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.