I had one of those tiny physical moments yesterday that explodes into a psychological OH YEAH DUH … that was a moment, literally an otherwise meaningless moment in the shower, of refocusing.

Life is powerfully, powerfully distracting, especially as you slam into full adulthood and all the filters that kept out various influences are removed.  This ( Read more... )

Boy, they weren't kidding when they said the answers are in you.  I'm learning so much philosophically from studying the mechanics of my own body, it isn't even funny; and it isn't funny how angry it's making me that there aren't classes in this in the academic world, either.

Here's something I learned from trying to perfect a Qi-driven punch.  ( ( Read more... )

First, they’re cool.  And if you know a physical art that you like, then by necessity you’ve made yourself cooler in your own estimation.  Woot for self-esteem.

(Oh, and by “physical art” I mean the set of physical skills that would include-to different degrees-kungfu, playing an instrument, skateboarding, calligraphy, and dance.)

Secondly, the ( Read more... )

Lately I’ve been fascinated with air.

In Taiji, air is one of the main sources of available energy.  We gather energy and use it to enlighten ourselves through focused attention and action; or to act upon the physical world (martial applications).  Energy is everywhere, of course - once you’re talking about it that broadly, you hit Einstein square ( Read more... )

I’m forever in the debt of people who drag me kicking and screaming through explanations of things I’d rather not explain…this one comes from my trusty pain-in-the-ass penpal Sabbath, who’s been taking the opportunity to bug me about my “faith” that Chi energy is a real thing.  (I did indeed have it coming, if you were wondering.)

Keep in mind that ( Read more... )

This upgrade is taking longer than I thought it would, so here’s a bit of niftiness to tide you over.

This is a prayer-of-sorts that gets said at the Shaolin Temple.  It’s accompanied by a “moving meditation” that a layperson would say looked something like Taiji, but which after doing it a while I have to admit, really adds to the experience of ( Read more... )

It’s the middle of yet another crazy dream:  Something about cell-phones giving away the fact that I’ve been doing something immoral with or on top of a desk, and my ex-husband apologizing for calling my phone and explaining that it wasn’t nearly so bad as the fact that I slept in his car while he cheated on his new girlfriend two blocks away.

( Read more... )

( Read more... )

I learned two important things at Super Xtreme Yoga Class last night:

One has to do with mudras.  One of the coolest thing about this particular Yoga class is the "monk forms" - the traditional kung fu we do to "warm up" for the Yoga.  (The sick thing is, this Yoga actually does merit using kung fu to warm up.)  Three of the monk forms were ( Read more... )

I learned two awesome things in taiji this week.  Wanna know what they are?  Sure you do.

The first concerns  “Ride the tiger”. Yeah, you used to think it was just a horrible phrasing of Ronnie James Dio’s, but no more.  The main Taiji form, known to practitioners as “the 108″**, has three sections, and they all end with the same two moves:  Ride ( Read more... )