Repel the Monkey

[dr_pretentious]

One of the things I love about Tai Chi is that I don't feel any need to be the best at it, I don't need to be the fastest at picking it up, I don't even need to be one of several A students, as if there were really such a thing as an A student in the art. Kinesthetic learning comes hard to me. I have to do it slowly. And it's gratifying, after so many years of rush-rush-rush, to have to do something slowly, indefinitely.

And yet, and yet...

Repel the Monkey was one of the first Tai Chi moves I learned, back when I used to take classes through the university. Now that I'm studying with the same teacher at her own Tai Chi studio, we've backtracked to discover that, in the years when I practiced on my own and had no time to attend classes, my form drifted, and I settled Repel the Monkey solidly into my muscle memory...dead wrong. I can Grasp the Bird's Tail reasonably well, and I do a good Punch Eye, for someone who's only been a serious student for a year and a half. White Crane Spreads Wings? No problem. I haven't quite figured out Pat Horse on High, but at least when I'm Patting said Horse, the more senior students don't flinch to see my form.

I cannot Repel the Monkey.

Keep your weight on the front foot. Good. Now, while keeping your weight on the front foot, turn it. Turn it? Like this? No, not like that.

And suddenly, a golden marmoset skitters through the Tai Chi studio, steals my car keys, and brachiates away, screeching, into the forest canopy. I have failed to repel the monkey.

Try again. No, you're still turning from inside the knee joint. If you turn from inside the knee joint, you'll injure yourself. Now you're turning from the hip joint, but you need to turn from your center. Nose, navel, toe--all must move together, as one piece. Like this? No, not like that.

A baboon knuckles through the window and out the other side of the room, steals all the chocolates off the desk in the office, and opens the front door to let itself out to the parking lot, snickering all the way. I have failed to repel the monkey.

Could I watch you do it right a couple of times? Okay, when is the moment when your weight shifts. No, I've confused myself so much, I can't see it, even when I'm looking right at it. Is it now? Now? No? How about now? That's the point when you shift your weight? Wow, I had no idea how wrong I was. Okay, is it like...um...this? No, not like that.

An entire troop of lemurs swarms the Tai Chi studio. Of course, lemurs aren't, technically, monkeys. But that's okay, because whatever it is that I am doing, it's not, technically, Repel the Monkey.

Not surprisingly, I don't repel the lemurs, either.

So, back to Grasp the Bird's Tail. Because, dammit, when I Grasp that Bird's Tail, I mean for it to stay Grasped.

Comments

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Funny you should send that--the main way my form drifted was that I was determined to have Tai Chi in my repertoire of chronic pain management tricks when I went to South Africa. Once the conference where I was giving a paper was over, Dan and I went out to one of the big national parks to view creatures, and in those parks, people are confined to cars, and the animals have the run of everything but a few fenced human-safe enclaves. We'd drive around the bush for hours, reach an encampment and stop to stretch our legs. I'd do the Twelve form, and the locals would watch the crazy foreign lady doing her mysterious interpretive dance. Everything stopped while they watched. Everything except me, because I had hours more of sitting in that car ahead of me, while we chased reports of rhinoceroses.

And it was the baboons I visualized repelling, because I'd been stopped behind them in a monkey-induced traffic jam in just such a beach town on the Cape Peninsula. "Roll up the windows!" our host said. "Baboons ahead!" Man, if you think you don't want a baboon loose in your kitchen, you really don't want one with you inside a moving car.