Writing has always been a big part of my learning and teaching experience. This winter I decided to thoroughly purge the hidden corners of my house. In one I found a large box of notes from my training that harkened back 42 years, to when I started martial arts. My first teacher (Judo), the man of few words, said to me one day, "you might want to keep a few notes - after each practice, jot down what you remember." Being a good student, I of course did.
That tip has really made a difference in my capacity to learn, remember and develop my abilities. It also helped me to gradually understand what I was feeling on the inside, both sensations and emotions and how the process of training was influencing my life. Over the decades I have gained a perspective that is at once an integration of all the lessons, the teachers, the students and colleagues fused with the course of my life. Dug into my 6th decade now, I am as grateful for the practice of writing as I am for my training.
In rifling through the few boxes of history that remain from my winter purge I am not finding many photos from 1999-2002, but I am finding quite a bit of writing. Starting from early days teaching here in Seattle, before the online presence that all of us moved into, I published very beautiful newsletters 2-3x a year. They were professionally laid out and edited, typeset and printed old school, stamped and mailed out to my students. I remember they were around $1500 to produce, not a small amount for a budding Tai Chi /Qigong professional. It must have been important to me to do them.
This piece from 1999 was a threshold for me, it was the moment I connected with my capacity to write about the internal experience in a way that was poignant and beautiful. It's fascinating to re-read it now, 21 years later, in the midst of the global reckoning we are experiencing: Montana
