Over the past year I have had a couple of questions from students asking how T'ai Chi 121 lessons with Mark are allocated and I thought now would be a good moment to put it on the blog. As lessons take place at my home during workshop periods which I also organise, Mark asked me to coordinate them for him. I keep a record of who has had sessions and try to share them out fairly between those who want them, though sometimes there are inevitable waits and shortages, as Mark needs to return to London to teach before we want him to! If people have missed workshops due to illness, childcare, travel, etc. I try to make sure they get a session next time. Priority is given to students who study with me regularly, as it benefits everyone at class greatly to have more experienced students amongst them. Also some people can afford the time and money to travel to London to work with Mark; other people cannot, so a class here would be more fitted to them. This is as clear and fair as we can arrange it. Please do feel free to discuss this with me when you see me.
Something I would like to mention is the spirit in which we learn T'ai Chi. When I began working more intensely with Mark again I felt as though I would never 'catch up' with all the students in the class I had left behind in London, that I had so much to learn, to get under my belt, to achieve... As you can easily see even just from the language, this is hardly the best of attitudes. Yes, there was a keenness and desire to learn so that I could better teach, which was good; but also an acquisitiveness, a desire to improve my T'ai Chi. If T'ai Chi is something we feel we own or that we can possess then we are totally mistaken. If we learn in this way we are just adding more layers to our shiny armour, keeping everything at arms length. Yes, even T'ai Chi can be used in this way. We could study hard at this and become experts, but we could still be closed and basically unchanged. Last year several times for various reasons it was not always possible to have my own 121 sessions when I had planned them, even when I had travelled a 1200 mile round trip to do them. Yielding to that made me look carefully at my attachment to 'my' T'ai Chi, and question some long-held attitudes. I try to do formal study with my teacher when I can. I will go to the BTCCA whenever the opportunity arises. Classes with my fellow students are the most precious thing to me now, just being in a room with other people putting their hearts into the same thing. My solo practice grows. There are the classes I teach, with good students who love this too. T'ai Chi is certainly a matter of the heart - opening not grasping. It is good see clearly how we approach our T'ai Chi, as it always echoes how we approach our lives.
Lastly, in regard to this, on Steven Moore's Taichi Heartwork blog today was this:
"In Heartwork not only are the relationships with your colleagues developing, but so are your relationships with the work and the teaching. All self-concerns evaporate, especially in the heat (heart) of the moment. Even notions of self-defence, and even yielding, go out of the window, all concerns are with just how well connected you can become and how fully and intensely you can express that connexion, how deeply can the connexion go and how fully can it affect and transform all involved. Be careful how you think of yielding. If for you it is means maintaining balance under difficult circumstances then it is still self oriented and self-centred. Yielding is, or should be, whatever you need to do to get closer. To the truth."
No comments:
Post a Comment