Tai Chi Notes, February 19, 2019

I missed the Saturday Tai Chi class, because I spent Friday and Saturday at a Lotus Nei Gong class instead. And wow: it was a lot more painful (and a lot more sweaty) than I expected. I think I’ll write about that more on my main blog, so I won’t go into details here; I was going there as preparation for probably going to a class by Damo Mitchell in May, and if his class is anything like that one (and if I still decide to go and manage to make it off of the wait list), then I will definitely be glad to have had some preparation.

The one concrete thing that came out of that is that the class spent a lot of time in something that is called Wu Ji that is significantly different from the stance named Wu Ji that my Tai Chi teacher presents: your butt sticks out more, you lean over some (with the result that your Huiyin is not at all in the line between your Baihui and your Yongquan), and you stick your arms forward and down with your hands spread. This was extremely painful (and I was sweating buckets) at the duration we were doing it in the class; less painful the second day than the first day, though, and my body was starting to feel like it was clicking into place a little bit when I did the posture. So I’m going to work on that: if I do end up going to the May class and if we spend anything like the same amount of time in that posture in that class, then I will definitely be glad to have been working on improving my tolerance.

On Sunday we had the monthly class: we’re continuing going through the second form, it’s the start of the second time for me. So we’re in parts of that form that I did learn the basics of, and it’s good to see some refinements. And we started the staff form, the parts we did are more different from the spear form than I expected.

I was reading another of Damo Mitchell’s books on my commute in this morning, this one about meridian theory; that’s something that I have a hard time believing in, but he gave a sensing exercise that he claims will help you perceive them more or less directly. So I figure I’ll also add that to my Tuesday/Thursday lunchtime practice. So I did both the Wu Ji and the meridian sensing drill; I started with 5 minutes of Wu Ji (with the plan of going up one minute a time until I hit 20 minutes), that was fine. And, in doing the sensing drill, I actually was kind of surprised at the feelings that I felt between the Taiyuan point (LU9, at the base of my wrist) and the end of my thumb (which is where LU11 is); could totally have been an artifact of how I was holding my hand, so it’s absolutely not any kind of strong evidence as to the reality of the lung meridian, but it’s not a complete lack of evidence, either. So I’ll probably keep that up for a little while, seeing if I can feel more of the lung meridian and eventually parts of other meridians.

No regular class today, but a bunch of us were there anyways; I ended up mostly practicing on my own (going through the silk-reeling exercises and 6 repetitions of the first form), though I did also do a bit of push hands with another student. I continue to think that I should spend a little more time doing push hands in Tuesday classes, I feel like I’m at a place where I can start to get something out of it.