Advertising, Promoting and Announcing!

I am taking advantage of this week’s blog to promote, advertise, and shamelessly announce:  

The Western Massachusetts Tai Chi Circle is proud to host a weekend seminar with Jan Parker, June 13-15, 2008.   

Friday night we practice Balancing the Heart Qigong at the North Hadley Village Hall. The eight simple exercises of the Balancing the Heart Qigong are an effective and powerful Qigong, designed to “extend the blood and balance the heart”. It is practiced throughout China and more recently in North America for stress reduction and prevention as well as in the treatment of hypertension, coronary disease and heart distress.

Saturday we meet again in the old town hall and enjoy Push Hands for Everyone! Jan has an amazing ability to make the study of push hands or sensing hands accessible and fun for everyone – whether you are new to the conscious movement arts or an experienced martial artist – you will get to know yourself a bit better, improve your skills,  and did I say we’d laugh a lot?

Then, on Sunday we head to Warwick – a small practice group has been working hard this past winter to learn some of Yang’s style long form and basic push hand drills. Jan will lead us deeper into this work and keep our focus on tai chi principles and the fundamental sticking energy that so characterizes tai chi.

Everyone is welcome to all sessions - see details and registration information on the seminar page of this website.   I hope to see you there.

Enjoy your practice,

Dorian

Persistence

What to write when there is not much on my mind to write about?  Some might say that it is better in such cases to not write at all. I have certainly thought that on occasion. However, today I believe that it is better to go ahead and put pen to paper (or actually, fingers to keyboard) and see what happens.

You see, I am in the middle of a 100-day tai chi practice.  And I am not alone – several of my students are doing the same thing and we are all on track to end somewhere around the 4^th of July. Some are practicing the first section of the form as a 5-minute meditation, others are committed to practicing all of what they know at least once every day. My 100-day practice is to play tai chi every day – most days this means practicing my bare-hand form, other times it is a weapons form, last weekend it was push hands with my classmates or a lesson with my teacher. It doesn’t so much matter what each of us is practicing, it is that we are practicing. Building a daily practice is not easy, and yet when we have one so much else in life becomes easier. And so we practice.  And if we miss a day or two here and there, we don’t sweat it or let that stop us, we just pick up where we left off and keep on keeping on.

And maybe that is why I am willing to write – even when I don’t have anything I think I want to say. Writing to this blog is part of my tai chi practice. A place where once a week, I set the intention to discover  - through this process of thought, analysis, synthesis, communication, essay writing-  something I have learned in my tai chi practice.  A student in class last night expressed frustration with tai chi that maybe we have all felt - that it is hard to know whether one is making any progress or not.  What are the signposts? I think this blog writing – this discovery process – is one way that I reflect back to myself  lessons learned along the way.

And this week a lesson learned (for the umpteenth time) is the power of persistence. There are times in any practice when the hardest part is just showing up. No great leaps of knowledge, no new insights, no immediate reward in the practice – just another step forward on a long journey. And we all know the steps add up until one day we can say – "Look Ma! I’m doing it!" As if something changed overnight, and it did – tee hee  - after years of dedication.  

Enjoy your persistence

Dorian

How We Learn, What We Learn

I am getting ready to travel again –and I am really savoring this process of learning. It is so different from what I am used to. I am accustomed to signing up for classes and attending them on a regular basis and gradually accumulating a body of knowledge. As a child, I went to school each day and pretty passively soaked up whatever was handed to me ( kind of scary know that I know what I know). As teenager and young adult, I went to college – different classes different days, some met weekly, some twice a week;  I got to choose the course of study, and still, I fairly passively received the teachings.

When I began my martial arts training the path was quite similar. Classes were held at the school, categorized by beginner, intermediate and advanced and I attended regularly the appropriate classes until gradually, by hard work yes, but also by some amount of passive accretion, I had accumulated a body of knowledge and became a teacher myself. 

Now my martial arts training is quite different – at least the tai chi side of things  - I travel to my teacher’s home and from the very first lesson, I have been welcomed inside like a member of the family.  We sometimes set aside time for lessons and work quite diligently for a couple of hours or more on a topic, theme, exercise, or form - - but quite often the lessons come at all different times, in all different ways. Over dinner, walking the dog, chatting with morning coffee, even while laughing or shaking my head at something on tv -   the lessons seem to emerge organically from the shared intention within the teacher-student relationship to which we have committed. The lessons come from the inside, if you will.

I read once that one of the ways the internal arts were distinguished from the external arts was by the tradition then in China that to learn one of the external arts – kung fu, shaolin, etc – one left home and went to school or temple. (I think of the famous Shaolin Temple) Whereas, the internal arts were passed down in the family, in the home – as in the Chen Family Village.   Of course  - nothing is ever entirely either/or – when I go to Jan and Ken’s home, I am also going to take seminar and my classmates and I will work hard in class. And here at home, when I go to the dojo for karate or arnis lessons, after almost 20 years, the dojo is as much my home as anywhere.

Still and all – I am really savoring this process of learning. The travel, the intention to learn, the welcome from my teacher, are all part of fully engaging me in the activity of growing my art and making it my own. From the inside out.  Thank you, Jan.

Enjoy your learning -

Dorian