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Less is (sometimes) more, part two

Posted on August 19, 2025 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

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.

Less is (sometimes) more

Posted on August 14, 2025 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

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.