(no subject)

[tylik]

Sometimes, when you train when you're tired, or otherwise not feeling well, it seems like you bring less intent to the job overall, but there is little enough room in your head that there ends up being a clear sort of clarity of focus. This used to be an awful lot of my practice, because I felt pretty bad a lot of the time. Less so now -- still haunted by the neck pain and the SI joint sciatic tweaking, but usually, especially recently, I feel pretty decent at least while I'm training.

Today not so much. Stayed up too late ("let's start conversation time earlier and make an early night of it!" um, yeah, great idea, didn't actually happen that way. Putting a clock in the living room, this has been happening way too many nights in a row...) woke up with a sore throat and feeling vaguely achey, earlyish, to do Bates. Didn't train until midday -- most of the time training in a light warm rain is just fine, but I just couldn't face it. Things dried up, hauled myself downstairs... I went through a whole qi gong set, just trying to reach the point where things were moving well enough to make a decent job of it. (Usually I do qi gong and standing meditation mostly at night, before going to bed.) The strangest part was this sense that I really wasn't feeling well enough to train. I mean, yeah, that happens, but that's *much* worse than I was feeling. I've just gotten spoiled.

So I worked through my less percussive taiji forms. And that's when I remembered how good this sort of training is. My form wasn't perfect. But my focus was good, and my relaxation was probably better than it mostly has been recently, because I didn't have enough spare energy to waste. (Must not cheat cannon fist.) Chen, Yang, Chen, more Chen, a bunch of dragon... slow and quiet, but even with my knees grumbling a bit about crouch stances (no excuse, I'm practicing my crouch stance transitions every morning, trying to get the stability to low push hands work) there wasn't room in my head for anything else. I've been trying to make a point of being more open to the world around me when I train, but... again, no energy for anything else.

Came in, got caught up in a minor bit of chemistry, took a nice long bath with a book, ate a huge heap of broccoli and caponata, and I feel tired, but halfway decent.