This weekend I attended a Tai Chi workshop in Detroit, taught by Yuan Wei-Ming and hosted by Carol Yamasaki.  What an wonderful experience!  Wei-Ming is a very generous teacher and has such a wonderful calm energy about him.  It was very interesting to learn his exercises and Mr. Liu’s, and the comments and corrections he gave were very much appreciated. I very much appreciated the logic behind his exercises and the pace and focus that were given while performing them.  I think they will be very interesting to work with.

One of the most interesting aspects for me was that although the exercises were new to me, all of the things Wei-Ming talked about were so familiar.  I spent a lot of time listening to what we being said and realizing it was either exactly as Ben or Lenzie would say, or was just a different perspective on the same principles.  I think getting the different perspective has in some ways already shined a light on understanding more of what I have learned from Lenzie and Ben.

Beyond the wonderful teaching, it was wonderful to meet so many of the east coast family of Tai Chi players in Professor’s school.  I feel like I got to know the history of the school more from this trip.  It was truly a joy to meet new people and get to reconnect with those whom I haven’t seen in some time.

Overall, it was an excellent weekend.  I’m very grateful to Wei-Ming for his teaching as well as Carol for organizing this workshop and her generous and kind spirit. I look forward to visiting Detroit again in the future.

Today we completed yet another amazing Tai Chi camp with our teacher Lenzie Williams at Walker Creek Ranch in Petaluma, CA.  Now that we live across the country, I think I noticed the golden hills of California even more this year.  The ranch was extremely beautiful.

I found myself a bit drained going into this year’s camp.  The work we did at camp and the fellowship amongst such wonderful Tai Chi practitioners was absolutely rejuvenating.  I certainly feel much more receptive and curious as well as inspired, and look forward to taking this wonderful energy forward into my daily life back in Rochester.

The Tai Chi work was also excellent.  It is always amazing to get to study with Lenzie and this camp was as fruitful as ever.  I enjoyed being able to focus on Tai Chi this week and hope to take the many experiences and things and keep going with them.

I’m extremely happy to have gotten to see my old Tai Chi family and meet new members of the family too.  I will value the memories from the past week and and look forward to seeing how life unfolds ahead!

This past weekend I was once again able to attend one of Lenzie’s workshops. The two days were–as always–filled with a lot of information and great experiences.  Lenzie often talks about how we get "little pieces of the puzzle" from all the experiences we have in Tai Chi, from our practice, workshops, camps, and lessons. The pieces of the puzzle at first might not make much sense but that we note it and file it away, and that later the pieces start to link up and we start to get an understanding of all of those gems.  Certainly after this workshop I had a strong experience of this as it seemed that a few pieces of the puzzle in regards to articulation of the waist and sinking started to come together. 

It was also great to see the members of the school there, both those whom we regularly see and those from out of town we get to see on occasions like this.  It was also nice to meet new people as well as seeing other guests (it was particularly nice seeing Veera from Utah).  It’s always great to get together with good people to learn and experience Tai Chi and to enjoy community and friendship.

This past weekend I had the great fortune to attend a workshop with Ben Lo in Logan, Utah. Like the previous workshop I was fortunate to attend, the work as tough as it was inspiring.  One of the biggest things I took away from the workshop was that one can work just as hard at home as there at the workshop: “I hope you work like this when you practice at home” he said, and really one can work at home with as much focus and intensity as one can at a workshop.  This is certainly one lesson I hope to keep in mind in my practice here on out.

There were many lessons learned from Master Lo’s teaching as well as all the push hands experience with the other attendees and enjoyable conversations. Being my first time to Utah, I was very impressed by how genuinely kind everyone was, and was grateful for the hospitality.  Inspired, I hope to take the the lessons forward and will be looking forward to being able to see these people again, either here in California, at other workshops, or hopefully again in Utah!

This year was our teacher’s 10th Tai Chi camp at Walker Creek Ranch, as well as Lisa and my 6th camp that we attended with our teacher.  The camp was a couple weeks ago from Sunday through Friday, June 22-27th, though I’ve only managed to find time to write about it now. 

Every camp has been an incredible experience and always a very special week of great fellowship, learning, inspiration, and rejuvenation. This year’s camp had all of these qualities, but also was a very special one for us as we got engaged at the ranch just before camp started! The love and support we received from our fellow tai chi players was just phenomenal and something I will always look back with great appreciation.

The tai chi practice and learning itself was of course of great as usual.  This year’s camp, like last year’s, was not one of the more physical camps, but again filled with a great deal of information.  There were many times where a single sentence made a connection as a gem of information, or something that was described briefly illuminated a much larger concept that was until then hazy.  The work we did on these concepts really did help to make progress in understanding them, especially all of the work and discussion on waist development. 

Coming away from camp, there are some very clear things I will be focusing my attention on, and plenty of notes that I will go through to see what other gems of information I had missed initially. It was great too to be back in class yesterday and to have a nice medium intensity practice.  It is a really great fortune that after camp we who live in the Bay Area can simply continue our practice with Lenzie in our weekly classes. I will be looking forward to taking what was learned at camp and continuing to work on these ideas during our classes at the school.