It took a month of searching but finally the new place is ready. It’s a 1,300 square foot area, training area about 1,000 square feet. I could teach five or ten people in here. Currently I have one student who comes once a week, which is something, but I think I will express to him that he should come more often. Maybe I will just offer him to come every day.

In the month since I came back from Toronto I didn’t practice very often. The shock of a new environment once again dragged me back into old patterns. However I have many things to look forward to. I don’t smoke or drink anymore, at all. Before I would smoke and drink only a little bit. But at this time it is all gone. This is a great headwind for me but it will be temporary, I must work hard. Second, of course, I have my new place and the teachings I have received. One, what I have been taught is still with me, I can do it. Also I know I am willing to push myself to practice and remember it all. But this door that my teachers have given me is a difficult one. I can get back to where I was and perhaps go further this time but it will not be easy. As I work myself into this new way of living there are two things I meditate on. One is the difficulty of my new path. A fellow player wrote it on his blog and I would like to share here.

It is said that a teacher can only lead one to finding the door.
Its up to oneself to walk though it.
One must be clear otherwise many years of practice is of no use. It may take many tries to find the right door.
Often its not the door we think or want.
Its the door that is, waiting.
Out there with out thinking or wanting… its there. Like the broom waiting for one to put it to use. Not quite finished the sweeper of the mind, waits for the mind it sweeps.journeytoemptiness.com “Finding the door”

This helped me remember some of the things my sifu said. Such as, we must always remember our goal and not to get distracted by other things. It’s one of my faults.

Another thing which has been troubling me for some time, which I call ‘the poisoned cup’. It is a surprise, a bonus post, which appears within this one.

The Poisoned Cup

What is Taijiquan? Every time I visit a different school I get told something completely different. My first teacher, Patrick Kelly, told me that he would teach me Taiji but first I must learn Praying Mantis and Eagle Claw kung fu. Why? Because without a solid grounding in external arts, I could never master the internal. This made sense to me and I had read it in other places. I also knew something of Chen style Taijiquan, having practiced Yang and derivative forms of Taijiquan on a daily basis for quite some time (about three years). With gusto I began my training and I learned two forms, the 18 hands and eight step linked fist. I loved these forms and I learned quite a lot of applications for them. Sadly I had to leave Winnipeg, because I was quite young and not in control of my own life. But I vowed to understand Taijiquan at some point.

Years later I found myself in places like Eddie Wu’s Taijiquan academy, Ji Hong Taiji College, Andy James’ school, the Jing Mo guys on Augusta (great guys, BTW, thank you all), and various groups in the park. The park people were mainly a place to ‘just do it’ for 2 or 3 hours in the morning. Everyone taught a little differently. Different jibengong. Different qigong. Different forms. I began to notice a few things. Today I will talk about one of them, tomorrow maybe another.

We do it this way because we don’t understand what is really going on

The first thing I noticed is that people at the student and ‘new instructor’ level (5-10 years) generally did their forms one way and it was the one true way things should be done. But not because they knew how to teach or do Taiji. It was because they didn’t know. They became locked into a certain way of doing things because their master taught them that way and out of a personal lack of commitment they never picked up on what was really going on. After a very long time I realized this kind of instruction could no longer teach me anything. Even for a long time I just sat around learning different variations of the Taiji form. This kind of stubborn, almost ignorant patience paid off however for three important reasons.

a) (most important) I got a lot of practice in. And it was all ‘Tai Chi’, my taichi in the end.

b) I was exposed to a variety of frames, so I learned to look for something behind the frame to tie everything together.

c) I met a lot of people, including some non-taiji people, who had some interesting skills to share.

In particular with c) I met a tachi preying mantis group which did a 108 taichi preying mantis form. These people had an exercise which is commonly known in Canada from another school. In this ‘other’ school they do not know what the exercise is for. However with just a few minutes of coaching from this group I was able to experience chi flow from my dantian out to my hands and back. This experience was one of the crowning achievements of my Taichi career, however as someone who was still not in control of my life I was unable to grasp and hold this experience.

In particular with c) I met a xingyiquan and yiquan master who taught out of the basement gym of a school on Beverly street. He was able to feed me jing. Quite an interesting experience and something I will remember and be able to work on in the future.

In general I began to realize the commonalities of neigong work and what neigong work was really all about via these experiences and my own personal study. And I realized that for most people even at this level they were not clued in to the particularities and specialties of Taijiquan but had instead fallen down into a wrong path (and there are several). This is a dangerous wrong path for people because it feels like you are making internal progress (and you are!) but it is just not the internal progress of Taijiquan. And you can’t get out unless you go back to the basics and double down on your practice time. You wont find out unless you find out for yourself. I look at these experiences as stepping stones along the Taiji path because I think getting your internals woken up to some degree is something you need to do before you can really understand why tai chi does things in a certain way. Before that point you don’t know and you are too easily misled by others.

But this is not the poisoned cup. The poisoned cup is the great number of tai chi people today who can’t even get to this point because they very impatiently mix taijiquan with other arts that go in a different direction (see above). And they don’t practice enough to get anything anyways. So their cup is poisoned, the information they give is poisoned, any success or gong they get is poisoned, and they are shocked and often insulted when you try to tell them what is really going on, what tai chi is supposed to be. They think they know. But they don’t know at all. The cart has gone before the horse. Reaching for the far and disregarding the near.

To be fair I am still working out what Tai Chi is supposed to be, but I have been set on a certain path in opposition to contrary teachings. I’ve become the mind that waits. I owe it to myself and my teachers to fully explore the path I have been given before once again branching out and seeking the truth elsewhere. Who knows, I may find it this time. But it is the years of doubt, of waiting and wondering, crying, difficulty searching, only to be told in the end I am still not ready (but I knew that).

It’s just that this time, I finally have not just the information and the path, but the means to explore it. Everything has come together. This is what I have been waiting for! With what I have I will be able to explore the future. And then, finally, there will be peace.