It occurs to me that the learning which takes place in a class is very different to that which we experience practicing alone – both are important but we tend to prioritise the class or one to one tutorial because we see that as a “proper learning” environment – after all if we are being taught then that means we must be learning – right?
Not necessarily – practising alone for long periods – that is the “in the wilderness” part – is vital to allow our subconscious body/mind to sort out the pieces and to develop new patterns in a kind of meditation – making sense of what we already know without the confusion of taking in new material all the time. It allows us to consolidate everything we have learned to date and understand the truth of that old saying that ” the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”
This lockdown has enforced a period in the wilderness for all of us – and I for one have found it beneficial – so please embrace the alone time and be at ease with the wilderness.
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When looking at a master in life or on video it seems true to say that if you can see what is going on then you can – probably – do it (given a body that is actually capable) and only need practice to learn how to make it work. If on the other hand – you cannot see it then you probably cannot do it – unless you are doing it already and simply don’t realise it!
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Seen world-wide it is observable that special interest groups have their own mores, practices, language (jargon) and social norms which are often quite foreign to outsiders who occasionally enter them, either out of need or curiosity. We see this in our interactions with the professions of medicine, teaching, law and so forth – when visited at need these micro-cultural schools of expertise justify high fees often sustained by this very separateness and the enforced barriers to understanding which they promote.
Elsewhere, we see a similar situation with areas of personal interest – clearly the one considered here is that of martial arts.
Once we understand Tai Chi/martial arts as a specialist niche culture like the professions, then we can begin to expect some challenging issues in comparison to mainstream culture. Certain practices for example, or ways of perceiving human interaction are just as “foreign” as any medical training (complete with dissections, intimate examinations, drug ingestion, etc) or legal conversation replete with tortuous thought experiments and Latin notation.
Compare for example with dance and its suppressed sexuality (a vertical expression of a horizontal desire), its intellectualised definition of physical expression and its pre-linguistic emotional expression through wholly committed physical action. Consider also the physical, psychological and linguistic worth of sports.
So, when you join a Tai Chi class consider that you have entered a very old sub-culture based on millennia-old ideas and practices, many once common but today lost except to some specialist areas. Perhaps consider what it means to join such a group and allow for the fact that you are the (albeit welcome) outsider who needs to make allowances for the conflicts which may come about from your own expectations. Even for those of us with many years as part of this sub-culture we continue to find that the thinking and habits we were brought up with continue to hold us back in developing our Tai Chi skill set.
So we are all beginners and all seeking to find our place in this world of multiple sub-cultures.
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Tai Chi is a bit like one of those online computer games where you start in a small world and need to work out what it is all about so as to open up another level after level on an apparently infinite journey. But this is real and you need to find and to learn to use all aspects of your body, mind and emotional spirituality. The exercises and a teacher offer tools for you to explore and to motivate.
Or perhaps like buying a jigsaw puzzle with a vague picture on the box and only a few pieces. Once you have assembled these you gain some more pieces, gradually you find gaps without pieces, you have to make pieces which fit and make sense of the picture. But the fit of each piece depends not just on the shape or image, matching other elements like texture, smell, squiginess and attitude are just as important.
At no point is it ever what you think it is, it is never the same, everybody experiences it differently, new doors open frequently. Age enables the integration of beneficial experience and learning – you get better as you get older.
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