Tai Chi Y2D71: Early Start

I knew I had an early morning meeting this morning, so I  tried to push back the start of my at-home day by getting up earlier.  No dice.  I woke at my regular time to the blaring alarm, and had to rush my tai chi routine, my morning routine, to get to my meeting on time.

Once routines are set, it’s awfully hard to adjust them, particularly when it comes to daily practice.  I imagine it would take me almost as long to re-adjust my schedule, as it took to adjust it in the first place.

 

Tai Chi Y2D70: working

I worked through the three forms this morning, as usual. They’re not getting easier, nor harder. Plateau, I guess. How does one move on from here? Keep working at it, I guess.

I started another painting, having finished “Black Pillar” and”White Pillar” last night. Scott and I were chat ting via Facebook occasionally, as I put some layers of shiny satin glaze over parts of both paintings. They look pretty cool, if I say so myself. Maybe I should have an art exhibit? Perhaps not yet.

Tai Chi Y2D69: running late

Had a lot of trouble getting up this morning, though I had few excuses for it. I spent a lot of Sunday in bed, resting and taking care of a sore throat, which appears to have quit overnight. Thank goodness. Bed rest and liquids matter!

But it meant that tai chi seemed like a luxury I could not afford this morning. I woke, and hit the snooze button on the alarm clock far too many times. When I finally did get up to do tai chi, it was rushed, rather than leisurely. And yet, now that it’s done, I realize (for today) that it’s not a luxury but a necessity.

Tai Chi y2d68: Unknowing

I was up late working on this painting, titled “Black Pillar”, and I think it’s coming along nicely. My morning tai chi routine was lackadaisical as a result: one qigong form done, then a bit of a walk around the apartment, then the other qigong form, then a bit of cleanup in the kitchen, then the tai chi form. There may have been some cleanup of the art supplies and drafting desk, too, although more remains to be done to clean up this house after the last few weeks of crazy. A lot of it will get done this week… Probably once the painting is finished.

I’m conscious that in the two months since my tai chi practice passed the year mark, that it’s been less and less interesting to me. Don’t get me wrong: it’s still hard to get up and do the work; it’s still hard to convince myself that I should do it. The Dweller on the Threshold still gets me front time to time, and I delay getting up and getting started. But sooner or later, I get up and out of bed, and I go do the tai chi.

But the actual tai chi is less interesting. There are fewer complications, and fewer barriers to success. There are times when I forget my place in the form, or I have to do a sequence over again — but I find that there are few parts of the work that cause strain or physical challenge. Which is sort of the point. I want to experience fewer physical challenges as I get older, and I want to remain flexible and mentally alert. And I’m getting those benefits. But there’s less to say about the work itself. And I wonder if that will continue to be the case, or if I’m only on a current plateau in my practice. Or if there’s a third option? Again, I don’t know.

Tai Chi Y2D67: on the grass

This morning I was teaching an hour-long workshop, and I was hugely sleep-deprived. I’d had coffee too late in the day, so that I could work on a poster for today’s session…. But then I was up until 3:30am, tossing & turning.

So, when I awoke officially, I didn’t dare go back to sleep. I might have missed my workshop. I drove down early (so I wouldn’t get lost) and did my tai chi at the workshop site.

I’ve been badly affected the last few days by the pollen counts. I never get seasonal allergies — or at least, not until now. Argh. The last few days I’ve been a snot machine. And it’s not been pleasant. Nothing has really worked to keep my breathing passages open.

Today though was finally better. Things eased up a bit as I did tai chi in the garden at the workshop site. And now that I’ve had a nap and some food, post-workshop, I think that maybe my allergenic reaction is finally slowing down. Thank goodness.

Tai chi Y2D66: teeth and bones

What with one thing and another,I haven’t gone to e dentist in a while. Over two years. I went yesterday. The curious thing is, my teeth were in pretty not-good shape back then. They weren’t bad — i wasn’t experiencing bone loss or about to lose teeth, but was experiencing some gum infections, and I had some incipient cavities forming. Bad stuff… But I ignored it for a year, and then another year more. And in the meantime, I took up tai chi daily for a year.

Correlation is not causality. Not scientifically anyway. But there have been studies over the decades that tai chi can help older people mitigate the effects of osteoporosis, and that it can improve bone density. So keep that in mind.

Yesterday, the dentist noted the presence of the broken facial plate on one of my teeth, something installed on my tooth 20 years ago, and decided that needed replacing… But otherwise my teeth were fine. Bone density, great. No cavities, either incipient or formed. Nothing requiring significant work at all.

Part of me goes, huh.. Part of me thinks, tai chi. And truly, I’ll never know one way or another.

Tai Chi Y2D65: unfolding

I’m working on this pair of paintings called, appropriately enough, “Black Pillar” and “White Pillar”. They’re pretty much meditations on geometry, with the White Pillar holding three mandalas or roundels (I like roundel better, actually. It’s a more western word.) The three roundels on White Pillar are they in-yang symbol at the top, a square turned on its point in the middle, and two nested seven-pointed stars at the bottom. White Pillar, as a painting, is about 80% finished.

Last night I began laying out the detailed painting guides on “Black Pillar”. This is the bottom roundel on that pillar, a meditation on the number 8, and as you can see, it’s a pair of nested eight pointed stars (one is actually composed of two inter-locking squares) inside an octagon. It’s a considerable change in geometry from 2, and 3, deceptively simple and yet relying on what one learned from the earlier shapes and geometries. It’s an unfolding, of sorts, as larger numbers reveal much more complex patterns and allow greater interactions and relationships.

What does this have to do with tai chi?

Well, daily practice is an unfolding, of sorts. The natural habit of our minds and bodies is to ossify and tighten up, to reject new things, and to limit the adoption of new concepts or new technologies. I’m neither a painter nor a math teacher, nor a martial artist (once upon a time, I wouldn’t have said I was a magician either, but that title is growing on me).

In any case, what’s going on here is an unfolding. The creaks in my body rarely trouble me past the first two or three movements — I’m not reversing the aging of my body, but I’m slowing it down. Many of the creaks and pops that were ever present when I started, are gone.

Unfolding, in this instance, means breaking out of the shell. Letting the egg hatch. Pinocchio becoming a real, live boy. It’s growing up, in a sense. It’s growing out, in another sense. It’s delving deep, or reaching high… Some Christians use the prayer of Jabez, “O God, increase my territory.” And others remember the prophet Isaiah (I think it’s Isaiah), “enlarge the place of your tents, strengthen your cords, lengthen the stakes in the ground.”

A tent is useful only in potential when it’s stored in the bag. A human too tight in his skin is only partially useful. Or strong. Or happy. Or healthy.

I feel that I’m unfolding, these days.

Tai Chi Y2D64: Slowing down

The last few days, I feel like I’ve written everything useful that there is to say about tai chi practice. Slow Down. Remember to breathe. Hold horse stance. And so on. I could just recycle those three or four pieces of advice, ad infinitum. And it’s getting boring for me, and apparently for my readers. The deep insights are rarer, and spaced farther apart.

And frankly, I want to give up. By chance, I was reading something about sobriety the other day, and the author said, “the thing about choosing to be sober is that it’s a constant choice. You make it once, but then you have to keep making it, again and again. You have to make it even when you don’t want to, or when the stakes are very high, in sickness and in health. You have to make the choice even when you don’t much feel like staying sober, and the choice to stay sober is more painful than the choice to break down.” that’s not the exact quotation, but it’s the sentiment: the need to keep choosing.

And so it is with tai chi, or any martial practice, or any practice at all. There was a quotation by Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters floating around on Facebook a week or so ago, and here I’m not going to use quotation marks because I’m not going to get it right: All these kids show up for American Idol or the Voice, and they get judged and critiqued so hard, and the ones that get turned down think that’s it, they’ve blown their shot. But the best bands of the next decade aren’t going to come out of the American Idol auditions. They’re the ones that are practicing now, in their garages, making a mess, making music… And they suck, right now, they’re terrible. But they’ll get better, and they’ll get a few breaks, and tour a bit. But that’s where great musicians come from: practice, and sucking for a while. Again, not an exact quote, but approximate. And the right sentiment: go practice, don’t worry about the Idol and the Voice, go suck at music in a garage somewhere. I haven’t got time to look it up: find it for yourself on Facebook. It’s floating around somewhere, and if you missed it the first time, don’t worry. It’ll be back. Eventually.

And the challenge is that practice is hard. And lonely at times. And you suck. Ten years ago I was in Washington DC for ISTE’s big conference, and I saw an African-American man doing tai chi in a park on the walk between my hotel and the conference center, every morning. Slow, graceful, fully in control of himself. Amazing. As good as my teacher,I’d say, at least in presentation.

But you don’t become that overnight, nor even after a year or more of practice. Keep going. Slow down. This isn’t a marathon. It isn’t even a sprint. It’s life. It’s practice. Keep it up.

Tai Chi Y2D63: Filling Space

Today, I woke up late on a school day for the first time in over a year.  My sleep patterns have been wonky the past few days, and I’m tired, and I have energy at times that I want to be sleeping; and I’m tired at times I want to be working.  Part of it is too much caffeine abuse over the weekend.  It makes many things possible, but it also leaves me a little wiped out.

Anyway, because of this, I did tai chi and the qi gong forms in the Design Lab this morning.  And as a result of that, I had the recognition/realization that my office is such a comfortable space to do tai chi in, because my movements fill the whole space.  I have no furniture in the center of the room there, so that there’s space for tai chi to occur. But that means that my tai chi practice is office-shaped.

JC over at Rosicrucian Vault wrote a little bit about the shape of space in a recent blog post. Ancients and medievals associated the dodecahedron with the shape of space overall, and correspondingly divided space into a twelve-sided figure.  It’s a remarkably consistent thing, this twelve-fold division, partly because the motion of the sun across the sky over the course of a year divides nicely into roughly-equal twelve parts (which twelfths also happen to very roughly correspond with the motion of the Moon against the stars, sorta — I know I’m simplifying here, don’t judge me).

Anyway, the result of doing his mental exercise in pencil (if not yet colored papers and foamcore, and large enough to work on) was this little paper model, in which the sides of the dodecahedron are marked with the signs of the Zodiac.  If it were colored to represent the four elements, and additional signs were drawn on the sides to represent the Cardinal, Fixed and Mutable signs, and perhaps a line of gold drawn on it to represent the course of the sun through each sign of the Zodiac, it would be a fair three-dimensional model of the universe as ancient and medieval students explained it — perhaps not as they understood it to be, but at least as they initiated the conversation about its structure and its nature.

Maybe.  I’m guessing, I admit. A lot.

Yet underlying this simple paper model (download your own paper blank dodecahedron here) is an understanding of the universe as being a thing with boundaries and edges.  And I realized today during my practice that the way that I practice, and the place where I practice, has become the place where I feel most comfortable practicing.  And that needs to change.  I’ve traveled along this path for more than year, learning all kinds of things about my practice in one place (or mostly one place — there’s been bathrooms and kitchens and hotel rooms in the last year, too)… but I need to extend my practice.  I need to widen my conception of space, so that I can work the forms in larger environments and within larger boundaries, than just my usual practice space.

Anyway, that’s my insight today.

Tai Chi Y2D62: stiffness and flexibility

Yesterday’s long car trip really did a number on me, and it took a long time to work the stiffness out of me this morning. Yet I feel ten times better post-forms than I did when I first peeled my eyes open at Dawn’s crack with its rosy red fingers.

This seems to be one of the great advantages of tai chi, or yoga, or any stretching system generally. It’s easier to flip back to the normal state of stretchiness and flexibility after a tough day or two. it doesn’t make it any easier to get out of bed, at the beginning, but it keeps you from rusting into the bed.