day 291: rusty

concepts:

• lian huan/linking

lessons:

• hsing-yi
• kyudo

this was the first weekend back since the Las Vegas tournament, and so the first real day back to the regular schedule. as to be expected, there was all kinds of rust, and things didn't go so smoothly. but i wasn't the only one, since a lot of other people seem to have the same issues. this made for a slow day.

hsing-yi

we spent the first half of class reviewing the 5 lines, going through the progression of 8 criteria for each line. i found that i'd forgotten some of them, and had to remind myself what they were. i ended up referring to my notes to jog my memory. it was a bit of a struggle, and it looks like a good number of other people also had some problems as well, making for a glacial pace.

the second half of class was spent working on the the linking form (lian huan). Sifu said we'd start it today, and finish it up fairly quickly--apparently, in hsing-yi, the linking form is quite short compared to other styles. having said that, Sifu said that learning the form is fast, but mastering a lot of its points takes a bit longer, and that we'd be spending more time on this. for today, however, Sifu took us through 1/2 the form.

kyudo

i fully expected kyudo to be excruciating tonight, and it proved to be just that. it wasn't that i'd forgotten anything (i actually managed to remember everything about where i was). it was more about what i hadn't known to begin with--there was a period of time when i could not get the arrow to release from the bow, but then i started to have the opposite problem of the arrow releasing before i can even draw the bow, and i can't figure what happened in either case.

this evening was a trial-and-error of trying to figure out what was happening. thing is, one of the things i do know about kyudo is that any adjustment in 1 part of the form causes a ripple effect in adjustments in other parts of the form, with your body making changes to accomplish the draw, with the changes occurring whether you want them to or not. one of the other things i know about kyudo is that minute changes tend to become magnified, and so little adjustments that propagate through the rest of the body end up producing a cascade in error.

things got bad enough that i went back to basics and started working again with an elastic band, just so i could concentrate on the form and find out what was happening. Sensei has told me what is happening, but the problem for me is that i can't correlate sensory signals to what is wrong or (for that matter) what is right. a lot of it is because this involves alien movements that my body is not familiar with, so there is no reference point for my mind to connect to in terms of recognizing good versus bad, with the result being that my body tends to all sorts of things with negative consequences.

this is going to take a while to figure out.