Yesterday, I was talking about my terrible first Taiji teacher. Honestly, he was the reason I did not find another teacher for quite some time. When I did look again, I had a few rules. One, I wannted a woman. Two, no uniforms or anything I had to buy from the studio. Three, I didn’t want anything woo-woo or that treated ‘the Far East’ as if it were some mythical spiritual land.
It took me a long time, but I finally found my teacher. She had just started her own studio, and I was her first student in that studio. I went with a friend of mine, but my friend dropped out pretty soon thereafter. I didn’t blame her because my teacher and I would chat a mile a minute. We both had that compulsion and we gave each other permission to gab a mile a minute.
I really appreciated that she was blunt and down to earth. She was not woo-woo at all, and she did not talk about ‘the Far East’ as if it were some exotic, inscrutable place. I also appreciated that she tolerated me asking a million questions and being skeptical of everything she told me. If she did not know something, she would tell me she didn’t, but that she would look it up. And, more importantly, she would look it up and then tell me about it later.
I hated the Solo (Long) Form. I will be very honest with you. I hated it with every bone in my body. Plus, it hurt my knees. I finally mentioned that to my teacher, and shse gave me a correction that massively helped with that. Every fiber of my soul protested, though.
And yet. There was a little voice in the back of my head that said this was the way to go. I needed to do this, even if it made me angry, impatient, and had me pushing back internally. I knew it was good for me, but it didn’t make me like it any better.
What changed it for me? A few things. One was when we were doing meditation and I started having flashbacks. It was bad enough that I did not want to do meditation. My teacher gave me a pair of–ok. That can’t have been the first–ok.
I’ll get to that in a second because it’s later in the chronology.
When I finished learning the Solo Long Form, my teacher said it was time to learn the Sword Form. I demurred as I did not want to learn weapons. I was not a violent person, you see, and there was no way I wanted to do that. She didn’t push it, which was smart because I did not react well to pressure. And I’m oppositional in that if you tell me to do something, I’m going to do the opposite.
At some point, though, probably a few months later, she had a wooden practice sword and pressed it into my mand. “Just hold it,” she said in a friendly, but firm voice. I could tell she would not take no for an answer and reluctantly accepted the sword in my hand.
The second my fingers closed over the hilt, I was hooked. A jolt of electricity ran through my arm, and the sword felt as if it was meant to be there. This is one of the moments in my life that I will never forget–and it changed my life. I begged my teacher to teach me the Sword Form as quickly as possible and then I taught myself the left side. At the demo for her school a few weeks after that first moment, there was a weapons vendor there. I picked up one of the swords because it was singing to me, and he said I had good taste beacuse it was the bbest one (and the most expensive). I love that sword and I still have it. I use it for my Sword Form practice–and the Dancing Wu-Li Sword Form.
Weapons are my life. Not just Taiji weapons, but mostly Taiji weapons. Sword, Dancing Sword, Saber, Double Saber, Cane, Fan, and Staff/Spear. Karambit Form, which is its own thing, and DeerHorn Knives from Bagua. I want to learn the Guandao next, but I’m on a hiatus form learning a new weapon. I’m refining my current forms and strengthening my arms by doing the weight-bearing set. Yes, there’s a weight-bearing set in Taiji.
Let’s talk about the DeerHorn Knives. This is what Bagua was created around. And this is where the meditation avoidance fits in. When I could not do the mediattion, my Taiji teacher suggested I walk the circle instead. She gave me her spare practice DeerHorn Knives, and then she showed me how to do it.
This was another time when I fell in love with something in an instant. Before this moment, I would have said that I was a pacifist. If it was going to be someone or my life, well, then I would let that person take mine. When my teacher taught me how to walk the circle with the DeerHorn Knives, I had the thought in the back of my head. That I was not going to hurt anyone, I mean. She informed me that there was an opponent in the middle of the circle and I should focus my energy there. She did not contradict my proclamation of being a pacifist because she knwe it would be useless.
Instead, she let the Bagau do the talking. Months later, I was walking the circle as they were doing meditation. I was focusing on the opponent and had a flash of, “If it’s him or me–then it’s him.” Meaning, he was going to die. It shook me, and I brought it up with my teacher later.
She said that it was common with her female (as I was at the time) students to have trouble with the aggressive aspects of Taiji (and Bagua). We had been taught to be nice girls and good girs and to be docile to the extreme. Middle-class girls, at least. Don’t make trouble and don’t make waves. I had it from two cultures, and it was to the extreme that I believed my life was worth less than others. That’s part of ‘always put others before yourself”, and it’s detrimental to a healthy self-esteem.
The fact that I was able to at least think that I would defend myself meant that I had realized my life was worth something, and that was a big step forward for me.
My life had wroth. Think about it. It took 35 years or a bit more for me to realize this, which is sad. I’m done for now. More tomorrow.