I woke this morning and my body said, “you feel too slow and icky to do tai chi today. You shouldn’t do it.” Then I got up and did it anyway. Now I feel OK. The movements and the flow between them has a way of waking everything up. I hate that I’m in a place these days where I feel grungy in the morning when I get up, but I’m glad that I have a method for clearing the cobwebs away. I keep discovering that I can challenge myself more with these three forms or paradigms though: this morning, I found that I could sink down into something much closer to a horse stance while doing the Five Gold Coins and Eight Pieces of Silk. My body can’t maintain that posture all the way through the form, yet, but it’s starting to be able to hold it through the preliminary exercises.
If you’re starting from almost nothing, as I was, you have a long way to go before you get “fit”. Fortunately, there are a lot of tricks that you pick up along the way.
