Underneath my yellow skin

Category Archives: Taiji

Less is (sometimes) more, part three

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I want to talk more about weapon forms because I can. Here was yesterday’s post on the same subject. When I decided to teach myself the Double Fan Form, I naively thought that it wouldn’t be too difficult. After all, I taught the Fan Form to myself with relative ease.

Well, that’s not exactly correct. I did teach it to myself fairly effortlessly I thought. But then, a year or so later, I was going to teach myself the left side. I started running into places where I could not do it because I had been fudging it on the right side. This was roughly halfway through the form. I decided to go back to the video and refresh my memory.

Much to my surprise, I realized t hat I had forgotten whole chunks of the Fan Form. I remember teaching it to myself, but I had no memory of those missing postures themselves. There was a chunk in the middle of the  form and another chunk at the end. I took a deep breath and taught the whole form to myself again. I took extra pains to make sure that I had it in my body and was not just fudging postures when I didn’t get them.

It’s hard because my teacher believes in learning the whole form first and then refining it after. Which is great when there’s the opportunity to practice it in class every week. However, when I’m doing it on my own, it’s harder. Yes, I can watch the videos I have in a pinch, but I will say that it doesn’t completely replace in-person teaching.

Also, the obvious problem with teaching myself is that I can’t see what I can’t see. What I mean is that I can’t tell when I’m making mistakes or not doing a posture right. Of course, I could do the form for my teacher–if she knows it. She does not know the Double Fan Form, which I’m making my way towards in this post.

Once I had the Fan Form in my body, I decided to teach myself the Double Fan Form. I also wanted to teach myself the Double Sword Form, but there’s no official form. I also wanted to finish teaching myself the Karambit Form, the Guandao Form, and I’m messing around with a Karambit/Fan Form.

That’s too much. While I can probably teach myself two forms at the same time, I don’t think I would do justice to either. Plus, it would probably take twice as long as it would to teach myself one. So, obviously, doing two back-to-back would take just as much time if not less than trying to teach myself two forms at once.

I’m so impatient, though. I’m like the kid in a candy store in that I want it all. Now! I have taught myself several different forms, or at least part of them. Wu-Li Dancing Sword, which is very short; halfish of the Karambit Form (I thought I had taught myself all but the very end); Fan Form; Cane Form (with the saber, so technically Saber Form); and the second half of the Double Saber Form. Oh, and I’ve taught myself the left side of the Sword Form, Saber Form, Cane Form, and Cane Form with the saber. Oh, and the last third or so of the Swimming Dragon Form, hands only, Bagua.


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Less is (sometimes) more, part two

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A few days ago, I wrote a post about how I’ve pared down my daily Taiji/Bagua routine. For the past year or so, I had been feeling a bit of a slight drag when I did my morning routine. Instead of looking forward to and being eager to do it every morning (well, really afternoon, so it’s morning only colloquially), I did it with a sigh and a heavy heart.

I still wanted to do it, mind. I was just burned out.

Here goes the backstory.

I have OCD tendencies. It’s not full-blown OCD, and it’s probably not diagnosable. When I mentioned it to my therapist a few decades ago (then-therapist), she said to me in a stern tone, “You know you don’t actually have OCD, right?”

Yes, I know that. But I have OCD tendencies, and I am internally obsessed with many things. I have learned to keep it mostly to myself and to gauge how much to let out without seeming ‘weird’. Also, probably autistic, but that’s more likely to be diagnosable.

I could talk about my martial arts weapons all day long. Not the technical aspects, but the beauty of them and what they mean to me. I like to joke that they’re my romantic relationships, but it’s not far from the truth. What I mean is that each weapon stirs something in me that I could conceivably slap a romantic label on it.

The Sword Form is my first love. I have such warm feelings for it. No, it’s not the most exciting form any longer, but it’s the weapon form that started my love for the weapons. I have told this story a million times, but I’ll tell it once again.

A year or two after I started Taiji, I graduated from the Solo Long Form. All that means is that I learned the sequence–not that I was any good at it. Soon after, my teacher mentioned it was time to learn the Sword Form. I resisted. While I had started studying Taiji because I wanted to be able to defend myself and really liked the idea of learning the combat applications, I recoiled from the very idea of doing weapons.

I was a pacifist at the time, and weapons seemed too violent to me. It was only when I was walknig the circle with the deerhorn knives (Bagua, not the point of this post) as my meditation that I had an ideology-changing moment. I was focusing on the ‘opponent’ in the middle of the circle as I walked. In a second, I thought, “If it’s you or me–it’s going to be me.” Meaning, if it was the opponent’s life or mine, mine was going to win.


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Less is (sometimes) more

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I have been doing my Taiji/Bagua routine every morning (well, early afternoon because I don’t get up in the morning), and I have slowly been adding to it in the last decade.

It’s amusing to me that I couldn’t force myself to do five minutes of practice when I first started studying Taiji. For whatever reason, my brain just rejected any thought of practicing at home. Because of that, I added another class per week to attend, and then one more. Then, pandemic and everything went online.

That was when I got serieous about my weapons. Before that, I loved them, yes, but I wasn’t intense about it. Scratch that. I was intense about it, but I wasn’t yet obsessed. During the lockdown, however, I got very into the Double Saber Form–which was what my teacher had been teaching me when we went into lockdown.

I still had my private lessons with her, but they were online rather than in person. Plus, her Double Saber Form was not the best as she does not care as much for the weapons. It took me a long time to realize that because she was careful to be enthusiastic about them when I gushed over my love for them.

About halfway through the form, my teacher just stopped teaching it to me. It took me a while to realize that it was because we had hit the limit of what she knew of the form. Her classmate had done the Double Saber Form at their school’s demonstration a few months before the world shut down. I had fallen instantly in lust, and I knew I had to have that in my life.

I bugged my teacher to teach it to me until she gave in. When we reached the point where she was no longer comfortable teaching me the form, I starting it to myself. I asked my teacher if she was ok with it, and she was. I don’t know why I asked her, but the best I can come up with was that I felt it was the respectful way to deal with it.

I have continued to ask her before teaching myself a form. Again, I’m not exactly sure why, but it’s out of respect. And  I have acknowledged to myself that not only am I more interested in weapons than she is, but…I have a hard time writing it or speaking it into existence, but it’s true: some of my weapon forms are better than hers.

It sounds like heresy to me because she’s my teacher.  She’s been studying Taiji for over thirty years (I think). How dare I say that any of my Taiji is better than hers? Here’s the thing, though. I have put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into my weapon forms, and I know that she pays more attention to her hands-only forms. It’s just a case of difference preferences.


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Double Fan Form humbles me, part two

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Back to write more about the Double Fan Form. Here is my post from yesterday in which I wander all over the place, but my main point was how I’m still struggling. A lot. I had to go back and rework a couple postures because I had learned them incorrectly. It’s not unusual to have to do some refinements, but I’m learning it wrong more than I have any other form.

In the past, I have taught myself new postures in a form on a daily basis. Unless I’m retconning my memories (which is very possible). As I mentioned yesterday, I inhaled the Sword Form (my first form) from the second my teacher put a wooden sword in my hand. I could not get enough of it, and I knew I wanted more of that in my life. I learned it in a very short amount of time.

Then, I taught myself the left side in a similarly short amount of time. In fact, the only time I got stuck was with the easiest posture in the form. That’s because I probably didn’t pay enough attention while learning it on the right side. It was easy! Why would I need to concentrate on learning it? Because it wasn’t as easy as I thought it was. Or rather, reversing it wasn’t that easy.

Besides that hiccup (which took me twenty minutes to get over), I had no problem teaching myself the left side of the Sword Form. I don’t want to guess how long it took me to teach myself the Sword Form on both sides, but in retrospect, it feels like it was a breeze.

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that even with the dreaded Saber Form, the form that I struggled with the most as I was learning it, I did not have trouble learning the form itself. It was more that I did not feel comfortable doing it, but I learned the postures fairly easily.

In the case of the Double Fan Form, I am making slow and steady process, yes, but it’s so very slow. And it’s not always progress. I’m frustrated, which is not something I usually feel whilst teaching myself a new form. Or learning a new form.

When my teacher said (wrote) spontaneously, “Wow, this is really hard!”, I felt a sudden burst of relief. I had been struggling with it for a month, and I was feeling downtrodden. This is one of the difficulties with learning things easily, I sometimes lack the grit to buckle down when things aren’t breezy from the get-go.


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Double Fan Form is double hard for me

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I am still pushing forward with the Double Fan Form, and it is still kicking my ass. I wrote about it a few days ago in this post. I mean, I’ve written about it before, but that was the latest time I’ve written about it.

I was naive and a bit cocky when I started teaching myself the form. As I said in yesterday’s post, I’m used to learning forms at a fast pace. Even the Saber Form, which I did not get at all, I was at least learning the postures pretty easily–until the end of the fourth (of six) rows. That’s where there is the most difficult movement, and my teacher quit teaching the form to me at that point. In part because I got into a minor car accident and needed to take a break from it, but moreso because she did not feel comfortable with that posture/movement. She didn’t tell me that until much later.

My teacher does not like the weapons. I didn’t realize that until much later because, of course, she isn’t going to tell me that. I found out when she was teaching me the Double Saber Form. We made it roughly halfway through and then the pandemic hit (I think that’s the timeline). She sent out a video of her teacher doing the Double Saber Form. I asked if I could teach myself the rest, and she immediately said I could.

I ask her because I feel it’s respectful to her as my teacher. We are also friends, but it just feels right to me. She always says yes and is happy that I am expanding my knowledge on my own. She’s thrilled that I am getting even more into weapons, though it’s not her first love. Or her tenth, I think. I get the feeling that she only does them because her teacher insists on it. And maybe because she realized that it’s a part of the martial art(s).

I know she really respects her teacher, so it’s probably in large  part because he wants her to learn the weapons. She’s talked to him about me teaching myself various weapons, and he told her that if I ever wanted to go to his classes, he would be more than happy to have me. He’s a huge weapon freak, too. And he’s very excited that I’m teaching myself the Double Fan Form.

I have to say, when I look back at my bumpy road to where I am now, I would never have dreamed that I would fall in love with the weapons like that. And after my struggles with the saber (my second weapon form learned), I was humbled.


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Double Fan Form is still kicking my ass

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I am still working on the Double Fan Form, albeit very slowly. I have taught myself 18 out of 48 postures, so I’m over a third of the way through. That’s being very generous to myself, though, because I have had to go over several postures several times.

Here’s the thing.

*Looks both ways before whispering*

Most of the forms have been easy for me to learn. Long Solo Form? Fairly easy. Sword Form? Really easy. Saber Form was frustrating as fuck because I did not get it and did not like the way it felt, but it wasn’t hard to learn the postures themselves.

When I decided to learn Bagua in addition to Taiji, that was definitely a mind shift. It’s a very diffeernt martial art (much more aassertive whereas Taiji is, well, not passive, but receptive), and I had to adjust to that (not to mention different weighting of the feet. In Taiji, it’s usually 70/30 front/back. In Bagua, on the other hand, it’s 40/60 front/back. Which is a massive adjustment.

Once I got more used to it, though, I found learning the Swimming Dragon Form to be pretty smooth and intuitive. There are a few postures that messed with my mind, but for the most part, I didn’t have too much trouble learning the postures/movements.

Side note: I have to take a minute to explain that my teacher considers being taught each posture to having learned the form. She will say you’ve graduated once she teaches you the last posture. That doesn’t mean you know the form, obviously, but it’s still a good feeling.

The Fan Form was the first form I taught myself after my medical crisis. I taught it to myself in roughly thrree months, but then forgot chunks of it over time. Recently, I was teaching myself the left side when I realized that I had started fudging some of the right side. So I taught it to myself over again. I had to clear up a lot, but it’s much stronger now. I’ve been teaching myself the Double Fan Form since at least my birthday (a little before that, I think), which is a month-and-a-half ago. If I continue apace, then it’ll be four-and-a-half months total.Maybe it’ll get easier the longer I learn it; I can dream, right?

It’s completely possible, however, that it’ll get harder later on because that’s how the forms usually go. It makes sense, really. The first third or so of the form is the tutorial, to use game-speak. It’s to ease you into the form so you don’t feel overwhelmed. This is the case especially for the Solo Form. That’s the first form you learn in Taiji, and it’s the basis for all the other forms. It has three sections. The first is very basic and so gently eases you into it. Most people* can do Taiji in one way or another. My teacher was willing and eager to adapt the form to her students (concerning disabilities), which I really appreciated.


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More about my goals–and the Double Fan Form

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Ok. Let’s talk more about the Double Fan Form first. I wrote about it yesterday and how I’m struggling with it. By the way, I’m getting so engrossed with it, I’m spending up to half an hour on learning it–and we’re talking about a new posture or two at a time. In other words, it’s been ROUGH. I messaged Ian, saying I’m struggling with it. He asked if there were different things to do with each fan, which would give him trouble. That’s part of it, and today, I learned a posture that had the two fans facing the opposite ways and doing distinctly different things.

Even before that, though, the form was fucking with my brain. I was trying to figure out why that is, and I think it’s beacuse I have to hold the two fans in one hand for several postures. This is unlike the Double Saber Form in which you immediately separate the two sabers. You have one in each hand from the first posture after the bow, and you continue along in that fashion until the last posture.

With the fan form, you start with both fans in the left hand (this is common. You start with the weapon/s in the opposite of the dominant hand for the form). You transfer both to the right a few postures later. Then, a few postures later, you separate the two. One fan is facing forward and one is facing backwards. Of course, this means that you have to hold them the opposite way in the beginning when they are in one hand. I have tried it the way it makes sense to my brain (with the front sides facing out), but that doesn’t quite line up with where I need them to be by the time I separate the fans.

Side note: I was just browsing fans. Yes, I just bought a new set, but I’m curious as to what is out there. One thing that is guaranteed to make me NOT buy from a seller is them not including the dimensions of the weapon. I have seen this far too often, especially with the fans, and it’s simply not acceptable. I think one reason it happens so much with the fans is because fans are in that gray area between weapon and toy. Well, not toy, exactly, but accessory. Plus, you can do dances with them. So it’s not strictly a weapon. Still. If you are selling a fan as a Taiji weapon, then you MUST include the length. That’s not negotiable, and it boggles my mind that sellers would not automatically include that information.

I was looking at a pack of ‘large’ fans, and I could not find the size in the description anywhere. Granted, I did not peruse it carefully, but it did not show up in the description, which is where I would expect it to be. I get all my martial art equipment from Kungfu Direct, but their fan selection is limited. I wanted to see what else was out there.

Back to the Double Fan Form. I have watched half-a-dozen versions of the official Yang-style Double Fan Form (that’s what I’ve dubbed it in my head), and they are the same with small flair/tweaks. I have decided that this will be the first one I learn and that it’s good for me to persevere with it.


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A new year, a new me?

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Let’s talk more about my birthday and my goals for the upcoming year. Before I do that, though, I am so stoked about the weapons I have ordered. I am working on the Double Fan Form, and I’m not loving it. I don’t know why because I adore the Fan Form. Something about this is not working in my brain. The video I’m watching is split in front and back view ins the same view at half-speed. Theoretically, it should be a gerat way to learn the form because I can look at both front and back–but I think that’s actually part of the problem. I have a hard time focusing on one or the other. I think I prefer two separate videos because then I can focus on one or the other.

Yes, I know I could do that myself, but my brain doesn’t work that way. I have added a few more movements. It’s…fine, but not blowing me away. I can’t help but compare my feelings about the Double Fan Form to how I felt when I learned that I could do the Cane Form with the Saber. Not only did that blow my mind, but it felt so damn good. I gave myself a week to learn it, but it took three or four days. One day per row (four rows).

I just did a quick practice of what I know for the Double Fan Form. My brain still can’t grasp it completely. I’ve looked at a few different forms. There are three that seem to be the most repeated. One might be the official one–the one I’m trying to learn. Another one is a bit more aggressive, which I like, but not what I’m about right now.

I feel like I should learn the official one first before branching off to the other ones. I need to be patient with myself, but I’m used ot learning new forms pretty quickly. Why is this one so hard? My impulse is to say that it’s beacuse the two fans do different things, but up to this point, they really don’t. Also, in the Double Saber Form, the two sabers do different things, and I did not have too hard a time with that form.

The Double Sword Form has been fun, but it’s just me messing with two swords. For whatever reason, though, it feels much more natural than the Double Fan Form (formal). There is not an official Taiji Double Sword Form (that I can find), but there are two that I’ve found that are pretty cool. One is Taiji and the other is labeled Taiji/praying mantis.

Ha. I found a cool video of one man with two swords fighting another man with a spear. It turns out to be someone I subscribe to–the guy who reviewed the twin straight swords I bought. I’ve included the video below.


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Mental health and more

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I am really working on my sleep, which has gone haywire since changing the time. THis is one of my pet rants, but can we please stop changing the time? I don’t care which we choose, but let’s just leave it the same all year round. My god. We have fake lighting. We don’t need to be beholden to the whims of the sun any longer. For fuck’s sake.

On the bright side, I’ve been getting a decent amount of sleep. On the not-so-bright side, it’s been at all hours of the day/night/morning. I am concerned. I am trying to drag my sleep schedule back to going to bed by 2 a.m. and getting up at 10. It’s not happening, though, and I’m just not happy with myself.

Let’s talk Taiji a bit. And Bagua. I’m focusing on those because they are my lifeline. Without them, I don’t know if I could .

Side note: There’s a new game out called The First Berserker: Khazan (Neople). It’s a soulslike, though the combat is likened more to Sekiro. I tried the demo for an hour, and I quit before even getting to the first boss. Hm. There’s an easy mode (someone mentioned it in the Discord), which I had not known. But I did play the demo, and I presume there was an easy mode in the demo? If so, wouldn’t I have chosen that? I don’t know.

Anyway. I am so sick and tired of soulslike relying on the parry and having bosses taht are brutal. It’s like they took the least-interesting thing from From games (to me) and made them the focus of the game. When I tried the demo, the scrubs could kill me in three hits or so. It took three hits to kill a scrub. This is actually something  people mentioned about the game–that the enemy difficulty is badly calibrated. Andy Cortez from Kinda Funny said that he dumped all his points into Strength to get the max with as little health as he could get away with, but it still took him two or three hits to kill the scrubs.

I found the combat to be grueling and not satisfying. I think I went with the greatsword because the other options are dual-daggers and dex. As we all know by now, I don’t do either. So it’s greatsword by default. I don’t know if there is any kind of magic in the game, but my hunch is no.

Every fucking review talks about how brutal the bosses are, but how they came to love the drutality. Here’s one from IGN that typifies that sentiment. Meanwhile, I’m summoning humans for Shadow of the Erdtree because I do not want to struggle for hours with a boss. I did that with the final boss of the DLC the first time around. Five hours over two days after getting the boss down four or five hits on my second try. Did I feel exhilirated after beating the boss? Yes. But it was so fleeting and then exhaustion set in. I was so numb by that point, I was mostly just glad it was over.


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Hanging on by a thread

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I’m tired. And depressed. And anxious. I know that I am in a bad way for several reasons. One, my sleep is terrible. I mean, it’s nearly the worst it’s ever been, and that’s saying something. I am trying to claw my way back to not completely off the rails, but it’s so hard. Here is my post from yesterday, meandering all over the place.

Another thing is that I’m wasting too much time not doing anything productive. It’s fine to spend some time playing video games, but not as much as I’ve been doing. I know that’s one way I self-medicate, so to speak, because it’s easy to numb myself out by doing another run (Balatro) or going a bit farther (Shadow of the Erdtree) and taking on one more boss (ditto).

By the way, I’m pleased that there are still people playing the DLC. I mean, I should not be surprised as there are still people playing every other From game I play. I can summon for any of the games, though not for every boss. And I get invaded with some regularity as well. Today, I was able to summon humans for most of the bosses I fought. This has been the case for the past few days as I’ve been cleaning up the DLC. Today, there’s only been one dungeon boss I’ve wanted to summon a human for and could not, but I do not blame people for not wanting to be summoned for that boss.

I am surprised that there was a summon for a boss I consider really blah, and it’s not easy to find. I’ve only had trouble with this boss on my melee character–none at all with my casters. It’s an interesting storyline, but, sadly, the two places you have to go to blow whistles in order to get to this boss are shit.

Briefly, there are these snake-like creatures that fall from the sky. One is a mage who can freeze you in place for several seconds while the others spawn and munch on you. The range is insane, and it homes so you have to ride/walk/run out of its reach. Which is impossible to do for me because I can’t gauge how far it’ll go. What did I do instead? Use the invisibility spell, Unsseen Form in order not to be seen by them. I’m wearing an armor set that muffles my footsteps so I don’t have to waste a talisman slot on the muffled footsteps talisman.

I zipped by all the munchy snakes, got to the whistle (eventually. It’s a maze and difficult to navigate), and blew it. Then I teleported back to the NPC/church so I could take on the boss. I got a human summon, and we managed to do it in one try. The human summon died right before the end of the fight, sadly, but I got the last blow as they died. So, once again, this was an easy fight as a caster.


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