First European Practical Method Meetup in Vienna, Europe

Practical Method Meetup in Vienna, Europe
17th – 19th February 2017

What a cool experience! On 17th of February 2017 we had the first PM Meetup in Europe. A meetup which was dedicated to meet other groups practicing our art. It was no workshop in that sense, but we were lucky, that Rick Pietila, a disciple of Master Chen was still in Vienna at that time and was leading most of the training. He prepared a training schedule which build up over the course of the meetup. Everybody was exhausted afterwards, but happy to meet other peers and to have learned so much from Rick.

But let’s start from the top. During the last Master Chen Seminar in 2016 Carlotta and myself were following our teacher to all workshops in Europe. Starting with Berlin, Germany there was Gdynia, Poland and Prague, Czech Republic. We two were practicing most of the time between the regular seminar lessons, alone, with other students or, whenever possible with Master Chen. We liked practicing together and started to discuss the possibilities of organizing a PM Meetup, not a workshop, only for PM practitioners so that we could practice together and talk about our art.

BAM! Here we are, about 9 month later with the event already happened. Carlotta, Fabian an me were meeting on Skype every week to make this happen. In the beginning and also at the very and we had help. Rick was there with a lot of “did you think about…” questions and we were happy for those, since Rick had lots of experience organizing big events in the past.

Every Training started with at least three Yilus and foundations training

We couldn’t be more happy, since everything went smooth and everyone was very happy. We got very positive feedback from all attendees. And that’s amazing, since the schedule was tough. Organizing the event we went for a DQS standard training schedule, meaning getting up early and having four training sessions through the day. So on DQS you basically fall out of your bed and are on the training ground already. Here we had to get into public transportations and commuting to the training place in the first place. Still! Most people got up and came. We did Yilus, Foundations and some basic partner work before hitting breakfast. The other Sessions were 9 – 11:30 am, 3 – 5:30 pm and 8-9.30pm. Saturday was a tough day, I tell you. On DQS you get used to this schedule after only a few days. In our case all of us had a regular day and on the next day a DQS-Day.

It was good, that next day we had a training schedule planed only until noon. After that we went sight seeing, eating cakes and drinking coffee to make up for all the calories we lost the day before. And we decided, that the next meetup will be organized in Berlin.

We hope that next time also PM enthusiast from other countries can join this event. That way there will be more possibilities for the nomination of a follow up location.

If you have questions regarding the meetups or maybe also if you’re interested where in Europe you can practice Practical Method Taijiquan you can write to practicalmethod.europe@gmail.com from were you’ll be redirected to the right place.

Thanks to all people who came all the way to Vienna, it was a great event!