Personal Evolution of the Forms

In class this weekend, Shifu was speaking about how we should practice the forms, and how we would improve and develop over time. He suggested that we try to do the form 3x per day in our daily practice, he felt that would be ideal.

The trick in learning how to practice properly though is dependent upon doing each motion of the movements correctly. Doing something wrong, several times a day is perhaps NOT the best thing to do, as we don't wish to develop bad habits or incorrect motion.

As an example in the second movement of Lao Jia Yi Lu, Shifu focused on the basics of the spiralling action following rollback... almost none of us actually did it the way Shifu was showing us! So, we spent quite a bit of time practicing and trying to correctly learn the motion.

Following that, Shifu went into an explanation of "closing" our body's positioning and then "opening" of the body... explaining that closing we may pulling in or absorbing and then, with opening, we may be applying fa jin or explosive motions.

Shifu then proceeded to explain that we try to learn the correct basics and all the small details as we practice; however, as we may zero in on a particular application, in our PERSONAL expression of the form practice, the movement may be reduced much smaller overall and actually executed in a quicker and more efficient movement and expression. But we clearly need to understand the full, larger motion with all the details to be able to best decipher potential applications and improve our arsenal of basic techniques, and choosing our best fit for our own personal expression once we have garnered real skill and understanding of a given selected application from the potential storehouse we have absorbed in our long term training.

Our ultimate goal is to have a uniform and standard form all of our classmates know and can present consistently and accurately with appropriate intention, and THEN to also have our personal presentation which may look quite different than someone elses' presentation, and that personal presentation may also change and vary at different times depending upon the application we choose to focus on at a given point in time.

Very cool concept; very cool goals; however, all of it is moot, IF we can't actually apply the motions in a combative fashion in real time. Clearly, practice and intense study is worthwhile and rewarding.
J