, tradition, and customs. And there was an array of weapons, which were both a treat and very clearly introduced as tools to test and improve our empty hand work.
It was with this group that I really started to practice seriously on my own, and to see that practice as worthwhile for its own sake. And it was also a beautiful community, from going to the pub together after training, through organising a couple of intensive summer training camps together, to all manner of personal things like the instructor getting his Master's degree and me learning to cope with a chronic illness. And then life happened and I moved away, first to a different city, then to another continent, and then across that continent.
I kept up my own training for a while, but I hadn't had time to build a strong enough base to keep going indefinitely without a teacher or the structure of regular classes. I missed it, and tried to find replacements in each place where I lived, but for years nothing quite clicked for me - even some clubs that I could see had something great to share but just weren't quite what I needed.
It was only after I'd lived in Seattle a few years that someone suggested I check out a Chen Style Taiji class with a teacher who was relatively new in town at the time. The first class was a lot more auspicious this time. I was intimidated by the length of the foundational form, and honestly not sure I could maintain the focus needed for a drill that takes 15-20 minutes each repetition, but I could see that I'd found the next teacher I'd really connect with, and that what she was teaching was the thing I'd been looking for.
Over the years a close knit community blossomed around that core, and I found myself more and more committed to the art. I've had the privilege of going to a few workshops with our grandmaster and his lineage inheritors, and our club in Seattle arranged a couple of week long intensive training camps. After a few years I started leading practice sessions when our teacher was away, then helping welcome beginners into the classes, and then teaching my own class to share one of the advanced forms. I found great satisfaction in teaching, and it made me a much better martial artist as students would ask questions I hadn't thought about, or we'd work together on fitting a technique to our different bodies. And then life happened and I moved away, albeit not so far away this time.
I had had much more time to build a foundation this time, so I'm doing much better at keeping up my own training. Of course, 20 years of technological advancement and the much shorter distance I've moved both help. I get to join my teacher's classes over Zoom 2-3 times a week, watch videos of the grandmaster demonstrating and lecturing, and have private lessons with my teacher a few times a year when I visit Seattle. But I miss the community and the energy of sharing a physical space with people doing the same thing. And since moving I've learned that I have ADHD, which explains both the brain fog I alluded to earlier and why I find it so hard to stay focused on a laptop screen even when it's a teacher I love demonstrating a thing I'm keen to understand better.
I know of one Chen Style teacher here in Victoria, but he's in a different lineage which has very different interpretations of many of the movements. Watching him, I see someone who knows his art deeply and demonstrates it clearly, but it's not the same art as the one I've spent more than a decade immersed in. I've been taking Yang Style lessons at my local community centre, but it's the same thing: beautiful art, great teacher, but not the one that I'm committed to. So if I want a community to practice what I know with, I need to make it myself. Thanks to covid, getting this going has taken a while. I got my instructor certification last year, and now I have a supportive venue lined up and a lesson plan for the next few months.
I hope that I can open a door for a few people, like my various teachers over the years have for me. Of course I want to bring people in to the specific tradition I'm now a student of so we can train together, but if I introduce someone to martial arts and then they decide that Karate is the one for them, I'll count that as a win too. And if someone comes along, doesn't stick with it, but leaves with a little more knowledge about what Taiji is, where it came from, and why some people like it: also a win. As long as I can faithfully represent the tradition, there aren't many ways to lose.
But first, I need some people to register for the class to even happen.
- Venue: James Bay Community School Centre, 140 Oswego Street, Victoria, BC V8V 2B1.
- Dates & times: Tuesday mornings, 9-10am, September 12th - December 12th inclusive, skipping October 31st.
- Registration: online or by phone, details at https://www.jamesbaycentre.ca/bulletins/fall-program-guide-now-available/ . Registration opens on Monday, August 14th, and we need at least 3 people to register for the class to go ahead.
- More info: there will soon be a website at https://taijiwitheldan.ca/ with more details and things like a formal bio and links to my teachers, good demo videos, and reference material.
- Updates: Subscribe to this mailing list for updates. Most of the time it will just be short admin things like reminders when registration opens or of any schedule changes, up to one short email per week. Every now and then I'll write longer, more personal things like the rest of this email, but those will be at most one every couple of months because I know we all get too much email already.
The rest of this update is about how I got to this point, and it's going to be quite a ramble which is why I put the bullet points first. I wrote the formal bio for the website yesterday, which does what it needs to in terms of situating me in a lineage and telling potential students why I might be someone they would want to learn from, but it doesn't tell much of a story. So here is that story.
It started with the end of high school. I had a close knit group of friends, many of whom I'm still in touch with 25+ years and an intercontinental move later. We all went to different universities, but in the holidays we'd meet up at a couple of our parents' houses, watch films and play video games. There was a wide variety of Hong Kong Cinema, and a lot of me losing at Tekken 2. It was all good wholesome fun, without any real appreciation of the contexts these things came from. But the more I got into the movies, the more I found myself wanting to learn more about that cultural context and what it would really feel like to learn kung fu.
A dear friend started at the same university as me a year later, and it was that friend who noticed that the university had a kung fu club. So we talked each other into joining, and went to a first lesson together. That first lesson didn't exactly go as hoped. I injured one of my ACLs by overexerting in a roundhouse kick, and being young and foolish I convinced myself it was minor and got back up and kept going. The next morning I couldn't stand, and it would be a few months before I could return to training (or ride a bike, or walk up or down stairs without pain). But even that unlucky, truncated experience felt like opening a door just enough to see that some things I was going to really like were on the other side, and my friend kept training which also helped me see that there was a Good Thing there.
I went back as soon as I could, and learned to take better care of my joints. The workouts were energising, and sparring became fun once I got over the fear. The two instructors were great examples and welcoming guides, and they introduced bits and pieces of the surrounding culture, around ways of showing respect for each other, simple techniques for calming the mind, and most excitingly of all this weird thing called "qigong". It was a revelation to me that such deceptively simple breathing and stretching exercises could do so much to clear the fog that was often in my head.
I didn't really understand the appeal of form practice at the time, but I dutifully put in the work to pass a few gradings and get my green belt. I would describe that as not a particularly impressive achievement, but enough to show serious engagement and not be a beginner any more. In the end, this first club wasn't quite the right fit for me, but it started me on a journey. Half of the people I'm still in touch with from university I met through that club, and every evening I still do some stretches they taught me, so it's fair to say that they gave me a lot.
One day I noticed a relatively new club in a different style happened to meet around the corner from my house, so I thought I'd check them out. There I found the first martial arts teacher who I really connected with, and the training system that really got me deeply committed. There wasn't just one qigong, there were multiple types with different goals. The forms weren't just for gradings, they were a core training method. As well as the high-exertion, muscle building hard techniques there was a whole "soft art" similar to embodying relaxed, smooth movement, which I quickly realised was much harder than it looked, but so very rewarding. The grandmaster would sometimes visit from Singapore, which was occasion for formal dinners and long talks about history, tradition, and customs. And there was an array of weapons, which were both a treat and very clearly introduced as tools to test and improve our empty hand work.
It was with this group that I really started to practice seriously on my own, and to see that practice as worthwhile for its own sake. And it was also a beautiful community, from going to the pub together after training, through organising a couple of intensive summer training camps together, to all manner of personal things like the instructor getting his Master's degree and me learning to cope with a chronic illness. And then life happened and I moved away, first to a different city, then to another continent, and then across that continent.
I kept up my own training for a while, but I hadn't had time to build a strong enough base to keep going indefinitely without a teacher or the structure of regular classes. I missed it, and tried to find replacements in each place where I lived, but for years nothing quite clicked for me - even some clubs that I could see had something great to share but just weren't quite what I needed.
It was only after I'd lived in Seattle a few years that someone suggested I check out a Chen Style Taiji class with a teacher who was relatively new in town at the time. The first class was a lot more auspicious this time. I was intimidated by the length of the foundational form, and honestly not sure I could maintain the focus needed for a drill that takes 15-20 minutes each repetition, but I could see that I'd found the next teacher I'd really connect with, and that what she was teaching was the thing I'd been looking for.
Over the years a close knit community blossomed around that core, and I found myself more and more committed to the art. I've had the privilege of going to a few workshops with our grandmaster and his lineage inheritors, and our club in Seattle arranged a couple of week long intensive training camps. After a few years I started leading practice sessions when our teacher was away, then helping welcome beginners into the classes, and then teaching my own class to share one of the advanced forms. I found great satisfaction in teaching, and it made me a much better martial artist as students would ask questions I hadn't thought about, or we'd work together on fitting a technique to our different bodies. And then life happened and I moved away, albeit not so far away this time.
I had had much more time to build a foundation this time, so I'm doing much better at keeping up my own training. Of course, 20 years of technological advancement and the much shorter distance I've moved both help. I get to join my teacher's classes over Zoom 2-3 times a week, watch videos of the grandmaster demonstrating and lecturing, and have private lessons with my teacher a few times a year when I visit Seattle. But I miss the community and the energy of sharing a physical space with people doing the same thing. And since moving I've learned that I have ADHD, which explains both the brain fog I alluded to earlier and why I find it so hard to stay focused on a laptop screen even when it's a teacher I love demonstrating a thing I'm keen to understand better.
I know of one Chen Style teacher here in Victoria, but he's in a different lineage which has very different interpretations of many of the movements. Watching him, I see someone who knows his art deeply and demonstrates it clearly, but it's not the same art as the one I've spent more than a decade immersed in. I've been taking Yang Style lessons at my local community centre, but it's the same thing: beautiful art, great teacher, but not the one that I'm committed to. So if I want a community to practice what I know with, I need to make it myself. Thanks to covid, getting this going has taken a while. I got my instructor certification last year, and now I have a supportive venue lined up and a lesson plan for the next few months.
I hope that I can open a door for a few people, like my various teachers over the years have for me. Of course I want to bring people in to the specific tradition I'm now a student of so we can train together, but if I introduce someone to martial arts and then they decide that Karate is the one for them, I'll count that as a win too. And if someone comes along, doesn't stick with it, but leaves with a little more knowledge about what Taiji is, where it came from, and why some people like it: also a win. As long as I can faithfully represent the tradition, there aren't many ways to lose.
But first, I need some people to register for the class to even happen.
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