The Extra Inch by Karen Dabrowski

June 26, 2014

A new blog from our regular guest blogger, Karen Dabrowski. I love the way she builds this article up to lead to the main idea - enjoy!


The extra inch



I was rushing to work, in a hurry as usual. When I turned the corner into the street where my office is, I almost banged into a lady in a wheelchair. It was a manual wheel chair and she was pushing herself along slowly, inch by inch, with a suitcase on wheels attached to the wheel chair.



Determined and resolute she made her way up the street. There was no question of helping her. She would make it on her own. She would exert every effort and keep going.



As we go about our daily lives we take our good health for granted. We are not disabled and we are able to practice tai chi despite the occasional aches and pains. But what about the extra inch? We make an effort, we go to class, we practice in between classes but do we commit ourselves 100 percent to our tai chi training?


(Fiona here: Karen refers to herself as not being disabled; LTCI does have various clients with disabilities, including wheelchair users, as tai chi is very suitable for people of all abilities.)



The warm up exercises become familiar. Do we give them our 100 percent attention? We have learned the form but do we make the effort to make sure that every time we practice the form it is our best form ever? What about the extra inch?



Making the extra effort makes all the difference. At 211 degrees water is hot. At 212 degrees it boils. And with boiling water comes steam. And steam can power a locomotive. Two hundred and twelve degrees is a message not only for tai chi but for life. The continual application of heat (effort) to whatever task or activity you undertake in order to achieve not only the primary objective you seek but to reap the exponential rewards that are possible by applying one extra degree of effort.



The American inventor Thomas Edison said that many of life’s failures are men who did not realise how close they were to success when they gave up.



In the confrontation between the stream and the rock the stream always wins... not through strength but through perseverance which is not a long race but many short races one after the other. Always remember the extra mile, the extra inch, 212 degrees.






 

Kids class successes

June 4, 2014
This past weekend, the London Competition for Traditional Tai Chi Chuan took place at the Clissold Leisure Centre.

My kids class did really well - as usual for them, they won various medals for Pushing Hands. They love pushing hands and the competition has a nice friendly atmosphere, so all the kids play together, whatever clubs they come from. They have a great time and the parents get to see what they can do.

The medal I'm really proud of them for is they got gold for their group form. This ...
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Let us pause by Karen Dabrowska

June 4, 2014

A new blog from our guest blogger Karen Dabrowska, about pausing.

Fiona:  Karen's introduction is very interesting, since I take the opposite approach, trying to eliminate pauses, while still completing each movement, to aim at a smooth continuous form. Her approach has led to a most interesting train of thought, which I hope you will enjoy reading as much as I did, for its fascinating insights.



Let us pause



In the tai chi 108 form every movement starts with a pause. Each form must be gi...


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Tai Chi in Vancouver

April 29, 2014

It's really nice having a roving reporter sending articles home! Often people come from other countries to our Academy in Bethnal Green,  so it's nice having one of our own visit elsewhere and report back. This article is by Karen Dabrowski, who is rapidly becoming a regular contributor here. I hope you enjoy her article about her experiences as much as I did:


Tai Chi in Vancouver: It’s better not to speak Mandarin!

Around half the population of Vancouver is Chinese. They have a lot to do...


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Pain and the body

April 29, 2014

I'm very happy to introduce a guest blog by Karen Dabrowski, who has very useful words of advice from her experience of pain. Becoming aware of the tai chi principles of posture and putting these into practise can make a huge difference, as she explains below:


Master Pain: Lessons You Can’t Ignore

Perhaps more by good luck than good management I was relatively pain free when I started learning tai chi. There was a slight discomfort in my back but it was soon cured by sliding my back down t...


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Your natural talent may not yet be obvious

April 10, 2014
Talking at the club tonight, my brother came up with a wonderful analogy, which I am shamelessly stealing: He said that your natural talent at whatever may not be obvious, but may become clear later "like you may not be the best at calligraphy, but later you could turn out to be a wonderful author".

This is a wonderful thought - instead of looking for instant natural talent at whatever, just keep doing stuff, so that eventually you will be in a position for your talent to manifest itself. 

I k...
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to the untrained eye...

April 10, 2014
In one of my recent blogs, I said that differences weren't obvious to the untrained eye. Which implies that eyes can indeed be trained. When I first started tai chi, I was very unobservant, as most people are. Over time, with training from my tai chi teacher, I have become better at systematically looking at people and actually seeing specific things, which previously I would have been oblivious to.

This reminded me of one guy's book, where he wrote that he had been trained in mainland China, ...
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"After 7 years you must be technically perfect".

April 9, 2014
One of my clients recently said to me "After 7 years you must be technically perfect". I was so taken aback by this, that I didn't know how to answer it at the time, but it's been on my mind ever since.

I  think it's the difference between doing an internal art and doing external exercise. The Chinese divide martial arts into external and internal. External are things that involve strength and muscle and what you can see. Internal arts actually are internal. For a long time, I didn't understan...
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Adapting the lesson to the audience

April 9, 2014
I've been thinking about this since one guy asked me if what I did at MIND was the same as what I do at the Wu's Tai Chi Chuan Academy, in Bethnal Green...

Depending on where I am, or who I'm teaching, there are definite differences in my lesson structure.

Sometimes this is very obvious - for instance, one group I teach want to sit on chairs to do all their exercises. These are a more mature group, with some having various physical disabilities. For them, I do a variety of exercises and chi ku...
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backs, knees and other pains

April 9, 2014
Many people discover things that need put right, when they start tai chi. This is due to us getting into habits over decades and not noticing, then as soon as you start on posture training, you start to notice what those habits may have led you into...

In my own case, I noticed that I was crunched up in the neck like a vulture and had odd grating moments in the neck. Tai chi is not a substitute for professional treatment, so I went to see a chiropracter - I chose my tai chi teacher's son, as I...
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