practice tai chi regularly

I am starting Tai CHi lessons YAY!

since the first article i got up and did tai chi 3 times and only missed 1 day of doing tai chi. I feel good about it.

I had been doing tai chi five times a day every day from when school got out till about 4 weeks into summer school but it got really tough to do, then i went on vacation where I could not do it. Today was the first time I did it in a while and It felt good on my muscles (which were incredibly tight) and I realized that I was really sloppy, and I do it on my own with no teacher only a book so I need to do it slowly and keep the book with me at all times.

I picked this up again and have managed a whopping six consecutive days so far, yay! Have decided to bribe self: if I make 10 days, I get a little treat. If 20, a slightly bigger treat. Hopefully by that time, it will have become a habit. Umm,the tai chi, not the treats ;)

It’s really only my perfectionism that has prevented me from marking this off. I regularly make two lessons a week and practice at home on my own most days. I’d like to work up to six days a week, but that perhaps deserves its own goal.

I’ve found this very rewarding with some great benefits for my health as well as my mental state.

Practiced a bit this morning. I actually had trouble remembering the new form. So I did my old form and when I finished i realized I skipped several parts. I need to review. But it felt good to practice and get that chi flowing.

Checked out a new class. It felt good! Actually it felt great to be back into the flow. I am so relaxed and happy now. And it’s been a stressful couple of weeks. Today was no exception. How great is that to be happy at the end of a stressful day?

I had an excellent lesson tonight. I noticed I’ve improved my flexibility: I can touch my toes!

We’ve started doing Qigong exercises too and tonight I noticed that I had a better feel for what the energy was doing.

I guess my practice at home is starting to pay off.

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, my boyfriend works weekends now, so we decided to go to the Wednesday night class.

Tonight was our first time. A friend of mine whose attended it said there’s a very different feel to Saturday morning. He was right, although it’s quite a subtle difference, even if the rowdy teenagers out front weren’t. Even though the lessons were the same length, tonight felt so much longer. Perhaps that was because we did less activities, but did each one for a greater length of time.

I found it a hard lesson and I struggled. Still, between the two classes and my practice at home, I think I’m getting pretty close to marking this as done. I’ll see how it’s going in another month.

It was another fairly good lesson today, although my balance was a bit off and my concentration was flagging a bit. I also needed to relax my wrists a bit more.

The teacher actually asked me to stand in the front row today, along with the boys who have had a lot more experience than I and who train a lot harder. I felt like it was an honour. My teacher also asked me to come for lunch some time and he would correct a few things with my Tai Chi.

Which is all kind of funny, because my practice this week has been non-existant. I hope to do better in the coming week.