I took the other sword clip down. I’m much happier with this one. I found a place without so many roots and it was wider than the other place. Plus there were no branches for me to bang into.

I’ve got a funny story about this clip, too. While I was filming it, I noticed that a teacher that I had a bit of a run-in with in the past was about 50 feet away from me. During this performance, I could feel him watching me. Thing is, this performance was the best of the four I recorded. Haha. Talk about a sense of an enemy. This time it was palpable.

I continue to be fascinated by the ability to sense these things. I knew exactly when he was looking and when not. I could literally feel it. I’m sure i’m not alone in this. I think all long-term, hard-core MAists can feel this stuff. It’s just a by product of the practice, especially if meditation is part of your training.

The Japanese are great because they have vocab to describe this — haragei.

I’m doing all this because I need to learn how to use my camera better, I need to learn video editing, I need to get things up on the net to represent me and the school, etc. There are a lot of reasons. And it’s a learning process. So I offer some of my practice to invite criticism, especially of the video technique and presentation.

For example, my taiji sword form goes far to the right and only a little to the left. I had a hard time staying within frame while performing it. If I pull back, then I can more easily fit the form in the frame, but then it’s too far away to see any detail. Closer and it’s hard for me to do a correct performance in the space allowed by the camera.

The water bottle on the right and the short lamp post on the left are my visual markers. I had to stay between those and still almost went off camera to the right. That’s how much space the form takes up — a lot.

Additionally, I wanted to do the form at an angle to the camera instead of straight ahead. I thought it looked better that way, but as it turned out, the form only looked better as I got closer to the camera. As I got further away, you couldn’t see what I was doing. So I’ll be looking at filming from multiple angles in the future and splicing them together into a video montage, at least when my editing skills and time permit that.

Hope you enjoy the performance.

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Edit: i took down the video and I’m putting a new one up. I like the new version I did today better and it’s clearer. Sorry for the confusion.

I’ve been working on the Chen Pan-ling taiji sword form for over a year now. It’s a tough form. As you can see, the postures are more athletic than in the taiji hand form and the range of motion is bigger. There are moves that go from very high to very low and some postures are very stretched out.

This move in particular

has caused me a lot of grief and I’ve struggled to master it. I dare say I’m haven’t quite got there yet but it’s coming along. This posture is great for extending your energy and reach and I love the fact that it’s one-legged. Most people don’t think of taiji postures as looking like this.

The sword form stretches and expands that notion of what is and is not taiji. It trains your athleticism and yet requires that you be subtle and relaxed. That’s not easy when you’re moving through the routine with a sword.

My flavor is still off here; it still has too much of my shaolin sword background. I should be softer and less obviously martial. I thought to wait until it was closer to perfection but that might take a long while so what the heck — go ahead and put it up.

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