Tai Chi Notes, August 8, 2019

I got back on Tuesday evening from visiting my parents and helping Miranda move into her new apartment. I didn’t do any Tai Chi since my last post, it just didn’t fit so well into helping Miranda move, and I actually paused doing my Dantian Rotations for most of that time, too: I’d had a cough while visiting my parents, which was exercising my stomach muscles quite a bit, so I figured I’d give them a break. But I did manage to do Wu Ji pretty much every day in Cincinnati, finding some time either in the morning or the evening, and most days I did 30 minutes or so of meditation. (And I’ve just now added meditation to Streaks, to help remind me, because I’m forgetting about that on non-workdays; I added Wu Ji a week or two back, that was useful.)

In one of Damo Mitchell’s books I was reading recently and one of his podcasts that I was listening to, the concept of Ting (listen) came up. Which had been coming up for a while, from the first seminar I took, but I’d mostly been ignoring it, because it didn’t make much sense to me in that context, but it seems like something I should experiment with. Basically, he says that Ting (listen) and Song (relax) are both key; I’ve been hearing about Song for years in my Tai Chi class, and that makes sense to me. But I don’t understand what listening has to do with understanding the state of the inside of my body; Mitchell claims, though, that not only are there sensations that are best accessed through listening, but that using other senses (e.g. feeling) can turn out to be actively misleading. Not sure what to make of that, but it sounds like something I should try, hopefully it will make sense eventually…