I have a tangled ball of thoughts in my head, with many loose ends about intensity, energy, the ebb and flow of energy, finishing techniques in our forms with a snap, and releasing vs. extending energy. There are ideas about intent and intens, relaxed vs released. I tried to clarify a few of these thoughts in my 1-on-1 this morning, and in that moment I felt a glimpse of light and the beginning of some understanding, but now, a few hours later, this whole experience reminds me of how I dream. I don't often remember my dreams, but occasionally I wake up, and I'm delighted to remember some scenes nothing super clear, definitely not the whole story, and often very disconnected. Every once in a while, I remember more of a storyline, and it seems to make more sense than usual, but within a few hours this memory and knowledge of my dream world is erased, I can no longer recover that information. 

For whatever reason, this is what I experienced today. I felt like I was onto something and tried to make sense of it, but the more time that passed, the more that feeling of insight slipped away.

I still think that I'm onto something, and right now I just feel somewhat frustrated that I can't put my finger on it. 

On a somewhat unrelated, or maybe totally related, note, I had the opportunity to watch Sifu Hayes do his tai chi form the other day. Between watching and listening to him, I feel like I understood a bit better how he finishes his techniques with a certain amount of "intensity" (but no snap, no hard stop) and flows right into a released state that rains his energy back into his center, and flows into the next technique to extend his energy again. 

I don't know for sure that I got this completely right yet, but I'm excited about the spark that created, and I want to experiment with it in my tai chi.

This blog feels just as chaotic and semi-pointless as my thought process this morning, which I suppose makes sense. I guess I was hoping something would untangle in the process, but it hasn't happened yet.

On the plus side, I can report that I did my DMH a few times this morning Tai chi style, and I really liked that. It wasn't easy to start, but for the most part I could feel my energy expanding and contracting, and I really enjoyed the flow it created in my movement, along with the lack of adrenaline, breathlessness, and exhaustion throughout the whole form. 

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