Good if weird classes

[tylik]

Double class day. I'd been pretty worried about whether I'd be up to it, but after a bunch of sleep and careful stretching, I was feeling pretty good. (A little achier than I would have been were it not for the tail end of the virus, but that's generally better than I was even a month or two ago.)

The past several months, I've been finding going through the Yang 24 form at the begining of sword class -- and this is the least physically demanding form I know, keep in mind -- weirdly intense and a little stressful. Some of this I couldn't trace to anything in particular, but some of it is because Shifu has been, more and more obviously, riding my ass on technique. I've been feeling like she's watching me all the fricking time -- which isn't a bad thing, exactly, but it's weird. OTOH, it's been fun to really work on refining that form, and in addition to all the corrections she's made a few comments about how I'm really moving from my center now, and how I'm using my whole body that makes me think that I'm getting somewhere.

But it's been intense. Heck, we go through the fricking Yang 24 (nicknamed "low impact aerobics for couch potatoes") and I'm completely breaking a sweat. I'm not having trouble balancing or anything, but there are times when it feels like my hands are going to start shaking. Of course, I'm starting to think that if I can handle this, I might even survive competing...

Last week, I ended up leading for this section. Don't usually do this, as A) I'm usually in the back because I'm tall and B) there are two people in the class who have both been at the school longer, have been studying that form longer, and are assistant instructors, so I'm way outranked. (This is not a problem, the only form I've really enjoyed leading is the Yang 32 Sword form, and that only because Craig and I were the only people in the class who could consistantly remember it.) Actually, it took me a moment to realize that everyone was waiting to take cues off me... anyhow, it only upped the stress level a notch or two, and didn't go too badly.

(Meanwhile, the other side of this is that I'm finding myself with all kinds of nit-picky little questions about things -- or weird esoteric questions about those, though I've learned not to ask those unless I'm pretty sure I can make them make sense. A lot really is coming together... and giving me new questions.)

Anyhow, today we formed up for Yang 24, and I found myself ending up front and center, so I did the sensible thing and slid off to the side. (By my favorite window. Where my water bottle was.) "No!" said Shifu. "You, over there!" Well! I guess I'm leading after all. (Are Esther and Lynn in on this? They seemed to think it was funny.) Actually, it really was only today that I started to wonder if maybe these forms weren't being this bizarrely intense bit for everyone in the class. (Craig says that indeed they aren't.)

Oh, did I mention that this is the form that I never took a class for, and learned mostly in two private lessons last year? It's also the form that she usually uses to teach people how to teach, which might be more the the point. Anyhow, it went fairly well, and I do feel like most of the things she's telling me are sticking...

So we had a very nice sword class (good class, but I was back to just being a relatively senior student, which was suddenly quite relaxing). And then on to Chen.

Last week, during silk reeling exercises, I started holding my arms differently. In a relatively subtle way (well, I think so) I'd been leading a little with my elbows and shoulders. She got on my case about keeping my elbows dropped during one move so I was paying attention to just how much I could relax them, and the shape of the moves I made completely changed. And things felt different... So I've been practicing a little that way, and went on that way during class. I also was working hard to get this one muscle in my shoulder to release so it could drop better, and by the start of Chen it had decided to oblige me.

At first I wasn't sure if I was doing things right or not. My hands felt lighter, the movements oddly delicate. I didn't feel, at first, that there was much force behind them. (Wushu can be a bad influence...) but then I started to notice how relaxed my arms were... Which is how they're supposed to be. I've been working on not overextending (more of that wushu thing) recently, suddenly it wasn't work, it was just there.

And all these things just sort of fell into place. Not perfect (especially with my some achey, tired legs), but I could feel how they worked, like I could get it right with just a little more playing around. There are moves that I've seen Gao Jiaming and Chen Zhenlei (not to mention Shifu) where I knew I didn't look like that, but I couldn't figure out how to get there... and all the sudden my arms were relaxed, and the press became more yielding and... yeah. I'm not claiming I'm suddenly great, but it's suddenly a whole new game, anyway.

I've been going through this major period of physical change, and most of my progress in taiji recently has been through wushu giving me the strength and flexibility to do things with the moves that I couldn't before. But if anything, while I've been doing well technically, I've been feeling like I've been barely breaking even either my feel for the forms or my conceptual understanding of what's going on. And I pretty much figured that that was where I was going to stay until things settled down for me elsewhere a little.

And then this hit me, with almost no warning... Okay, I knew things had to have been changing, because Shifu said so, but it all felt so superficial to me. If I was moving more from my center more... well, I could kind of see that, but I didn't precisely remember not doing that... It's like I've been swimming under water for months, and suddenly just broke surface.

And now I'm splashing around and sputtering with the sun in my eyes and the wind in my face. I'm kind of blown away. We went out to grab dessert after class, and Craig was very undertanding as I sat there and babbled at him, and tried to demonstrate moves while sitting that just didn't really work that way. And now it's after one in the morning and I'm still writing this post. Stark raving.