Trifecta... then Fail

I did not turn for an hour yesterday.

I did three days in a row, which isn't much of a testament to my level of commitment, and then on Day Four, it fell to pieces. Life and a meeting for applications conspired together to take first my time and then my energy, and my turning total was exactly ten minutes, all in Lion, all in one direction, all without faltering in my posture despite a fair amount of discomfort. On the up side, once my partner-in-crime arrived, I managed to do roughly an hour worth of strikes, twenty minutes of forms work, and a fair bundle of applications plus we both took the time to give each other corrections, something we really need to spend a bit more time doing when we're together. The absence of having a regular class or training place did, it turns out, rob us of more than just less-dedicated students. After tweaking our techniques, though, we were ready to go on some apps, and I think we made a fair amount of progress in understanding some of the theory of the human body (and how to destroy it in a smooth, powerful, and almost elegant fashion).

There is a major upswing to the three days I did succeed in pulling an hour-plus on the circle. I'm convinced now that I can do an hour turning a day for a fairly large number of days straight if I need or want to. It's another mental barrier that has been destroyed. Now to succeed in the double-kilo-circle (2000 rev., approx. 3.5 hours) or maybe just the three-hour turn....

Since I mentioned our homelessness, I think I should comment on it. Our "study group's" largest barrier to training has been homelessness, which has persisted now for roughly fourteen months. We lost our place to train together via a odd string of events, and our group of roughly seven or eight guys started to crumble. I think now we have just the three of us, though one or two of the old gang want to start again and a few new faces want to give it a try. Our commitment to Yin Style Bagua, we've decided, has been severely tested in this time period in which we rarely get together to work out or study collaboratively. I, therefore, think we are justified in saying that we've proven ourselves committed and really made a statement about our desire to study and learn Yin Style since for nearly a year and a quarter it's been a mostly individual affair for each of us.

"Why were we homeless?" you may wonder. Well, money. It's not that none of us have it, though we're certainly not rich or even "well-off." It's not that none of us is willing to part with it for training. It's that we've decided that money should not be part of our training. Classes have been, as long as our group has existed, and will continue to be free of charge. We say "you pay with your sweat and dedication." To get a location that charges us rent would be to upset that situation since none of us is financially powerful enough to just eat the cost of renting a space. Finding a place that will let you use a space free of charge is vastly more difficult that one might suspect, particularly since none of us belongs to a local church (the only avenue we haven't really tried).

Our current solution to homelessness may not be a great permanent one, I don't think, particularly because I don't know how it will hold up in winter in the evenings (since it's dark then and lighting is questionable in the facility), unless we adopt a daytime, weekend schedule in the cooler months. There's a pavilion at a school near here that is considered, according to the principal, to be a public park area after 6pm so long as nothing gets messed up. That's enough to keep rain off our heads, which is really all we're after, though we don't particularly want to mess up the grass in a public park somewhere with our turning. I mean, we think our circles are cool, but I'm thinking the city won't appreciate them being all over their park lands. In any case, I'm hoping our solution will serve to aid in growing our group again to a strong dozen or so. It's definitely more likely to work than responding, when people ask where and when we get together, "Well... we don't really, and it's a long story...."

So... keep heart! Training can be accomplished, albeit probably more slowly that otherwise, even if the approach has to be largely individual with very little group interaction other than phone calls to keep us encouraged.