Improvements, performances, relaxation, challenges and skill

Today during tai chi lesson, as usual, with my "pulling cloth" technique, I was the last to finish my form again. Luckily the assistant coach has not been around for the last 2 weeks, which left me going through my form in peace without any disruptions. I know he corrects my form for good reasons but I still like to go through my whole form undisrupted! Furthermore, every correction just leaves me with terribly aching muscles and taking an even longer time to finish the form....ha, I just hate it! But.....

This pulling cloth technique is really fun, after every round of doing the taiji form, my body would feel terribly hot, arms, legs, back, and all. It is really amazing! And you just feel a whole lot calmer after the whole thing.

But.....going through the cloth technique left me forgetting my footwork, the shifting of weight, the empty and full feet etc... Why does this kind of thing keep happening???
This is not only frustrating but also really dangerous as I do the Yang style with low stances, and not changing from full to empty leg, meaning when I am supposed to change, like in Cloud Hands, the leg which is supposed to be empty is all stiffed up, muscles and all! And when I bring such a leg in in mid air, I can actually hear the crackling of bones and feel the movements of the tendons across my knee, which is actually bad for the leg and knee. Just relax it when you are supposed to and all will be fine....

Recently, my teacher was commenting on how he managed to perfect the many nuances in the Yang style taichi form. He said that when he was still learning taichi, they had to do many performances in restaurants and hotels, and so their teacher would correct their form to every last detail such that it would look good. He said that while performing, he had seen people holding their chopsticks in the air, stopping short of picking up the vegetables, while their eyes were riveted to the performance! I was like wow, I thought "watching a taichi performance is like watching the grass grow(quoted from Tung Hu Ling)".

Speaking of Tung Hu Ling, there is this coloured picture of him which just looks really great! The "look" (气势) is just great

The other day, I was thinking of joining my schools' taichi club to find more push hands partners. However, on the first day, after I introduced myself to them and told them who I learn under, I was already pushing hands with his assistant coach. The first thing they told me to do was to shorten my stance, which left me handicap as the skill of my stance is much better than the skill of my Ward Off(peng). So needless to say, they had me pushed all around the house....Damn! And the teacher there kept criticising not only me but also my teacher......I smelled a gunpowder!
Upon questioning my teacher, I found out that the upper generation had a vendetta.....A case of the upper generations fueds affecting the lower generation......How like the good old days of China........So that would mean I have disgraced my teacher...Damn again!!

Oh yeah, just this morning, I was just surfing around and found an interesting account of a fight between a taichi guy and a Brazillian Jiu-jitsu guy:http://www.netweed.com/lyricalswords/2006/06/ever-wonder-what-happens-when-tai-chi.html

Both ended up impressed with each other's art!

Incredible push hand video!

Here's an incredible free-style push hands video, where everything moves at a fast pace with good neutralisation between both parties, both handled each other rather well: http://media.putfile.com/free-style-push-hands/320

Recently in push hands practice, a fellow student brought 3 friends to class to introduce them to tai chi chuan. And I was asking him how he managed to get 3 people to come, when all the people I know just shut off when I start talking about taichi. His answer was in the methods of taichi push hands, to slowly lead the people in rather than use strength. To slowly give them snippets of interesting taichi info rather than bombard them with stuff on taichi everyday(which I tend to do, making them think that I am a crazy taichi fanatic).

That day, in class, there was a new student who had previously learnt taichi push hands from another club. He trained mainly in double hands push hands so when I asked him to push single hands with me, the game got quite interesting(I don't really know how to do 2 hands push hands yet). While pushing hands, his other hand would come up very often to seal my elbow and it made the game rather different as I had to negotiate his 2 hands with my 1 hand. Furthermore, in our usual training, we seldom use elbow in single hand push hands but since he was trained somewhere else, he tended to use the elbow a lot which brought new elements to the push hands and it was quite refreshing and fun as i got the chance to explore new attacks and defenses. At the same time, I got a chance to test if my neutralisation skills was up to the task of adapting to new and unfamiliar moves. A rather interesting session! That's why my teacher always says, don't always push with the same people, push with as many people as you can, everyone has a diferent hand.