Instructor Training

I’m heading home to Boston tomorrow, but I’ve already begun looking through my notes and thinking about what I will personally practice and what I’ll be able to share with my students in classes this coming year. Here are some of my initial thoughts: How Material is Woven together over a Month: Day to day we’re looking at really small specific pieces but now going back through my notes, I can start to see different threads that run throughout the duration of the month. It’s almost like you don’t even notice some of the nuances as in the moment, but like we’ll look at something about the legs in Tai Chi from the first day and then we came back to it four or five days later and then we look at it again, and when you actually line up the pieces side by side, what you start to see is that…versus looking at it from like sort of looking at a ball, you look at it from one side and then the next time you look at it from this angle, then you look at it from this angle. And by taking this kind of spherical approach to it, looking at different facets of the subject, you start to develop a sense for the whole. And it’s not the progression that he always teaches and it’s not linear. It’s not one, two, three, four, five. It’s look at it this way, look at it that way and it’s sort of up to you to put the pieces together to create the whole. ...

Week 3 wraps up and testing is right around the corner. What was Bruce’s big message as we prepare for testing? Work your ass off and cram all night for the big test? Not quite. You might be surprised. Check it out: A Lesson about Integration: The biggest thing that Bruce is emphasizing in the last couple days of class is that with this stage of the training, a month long training, you need integration time. And we talk about this all the time in regular weekly classes. We talk about in a given practice session, whether it’s an hour or 20 minutes or whatever, you always have this sort of startup time where you just get warmed up. And then from there you go into the work period, where you just kind of crank and crank and crank, and that’s when your system is the most open. You can get a lot done. ...

Here’s my Week 2 update. Some big milestones this week: group 1 finished the form and group 2 has been languishing in the purgatory that is holding static postures. Check it out: Inner Form vs. Outer Form In the two groups, we’re doing very different things. The group one just finished the form this week. So on Thursday after they finished it, we came in Friday, and it was a really interesting dividing line. Bruce made the big distinction between, on the one hand, on Thursday we finished the shape and the form, that’s sort of the container. He said, “Now, everything that we’re going to do has to do with internal content.” So he made this distinction all the time. He talked about the bottle versus the wine you put inside it and we even have an article at Brookline Tai Chi that we put out from, I think, it’s from 1989 Tai Chi Magazine. The title of the article is “The Inner Form is the Key to Health.” And in the article, Bruce talks about all the different internal content things that should be going on that to be Tai Chi form. ...

We’re a week into the Wu Tai Chi short form instructor training in Brighton, UK, with Lineage Holder Bruce Frantzis. So far we’ve been completely rebuilding our forms, working on Tai Chi leg power, and exploring the meditative aspects of the art. Check it out: On Rebuilding Your Form: It’s crazy when you come at these things, you’re completely rebuilding your Tai Chi form. We’re about two-thirds of the way through the form and it feels so different. When you run through the whole thing one time, you get up to what we’ve done so far and it feels brand new, like a completely different moves. And then you get to the last thing we’ve done, you come around to the last move that you finished and you go back to your old form and it has a totally different feeling. ...

This one is for the Energy Arts Certified Instructors. The new EA website allows you to change the details of your instructor profile when you have a registered account. I think having accurate and updated information is helpful, especially if you decide to become an active contributor on the forum.

Last week I got back from two weeks in the UK doing an instructor training with Bruce Frantzis on Opening the Energy Gates of Your Body, the core chi gung set in his program. We’re right back into the swing of classes now, but I wanted to post a little review before too much time passes. The Energy Gates set is made up of six different exercises – they run the gamut from standing still holding a simple posture, to vigorous shifting, turning, and swinging. The range of skills and movements you can practice with them sets the foundation for all of the other work done in more sophisticated chi gung sets as well as in tai chi and ba gua. ...