This is part five about my discourse on Taiji (and how it’s been a boon for me). In the last post, I talked about….well, lots of stuff. I wanted to talk about trust and my teacher, but then wandered into my past and why my family dysfunction made me unlikely to trust.
It turns out thaht I can trust–when someone is worthy of that trust. And, yes, it did not happen immediately, but took quite some time. It’s good not to be too trusting, but I think I took it to the extreme. Hell, I kow I took it to extreme, and I would say I still have a hard time calibrating my ability to trust (especially in my romantic life). It’s either too much or too little, but rarely just enough.
In the case of my Taiji teacher, she earned it by being transparent, honest, and open about what she knows and doesn’t about Taiji. It’s the last one especially that really made me trust her.
Side note: I have a hard time admitting when I don’t know something, especially if it’s an area that I consider myself an expert. The fact that my teacher can do it with ease is a plus in my book. She doesn’t seem worried about undermining herself by doing so, which I admire.
Anyway, I learned over time that she would be honest with me no matter what. She accepted me where I was and did not push me–wait. That’s not what I want to say. Because she absolutely did push me, but in a way that was positive. I think it’s better to say that she encouraged me to go outside my comfort zone.
I’m stubborn, though, so I would often push back. That’s my nature. I’m not proud of it, but I have to be real. It’s a fear response, but it’s also a way for me to guard my boundaries. That was necessary in my family, but it was not as necessary in Taiji with my teacher.
What helped me with that? Sit back and listen to a little story I have for you. I started learning Taiji beacuse I wanted to be able to defend myself, but I was rabidly anti-violence. In other words, I was a pacifist. About a year or two after I started studying with my teacher, she wanted me to start studying the Sword Form. I reacted strongly against it because I did not want to do weapons. That was violent! Not like the Solo Form, which was without weapons and so gentle.
My teacher brought it up every few months, and I was adamant that I would never, ever do the weapons. After a year or so of this, she pressed a wooden practice sword into my hand and told me to just hold it. I tried to pull my hand back, but she would not let me. She wasn’t mean about it, but she made sure I closed my hand on the hilt of the sword.
That moment changed my life. The second I closed my fingers aroound the hilt, I knew that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. The sword was like an extension of my hand, and I felt as if I had always been holding it. My teacher taught me the first few postures of the Sword Form, and I wanted more. I bugged her to teach it to me as quickly as possible, which she did.Which she did. Happily.
One of the best things about her is tha t she is not the type to say, “I told you so.” She’s just happy when you do as she suggested,, but she realizes that everyone is on their own journey. She can make as many suggestions as she wants, but she can’t actually make someone do them. It’s the old, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink” adage.
She also knows that if someone isn’t ready to do something, they’re not going to be persuaded to try. Well, except me, apparently. But in general, she knows how hard to push and how often. Also, she wasn’t pushing me to actually do the Sword Form (after the first several times failed). She switched to urging me just to hold the sword. That is much less of an investment, and it’s what made it so easy for me just to try.
It’s hard to imagine if she hadn’t done that. Weapons are my life, and I would be so bereft without them. The sword will always hold a soft spot in my heart beacuse it was the first weapon I learned. And it’s what made me fall in love with the weapons.
I have talked about this before, but I ascribe different romantic relationships to how I feel about the various weapons. The sword is the long-term partnership with the person you’ve been with for ages. A good partnership, I hasten to add. Someone you can just chill with and not put on any airs. You can be in the same room and not talk, and it doesn’t feel uncomfortable. They can finish all your stories for you, but they love you enough not to do so.
The sword was my favorite weapon for quite some time. It’s slid out of that position (the double sabers are now in first place), but it will always have a special place in my heart. I will not hear a bad word about it, and I always smile when I think of it.
I learned the Sword Form in an astonishingly short amount of time. That’s how I roll. If I love something, I want to glut myself on it. I pestered my teacher every chance I had, and I learned it in a few months. That’s unheard of, really, unless it’s a form I’m teaching myself. I have a private lesson for an hour every other week, which means I learn two or three new movements in a new form per lesson. I am currently learning the Swimming Dragon Form in Bagua which is something like sixty postures/movements? I’m about a third done, and I’ve been learning it for three months or so.
Here’s something else Taiji has given me–an undying love for the weapons forms. This is not something I would have foreseen in my wildest dreams. I bought my steel sword at the next demo of my teacher’s teacher’s school, and it was not cheap. In fact, it was the most expensive sword the vendor had brought with him. I had an unerring nose for that for whatever reason, which is hilarious as I don’t normally buy much of anything that might get pricy. It was something like $150, and the vendor told me that the forge that made it had burned down. That meant that they would not be producing more for a while.
I’m tight with a penny, but I rationalized buying the sword by saying to myself that if I used it for a decade, it would basically pay for itself. I’ve been using it for over that, and I feel that it’s money well spent. I would love to get an even better sword or a really nice set of double sabers, but it’s not something that I feel pressed to do. The beauty of the weapons is not in how they look or what they’re made of–it’s in what they do.