Tai Chi Notes, July 23, 2019

The main event for this week was the number of times I did Wu Ji. I finished something at work at 4:45 on Wednesday, decided I didn’t have anything super productive to do for the next 25 minutes, so I did a last e-mail scan and went outside and did 15 minutes of Wu Ji. On Thursday there was a team lunch, so I didn’t have my normal lunchtime practice, but I again found some time in the afternoon. And basically I kept that up, sometimes doing Wu Ji when I got home, sometimes at work, and sometimes in my normal practice times, and I ended up doing it 7 days in a row and counting.

They weren’t, admittedly, always the best practice sessions: on a couple of them I bailed noticeably early and on one or two I bailed a little early. But still, doing it every day made me happy, and my body felt better after that.

I’m also trying to tweak my posture: I was reading a collection of articles called Daoist Reflections from Scholar Sage and one of them mentioned not having your knees past your toes, and also not having your pressure on the balls of your feet. (It’s supposed to be over your Yong Quan, but that’s a little further back.) So I’ve been trying to alter my posture to follow that, which also seems to me like it should fit with the idea of acting like you’re about to sit on a barstool instead of down into a chair? Good that this fits together, though it doesn’t actually feel like it’s making things any easier, in fact frequently the practice has been feeling more strenuous since I’ve made that change, so I’m not actually sure that I’m doing things more correctly.

I’m also starting to feel like I have a better notion of how far down I’m supposed to go: in particular, if I go far enough, I definitely feel that my center of gravity is too low. So that’s good. And I’ve been working on sinking my qi, both when doing Wu Ji and when doing seated meditation, and I feel like I’ve been able to do that more reliably; hopefully I’ll be able to build on that. (Sometimes I then do some reverse breathing after I feel I have my qi in the right place, not much coming of that yet.)

Not much to say about Tai Chi. This weekend we had the Sunday class, and some more people were taking the teacher training test; some of this is probably seeing flaws in others while not noticing the flaws in yourself, but I felt like I can do the first form better than three of the four people showed? So I should probably take that test at some point; maybe I’ll do it next year. The potential blocks are making sure I can do one of the weapon forms, and the fact that my teacher has a preference for people having done a competition first; I’m not 100% sure I’ll feel like doing a competition next year. But I could work on the Lao Jia Dao form for the weapons form, that should be okay, I think. Still, I might target two years from now instead of next year?