Despite what the title is of this post, I’m actually going to finish the list that I started yesterday of my weapons, easiest to hardest to learn. If I have time and the brain bandwidth, I’ll get back to the Double Fan Form. If I don’t, though, then I won’t and will get back to it in another post.
For some reason, I thought I was making a list of the weapons, my favorite to least favorite. Nope. That wasn’t what I was doing, so let’s get back to easiest to learn to hardest to learn.
Before I get to the rest of the list, though, let me quickly rattle off the weapons I’m including. You know what? Let’s throw in the Solo Form as well. No. If I do that, then I have to rejigger my list. The Solo (Long) Form was easy for me to learn for the most part. That’s good; I don’t know if I would have stuck it out otherwise.
Why? Because my first experience with Taiji was a disaster. The teacher was terrible for so many reasons, and I was skittish about trying another studio. When I finally mustered up enough energy to research other studios, I had a list of things that I needed from the studio. One, a female teacher. This was nonnegotiable. Two, no shilling of in-studio products like belts and gis and shoes. Three, related to the last one, no belts at all. That’s not really a Taiji thing, anyway, but I was amazed at how many Taiji studios wanted to mimic more traditional karate studios.
I remember at our last studio, there was a group who used the space after us on occasion. I’m not sure what their group was, but they all wore white. I got the sense that it was some kind of New Age hippie thing. I also got the sense that they looked askance at us. See, we wore mostly black, and we were much earthier. I have visible tattoos for one thing. They were very much peace and love. We were more, ah, not hate and strife, but not what they were.
Plus, they would talk in their normal voices while we were trying to finish up our class. That was as annoying as fuck, to be honest.
It took me some time to find my teacher. She had just started her school, and I was her first official student. We gabbed more than we practiced, and we have the tendency to still do the same. I had a lesson with her yesterday and before it, we both said we needed to hold ourselves accountable.
We did it, too. We talked for five or ten minutes, then got down to business. It’s not that we can’t stick to what we’re meant to do; it’s that we’re both too willing to derail each other (and ourselves).
Ok. The weapon forms I’m rating: Sword Form; Cane Form (with cane and with saber); Fan Form; Double Saber Form; Wu-Li Dancing Sword Form; Karambit Form; Staff drills; Swimming Dragon Form; Solo (Long) Form (I changed my mind. I’m going to include it); Saber Form; and the Double Fan Form.
I’m not sure I can put the Solo (Long) Form on the list because it wsa the first for I learned–and it was a long time ago. Twenty years? Something close to that. It was for the most part fairly easy to learn (with a few notable exceptions), but that’s only because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Meaning, I learned the postures, yes, but not the meaning behind them. Or the nuances that went completely over my head..
I have included above a video of a woman doing Double Hook Swords. It’s not in my lineage; it’s not ever Taiji. I just think it’s pretty cool, and I would not mind learning something similar. But that’s at the very back of the back burner because I have so many weapon forms I want to learn. I am like the proverbial kid in the candy store, and I want to cram it all in my mouth. Metaphorically, of course.
Back to my list. I’m taking the Solo (Long) Form off again. It’s too hard to rate, so I’m going to just say that it was fairly smooth sailing to learn it, but only now can I say that I’m pretty good at it. My teacher has more faith in my ability than I do, which makes me feel warm inside.
I have thought of myself as an intermediary student for quite some time. It’s only when I started teaching myself that I realized I’m not intermediary any longer. I didn’t want to say that I was better than I was, though. I was not comfortable with pro or anything like that. My teacher came up with advanced, and that suited me.
3. Double Saber. This one surprised me. I expected it to be hard because I had such a time with the saber. I will get more into that when I reach the saber, but I will say that the Double Saber Form was one of my favorite forms to learn. My teacher started teaching it to me while we were in the pandemic–so it was over Zoom.
Let me step back a moment. Right before the pandemic, my teacher’s home studio had their demo. Her classmate did the Double Saber Form, and I immediately fell in love. I knew it was something I needed in my life, and I asked my teacher to teach it to me. We were learning the Cane Form at the time, and then we went into soft lockdown. My teacher taught me double saber drills, and I emphasized how much I wanted to be a human blender. Either that or a human Cuisinart.
She taught me the first half of the Double Sword Form, both online and in my backyard. Then, we reached a point when she didn’t feel comfortable teaching me any further, though she didn’t exactly say so .Once I realized that, I asked if her teacher had videotaped himself doing the Double Saber Form. She said he had, and she sent me the videos. I took over teaching myself, and it was very smooth sailing. For whatever reason, it was not a difficult form to teach myself, and I was pretty pleased by the end of it.
I still love this form. I practice it twice a week unless I need to brush up my memory. It’s funny how each form is roughly two minutes, but it seems like so much longer when I’m teaching the form to myself. It’s when I was teaching myself the Double Saber Form that I realized I was not a newbie any longer or even an intermediary.
It was a weird feeling because I feel like I’ve been playing at Taiji for twenty years. My teacher spends most of her time doing martial arts, whether it’s teaching it or taking classes. In turn, I have only taken one class a week since I returned home from my medical crisis, and I have a lesson every other week. Other than that, I do my daily routine which takes roughly an hour-and-a-half.
That’s all for today. More tomorrow.