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I tend to think of myself as not being particularly ego-driven.  But just now I was fooling around, re-reading a few of my old posts from a year ago, and this one hit me in the right way.  Like, I need to consider this all over again.  So I’m reprinting it!  Not the Taijiquestion yak-yak, just the meat of the article (see below).

One of the (damn, wish I could employ a more macho-sounding word) charms of studying the eastern martial arts, is the doorway into the past.  For me, it’s not so much the last few hundred years, which are full of relatively well-recorded information.  So many masters, so many styles, so many families,

Glad I’ve gone back to reading the new York Times more frequently.  They sometimes get slagged for being left-of-center, but wot the heck, a class act is a class act whether or not it resonates with your own personal style.  You should see what passes for a newspaper where I live.  But they too once

Taiji short cannon fist form created by Master Ren Guang-Yi for Hugh Jackman in “The Fountain” ShareThis

Formosa Neijia posted a clip of some Chinese taiji bigwigs testing each other’s skills at a gathering: http://formosaneijia.com/2008/04/28/when-taiji-masters-get-real/ With my push hands experience not quite enough to fill a thimble, I watched the vid and read the comments and said Hmmm.  But

Spirit has no name — We call it Shen so that we Can point to the moon.

Here it is — here he is rather — Dr. Gaspar Garcia.  His website got me started on the path to zhan zhuang, taiji, the internal arts.  (Before that I was just your average MA hacker who’d taken a few karate and kungfu classes.)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-To_J9r3RrE&feature=related I just found this!  Funny I never thought to look for him on Youtube until just now.  I blogged about Dr.

Yup, in my Yang Form practice — which is still totally in its earliest stages — I definitely feel the desire to seek a compact form, just as I eventually did with Chen Style.  FWIW, while working with that great book Mastering Yang Style Taijiquan, even though Yang Chengfu is shown in larger-frame postures, I see in them the alternative of compaction.

Don’t know how many people caught this first time around.  It was posted by Internalartsia almost two years ago.  A really amazing video, and then we get the story behind it which just tops anything. http://insideawake.wordpress.com/2006/11/06/1000-hands-quan-yin-dance/#more-3 This is where I first heard about Quan Yin.

I thought about writing a post discussing my general preference for a more compact form, both in theory and in practice.  But there are plenty of good arguments on all sides of the “frame” game.  Plus the well-known training concept of “start large, learn it well, then go smaller”.  And the various approaches to lengthening the tendons, expanding the joints, so on and so forth.