I want to start this off by first of all acknowledging everyone who was at the Forms Seminar on Saturday! Thank you to the people who worked behind the scenes to organize it all. Thank you to all the Sifus who spent their time helping each of us reach our goals. Thank you Sifu Vantuil for your unending patience. Thank you Mr. Kohut and Mr. Sand for being my partners in this. Thank you to the other participants who helped make it so memorable.
This year I chose to do Lao Gar again. I learned a great deal of it last year at the Forms Seminar. It was shortly after the seminar that I was put on couch rest and a restricted heart rate. All of the information that was so carefully shared was scrambled around in my poor brain. I had walked out of the seminar last year feeling so accomplished, but felt that I had wasted all of everyone's efforts once I was able to get moving again. It is so true that you need to keep on it so you don't lose it.
This year before we even started Sifu Brinker asked us to really ground ourselves. To figure out what our goal for the day was and to keep that goal in front of us for the remainder of the afternoon. That was simply... I wanted to put back together the fragments and then learn the rest of the form. The main goal was to get out in front of the panel at the end of the day and do the entire form (hopefully without too many mistakes or pauses).
As we started working with Sifu Vantuil, I realized that there was not as much lost as I had originally feared. I still had some of the sequences stored and once I started moving they fell together. There was just a loss more in the transitions. I knew where I needed to go, just couldn't remember how to get there.
By the end of the seminar, I was actually feeling pretty good about where I was and how things were going. I was able to run through the entire form. Then it was time to perform for the judges panel. Yikes! I realized that the orientation that I had been practicing was facing the mirrors. Now I needed to face the benches. Normally I am able to flip my forms to different directions but this one was still feeling pretty shiny new and I was still really relying on physical landmarks.
That all said, I did make it through the whole form. There were a few mistakes. One was in a place where I consistently had been missing something and correcting. It shows we really do perform how we practice. So much so that I actually smiled to myself at that point. Sorry Sifu Hayes... I managed to landmark the first 2/3 of the form not too badly to the new orientation. The last 1/3 I honestly did get turned a little around but I did get in all of the steps and finished as strong as I could. At the end I was feeling a little disappointed with how I had messed up the ending. The comments from the Sifus were then filtered through that disappointment at first as well. Then I remembered that grounding moment from the beginning of the day.
So what did I learn on Saturday... Obviously, I learned a new form. I learned to think ahead about how I will need to perform it so that I can place my landmarks a little differently. I experienced that mistakes will likely come out just like you practice them. I received lots of constructive comments that I can take away and apply to what I did learn so that I can continue improving. Most importantly, I realized that I had set a goal and I did indeed achieve it. Perspective helped turn all of this back into a positive experience. Now to keep working on the form so that I can keep all of the pieces.
No comments:
Post a Comment