Launch of The Beginners Taiji-Training-Camp in Italy

I would like to give some impressions of the PM-Taiji-Training camp that took place in Italy this September.

From the 17^th till the 22^nd September 2018 we have had the joyful experience to live and train together in a beautiful Villa at the Bolsena lake in Italy. It is a place which is located around 100km north of the city of Rome.

The idea for this event was brought up by the PM-Groups in Vienna and Berlin. We would be happy, if it could take place once a year in the future.

The schedule included training sessions in the morning, before and after breakfast, and in the afternoon until supper. The training content was mainly foundations, Yilu, partner exercises, push hands.

Our main ideas for trying to establish this kind of a training camp are the following:

• Having a regular (annually) meetup for european PM-practitioners for training and exchange
• Helping especially beginners in learning the PM-system, Yilu and foundations. Even if they won’t have a PM-teacher near their living place, they could get enough input during this one week to train at home by themselves and could maybe later take part in the european PM-workshops more efficiently                            
• Having a good time and some holidays in a nice surrounding and landscape

This first camp was some kind of reality-test about our idea and about the location at Bolsena lake. For the Berlin trainer team, Kerstin, Carlotta and myself took part. Sven from Berlin was at the same time in China and unfortunately Fabian and Pawel from Vienna couldn’t join neither, due to personal circumstances.

Besides the trainer team, Paolo also joined, he is not so much interested in Taiji, but in Charlotta (he is her Boyfriend 🙂 ). And we were so lucky to have him in the camp as well. Paolo helped us a lot with the organisation in general and with getting and preparing food at the villa.

I guess mainly because of only little experience so far and due to the lack of advertisement, we only got one student, Andrea from Italy.

Andrea is very enthiusiastic about taiji. He practises Yang-Style Taiji for 12 years already, and also has some experience in Wudang-Style Taiji (if I remeber correctly). He was interested in the connection of our Yilu-Training and the application in push-hands. In his former taiji experience, it has been taught as two totally seperated subjects.

Our training schedule included:

• basic foundations (pos/neg circle; double pos/neg circle; fetch water; twist the towel; six sealing four closing, etc)
  • focus: out with the hand/ in with the elbow
• Yilu training,
  • focus on 13 moves
• (partner) exercises
  • Focus: stepping
• push hands,
  • establishing a catch on the opponent, than move sth. else (indirect power)
  • „going in“
  • free push hands

At the end of the week Andrea could do the full Yilu together with us. And he was not only able to do the 13 moves alone but already focused on some technical aspects like stepping, stretching e.g. during performing the 13 moves.

Also, he got an impression of how the PM-Taiji works as an organic system, having a guiding principle like Yin/Yang seperation and methods like indirect power which are consistent in basic foundations, Yilu and push hands.

Overall, all of us have been very happy being part of this year’s Taiji camp. Nice place, good food, hard and satisfying training. I hope we can repeat this kind of event in 2019!

I want to end this report with a quotation from Andrea about his experience of this week:

‘Always interested in tai chi advice, I use to watch videos on you tube, and for a lot I appreciate the ones proposed by practicalmethod. I took also the choice to take part in a  workshop. I eventually went to Bolsena from the 17 to 21 september, and I wish to let here a comment on this, to give my feedback on the school and the people I met there and overall write just few words. Difficult job!
In the meantime I heard that in order to evaluate a school is enough to evaluate the attendees and my conclusion is that this is really a good school! Thanks a lot Kerstin, Charlotta, Lutz.
I really suggest to everyone interested in tai chi to attend a practicalmethod workshop.
Andrea