Inside the Great Mystery that is we don't really own anything. What is this competition we feel then, before we go, one at a time, through the same gate.
The human shape is a ghost made of distraction and pain, sometimes pure light, sometimes cruel, trying wildly to open this image tightly held within itself.
Take someone who doesn't keep score, who's not looking to be richer, or afraid of losing who has not the slightest interest even in their own personality: they're free.
(Rumi)
Just looking online for a different Rumi poem for someone dear and found some old favourites too. Away from my books of Rumi, which are some of the very few things I have kept since my teens, I have found the web a real resource.
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If I am engaging at all honestly with my T'ai Chi practice I invariably come up against my huge competitiveness and fear of failure. When there is no one else to be competing against, there is always my idea of how I should be. As a beginner I went to my great local T'ai Chi class because it was a blessed respite from the daily low-grade warfare of girls' school life. Later, T'ai Chi retreats and yearly workshops were initially escape from the attrition and occasional explosive charge of being in a touring band, on the road and thrown together. These forays into T'ai Chi slowly revealed my aversion to confrontation and ironically also my own reactivity and hardness.
Both at my final T'ai Chi and meditation workshop with my previous teacher and since I have been studying with Mark, there have been countless times when I have wanted to throw in the towel. My pride gets so dented becuase I do not feel I am learning sufficiently fast, or as well as a colleague or class mate. Judgments I would never pass on others I pass on myself. Things I dislike that I do I judge harshly in others. All this is present if I am honest with my practice. If it is all 'sweetness and light' then I know I am just coasting. That is not to say that T'ai Chi gets to be an ordeal... only occasionally! Even then it's only a part of me (the part of me that is afraid of losing, that is holding an image tightly within itself), that is squirming under the light that good practice shines on life. This is natural. But do I want to lead an unexamined life?
There is great joy and also immense fun in my T'ai Chi as well as great companionship. Some of the best people I have met have been students, teachers or class-mates of mine. When life feels very rough, class has been an anchor point, a rock. When I am in a little bubble of complacency, it pops up with something sharp. 10 years into it all or thereabouts, I am still totally intrigued and in love with it. Sometimes I want to bloke-ishly rush off and learn a whole raft of techniques so that I can be more 'effective', or fix some perceived deficiency once and for all such as rooting or letting my energy out. What I often resist, however, is the steady hard-won improvement that only regular practice can bring. My impatience for outward results is not something I would wish to encourage in others. Enthusiasm and a sense of direction are great, however, vigilance and being totally driven are less helpful, for me at least.
Today I saw how this stuff is doing great things for one of my senior students, and how my teacher's T'ai Chi is developing and growing in new ways. It's all a bit raw and gnarly for me right now, but it is for most folks every once in a while. So today I did not give up T'ai Chi.
Caroline
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