Obey My Blog

Despite persistent 100 degree weather here in central Texas, I can smell the fall. And it smells like Tai Chi! Chen Tai Chi Old Frame 1st Routine, that is!

Yes, I am virtually salivating in anticipation of my next Tai Chi adventure. I will attempt to start all over again after dropping this very same class last fall.

Even though I have to leave Baguazhang behind, I am so incredibly glad that I took it. It was really hard! And I don’t mean that in a whiny way (well, maybe just a little). We soared through the basics and went right into learning the Lion form. I didn’t realize this was deliberate until this week though. I just thought my teacher was insane (I kid!). But it’s good my teacher approached it this way, because if I had known what I was actually getting into I would have been incredibly intimidated. Okay, maybe not that intimidated, but it would have been daunting mentally nonetheless. I have a tendency to overthink things, so I really like being blindsided and just thrown in there. Actually, I don’t really like this, but it seems to work for me in some weird way.

I feel a bit guilty leaving Baguazhang. Many of the Bagua students are extremely passionate and they really want to share that with you. There is a palpable energy in Baguazhang class that can’t be matched in Tai Chi. I don’t know how to explain it really. Let’s just say I always had a very hard time falling asleep after a night of Baguazhang. It left me pretty hyper and I had to make sure to devote a bit of my evening to winding myself down. It’s very easy to get caught up in that kind of energy, but I have to be honest with myself and admit that my heart is still in Tai Chi. I feel I’ve only barely scratched the surface of my Tai Chi practice and I want to follow  through with it and see where it takes me.

If all this talk of Baguazhang has piqued your interest, check out the Yin Style Baguazhang International website. This is the style we learned, as taught by my teacher, Kuan Wang, who was taught by He Jinbao (Who I hear is a very serious guy. I would never want to cross him. I can only imagine how he’d react to my goofiness…*gulp*).

By the way, a sincere thank you and many bows to whoever sent me the Baguazhang DVDs from The Association for Traditional Studies. I was quite surprised and honored that someone took the time to send these to me. Thank you!

On a completely different note, I decided to attend a Japanese Tea Ceremony workshop with a friend of mine last Saturday and thought I would close this by sharing a few photos with you. Check ‘em out. It was so much fun and Sheila Fling is one of those wonderful Southerners of such unpretentious grace and humor, that I felt right at home with her. She likes to refer to herself as a Buddhapalian – a Buddhist and an Episcopalian. How awesome is that?

One of the attendees was kind enough to capture my backside as I attempted to bow in front of this lovely scroll (note Sheila’s cruel and menacing laughter).  I learned a lot (there’s a lot to learn!) but I will definitely not be making tea for any cute guys like in Karate Kid anytime soon. Ah well.

My company is big on volunteering, so every year we have a day dedicated to going out into the community and volunteering our time. Last year I worked with Texas Hearing and Service Dogs, which was awesome. This year, several of my coworkers and I volunteered with TAP – Theatre Action Project, which works with youngsters to encourage creative expression while learning life skills, building confidence and just having fun.

I was immediately taken in by all the bright colors, the paper-mâché parade dolls hanging from the ceilings, the marionettes and all the crayons and glue and stuff (glue is fun!). Our first task – make signs! So we did. I painted a nice, lovely arrow for them and then my coworker April worked her artistic magic on the others.

While we let the paint dry on our signs, we were given a second task – tie together paper cranes. The paper cranes were to be sent to Japan in honor of a young girl affected by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima named Sadako. Inspired by an old Japanese saying that a person who folded 1,000 cranes would be granted a wish, Sadako attempted to fold 1,000 paper cranes while sick in the hospital (or so the story goes). She fell short of her goal and passed away, but her schoolmates decided to complete the cranes for her and buried them all with her. Now kids from all over the world carry on this tradition and send their completed cranes to Japan in honor of Sadako. Kids from several different schools around Austin had created thousands of these colorful origami paper cranes too and they absolutely had to be strung together in strands of 50. So we got to work…

And they turned out beautifully! We managed to get them all strung together and ready to go. Our signs were finished and we even had time to help out with a few other tasks involving construction paper and glue (no rubber cement though unfortunately!).

This reminded me of volunteering in Costa Rica and helping the kids there make lanterns for the Independence Day parade. I’ve been saving money to do another volunteer trip abroad, but I’m having trouble deciding where to go again. My first thought was, India – absolutely! But then, after doing some math and then redoing the math again, I realized it was going to be near impossible for me to afford it. My sister recommended Thailand. I would love to visit Thailand, but the only affordable program is in Bangkok. I’m not sure I want to stay in Bangkok. I can handle big cities, but deep down I prefer smaller, less populated places (yes, I know…and I was considering India! So be it…). So now I’m actually considering going back to Costa Rica…

But now – time to go to Qigong!

I took my sister to a wonderful Vietnamese restaurant here in Austin not too long ago called Triumph Cafe. After happily slurping away at my noodle soup, I ended up buying a small book on incense. I love scents. Call it my Taurean nature or my mother’s near obsession with perfumes while I was growing up, but I love experiencing and learning about perfumes, candles, incense and the smell of food even. Anyway, this book, The Book of Incense, reveals the history of incense in Japan. I had no idea there were ceremonies surrounding the appreciation of incense – just like tea ceremonies. It is called Koh-do or The Way of Appreciating High-quality Incense.  There are even games that you can play to take your guests on a mental journey while they try to guess the correct ingredients of different types of incense.

Kyara incense

I don’t plan on performing an incense ceremony anytime soon. I simply enjoy the way they smell and the way they make my place feel like home, but I did come away from this book with a new appreciation, if you will, for incense. I would really love to know what good quality incense like this $600 packet of Kyara incense smells like, but I think I’d be too afraid to burn it at that price! Maybe if I ever go to Japan I’ll see about purchasing a small sample instead. Oh and touring the incense factory… Apparently the place where they make Shoyeido incense still resides on the exact same property where it began 300 years ago.