Poagao's Journal

Absolutely Not Your Monkey

Oct 08 2012

Pick your joints

The guy who wanted to re-teach me the sword form hasn’t shown up since we had our little talk, making me wonder if there was more going on there than I realized. Teacher X has returned from his trip to the US, bearing several rolls of expired Kodak film he generously donated to me.

Last Sunday was great weather for tai-chi, cool and cloudy, with only the threat of rain. I was practicing push-hands with the UPS guy, and he gave me some good advice (well, reiterated is more like it, but I needed the reminder) on how push-hands is more a matter of figuring out where and when you are going to relax yourself instead of how to resist force. There’s an amazing number of combinations available to you, so many that it’s almost bewildering, in the course of tuishou interaction. Your partner could, say, twist your wrist in some fashion, and all of sudden you have the option of relaxing your wrist, or elbow, shoulder, hip, knee, ankle, or any combination thereof, in any direction that is useful. It’s quite amazing, so much so that I spent the rest of the session just wondering about it and failed to follow through to the inevitable process of inducing such forces on him.

Oh, well, plenty of time for that in the future, I suppose.

posted by Poagao at 5:38 am  

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