day 300: wait, where am i? oh, god, i'm lost. whatever

concepts:

• bear
• eagle
• shanxi-hebei
• extension

lessons:

• hsing-yi
• kyudo

well, i'll preface this by saying that i'm pretty much lost. i've had another extended break period that was somewhat involuntary. i got sick, recovered just in time to do the LA marathon, then go sick again, recovered once more, and then got sick again. it may be the same illness that just won't go away, or it may be that i've just been exposed to a lot of sick people with different kinds of diseases.

regardless, i'm now largely lost as to where we are and what we're doing. really lost. oh sure, i know we're learning hsing-yi and wrapping up the 12 animals (of which, incidentally, i missed half, or 6). and oh sure, i know we're learning kyudo and working on gloves (even while i'm still working out everything else about the art). but in terms of lessons and details, there's just been so much i've missed that i might as well be on another planet.

i think we'll have to do what we did before, and make one of the next Sundays a hsing-yi make-up section. i know Kieun and Cheng-Chieh are in situations comparable to mine, so it'd probably benefit all of us.

hsing-yi

i pretty much stated where i am above. i will say that we spent about half the class working on the last animal in the Hebei style 12 animals. it's not actually 1 animal, but a combination of movements of bear and eagle.

for the remainder of class we turned to Shanxi style. Sifu reminded us that there were 3 major versions of hsing-yi: Hebei, Shanxi, and Henan. technically, Shanxi was the original, and Hebei and Henan developed after. however, Sifu noted that you can't see this from the curriculum, since the 3 all experienced changes over time, with some more than others.

Henan was the most well-preserved, since the Muslim community was largely insular and mostly kept the art within the community, preventing its practitioners from interacting with other practitioners from other branches of hsing-yi. Hebei, in contrast, was where hsing-yi became more popular, and its exposure and propagation led to changes in the way it was taught and the content that was taught. Shanxi practitioners responded to this by making changes in their hsing-yi, and as a result it also moved away from its original form.

having said that, Sifu said you can still see different teaching philosophies at work in the contrasting curriculums. he pointed that in Hebei the 12 animals are largely meant to train the body and help the body adapt to certain kinds of physics, and so you can't see the applications easily and what applications you find work differently than what happens in training. in Shanxi, however, the 12 animals are still done closer to the original hsing-yi roots, and so the emphasis is less on training and more on actual applications. Sifu said we'd compare with Henan, but for now we'd go through the Shanxi and compare to the Hebei.

we began with the Shanxi dragon. this is definitely different from Hebei. Hebei involves jumping and a deliberate emphasis down. Shanxi, in contrast, is almost no jumping and the direction of intent is not strictly down, but at an angle. also, with Shanxi, the application is clearly evident from the movement, with an eery resemblance to black bear probes with its paw from bagua. Sifu showed that it's a little different, but that there is some overlap.

i have some other notes from today, but i'm going to hold off until i get things more organized.

kyudo

kyudo this evening actually went okay considering the time i've missed. i'm starting to feel more familiar with certain aspects of the form, and it's freeing up my mind to concentrate on other issues that i've had with shooting. Jean pointed out that right now my major issue is my extension, in that i'm not going far enough at full extension. she said that i should be able to open the bow more at full extension than i am doing.

Sensei has commented on this about me before, and i'm only just now getting to the point where i can understand why this is happening. i think the issue is to focus on the elbows and shoulders expanding outward, and letting the chest and back follow. to do this, i have to allow the chest and back to be loose. right now, i can feel them tensing, and thus locking into place, leaving me unable to go expand beyond the range of motion in my shoulders and elbows. if i can get the chest and back to relax, it should allow the shoulders and elbows to lead them out, and thereby gain additional reach from the opening of the chest and back.

of course, this is easier said than done. i spent the entire class working on this, but it's a bit of work to unlearn my habit of tensing the chest and back and to instead focus on just relaxing. a lot of this, i suspect, is that i can feel the tension in the string and the bow, and the natural instinct is to tense up in response (much as a fighter feels the muscles tense up in response to feeling an opponent tense up). the appropriate response of relaxing is actually counter-intuitive.

but at least i'm feeling some progress, so that's positive.