ICR: Taiji Sword Class 12/13

This past Friday, myself with along with a few other classmates participating in the IACA ICR component of our course went to Noblesville to participate in a Taiji Sword Class hosted by Master Ling. None of us really had expectations. Personally, I have had no prior experience with any type of martial arts so this was all new to me. I was very surprised when, upon our arrival, Master Ling handed us real swords to work with in our practice. I don’t know why, but I never really imagined they would trust us with their swords since this was a new practice for almost all of us, but it was a very pleasant surprise. We rehearsed a practice called Yang 32, or Yang style 32, which was a practice of a bunch of very elegant movements that was extremely lengthy. Master Ling lectured us prior to practicing about the fluidity of the movements and how a lot of this practice could be used in combat as a defensive tactic. Tai Chi, in modern day practice however, is used commonly for joint health and stress relief. Now back to the practice, it was definitely a very different experience for me. I consider myself relatively athletic and all, but going through the Yang 32 practice, I definitely was not as coordinate as I thought. Obviously this is a very tough practice to master in a short amount of time as Christine, a lady who practices at Master Lings, said it took her over a year of almost daily practice to master Yang style 32. So yes, I often times found myself looking like an idiot. But as we went on, all of us seemed to capture the idea of the flow in the different movements and it ended up looking not half bad towards the end of our time. It took us our full hour slot to just rehearse half of the Yang style 32 which was amazing to me. At the end, Master Ling just had to show us all up and rehearsed the whole Yang style 32 practice perfectly. It was an artful demonstration of movements and was very impressive. I overall really enjoyed this experience. Doing something very unfamiliar and being able to have a lot of fun and learn on top of that made for a wonderful experience. Thank you to Master Ling for having us!