Tai Chi notes, September 11, 2018

On Saturday, we spent a lot of time on the spear: we learned the very beginning and the full marshal. I think I’m going to enjoy the spear – lots of spinning your hands around, but it ultimately seems to make sense? Quite different so far from other forms I’ve done…. Because we spent so much time on the spear, though, we unfortunately didn’t have time to do Xin Jia. And I did go through both dao forms during a break.

Sunday was the once-a-month Pao Chui (second form) class. Getting close to the end of that form; there are definitely parts that I’m rough on and parts that I don’t remember so well outside of class, but I made progress on one of the latter areas, I think. And then we did an application discussion on the first form, covering relaxing your arm to get out of an arm lock. Interesting to practice both sides of that one, I wish I’d had a little more time with it.

And then I relaxed a bit while other people did the guan dao (I was already learning enough new forms, so I skipped that one); and then we did Xin Jia practice. (So it wasn’t so bad skipping that on Saturday.) Again, there are a few spots where I don’t quite know the form, but I’m making progress…

Today was the first week of a new session on the Tuesday class, which is always more introductory than normal weeks; so a pretty quiet class. Though that meant that we were working on the moves right at the start, which meant that I got to practice the bit where I’m balancing on my right leg; I think I’m getting better at that because of the 8 energies course, because I’m doing a better job of treating it as a lu, somehow that helps me maintain my balance by drawing my body together. The other good thing that happened today was that I didn’t have much trouble doing standing meditation for 20 minutes over lunch; hopefully I’ll be able to maintain that.