Saskatoon Nine Dragon Baguazhang
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Location
Albert Community Centre
610 Clarence Ave S.
Saskatoon, SK
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Practice with Awareness
Each of the Dao Yin inter-twine with all of the others (e.g.: the rotating ridgepole helps with square stepping). Each Dao Yin exercise has multiple layers of information that we can apply to our understanding of our body and our movements. (How often do you notice deeper layers? How many of the Dao Yin have you discovered depth of application for?)
The Dao Yin also illuminate fundamental principles that are essential to the functional application of Jiulong Baguazhang that we can notice if only we look for the principles. You have to search deeply with full awareness of what is occurring in your body at that moment to find them.
Practice with Awareness. Anything less develops only “flowery fists and brocade legs.”
Shifu Painter showed a hint of how to develop awareness in addressing this topic: if you wish, you may delve into anatomy texts to better understand what you're dealing with. Every martial expert worthy of the name I've ever met has done some anatomical study. But they will often tell you, "It's not necessary." Do they really mean this?
Do they mean they found the exposure to in-depth knowledge of anatomy useless? I don't think so. Perhaps they judge that depth of knowledge to be beyond the needs of the average practitioner. The average practitioner is a 'hobbyist,' after all, and not likely to be involved in real life or death encounters or going to be responsible for passing on the knowledge to future generations. So, maybe they do not need as much information to learn and enjoy the art.
Perhaps it is an unconscious display of "Waiting Outside the Gate." You know, that old legend about the eager applicant being told, "There is no room," or that he is "not worthy," or to "go home." Only after the applicant showed he had the personal fortitude and discipline to persist in the face of a seemingly hopeless task would the master allow him to begin training.  Nowadays, people seem to think of this tradition as a useless hold-over that merely slows them down; I have heard some students suggest that the master was jealously guarding his knowledge and reluctant to dole it out. I can only say that all of the experts I’ve met have been incredibly generous with their teachings.
I have met many students who have been unimaginably unaware of the gems handed to them by their teachers. Pearls before swine, perhaps? One the other hand, we know it is nigh impossible for one to perceive that which is outside one’s experience. Peoples raised in certain environments cannot accurately judge great distance, or even comprehend corners and edges when they see them; their brains refuse to accept the incomprehensible input and come up with another meaning for it based on previous experience.
As students, we must accept that our teachers have experienced awareness of their bodies at a level that exceeds ours. They try so hard to lead us toward how they came to their own awareness and other abilities, and we, the students, fight so hard to relate the lessons to our current level of awareness that we often miss the new, the novel experience that helps us break through to another layer of awareness. The phrase, “It’s just like…” totally misses the point of deepening awareness.
Embrace the “beginner’s mind,” and begin training your awareness by noticing, by becoming aware of, every time you resist the lesson before you. Every time you think you’ve already learned that, or that it’s too difficult for you, or that topic is distasteful, or that isn’t right, you’ve lost the beginner’s mind and lowered your awareness of the moment.