Tai Chi and Suffering
Dec. 4th, 2002 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tylikY'know for about a year there, I worried about whether I was going to pass out in more of my tai chi classes than otherwise.
I'm not quite as over the bug as I'd hoped, so I coughed and hacked my way through three hours of class today. Between that and my hip (yeah, the same thing that's been bugging me for the last three weeks -- finally talked to Shifu, she thinks I tore a muscle, and I'm under orders to massage the heck out of it) tweaking every time I rotated on it, class was moderately hellish. My concentration wasn't really there, and the hip isn't moving right which throws a lot of other things off, and then I started getting these dizzy spells, which were awfully distracting.
(Somewhere along the way I lost my poker face. Honest, I used to have one... Shifu kept telling me that I could take a break if I needed a rest. Feh. Of course, I sound awful, even though the cold is doing a lot better. My voice is toast. I sound like and elderly raven.)
And the overwhelming sense was "gosh, this is so bloody familiar". Actually, in general I didn't feel anywhere close to as bad as I used to most days. But I just suddenly remembered all those evenings of barely being able to track what was going on in class at all, and telling myself over and over again "just another couple of minutes and you can sit down" (I couldn't always stretch this through the whole evening, but I did a lot. And for a lot of the worst of it, I didn't have two classes in a row.) Those stupid, blinding headaches that just shut down every thought. And when the room would start wavering brighter and darker... I never did pass out in class, though I abruptedly curled up and put my head on my knees more than once.
At the time, I just did it. But even from not that long after it, I'm kind of amazed both at how bad it got and that I stuck with the Tai Chi. (Did I mention amazed that I'm damnfool enough to take wushu so I can do things like tear muscles in my hip? Okay, that is somehow less surprising.) Tai Chi always helped. (Though there was at least one day that I drug myself all the way to the school -- and then simply couldn't face the stairs. There are kind of a lot of stairs.)
If I could drag myself through class, I felt better at the end than if I didn't go to class. During wasn't exactly another story, but it was more complicated -- I have always loved tai chi, since I first started taking it some almost six years ago... but I could be intensely miserable at the same time. (I try to think of it being like camping. I love camping. But there are few things more miserable than being cold, uncomfortable and exhausted in a sleeping bag on a little inadequate close cell foam pad in a tiny little backpacking tent in the middle of fricking nowhere at about two in the morning. And then somehow by morning you've become warm and comfortable and all will be well if you can just figure out how to boil water via remote control...) The hours in class were one of the things that kept me going -- probably the most important thing that kept me going. But a lot of the minutes sucked.
It's easy to forget how much things have gotten better.
I'm not quite as over the bug as I'd hoped, so I coughed and hacked my way through three hours of class today. Between that and my hip (yeah, the same thing that's been bugging me for the last three weeks -- finally talked to Shifu, she thinks I tore a muscle, and I'm under orders to massage the heck out of it) tweaking every time I rotated on it, class was moderately hellish. My concentration wasn't really there, and the hip isn't moving right which throws a lot of other things off, and then I started getting these dizzy spells, which were awfully distracting.
(Somewhere along the way I lost my poker face. Honest, I used to have one... Shifu kept telling me that I could take a break if I needed a rest. Feh. Of course, I sound awful, even though the cold is doing a lot better. My voice is toast. I sound like and elderly raven.)
And the overwhelming sense was "gosh, this is so bloody familiar". Actually, in general I didn't feel anywhere close to as bad as I used to most days. But I just suddenly remembered all those evenings of barely being able to track what was going on in class at all, and telling myself over and over again "just another couple of minutes and you can sit down" (I couldn't always stretch this through the whole evening, but I did a lot. And for a lot of the worst of it, I didn't have two classes in a row.) Those stupid, blinding headaches that just shut down every thought. And when the room would start wavering brighter and darker... I never did pass out in class, though I abruptedly curled up and put my head on my knees more than once.
At the time, I just did it. But even from not that long after it, I'm kind of amazed both at how bad it got and that I stuck with the Tai Chi. (Did I mention amazed that I'm damnfool enough to take wushu so I can do things like tear muscles in my hip? Okay, that is somehow less surprising.) Tai Chi always helped. (Though there was at least one day that I drug myself all the way to the school -- and then simply couldn't face the stairs. There are kind of a lot of stairs.)
If I could drag myself through class, I felt better at the end than if I didn't go to class. During wasn't exactly another story, but it was more complicated -- I have always loved tai chi, since I first started taking it some almost six years ago... but I could be intensely miserable at the same time. (I try to think of it being like camping. I love camping. But there are few things more miserable than being cold, uncomfortable and exhausted in a sleeping bag on a little inadequate close cell foam pad in a tiny little backpacking tent in the middle of fricking nowhere at about two in the morning. And then somehow by morning you've become warm and comfortable and all will be well if you can just figure out how to boil water via remote control...) The hours in class were one of the things that kept me going -- probably the most important thing that kept me going. But a lot of the minutes sucked.
It's easy to forget how much things have gotten better.
