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.
I have started to pay more attention to my Solo Form because her teacher has updated it and because it’s the basis for all we do. I have neglected it shamefully because I love my weapons so much, and I don’t have time to do everything.
I have pared back my weapons beacuse I was starting to burn out. I wanted to do everything every day, which streched out to two hours and sometimes more. We’re talking a full warm-up (half an hour to forty-five minutes), then a half hour to forty-five minutes of weapons (the Double Fan Form is kicking my ass. Still. I have 34 of 48 postures learned, and it has not gotten any easier. I started around my birthday, so it’s been four months, and I’m only two-thirds done. This is by far the longest I’ve worked on a form in terms of actual time (rather than time-span), and I have thought about giving it up several times.
I would like to find a weapons teacher, but there aren’t any that I have been able to discover online. Also, I’m not into the more stringent/strict/harsh mentality that can sometimes accompany weapon forms. I have looked for weapon forms forums online, but the few I’ve found are more into how many weapons they do and how hard they (the weapon wielders) are. That’s so not my vibe at all.
I know weapons are about as martial as you can get, but I’m still all about the art. It’s the vibes, man, and I would rather just feel my way through it than rely on strict counts and whatnot. It’s so boring to me to talk about the mechanics (beyond actually knowing them, I mean), and it’s probably not a surprise that it’s overwhelmingly men who populate these forums.
This is how I feel about my writing as well. I got my MA in Writing and Consciousness (ughhhhh. Boy, does that bring back a lot of mixed emotions). and one of my professors idea of analyizing a piece of literature was to go paragraph by paragraph and dissect every word choice.
That’s not how I enjoy literature. At all. As a writer, I don’t labor over every word. I don’t write and erase a dozen times, only to end up with the word I had chosen in the first place. I am a very stream of consciousness writer. I write what I feel, and I’m not particualrly choosy about each word.
Back to Taiji. Ever since adding Bagua, I’ve been struggling not to feel tapped by the end of my routine. At some point, I realized that I didn’t need to do everything every day. And, in a rare move for me, I actually wrote up a schedule for me to follow every day. And in a not-rare-move for me, I immediately scratched out parts of it and scribbled other things in. I can’t do anything on the first go because I just cannot.
The first week doing my new schedule, I felt as if I was slacking whilst doing it–but I felt so much better afterwards. Instead of being exhausted and slightly resentful, I felt refreshed and strong.
My teacher told me that one of the masters (either her teacher or one of her teacher’s teachers) said that you only needed to practice a form once a month once you have it in your body. I don’t think I’m there yet, but I certainly didn’t need to do them every day. I had already shifted the Sword Form, left side and right, and the Saber Form, left side and right, to once a week, but that wasn’t enough to stave off the burnout.
I took a drastic step. I have been doing the Cane Form for a while, reworked it, and know it pretty well. My teacher showed me a video from her teacher of him doing the Cane Form with a saber, and that changed my life. I’m not being hyperbolic as it really opened my eyes to what could be done with the weapons. I spent a month or two learning the Cane Form with the saber by doing the Cane Form every day. Except, it’s four rows, so I would do each row differently. One row with the cane in the right hand; one with the cane in the left; one with the saber in the right hand; and one with the saber in the left hand. I would rotate it on the daily so I was doing every row with both hands.
Now, I feel I know the Cane Form well enough that I do one of each version (Cane Form with the cane, right side and left, then with the saber, Right side and left. I practice six days a week and rest on Saturday because I have class on that day.
That’s all for today. I will pick up again from here tomorrow.