I’m off to ST!

I love Special Training (ST) -  almost every year since my first ST in the summer of 1989 at Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, CT,  I have made money and time to travel somewhere in the States to join another two or three hundred women martial artists in the greatest training event I can imagine.  It feels really good to share something I love so much with so many women who feel it too! It feels practically - dare I say - ‘Amazon-ian’.

It takes a little while for everyone to gather and to focus – to drop away the travails of travel and the priorities of work and family life. But gradually, after opening ceremonies and the first workout on Thursday evening, after all the greetings and long-lost hugs among old friends, our reason for gathering starts to sharpen in view. We are here to grow in our arts and in ourselves, to move our bodies in ways at once familiar and strange –breaking through shells and coatings and into new visions of ourselves and what we could be – individually and together.   And we do- in four amazing days – we shed what no longer serves us and rediscover the power of movement!

So once again I am off – perhaps it is my annual pilgrimage -  to remember who we are and who we can be. This year camp is in Texas.  Sure the temperature will be in the 90s and it will be humid, but we are martial artists going to train in our arts - I am not heading off to the spa after all, though I admit I am looking forward to lounging at the swimming pool with my friends, ‘the Amazons’.

These days, as in most days, I think people- men and women both– are put off by images of Amazons or such. That is nothing new.  Women warriors, capable women with skills for making peace and protecting ourselves and who and what is important to us, are often the object of fear, ridicule and misunderstanding by the general ‘people’. Nonetheless in every age we live and love and gather and encourage and share and laugh as we surely will this coming weekend in a little town in Texas.

The National Women's Martial Arts Federation is an organization for women martial artists, whose purpose is to share skills and resources, promote excellence in the martial arts, and encourage the widest range of women to train in the spirit of building individual and collective strength.  Special Training, the NWMAF, its sister organization PAWMA, and all the women who make these camps as special as they are -  make the world a better place for all of us and these camps nourish me deeply.  ( See links on this site's home page)

I am proud to be a part of these great organizations. What an amazing event!  For four whole days women gather to train and share in the martial arts. And for four whole days the world is a different place.   May we all see the Amazon in every woman.

Enjoy the Amazon in you –

Dorian

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

This Pulitzer prize-winning 1974 book by Annie Dillard is currently my favorite tai chi book.  As my friend Sally who recommended it to me said, “ It’s Mary Oliver in Prose!”  Simply put and one-dimensionally, the book is about the author’s perceptions of the world by the side of a creek in southwest Virginia.  It is a celebration and a prayer of thanks for the intricate and intimate natural world we inhabit.

Scientist, naturalist, lover, philosopher- she describes butterfly migrations, water bugs eating frogs from the inside out, muskrats dining nearby, petting a puppy at a highway gas station, and a swarm of silver eels slithering to the sea by moonlight - all with an honesty that borders on brutal and a love that never veers toward sentimental. Reviewers call it meditation, American nature writing; the author refers to it as theological treatise; clearly it is a collection of essays only in the sense that the collection is a whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

It’s my favorite tai chi book these days because of its patient and quiet insistence on the dailiness of life and the practice of life, its firm embrace of the whole of life from the cosmological to the microscopic, and its abiding comfort in the present moment deepened by her willingness to see both the ugly and the lovely.  Just reading it brought me more fully to the present moment.

No surprise then, that within its pages, I found a really great description of standing meditation,  in the chapter called “Stalking”  in which she describes her attempts to observe the elusive muskrat ( or did she say Tao?)

 She writes:

“ Can I stay still? How still? It is astonishing how many people cannot, or will not, hold still. I could not, or would not, hold still for thirty minutes inside, but at the creek I slow down, center down, empty. I am not excited; my breathing is slow and regular. In my brain I am not saying, Muskrat! Muskrat! There! I am saying nothing. If I must hold a position, I do not “freeze.” If I freeze, locking my muscles, I will tire and break. Instead of going rigid, I go calm. I center down wherever I am; I find a balance and repose. I retreat – not inside myself, but outside myself, so that I am a tissue of senses. Whatever I see is plenty, abundance. I am the skin of water the wind plays over; I am petal, feather, stone.”

If you have not read this book recently or ever – I highly recommend it.

Enjoy your summer reading -

Dorian

Can you Make Change?

Some folks ask me “ tell me about this tai chi thing – it really seems to have changed your life.” And, you know for the first little while I thought so too.  But really   - which came first? The tai chi? Or the changes that seemed so sudden, but whose conditions in reality - were ripening for months and years? In many respects, I do believe we grow and change becoming more and more ourselves every day.

No, tai chi did not change my life.  Life is change.

How we deal with change is up to us. Tai chi  - for me – is the key to how I change. Do I resist, avoid, tense up, deny, hold tighter? Or, do I let, allow, release?  Tai chi teaches me how to hold a structure within which I can let change happen, allow new and different ways of being and relating come into existence, and release old habits that no longer serve me.

By practicing my form – moving from one energetic shape or posture to another  - in a mindful and attentive manner, I get the chance every day ( twice a day?!) to embody and then to feel with my mind what it is like to let my arms raise in commencing, to allow myself to choose my next step, to let go of a posture that is no longer relevant.  

When you practice something regularly – could be anything  -in which you integrate your mind, your body, and your spirit, and in that practice you seek a state of ease, comfort and power – it seems to me you are bound to handle life differently than if you didn’t have a practice at all.

And  - as the Sufi poet Rumi encourages us -  if you find yourself silently drawn by the strong pull of what you really love, may you trust that it will not lead you astray, but is perhaps the very thing you need to help you navigate the changes of your life.

Enjoy your practice – whatever it is

Dorian