martial arts: six months on my own

[tylik]

Of course, technically, I'm not alone, I'm studying bagua under this guy Ted. However, that's a weird and extraneous enough set of interactions that I don't think it really counts. I'm also not really in the mountains. And I've been teaching the last bit, once a week. Nevertheless, before this the longest I'd been away from Chen classes was some weeks. For the last eleven years or thereabouts.

I was worried, moving out here, that I didn't have the discipline to maintain my practice without the structure of a class schedule. It's kind of funny - there have been long periods where I practised faithfully every morning, or had some other regular schedule for myself. Not so much the last several years, but mostly because I had just so many classes it wasn't practical - if I could stretch every morning, and maybe take a few minutes away from the day to do forms and clear my head, I was doing pretty well. But I was also in class pretty much every day. Still, martial arts was something I did in the context of other people, mostly. Teaching helped me -- sometimes almost eerily so. That whole bit of going back and focusing on the basics, and explaining them, and OMG demonstrating them (when I first started teaching the bit I found the scariest was demonstrating forms) is very real. And no matter how lousy I felt going into it, and I taught sometimes in significantly bad health, I always felt better for teaching. I sometimes wondered if I needed other people for my practice, honestly.

I guess I'm good at worrying. So, um, verdict is, no. Maybe this is another part of the reason why at a certain point it's good to go off on your own for a while. I almost wish I could just spend a while as a wanderer... but I really like my academic studies, too. (And there are parallels -- I've learned this past bit that there are a lot of things I'd rather learn on my own, or might learn better on my own than learn through classes.

My practice has changed. I wrote about this more when I was first out here, but working with chinchillagirl yesterday brought my attention back to it. How I think about my practice has maybe changed more. I guess this is going to turn into a random list, rather than some nice essay.

Practising alone has given me the time and space to work through a lot of things on my to-do list -- all those moves that never quite felt right, but met some kind of "good enough" criteria. (Uh, actually they're still "good enough" at best. But they're better than they were. It's all one long form correction... ;-) )

It pushes my attention back into my own body. I wish I were getting more sparring time in (K and I spar some, I get some in bagua) but for a lot of the non sparring, worrying about running into other people, or staying in synch with them, or being watched by them is mostly a distraction. It's me, my centre (oh fer crying out loud -- I must have set this to international english, and it's ideas of correct spelling... I prefer colour and favour, but centre is kind of pushing it... why must I choose?) my body (my stance, my hip rotation, my shoulder flexibility...) And so, I have to look into the forms and feel the forms as hard as I can and learn from that. I've been pushing my physical bounds, and everything is feeling more springy and fluid in that nice creeping low stance sort of way. But... it's all mine. I can't rely on anyone else to correct me*, and I have to be my own teacher.

This is pretty overdue. Or maybe, to look at it another way, because I took so long to turn this much more inward, a lot was in place by the time it happened. For a long time, there were a lot of things I knew, and felt, but couldn't quite do or do consistently... kind of a backlog of things that I needed to work on but wasn't really getting through in the context of my practice as it was. Now, suddenly, that's what it's all about. Or a lot of it, anyway.

And all the sudden a bunch of my advice regarding forms comes down to "here are a bunch of corrections and things you should work on. but when you have the structure and the basic understanding, you have to do the form, and feel the form, and until you can let yourself express it fully" there's this leap, where doing everything right isn't enough, you have to reach a little deeper to find a core of the forms that is both still and wild, and then set it all free. Um, or something like that. They always whispered to me.

In some ways that I haven't quantified, my confidence in my own ability to demonstrate what I mean is increasing. I have a stronger sense of what is right, and a stronger sense that when I do it people will be able to see that. I didn't know this at all until I was trying to explain some things to Chinchillagirl.

I think my standards are generally higher. I don't think I'd realized that before, either. And... I've been a student for a long time, and while I've still Shifu's student, something has shifted and my focus is no longer on being someone's student. That's what I mean by a coming of age. It's my practice. It's what I do.

* Yes, highly looking forward to Shifu's corrections. And I'm sure there will be a list. Just as much, though I want to run a lot of things past her -- what if this here becomes a spiral, coiling in between these two kicks, and then out in this other place? What if the movement of this fist is echoed in the movement of that knee -- doesn't that balance better? Things that seem to be falling out of the basic principles into the forms for me right now. It's great fun, but I probably need a dressing down or something. (I feel like a kindergartener running home with my crayon drawings clutched proudly in my hands.)

Oh, oh! I'm going to have private lessons with Shifu! This still completely makes my day.