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.
For better or for worse, I decided this was my hill to die on. I really wanted to learn a Double Fan Form, and this was the one that seemed to be the ‘official’ Double Fan Form, if you can call it that. Or, more to the point, it’s the one I saw the most videos of. I think it’s Chen-style, but I am not positive about that. They do a lot of deep knee bends, which is a trademark of that style. I don’t do the deep knee bends because I don’t want to wreck my knees. At this point, I can adapt postures to make them better for me, which is not something I would have said even three years ago.
It really has been quite recent in that I no longer feel like a noob. I considered my practice lackadaisical, even though I did it every day for ever-increasing amounts of time. I started with five minutes of the warm-ups a day because I could not make myself practice Taiji. That was elongated into twenty minutes of warm-ups, plus about two minutes of actual Taiji. Now, it’s an hour-and-a-half to two hours, depending on if I’m teaching myself new postures of a form or not.
By the way, the video I included above is the third video I watch to teach myself the Double Fan Form. This is the one I watch at regular speed. She does it smoothly, and sometimes, that’s what I need to get my shit together.
I love the Double Fan Form; I really do. It’s a beautiful, elegant form that touches something feminine deep inside me. This is unusual for me as I tend to lean masculine. Or at least not feminine. But, as my BFF, K, says–sometimes, it’s fun to put glitter on your boobs. And you know what? She’s right. Sometimes, it is afun to put glitter on your boobs.
It’s not delicate, though. It’s still a weapon form that can be used in combat. This is one thing I like about the weapon forms. They are geared towards combat. The way we do the Solo Form is gearing it towards health. I appreciate that because I don’t take the best care of my health, and doing Taiji every day makes me feel better about that.
I don’t understand how I can watch a movement four or five times in a row and still not be able to translate it into what I need to do. I was talking to my teacher about it, and she commiserated with me. She has some difficulty with her lefts and rights, and ever since my medical crisis, I’ve had some problems with it, too.
It’s frustrating. I will watch a posture several times in a row across all three videos, then immediately forget what I was looking at or what I was supposed to do with it. I try not to let the frustration get to me, but it’s hard not to.
Today was a chill day. I did not try to learn anything new. I just wanted to make sure that I had the postures I have learned up until now right. I had to tweak a few things, but I think I have the basic shape of things. I have to remember that I don’t have to speed-learn it. There is no time limit, so I might as well go slowly and steadily.
The problem is that I have so many weapon forms I want to learn. I’m impatient to get on with it. I have been stopping myself from trying to learn two weapon forms at the same time. I think I would just confuse myself and get even more frustrated.