Xiulian with Adriaan Blaauw

From late June to mid-July, taijiquan player Adriaan Blaauw and I spent about six hours a day training together. I wanted to consolidate the things I’d learned from Master Chen Zhonhua and Ken Cohen and my current research project allowed me to give Adriaan a modest stipend on which to live, plus I could put him up at my place.

We worked six days a week from 7:30am-10:30am, 4:00pm-6:00pm and 7:30pm-8:30pm. Mornings were for qigong, basics, forms and conditioning, afternoons for partner practices and evenings for qigong meditations. Adriaan practices Hunyuan Taijiquan and Xinyi Liuhe, so a good deal of his material overlapped with mine; we would sometimes work together and sometimes train our own material separately. 

Perhaps the most fun part of our work together was the sticky-sword training Adriaan introduced me to; we found we could do it for hours (literally) and had to put ourselves on a round timer so as not to miss dinner!

I’m really glad we did it; our work together allowed me to experiment with my curriculum for this fall’s Ateliers. It was also great to spend that much time outdoors, rain or shine, working on material I love.

A warm thanks to Adriaan for being up for it.

~ by Daniel Mroz on August 9, 2009.