A Week Of T'ai Chi

9 days of T'ai Chi with my teacher Mark, David, my students and other T'ai Chi folk have drawn to a close. I feel sadness at it ending mixed with gratitude for both the teaching and the chance to practise in a group for a sustained time. Over the next few days I will put a few pictures up from the Sunday afternoon session. There have been some real challenges for me over the period, including wrestling with the desire to be a full-time student of T'ai Chi, rather than to teach. I do love teaching, and students light my enthusiasm regularly, but it is such a luxury to be able to ask questions of my own, to get corrections, to have the time to take apart my attitudes, techniques and postures, go right back to fundamentals and see if things need throwing out or adjusting. Yielding to physical, internal and 'external' pushes has a been a theme of my week; or rather, how much I am a beginner in this, and how much I need to further soften and connect.

Over a week or more it gave me time to spend a whole day working on one correction, rather than flitting to the next thing to be attended to. One day, for instance, Mark had been speaking about using the eyes correctly in our T'ai Chi. The following day I tried to do all the work 'as if looking out of the whites of my eyes' (as Steven Moore [see link to his blog at side of page] once evocatively put it), trying to cultivate a relaxed, expansive gaze that does not fixate or grasp at things. I wear glasses, and spending a few of the hours with the unfocused gaze that removing my lenses and specs produced, was interesting, but made me feel slightly disconnected. It was very different from really allowing my lens-corrected 20/20 vision to relax and encompass the room, softening but reaching out to the periphery of my visual field. I felt far more connected to the group and felt my movement was part of a greater whole, something I rarely glimpse. Also it produced a subtle shift in where I felt I was located in my own body. Rather then being 'in my head' I felt loosely in my spine, like a big C curve or a satellite dish, with the feeling that my heart could somehow beam out... The softening in the gaze must be helping other things melt too, as the spiralling motions felt utterly changed, much more present in all 3 tantiens and less prone to being clunky.

These are all words about things. The main thing is the hours of T'ai Chi and receiving good teaching have profound effects. To my students who came along: keep up daily practice, so as not to feel ill effects of suddenly stopping again. Also, you may feel changes for many days or weeks. This is natural.