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.