Each time I travel to London to teach I stay with an old friend with a burgeoning teenage son and I'm reminded of that time when each day you wake up feeling strange because you've either grown overnight or the hormones have shifted and you're a little more awkward and irritable. The day is then spent getting to know this new state only for the whole process to be repeated the next day. Practising Tai Chi one expects this to be reversed: each day I practice hard, become a little more knowledgeable and expert in my movements and use of energy, sleep and wake up a more refined and capable human being. If only this were so. If your Tai Chi involves a lot of partner work, and you really open up during those sessions, then the only thing you can guarantee is that those interactions will stretch you and take you to strange places (nowt so strange as folk), leaving you feeling tender, unsettled and a little wretched the next day. (Sign of progress.) Just like being a teenager again. One could say that this is the secret of life, or the secret of 'awakeness' anyway, that the process of openness, which if managed intelligently involves growth and change, should be the constant that keeps you young, fresh, excited, exciting, interested, interesting, for the rest of your days. As long as you've got the balls for it (and it is balls - they need to be full in this game just to face the day). I suppose most people slip into the slow death of conformity, their eyes glaze over slightly and the crust of self gradually hardens around them. This is the crust you let drop when you open to another in pushing-hands or especially in intense Heartwork exchanges. To willingly live a life without that protection is asking a lot but like my teacher says, if there was an easier way I'd be doing it.
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As I often wake up feeling tender, unsettled and a little wretched, I shall take this at last as a wee sign of progress... all that self-improvement nonesense has us building up and polishing the very thing getting in the way of our loving and our lives, i think... the 'self'. as for needing balls, however, to do this stuff, well, ovaries, full or otherwise, will do just as well, surely?
Balls is just my coarse way of saying sexual energy, of course. A lot of the power of the work we do is that it uses sexual energy - sublimates it into heart energy I guess, though this sounds terribly pretentious. Unfortunately one can't have it both ways. A little of one and a lot of the other.
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