I led the Silk Reeling Exercises in the Saturday class this week. One of the senior students gave me a few pieces of advice afterwards: when I’m doing the Spiraling from Dantian to Wrist, I should lead with the pinky and end with the middle finger; when I’m doing the punching in the exercises, the punches should be chest height instead of waist height; and when I’m doing the Six Sealing Four Closing in the form, I shouldn’t lean forward at the start.

When doing the form, I feel like my Hand Maneuvers are getting a little better – I’m doing a better job of relaxing the off hand. I’m feeling a little off-balance in the Oblique Posture, when returning to my back foot: I think I need to work on that. And I was feeling a little uncertain about what I should do with my hands between the Protecting the Heart Fist and the Whirlwind Kick; not sure where that uncertainty came from, but hopefully I’ve got it mostly figured out again, but I should probably ask about that on Saturday?

For the spear part, we just reviewed what we’d done the previous week. (Which was a good thing: it’s important, and I hadn’t practiced because the Pao Chui course had taken up my normal practice time. Tony repeated some advice to practice new moves a hundred times; I should probably try that at some point!) And Xin Jia was also a repeat, we’re kind of stalled with that.

After the regular class I reviewed both Dao forms for a bit, and a couple of other students joined me; good to have company. There were a few things I wasn’t quite sure of, but hopefully we mostly figured it out…

Sunday was the last 8 Energies workshop. When doing 8 Energies reviews, I’ve been enjoying the feel of the Lei, feeling like something is stretching between my forearms; I think I need to work on Lu, it’s subtler than I’d been thinking of it as; and Kao definitely needs some work. I’d been doing the Kao in the drill as just moving my shoulder forward, with my arm already down, but I realized that Tony spirals his arm down to set up the shoulder strike, I need to work on that. And the handout translates Kao as torso instead of shoulder; I asked about that, the point there is that the force comes from the torso as well as the shoulder.

Most of the morning was spent on the moving steps version of the 8 Energies drill. Not sure if I’ll be able to remember that, but here are some notes to try to help:

• In general, moves are done with your hands in fists. And in the first four you slide your feet forward and backward; in the second four, you switch feet and step every time.
• Peng: both fists curve forward and up, but make sure you don’t get uprooted: it’s important to sink. Your back fist goes pretty far forward, you’re not just expanding with the front fist, and in fact the back fist can turn into an uppercut.
• Lu: both fists are in a horizontal orientation (in fists), with the front palm up the back palm down; pull back with them.
• Ji: switch feet with this one; punch forward, with both fists in a vertical orientation.
• An: pretty much what you’d expect, punch down just inside your back leg.
• Cai: no fists on this one, you’re grabbing pulling back like in the regular version of the exercise. But think of the foot switch at the end as part of the Cai.
• Lei: there’s a foot switch right at the start (coming very soon after the Cai switch, so it feels like two switches in a row). And then pull your fists apart while turning, but don’t think of it as a turn, rather as emphasizing the split: bend your front arm at the elbow, with the outer half of your arm vertical, while the left hand goes back. So you can think of it as using your back hand to pull on your opponent’s arm, extending it, while your left hand pushes on the part of the arm above the shoulder, locking their joint. It’s kind of like jump turn after third Pound Pestle in Xin Jia.
• Zhou: start with a block and strike, just like in Kao. Both elbows are going horizontally sideways, but the front elbow is the important one: unlike Lei, you’re not splitting. (And maybe the back arm isn’t even really hitting so much with the elbow at all?)
• Kao: it starts with the same block and strike as Zho does; it’s basically just like the regular 8 energies Kao.

And in the afternoon we did a push hands version of that; that was fun, but I don’t think I’ll try to write down notes, I don’t spend much time on push hands. (I should probably start doing more push hands at some point?) And then there was some other push hands thing after that, but I was feeling surprisingly wiped out, so I sat out during the last hour.

I skipped class today: Liesl wasn’t feeling good so I walked Widget after getting home, and I got home late because of train problems. And the combination of those two took enough time that I would have shown up quite late to class.

As to non-class practices, I skipped standing meditation last Thursday (I was at a conference over lunch) but I did it today; only 15 minutes, though. I haven’t been as good as I’d like about the leg strengthening exercise that Tony’s been talking about over the last month or so, but I’m still doing it some; hopefully I can turn that into a regular habit (before I go to bed, probably?), because I’m pretty sure it would be good for me.

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.

In Saturday’s class this week I didn’t get the same feeling when doing the shoulder rotation that I had the previous Tuesday; ah well. Maybe the previous one was partly a side effect of having spent six hours doing Tai Chi a couple of days earlier; we’ll see what happens after the third 8 Energies course?

One thing that my teacher pointed out to me on Saturday was that I was bending my arm too much in The White Goose Displays the Wings; he’d also mentioned that to me earlier in Grab and Tuck in the Robe, I should work on extending my arm more. (I’m better at remembering it in Dantian Change.) The other thing I’m thinking about now is something he’s said about energy going down your unweighted foot in certain moves: he brought that up a few weeks back in Reverse with Spiraling Forearms, and he’s mentioned it before in Grab and Tuck in the Robe and in Dantian Change.) I’m not entirely sure what to feel for there, hopefully I’ll get better at sensing that? (I think I’ve felt something related to that a few times, though.)

We started the spear, specifically learning how to do a half marshal. I scrape the ground more than I’d like, and the middle of the three turns in the half marshal doesn’t feel particularly natural yet, but presumably that will come? And he also recommended an exercise for getting used to your weapon, namely jerking the spear up from the ground, having it slide through your hand, and trying to stop it with your hand right near the bottom of it (without changing the height of your hand, so your hand should basically be near your waist the whole time). That seems like a fun exercise; so far my failure mode is almost always that the spear doesn’t come high enough.

And we got back to Xin Jia this week. I still have significant gaps there, even in the portions I’ve allegedly learned (we’re only up to the first Feel out the Tall Horse): I’m getting something wrong in Teal Dragon Emerges from the Water, and there are some parts after Reverse with Scrolling Forearms that I’m significantly off on. Still, I’m doing better than I was a couple of months ago: Xin Jia still doesn’t feel natural to me, but I don’t feel as completely lost as I did…

Sunday practice is now getting kind of long: I’ve been doing the Lao Jia first form three times, as much of the Lao Jia second form and the Xin Jia first form as I can remember, and both the Lao Jia Dao and the Hunyuan Dao. And now I’m adding in the Eight Energies drill and starting to add in the spear; and I’m just learning three of those, so if I stick with all of that, it’ll just get longer! Still, it’s a manageable length, and all of those forms feel like stuff that will stick with me if I keep at it, so I think that’s the right choice; maybe I’ll start practicing the Dao forms on Saturdays, though, I imagine there might even be other students who would want to keep it going.

This Tuesday was the last day for the Silk Reeling special class; our teacher was answering questions about stuff. Nothing in particular to note, though there was one question another student asked that I was glad to hear: I was thinking this Saturday that the weight shifts in both directions of the four energies Silk Reeling exercise felt like the weight shift in the eight energies drill (which makes sense!), which in turn suggests that I should turn my waist a bit more than I had been while going back; but Tony said that we shouldn’t focus on that: in particular, on the second version of that drill, the focus should really be much more on how we spiral out of our shoulders.

I’ve been spending a lot of time practicing and thinking about Tai Chi over the last three years, and I thought that maybe I should start blogging about that. But I don’t think I want to start with big posts about individual topics: I’m going to just try to take notes about classes and practice every week. Which means that it’s a fit for this blog instead of my main blog; if the only reason why you’re subscribed to this blog is Minecraft pictures, there’s an RSS feed that only has the Minecraft stuff.

I imagine these notes won’t make much sense initially without context, because they’re coming into the middle of multiple ongoing trains of thought; hopefully that will improve later.

On Friday, I had the day off (I took the whole week off because of taking Miranda to college, but we flew back Thursday), so I stopped by Kung Fu Direct to pick up a spear, a staff, and a weapons case that can store both of my swords. The spear is long, in fact too long to fit in the trunk of the car; not sure what I’ll do about that going forward, maybe I’ll fold down the rear seat? We’ll start the spear in a Saturday or two; the staff is the next weapon for the monthly Sunday class, but that’s still a few months out, it was just convenient to pick it up while I was at the store.

Not much going on in the Saturday class this week: a little bit of a preview of the 8 Energies stuff, a review of the Hunyuan Dao form, and that was basically it. (We skipped Xin Jia this week.)

Sunday was the second of three courses in the special summer 8 Energies course. We did the last four energies this time: Cai (plucking), Lie (splitting), Zhou (elbow), and Kao (shoulder). I’d seen the 8 energies drill before but I’d had a hard time remembering how those last four fit together; this time, though, I think it will stick? We did isolated drills for each, which made it easier for me to remember the transitions: after Lie, you let your arms relax and drop and then swing forward, up, and back in a circle, while after Zhou you arc your front arm back in a block and then swing it up in a strike.

(Side note: I’m a lot better at relaxing my arms and letting them drop under gravity than I was before starting Tai Chi. Not so good at relaxing other parts of my body, though…)

I came in with one question, whether the hand movement in front of your dantian in Six Sealing Four Closing is a Ji (press) or a Lu (divert); I’d kind of thought it was the former, but it’s actually the latter, good thing I asked.

I’ve been trying to do Wu Ji (standing meditation) on Tuesdays and Thursdays over lunch, trying to build up from 15 minutes to 20 minutes. I skipped that last week while dropping Miranda off, though; maybe because of that or maybe because of random fluctuation, I only made it about 16 minutes today. Still, it was good to get back to that.

And then this evening was the Tuesday class, which is covering Silk Reeling this summer. There was one bit that was really surprising: I felt sensations flow around in my body in a way I’ve never really felt it flow before while doing the double-shoulder rotation. (One of the questions I have when studying Tai Chi is what are the physical sensations that are a plausible match for the concept of “qi”; so that was an interesting new data point for that question.) Maybe it’s a sign that I should do more Silk Reeling outside of class? And in terms of the lesson part, I got a useful tweak on the reverse part of the chest folding exercise, I should have my palms up instead of back when unfolding my chest, and I should spiral my hands significantly more when sticking them out.

And then I practiced the 8 Energies drill after class ended; I did basically remember how it worked, though my footwork felt a little unsure during the Lie / Zhou / Kao transition. So that’s something I’ll want to practice a little more and then pay extra attention to in the third class in a few weeks.

There’s also one new strength exercise that we learned a couple of weeks back and saw again this Sunday: very slowly lowering down into a squat, pausing, and very slowly raising, with arms raised and hands relaxed. After the first time I tried the drill, I was still feeling the effects the next day, which was a sign that it’s effective; so I’m thinking that maybe I should get in the habit of doing a few repetitions (5 working towards 10, for now?) every evening when I get home? Not sure if I’ll commit to that just yet, though, but I do feel like it would be useful in strengthening my legs and helping me relax my upper body.

For the July Minecraft session, I was continuing from the room with the balcony that I’d built in June. First, I needed to clean up that room:

A bit of rendering weirdness on a nearby mountain.

The room is unfortunately asymmetric.

Digging out the inside to make it symmetric.

Let’s make the ceiling a little higher.

Now let’s build some steps up through the ceiling.

Stairs seem nicer than blocks.

Once that was cleaned up a bit, I looked around outside; after wandering around a bit, I decided to build a path from the stairs above this room to the castle at the top of the mountain.

The main stairs up.

The view from the top of a second set of stairs.

The top part of the path, looking out from the flat area near the castle.

Let’s add a bit of color to mark the horizontal part of the path.

The path was a bit narrow, let’s widen it.

Here’s a view of the whole thing.

I think the next thing I’ll do is to fill this bit in with a building of some sort.

Now onto other people’s work. First, Miranda:

When I teleported to her, she was working on a pool.

Light at the bottom of a pool.

The pool is at the bottom of a shaft.

Here’s the room at the top of the shaft.

Next, Pat:

An attic room with a rough wood wall / ceiling.

Adding a bed next to one of the walls.

There’s a balcony off of one end of the room.

The stairs down from the attic.

The first-floor room.

A view of the (setting? rising? probably setting) sun through the window.

The view from the street.

One last look at the swimming pool.

A top view of the finished swimming pool.

And it turned out that Dan had started building on a mountain next to the one I’ve been working on.

Dan’s building a plateau.

Howdy, neighbor!

A bit of space beneath the plateau.

In the June Minecraft session, I wanted to continue building floors up above the train station, continuing the work from May.

A light in the forest that I saw when traveling back.

A side exit from the third floor.

Looking out the third floor window.

Where exactly do I want the next floors to be?

Looking around the top of the mountain.

Before, I’d built a second floor (basically looking out through the top of the train station) and a third floor (the window visible in the fourth picture above). The third floor has a side exit which, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to connect anywhere particularly productive: there’s really not a way to make a path going up the mountain from it, and there’s what looks like it could be a mountain entrance behind it, but it ends almost immediately.

Going up the mountain is more promising, though: near the top, there’s an existing opening into the mountain. So I should try to add more floors going up such that one of them naturally comes out into that area; and also maybe I can make a path from there to the building that’s already on the top of the mountain?

So I decided to start by building a fourth floor that’s the same height up from the third as the third is from the second, and see where that leaves me.

Digging out the fourth floor.

Fourth floor window from the outside.

Putting some glass in place.

Looking at the outside view, it starts to become clearer. There’s a lump of mountain blocks on the right side (looking from the outside) that make a bit of a mess, so I’ll want to clean that out to have an even wall. And the fourth floor is a little uncomfortably far from the hole at the top, so I need to figure out what to do about that.

I decided to embrace the extra space between the fourth floor and the hole at the top: that hole actually sticks out a bit, so I can think of it as a balcony, and so having a couple of blocks of floor sticking out beneath it makes sense, which will take up some of the space. But even so the amount of space is a little large, and actually there’s a little more space between the third and fourth floors than I’d like: so I think a three-high window would provide more balance than the two-high windows I’d been using.

Here’s the view with the front leveled out and with a three-high third-floor window, that does look better.

What the three-high window looks like from the inside. (I think this is the fourth floor?)

Outside view with the third and fourth floor windows and surroundings in a good state.

A strange strip of light at the top of the train station; apparently light can shine through half-height blocks?

After that, the spacing looked good: two spaces above the fourth floor and then two spaces of balcony floor left a good balance.

Digging out the fifth floor, reaching the balcony.

Making the balcony width match the other floors.

The balcony sides are asymmetric, I’ll need to clean that up.

Cutting back the right side and adding in a railing.

Let’s use stone brick for the floor here instead of wood.

So now I’m almost done with the area above the train station. I’ll need to clean up the balcony level a little more, probably; I’ll probably want to provide access from it somehow to the building at the top; I might want to something out of that little green exterior area on the third floor; and I might add some interior furnishings. But basically that phase of the construction is done, I’ll want to figure out which part of the mountain to build out next.

No pictures this time of other people’s work: there wasn’t as much other building going on as normal. (Pat in particular couldn’t be there.)

For the May Minecraft session, I continued the work of vertically extending the train station that I’d started in April.

Looking up in the middle of the train station; the wood is the side where I’ve built a second floor.

The second floor now has a window into the body of the station.

Looking up and back into the second floor.

Looking across the second floor; I’m really not sure what to do with the dirt area on the end.

Digging up so I can put in a third floor.

Once the second floor was done, I needed to figure out the third floor (and potentially higher floors) – how high up can I go, anything I need to worry about on the sides, anything I can actively connect with on the sides?

I’ve cleaned off the front, so I can potentially go up for a while.

There’s this blobby shape on the right side, though; not sure if I want to put a room in there or just get rid of it…

Reminding myself how the stairs worked on the first floor.

The third floor, dark and empty right now.

Let’s get some light in here.

That’s a nice view.

Here’s what it looks like from the outside.

Filled in with glass. (And one stone block on the side.)

The view out the window at dusk.

Adding a side exit: on the side away from the weird blob, there’s a green bit of mountain that seems worth connecting to?

I guess the next questions (in no particular order) are:

• What will come out of that connection to the outside in the last picture?
• What about the blob on the other side?
• How far up can I go, and what happens when I reach the top?

After that, I went to look at Pat’s swimming pool, it really looked quite stunning:

Pat’s swimming pool; I like how the green and the reddish-brown work together.

A view at a bit of an angle.

Looking down from the top of one of the light fixtures.

An outside view at night.

Here’s the floating town during the day.

I started off the April Minecraft session by working a bit on the station near the city.

A random jungle and water picture when traveling back to the city

Tracks over the water

The initial state of the station; it’s a bit of a mess

Now the body is cleaned out

The door is asymmetric

That’s better

Here’s a top view; how do I want this to fit into the surrounding areas?

Adding some stairs leading to the portal

Here’s the top part of that path

The view towards the water

Adding in a gap in the wall

I didn’t have any great ideas about what to do with the back, so I left that part alone

After that, I flew back towards the mountain to figure out what to do there.

The view from the beach

Looking down into the middle of the mountain

Some curiously triangular water

The front view of the mountain

An oblique view

Nearby lands

The wall above the station

After looking around, extending vertically from the back of the station seemed like the next step; there was already the beginnings of a space on the inside, and there’s a natural hollow if I head far enough.

Looking up from the back of the inside of the station

Cleaning up the back a bit

Looking down from where a second floor might be

Starting to put a floor in place

The view from the second floor

Maybe the floor should be one block lower?

Another view of the lower version

The lower version, from upstairs

Putting in some stairs on the back wall

At this point, I ran out of time, so I went to take pictures of Dan’s latest building.

A tower with lava floors

The tower with two of its neighbors

The view towards the city

There’s a black box on top

Closeup of the bottom layer

For the March Minecraft session, my main goal was to finish the train tracks that I’d begun in February. I’d made it to where I started to hit water, so I needed to go from there to close to the city.

My first tracks across water

What comes next

Looking slightly further ahead

Building the next set of tracks

Some land to make my way across

A surprising location for a cow

Tracks snaking through the snow

After that, I’d reached the edge of the large body of water that the city borders on. I had to figure out how much I wanted to cross: did I want to just go straight across (to the left of a tower in the water), or cross less water (to the right of that tower)?

The watery side of the tower

The less watery side of the tower

This looks like a good place for the tracks to land

Maybe put the station in the area on the right side of this picture?

A moonlit window in the ground

Looking towards the city from the portal

I think that door leads to the first place we ever built in this world?

A closeup of the strange half door glitch

After looking around, the shore wasn’t super conducive to train tracks, so I decided to cut across the water on the wider side instead of going on the narrow side and trying to snake across the shore. And, looking for a location for the station, I decided not to go all the way to the city; there was an area not too far away from the portal a little way away from the shore that was already dug out in an appropriately rectangular shape. So I decided not to go along the shore at all: instead, just dig a trench straight in once I hit land.

The tracks have crossed the water

Starting to cut through the hillside

Looking back towards the water

And, with that done, it was time to go back and add power, and then take it for a spin. (Fortunately I didn’t run into any animals when riding it.)

Powering the rails

Everything’s all set now

The glow of powered rails at night

More of the nighttime tracks

With that finished, I decided to wander back to the city and then towards Dan’s most recent tower.

Some pink and teal buildings in the city

Cats live inside the pink building, it turns out

There’s one in the teal building, too

Dan’s tower is nicely lit up

He built a flower field next to the tower

A closeup on the flower field

There’s a space underneath the field

A slightly different angle on that space

Another view of the field and the tower

Next, I visited Pat’s latest addition to his floating city, a swimming pool. When I got there, he was leveling out the water by covering it with ice and then melting the ice.

Working on a swimming pool

I’m actually not sure what building this is – based on a later picture, I don’t think it’s the swimming pool? I could be wrong, though…

Maybe this is the view of the street when you exit the swimming pool?

A top-down view of the pool

Icing over all of the pool

Laying down a heat source to melt the pool

More glowstone

The ice is melting

Pat had to leave before the ice finished melting, unfortunately. And, finally, Miranda finished off the floating glass building from last time:

A bottom view of the floating building

And a top view, with the forest beneath

A nice space inside

And a view of the forest below

For the February Minecraft session I decided to build the train tracks from the station I’d completed in January. There were actually three tracks coming out of the station, which raised the possibility of having multiple tracks going from the station to the city, but I decided to just build one. Which sounds simple enough, I just had to figure out the exact path.

A random pretty picture I took while flying back to the station.

A nighttime view of the back entrance to the guardhouse on top of the mountain.

Where exactly should the track go here?

That last picture raised the first real question about the track. The desert isn’t very high quality terrain, so I’d been thinking I’d run the track through that. But the track would naturally enter on the bottom right, and there’s water there with a tree nearby, making a rather nice oasis. So, after thinking about it more, I decided that I didn’t want to run it through the desert, and I also didn’t want to run it between the trees and the desert: I instead took inspiration from the terraces on the right and put the track on one of them.

The track winding around to the right of the desert.

A closer view of the terrace.

After that, I followed that level of the terrace for a while; not too long later, it opened up into a wider grass area, near Roger’s unfinished cathedral. And I decided to scout ahead a bit; after that grass area, there’s a water / shore section, with a big tower that Pat built as the major landmark.

Near the unfinished cathedral.

A view of the city across the water.

A closer view of the base of the tower.

I’d been thinking I’d run the tracks along the shore, but the woods there are really thick, I’d have to cut trees down. And, if you look at that first water picture, there’s a nice gap in the trees on the land between the two water sections; if I run the track through there, then I can skirt the water on the left shore in the first section, and cut across the ice to the left of the tower in the second section.

That seemed straightforward enough; back to track laying.

Some interesting caves I noticed when passing by them; I can imagine eventually building stuff around there…

The windy parts of the track, near the station.

It got a lot more boring once I moved away from the mountain.

Approaching the water.

My first track over water; turns out I can’t build track straight on ice, I have to replace the ice with something else.

That’s what I was working on; yes, I spent more than an hour mostly thinking about where to put a bit of rail, and didn’t even reach the city. Dan was the other person building stuff; he built a tower near the art installations he’d been working on earlier, nicely placed to link his recent buildings with buildings extending out from the city.

A glowing tower.

A view from farther back: you can see how it’s near one of Pat’s towers (not the same one earlier in the post!), and you can also see one of the existing train loops attached to the city (the one that goes through the underwater tunnel).

Just the tower and the rain.

Two towers and the city.

The view from the tower to the art gallery.

A view down from high up.

This tower is quite tall; and, in keeping with Dan’s recent aesthetic, there’s a deep hole at its base (though I don’t think he went down to bedrock this time).

Looking down the middle of the tower.

Where the tower enters the water.

The bottom of the pit.

Looking up from the bottom.

The view from the art gallery area.