day 269: post & 2-person xiao kai men

concepts:

• pressure
• post
• 2-person

lessons:

• xiao kai men
• kyudo

this post covers March 13. things went off the deep end the past few weeks in terms of workload. so i've missed a few classes and missed a few posts. i'll try to catch up here. you'll have to forgive the terseness of the posts.

xiao kai men

we continued with xiao kai men. today Sifu had us start with post training for the form. essentially, you do the form, except that you do it against a stationary post, with the post serving as an imaginary opponent. this means you have to adjust your positioning and change the orientation of the postures in the form so that it's constantly against the post. Sifu said to do this with varying degrees of pressure against the post. he cautioned that in reality you wouldn't strive to constantly apply pressure against an opponent, but rather instead change depending on where you were in the arrangement of ting, hwa, na, and fa jing. still, with the post, you try to work with pressure, with the goal of training yourself how it feels to apply techniques against a solid body/mass.

we spent the 2nd half of class doing the xiao kai men 2-person form, which basically means 2 people doing the form against each other in a symmetric application of each of the techniques. Sifu said that this takes training a step further, training you to learn how to find spacing and how to fit your body against another person.

i ended up skipping the post-class lunch today, since had to rush home and pick up with exam grading.

kyudo

news this evening: my bow arrived. i now have a brand new bow. 13kg draw weight. of course, the catch is that i need to string it. originally i thought this would be straightforward and that i could do this during the free shoot after the tea break, but it turns out that it's more intensive, since the string length has to be adjusted, then treated, and then wrapped to fit the arrow nock. i decided to exercise wisdom and postpone this to another class.

shooting went well tonight, with Sensei saying that i'm getting better. he advised me to continue working on the draw, saying that it's simpler than i'm making it and that i should concentrate on inserting my bone structure inside the bow rather than on expanding my arms out. he observed that drawing the bow is about applying proper body structure.

we ended up eating out as a class afterwards, and went to a diner for a late dinner.