I’ve found that reintroducing the two qi gong forms into my tai chi practice has really helped me slow down my movement through the form. Adding in the first and second postures from The Way of Energy has been equally helpful. There’s something about the deliberate effort to breathe while holding a posture, or breathe at the specific part of a movement in Five Golden Coins, that makes it really easy to use the long, slow breaths while working through the tai chi form.
So that’s been helpful. It’s also reinvigorated my druidic practice. I’ve been able to get up early enough that I’ve been able to do the complete druidic practice in the morning, instead of breaking it up over the course of the day into several segments: divination, prayer, meditation. Having it all together has made it easier to do, and the results have been more consistently good.
I’m conscious that I’ve not found a way to do the drawings for my tai chi form, from Cloud Hands all the way to the end. The forward-and-back motions that begin in the form at that point have got me flummoxed; since my drawing style to this point has been very flat and two-dimensional, how do I represent moving in three dimensions? I’ll figure it out eventually, but it’s not coming easily to me.
