Awareness

         Temperature might have dropped, but the sun was out, and it was a nice enough day to practice outside.  First to my weapon, which I'm still developing more of.  As I was finishing my first repetition, I noticed that I naturally moved my gaze before executing my next movement.  I believe this is because I am a lot more clear about what my targets and intentions are for this form, since I am the one who developed it.  This has been something I've been trying to apply more and more to my other forms, mores after Master Brinker went over this with us on Thursday's I Ho Chuan meeting.

        Next to Lau Gar, which I played around with quite a bit.  I first started by doing the form with decisive pauses after finishing each technique, and then I did a few repetitions doing the form at a very slow speed, followed lastly with normal speed.  What I noticed by doing this, is that it dawned on me that when I'm in class, I'm usually trying to catch up, or maintain speed with my peers beside me, instead of just solely focusing on my movements. Thus, I am not always finishing my techniques.  Unfortunately, I've noticed this was creeping in to my training at home.  Well, I don't think we'll be doing in person classes for a while, so now is as good as any to work that out of my forms.  When performing the form slowly, the next thing I was made aware of was my stances.  When moving through the movements slowly, I was getting deeper and deeper into my stances, especially as I was finishing my techniques- upper finishing with lower.  My legs were burning.  I have definitely been lazy with my stances when performing at regular speed, most likely again because I was wanting to transition faster out of them to speed up my movements.  Lastly, performing the techniques with the pauses, first aided in developing the concept of looking before striking, and made my technique, especially what I was doing with my upper body, a lot crisper.  Going forward I plan on continually adding in these forms of repetitions to hopefully iron out the bad habits.