Slow down, get sweaty, take at least fifteen minutes. I think that’s my resolution for tai chi for the coming year — although once my year of tai chi is up sometime around the end of the first week of March, I think I’ll stop writing about it except for an occasional thing.
Today I did the work with the fourfold breath — stopping at each posture for a breath in, a breath out, a breath in and a breath out — before moving to the next posture. It’s not fluid movement, however much I might wish it to be. But I think fluidity comes from slowing down first the individual postures, and then slowing down the motion between them. Progress, not perfection, should be the goal.
