steven yi :: music

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.

This past weekend I had the great fortune to attend a workshop with Ben Lo up in Fairfax.  While the experience was difficult and very challenging, it was also incredibly inspiring and provided a very high set of standards to push towards. There were so many gems of wisdom given by Ben that were so simple yet so deeply profound.  I will be studying my notes for some time to try to really take that information and to truly learn and embody it.

Beyond just the teaching, I think there was a lot to take in and absorb about Ben Lo the human being.  His humor and character were really amazing to be around and I felt there was much to learn from and emulate.

The whole workshop was really inspiring on many levels, and I left the weekend really motivated and excited for my tai-chi practice, music, and life in general.  I’m grateful for the experience and will value it for a long time to come.

The past three days have been as enjoyable and as enlightening as all of the past workshops I’ve attended with Lenzie. With each workshop I only grow more and more appreciative of the opportunities I have to learn from Lenzie and to be with such wonderful groups of people to learn tai chi together with.  I am still sorting through the experiences and thoughts from this workshop and will enjoy reviewing my notes tomorrow to gather up all that has happened. 

One thing I do want to note is how much I enjoy the people associated with the school.  It’s great to see all of the people we see regularly, and it’s a special treat to get to see those from out of town whom we’ve had connections with in the past.  Training with the class, I found myself genuinely and completely happy… ^_^

The past three days have been excellent: hard physical work, a great deal of learning from Lenzie’s conversations and corrections, and a wonderful sense of comradery between everyone in the push hands class. That sense of working together was something that was really noticeable to me on this final day of training, and it’s a tribute to Lenzie’s teaching that he can create the kind of environment where people are really working cooperatively to push each other and to take each other to limits to help development.

Besides all the wonderful push hands work, the practice time for posturing, standing meditation, and form as a flow were really solid. We had a some great questions and Lenzie gave us a lot of information this training and I found myself writing down a large amount of notes. It’s amazing how many times I’ve heard a lot of these things Lenzie says but haven’t ever really sunk in completely. I’ve been finding myself writing down notes more and more for all the things I am studying or presentations I am attending to help retain the information and I hope the notes I have taken the past couple of days will help with that.

It was also wonderful to meet those guests who were not regular members of the school as well as to get to know some people from within the school whom I did not really meet yet. Of course it was also a wonderful treat to see people I did know but whom aren’t local now.

I hope now to take all of this great work and learning and to continue to study it and to develop it further!

This year’s Tai Chi Camp (June 17-22) was our fifth Tai Chi Camp with our teacher Lenzie Williams. As always, the experience was fruitful on every level, from deep work with the body, a great deal of learning, and of course getting to spend time with an absolutely wonderful community of Tai Chi players in the beautiful setting of Walker Creek Ranch.

This year’s camp seemed to have gone by faster than other years.  It may have felt that way as in the past camp normally came around as a real break from the regular schedule of daily life, while this time life had already been floating along so that we didn’t have the shift in perception of time that we had in the past.  It may also have been that it was our fifth camp and having some familiarity and sense of how camp goes, though I think each camp has its own unique sense of time and this one felt as if time was just flying by.

Although it felt fast, the camp was a very welcome time and experience.  I felt that the work on the body building a more stable posture really seemed to have transferred over to daily life as I feel much better grounded since camp.  One of the biggest take aways from camp this year for me personally was the discussions on practice.  Being in Lenzie’s school and having been to other camps, I felt like I had heard a number of these ideas before, but like many things in Tai Chi, they did not ever really make the impression that they did until this time around.  (I have the feeling Lenzie has not done anything different but just simply the my mind is now opening up to ideas he’s been explaining for years… :P)

I know from past camps that I would always have learned a great deal but somehow would miss carrying a large portion of what was learned into the every day practice after camp.  Since the end of camp though I think that I’ve really begun to establish a strong daily practice now, largely in part due things really clicking from what was discussed at camp about practice, but also starting to keep a journal logging what I’ve been doing at each of my practices (warmups, form, sections of form postured, standing, etc.). Practices since camp have been as mindful as they ever have been and I’ve been enjoying waking up each morning and again engaging with study and practice of Tai Chi.

While the camp came and gone, I have a strong feeling that I will remember this camp as one where many things came to fruition.  It was another great camp with our teacher and friends from the school as well as new friends and old from other parts of the country.  I feel very fortunate and grateful to be able to experience these camps and am looking forward to the next camp already!  ^_^