So Many Ways To Learn

When I think back on a year filled with intensive learning of T’ai Chi Chih, I am now reflecting on the reasoning behind our studying with more than one teacher and its implications for all of us as teachers. It is a good thing.

The Albuquerque Intensive with Pam Towne in November 2008 was filled with the impression of Justin sitting behind me and discussing our yinning and yanging. He was not always pleased with us. We watched him discuss the fullness of the turning of the waist for perpetual motion, and even Pam was corrected! That was an important moment for me, as the master’s eye was on all of us, and no one could escape the scrutiny, his intensity. It was a call to keep learning more, as a friend and I rose early each day to practice on a high ridge and watch the dawn coming up over Albuquerque.

In May 2009 I took the Teacher Training in San Antonio, which was a warm and exciting time – meeting people, laughing, focusing, reading, learning more and being corrected. I was just beginning to ponder how I might begin to be able to teach this myself, when I realized how much I still had to learn. I was reminded that although I have almost 40 years of teaching musicians behind me, my first TCC presentation was far from perfect. I looked in the mirror and saw that the weight shift was still not level on the right side. I was accused of being too intellectual when I asked lots of questions. Asking too many questions?

The year’s journey was filled with the absolute passion of learning something new. I started reading everything I could find on Justin Stone, haunting the used bookstores in Berkeley, reading back issues of The Vital Force. I started picking up books from the 60’s and 70’s, written by the Asian writers in New York who were writing on the origins of T’ai Chi Ch’uan, which started with a moving meditation in 2700 BC. My voice students this summer caught the drift and excitement of what I was doing, as I had started to begin many of my classes with Rocking Motion or Around the Platter to get them grounded. We practiced the side-to-side weight shift in silence, so I could get them to feel what it would be like to move through heavy air. The length of a phrase, the rhythm of moving slowly; sinking into the ground; feeling a breath that was centered at the tan t’ien, the energy sea. I wanted that same sense of deepening their connection to the earth to be in their singing.

In the middle of all this intensive TCC summer and an intensive one of teaching music, I went to the Intensive at Casa de Maria in Santa Barbara, taking a friend I thought wanted to become a teacher. The intensive caught me in the middle of my thoughts, my questions and my friendships. Sandy McAllister’s technical approach was right for that moment in time, and being asked to correct Athene Mantle, who had been one of my three generous teachers, was a profound moment for me. Here we were at this beautiful and secluded setting in the mountains, and we were now both teachers correcting each others’ practice. I walked at dawn every day among the old oaks and orchards, solitary, reflecting, and noticing the circles within the circles of my life.

The Teacher Conference in Omaha in July 2009 almost seemed like an afterthought, a grand celebration, a party, a meeting of the minds, a sharing of the form that was bigger than any event I had experienced over my TCC year. Athene told me to be quiet and not ask too many questions. She was still a guide, but now one of many.

On the last morning of the conference, Antonia, Sandy and Pam stood in a circle, and we teachers were in a huge circle of 96 around them. The new teachers who were there, some of whom I had first met at the Albuquerque intensive, laid out small bottles of earth we had brought from all over the U.S. and Canada. It was in a wheel, a circle of spokes that told everything. The energy and interconnectedness at Omaha was strong. There was no longer a right or wrong way of doing the practice, although Justin’s example stayed with us. This new moment had no words and no questions, only that feeling of sinking and grounding, or as we say when the music is happening for the artist – just being in the zone. I knew I was now ready to teach TCC.

Note: Judy’s first T’ai Chi Chih project at City College of San Francisco (CCSF) is to develop an outreach project with her music students through the Department of Mentoring and Service Learning. She hopes it will lead to students to partner-practice with seniors. She also team teaches a TCC class for CCSF Staff and Faculty with her first teacher, Jennifer Biehn; encourages her students to study with her second teacher Judith Schwartz, and plans to ask lots of questions of Athene Mantle at the next Norcal meeting.