Standing

The last couple of days have again brought slack training, though the ones in between were pretty good. Nature brought some fury our way, and between wind, rain, mud, and Mother's Day, my weekend training was rather slight. I got in some decent application experimentation on the happy subjects at the karate school I work out at on Saturdays and did a little turning after that, but the rest of the weekend was pretty much a wash.

I did, however, spend some time re-reading the notes I wrote about last year's seminar in Northampton, something I'm quite glad I did. I noticed the commentary that He Jinbao made to us concerning the importance of standing practice, which is an aspect of my training that I've been particularly lax in for the last month or two. It's easy, I guess, to justify each day that "there's just so much to train and so fixed a reservoir of energy and time to train it in," but my inattention to standing practice has been just short of criminal. Weirdly, my desire to practice striking and forms has also dropped off the map in the last few weeks. Every time I would attempt it, I'd either feel sore or weak or tired or disinterested, and forcing myself into it was almost a worthless endeavor. At least no fruit came of it. Then, yesterday while at my mom's place for Mother's Day, I sneaked off while being mostly ignored while all the women talked to each other and did some meditation, stretching, and, for the first time significantly in over a month, Lion Opens its Mouth static posture, along with the strengthening postures for the seizing and grasping palms in the Lion system.

Instantly, my attitude was transformed. I wanted to do strikes, as in I really wanted to do them. After I got up from a very productive moment of stretching, I began performing some of the Lion system basic strikes, and I found my power and excitement and interest and ability had all returned to their normal state. It was as if the six or eight minutes I spent standing revitalized my striking practice entirely. I repeated the exercise today, stealing a few minutes a few different times today, in between working in the yard and on the garden, to stand for two or five or eight minutes at a clip, whatever I had. My strikes still feel strong, and my motivation for them is still up.

He Jinbao said: "You must spend a long time standing each day in order to have good development." I'm glad to have been convinced experientially of the power of standing, and of not standing, because it brought those words back to me in a powerful and meaningful way.