It's a New Year

This year I have a lot to be excited about. I'm teaching a lot of people forms. That's awesome. I love sharing my knowledge and it's a really great way for me to practice teaching. Teaching something I've never taught before is really difficult. The words that I use to describe movements need to be clear but not too defined. There has to be a small amount of room for adaptation. Everyone moves slightly different, and we all have our limitations. However, I'm going to try to remain as true to the forms as I can. Teaching someone a different style is often more difficult than teaching a beginner, There are so many similarities that it's easy to start to merge things together if you're not careful. Wudang looks like Kempo or vice versa.

I have come up with a blog challenge for myself this year. I'm going to write one blog a month on ways that I am experimenting with to reduce my environmental footprint. Some of the things I have already been researching and experimenting with and I'm hoping that this will not only share some good ideas that I've test run, but make me even more mindful on a daily basis of the decisions I'm making that directly and indirectly effect our environment. There are so many small things we could all be doing to help with this, and I hope to raise some awareness about those things.

Meditation and calligraphy are both still on my list. Although I've been practicing them both still, it's been very inconsistent. And the calligraphy student I started teaching last year lost interest pretty quickly. I have to say it's painstakingly detailed and I haven't come up with a less boring way to teach it. It's the way I learned. I practiced each tiny dot individually before I learned any of the actual strokes. It's an incredibly important detail just how you first make contact between your brush and the paper. It can change the entire look of a stroke. Kind of reminds me of 'Jeet'. I have decided to be a little less ambitious with my meditation. My goal was to meditate a half hour every day last year. But I did it so inconsistently it would maybe be half an hour a week. So now I've decided that even if it's 10 minutes, I need to start doing it daily. Then I can work on increasing my number. Incremental progression.

My forms this year are ambitious though. I am practicing a straight sword form that I've half forgotten. So it will be half relearning, half perfecting. That's cool with me. For my hand form I've chosen BaGua. This is going to prove to e difficult. It requires a lot of balance and smooth movements which are not my forte at the moment. But that's why I chose it. I\m hoping it will help me progress a lot this coming year.

I'm very excited to get to know some of our new teammates, but sad to see some go. But, we can't all be on the team all the time. Just wanted everyone to know how much I've loved this past year of getting to know you all. Last night was amazing. I left feeling tired, but full of gratitude for getting to spend my new years with such a spectacular group of people.