jonathan on a path: day 293: getting organized again

concepts:

lian huan
12 animals

lessons:

hsing-yi

oh okay. it's been about 2 months since my last post. that's because i missed 2 months of class, courtesy of a tsunami of work that took me out of commission altogether in terms of extra-curricular activities. i did manage to make 1 class, but i had to spend so much time catching up with everyone that i figured it was pointless to even discuss it.

things seem to have quieted down for now, and i have a little bit more time--at least, enough to resume activities again. but i have to point out that given how far behind i am i'm probably not going to have anything substantive to talk about for awhile.

to a degree, it's just as well that i'm returning now. some other students have returned after extended absences (Ching-chieh and Art), and so we're essentially working together to learn the same material. there's also some review for everyone as a whole, given the holiday break. hopefully this will be enough to get on track.

before class, Sifu made some administrative comments. the San Diego Tournament is the weekend of January 21-22, and so we're planning to drive down for that. seeing that it's so close, we'll just make it a 1-day trip with no hotel stay. it means that we'll have no class that weekend. there's also another disciple meeting planned for sometime in February (the date TBD), which we have to keep in the calendar.

there was no formal kyudo class this evening. today was the annual clean-up of the dojo, where the everyone spends an entire class session cleaning the dojo and shares a post-cleaning dinner. this was pretty non-descript, other than that everyone had a good time and lessons will resume next Saturday.

hsing-yi (xing-yi)

since this Saturday was the first day back from the winter break, we ended up taking things a little easy to help everyone refresh their memories. we made it an informal review day, with Sifu taking only the end part of class to begin with the hsing-yi 12 animals. this was perfectly fine with me, since it let me fill in some of the things that i had missed.

we began with a review of the 5 lines. this was straightforward, and involved just doing each line once going through the 8-step checklist for hsing-yi structure and then doing each line dynamically. the hard part, however, was tying in the 5-element theory for each one. i'm still scratching my head over this (i missed all the classes covering this part of hsing-yi), and so decided to go through it again on Sunday.

following this we continued the review by doing the lian huan form. this was good for me. i hadn't really gotten it the first time, and had missed out on the refinements from last semester. the form itself is not that long, but it can be deceptively tricky in terms of transitioning from one posture to another and following the proper sequence of footwork. i recorded the video and you can see it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixxhd9Pv6D4

once we'd finished with lian huan, Sifu came back and began teaching the 12 animals. he reminded us that the 12 animals is associated with the Hebei and Shanxi styles of hsing-yi, and that the Henan style uses 10 animals. the 12 animals are:

dragon
tiger
horse
monkey
crocodile
ostrich
swallow
snake
eagle
bear
rooster
hawk

i should note that different lineages have different sets of 12 animals. i don't know which lineage has the above set. each of the animals has an associated movement with some specific expression of principles. similar to the 5 lines, each movement has different applications depending on the physics applied. the physics is a function of the intent (yi).

Sifu noted that the 12 animals are also exercises, in that they provide a training purpose in terms of conditioning (muscular and cardiovascular) for the practitioner, and so represent an additional layer of development beyond the 5 lines or lian huan. he also noted that the way the 12 animals are applied in fighting are not the same as how they are practiced in terms of conditioning, since the purposes are different (although related).

for today, since we were near the end of class, he only showed us the dragon. rather than explain it, i'll post the video of it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5hyV4-5pn0