Feedback
/Below is an excerpt of a letter from a long distance senior student sister. This is in the context of responding to an older post on Student Corner: The devil's in the details. This post involved Wing Chun hand positions. You can view it by clicking here for a refresher.
This student studies with other teachers in her area.
Sometimes it can be challenging to reconcile two different systems. Recently, I was told to try to just move my hand rather than to move my body to execute a certain drill. The point of the drill, I think, was to experiment with certain rotations of the hands, which are useful for seeing the spiraling movements, but I am always trying to have the body make the hand move, remembering Master Jou saying, "Arms have no movement," in the last workshop I attended with him and your principle of whole-body movement.
Probably because I have finally broken though in the movement of the hip joints, I think, I am especially focused on this. Two things, in particular, have come out of my working on this: I understand now why you told me that I need to be 80/20 in Roll Back rather than going to 100/0 and what being 50/50 in Cloud Hands means. In one of the taiji books I read, there was an anecdote about Cheng Man-ching standing in front of his desk and moving; not wanting to interrupt him, the person who told this anecdote waited for a while then finally interrupted him and asked what he was doing. The name he gave was Constant Bear, and Cheng said that it was all you need for taiji practice.
I believe that movement was what we call Bear Swings through the Woods (and Wags Its Tail). I first began to work on this in the cane form when I found it difficult to move from one posture to the next in some places because I had weight on the foot I needed to pick up, and through some experimentation and a return to the Four Flowers, I began to see what I was doing wrong. I am still working on this, of course, but I'm starting to have the sensation of riding a wave when things are going well!