Lets do something strange, lets talk about Tai Chi.
This weeks focus has been on rounding the knees, incorporating my lower body in my awareness, and extending my spine through the top of my head and through my root.
I have really made some leaps and bounds in the splitting of my intention between multiple concepts. I have become familiar enough with them individually to begin to dabble in holding one or two at a time. Granted, I am not as familiar as I COULD be, but it at least doesn’t overwhelm me anymore when holding two at a time during practice.
I also discovered this week that I am able to fold in to the kua on certain moves if I REALLY slow down think about it. It has allowed me to turn my waist farther than before to actually start to look like I am sinking\moving properly.
The issue with that, however, is that it really illustrates how much work I still have in front of me to loosen my hamstrings and quads.
In a forward horse stance, I can twist my waist and collapse in the kua enough to point forward my belly button forward, but my right knee still collapses in unless I really wrench it outward which causes an awful lot of muscle strain. The good news is that I am no longer getting as much knee pain in those low horse stances.
Lots of work still ahead of me, but I am happy with where I am!(For the minute anyway) Pretty excited about that discovery. It has been blocking me from fully sinking in to moves for a while.
Another interesting thing happened to me this morning while doing my 30 minute standing meditation.
I realized that I could relax my stomach and lower esophagus.
I had been focusing on relaxing my chi in to my dantien while at the same time holding my intention at the top of my head. After about 15 minutes I noticed an acute tension followed by the slight feeling of heartburn.
As I explored that, I sent a wave of relaxation to that area and the response was immediate.
I had the sensation of a a mass flowing in to my lower body as I eased that area right in the center of my chest down in to the lower half of my torso. The feeling of heartburn went away and after a couple minutes doing several large burps bubbled up as I relaxed it even deeper.
About this time, a shiver went through my whole body. It was like a pop in my chest that sent chills outward from that point through my entire body. The feeling lingered for a couple seconds and then faded away.
Not much to say about that other than that… but it was a unique experience realizing I had control over relaxing that deep of a level of my body.
I am very close to finishing my first qigong routine video. It has taken up a considerable amount of time, but it really helped to create some understanding of what it will take to regularly shoot this type of videos.
I am definitely NOT going to be shooting this length of video every time. I am going to focus on shorter videos that are pinpointed to things that I am working on and the discoveries I have made that week\month whatever.
Pretty excited to get those started! I will be posting that video on my YouTube channel, along with all the shorter videos. The channel is fairly lack luster ATM, it just has some of my form videos as well as some videos of my teachers teachers I found online.
Be sure to pop on a subscribe! It will take me a bit to fill it in but subscribe so you can get those updates!
I have been doing a lot of foundation work on the social media side to start to some cross promotion between the sites, not sure what the final result is going to be, but I hope to shed some light to the process of learning tai chi. To me it seems like a process not well documented or explored and I figured since I am right in the middle of it, I may as well record it for others.
I also created a Facebook Page that I will be posting these blogposts as well as videos too. Going to test out submitting videos to youtube and facebook and see which one is easiest :).
Who knows, maybe someone will benefit from my blundering around on the interwebs.
Till next time!
The Restless Raven 