(no subject)

[tylik]

Finally seem to be staying better. (Crashed and burned badly Friday, but things seem to be settling.)

I wasn't at full speed during practice (but then I went out late and it was pretty muggy) but it was a good practice. Settled into and moving through my low stances well. Mostly focused on Laojia Yilu. I noticed more something that's been kind of in the corner of my brain for a while. There's this ebb and flow in the form, this cycling sort of flowing that seems to have come to the fore for me. I really noticed it, and started trying to understand a little more what I was feeling... almost like a slow heart beat through the form, a kind of inevitability running through it, permeated, led, by something I knew I should recognize, but didn't quite. And then suddenly I realized that all of it was my breath. Everything in the form is just breathing, just more complicated-like. I was quite amazed... and then, as is often the case with these revelations, the next thought was "Oh! That's what Shifu meant! That's what Master Feng meant! D'oh!"

Sometimes I wonder what Shifu will say when I next see her. On the one hand, I've been working so much on my own, and I'm a little afraid of what she'll make of what I'm doing to the forms. Oh, yeah, gonna be some serious corrections.

On the other hand, in terms of Chen, I'm pretty sure I'm in the best form I've ever been in. I didn't expect things to open up for me this way when I'm working so much just on my own. (And then I go to Bagua and get a lesson in humility. Happy balance.)

Oh, and I've now lost just around 25 pounds in the four months since I moved out here. Mostly I'm pleased (certainly I had it to lose) but I'm a little perplexed as well. My diet... oh, it's better since I don't eat out, but it's more the same than different. My training... well, it's clearly working well for me, but again, hard to argue that my overall activity level is that much greater. I almost wonder if my body has its own agenda.

And I kind of knew this would happen.