Live Training and Back to Basics.
2 months in and I've had my first experience of the live group training session. Up ‘til now I’ve been comfortably going at my own pace, last Sunday I joined group practice. One of the practices involved ‘anchors’ as a foundation to the movement. I immediately realised that my home practice speed of working through anchors and real life speed bear zero relationship to each other. Reminded me of visiting Rome with a year of Italian practice under my belt and thinking ‘Wow, what are they saying? they speak so fast :-)’
Invaluable, you don’t get the real experience just watching home videos and neither do you get important personal feedback.
On last Sunday’s session Sifu mentioned something about my bend/back/cavities which I didn’t fully get and my mic wasn’t working so I thought I’d ask offline to get clarification. In the meantime I went back to basics with ‘Bend’ but only reached as far a ‘Bow’ before I realised that I was kind of sliding past the pre movement ‘Anticipation’ set up. Going back to this gave a fuller sense of upper cavities stretch pre ‘Bow’ and heightened the feel of MC pull on Hip/Shoulder Cs.
I had been practising ‘achors’ at a bit more pace all last week as part of my morning stand and this week I added some time noticing the leg cavities as a focus section. Didn’t really know ‘what’ I was meant to be focusing on but just got curious about what was going on. This am while standing the top leg cavity released and my pelvis / tailbone dropped and I half wondered if that’s what Tai Chi folk meant by ‘tucking the tailbone’ it drops - it's not tucked? There was no tucking involved it just ‘released’. I then went on to practice ‘Bow’ and caught myself ‘tucking’ / tightening around my sacrum to prevent the tail popping out, which was interesting having just had the experience that when I attended to the cavity then maybe I wouldn’t have to do that , yet habit won out.
Something else to work on!
So I have some questions for Sifu. Is tucking the tailbone a form of compensation that just gets in the way? Is there a 'how' of the 'tucking' in bend that allows for stretch or pressure? Do you have any suggestions that I might be able to take on board leading on from what you see in the sessions around bend?
Thanks