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Here’s a quick update on what we’ve been working on during Immersion Week 2014.

I’m very impressed (and I say so in the video about 15 times!) with the way this group has patiently explored many different facets of the Swings and Spine Stretch without rushing ahead to try to fit seemingly contradictory pieces together conceptually. Instead, they’re doing a great job experiencing/exploring each different component on its own.

Last night I taught my last two weekly classes at Brookline Tai Chi. Next month, I’ll be diving into a new intensive learning experience, building software applications and learning about the web from a depth I’ve only poked at up until now. (I have some really cool stuff planned for Immersion Week too, so I’m not quite done yet!) It’s going to be a big change for me. I don’t quite know what to make of shedding a professional identity that I’ve held for almost 10 years.

When you settle into your practice each day, you should always give yourself a couple of minutes to just feel and see where your body, your energy, and your awareness are. In one sense, each practice session is about bringing the rhythms of each of those into harmony. That’s why Tai Chi and qigong can be so powerfully restorative. So, if you take a couple of minutes to just “settle in,”

Last week I had the pleasure of recording a conversation with my friend and Tai Chi colleague Dorothy Fitzer. Drawing on her background in movement, energy arts, and psychotherapy, Dorothy has put together a very interesting group of practitioners from several different modalities to address the question of how embodiment practices can lead to nourishing, healing, and even transformative experiences.

Of course, I was thrilled to make the case that this is at the core of so much of what we do in Tai Chi.

I’m getting excited about Immersion Week at BTC next month, where we’ll take another look at the Spine Stretch and the Three Swings. Another look? Like we’ve done it before? Yes! Why is it exciting to go back to the same qigong sets over and over again? So-called creative people understand better than most that there is nothing new under the sun. Working with boulders of granite, with empty stages, with blank paper, they are credited with making something out of nothing, but that isn’t exactly what they do.

Why is it that sometimes you feel confident, connected, and at ease and other times you get flustered, disoriented and nothing seems to come together? According to Greek poet Archilocus, “we don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” Now does that mean that every possible situation you go through needs to be practiced, rehearsed, and trained? That seems a little overwhelming!

“I just want to get a feel for what I can change/do…” Or “I just wanted to see what I could do…” In the middle of launching this blog, I wanted to change some of the core settings and I wasn’t sure what could safely be changed without breaking the whole thing. When I asked someone for help, I explained that I wanted to “get a feel” for what I could do without messing other things up.

Just running through a test post again to go over the process and remind myself how this works!