Hand Form

As promised, this is going to be a blog about my hand form for the year. For the first time ever I am creating my own hand form to be my focus for the year and I couldn’t be more excited! The hardest part so far was creating the first technique. Having no previous motion and no following technique left me in a place of no context and infinite possibilities, it was very daunting. I also felt a little pressure to define the style for the whole form within that initial motion; with a weapon form I usually let the weapon guide me, I try to follow it’s strengths and my weaknesses to lead me through each thechnique, but with a hand form all I have is me. This has been a double-edged sword (ha! ironic since there’re is a distinct lack of blades!) because on the one hand, I can allow my vocabulary of motion to guide me to what should come next, often the movements come with way less active thought and planning than I usually employ in my form creation, but on the other hand without the guildance of a weapon to constrain me to certain motions, I can be overwhelmed with the possibilities. However now that I have a decent chunk of the form mapped out the possibilities are narrowing and it is getting easier to add things.

The biggest difference I’m finding between learning a new form, or rather, relearning an already familiar form, and creating my own, is that it feels so perfect immediately. I have worked hard to make our school forms my own, but this is teaching me I still have a very long way to go, because the sense of familiarity I’m getting, the way every motion just feels right is someting I have rarely felt in our school forms. It feels like wearing someone else’s clothes versus something I sewed for myself. The ability to tailor each technique to the exact way I want to move is overweheliming me with joy!! As I progress in developing my skill with each of our school forms I have goetten bits and pieces of this joy many times before, certain sections that just feel right, or parts I have worked very hard to understand, expanding my abilities to match them can bring me this joy of movement, the satisfaction of power generation which is such a huge reason I love forms so much in the first place! There are some moves that just feel good to do. 

I don’t think I’m doing a great job of explaining myself because I have never tried to put this idea into words before, because it has no skill based value. When I feel joy in my forms it doesn’t give me more power, or develop my understanding further, so I have never tried to analyze it before. It reminds me of that feeling of delight I get when I’m dancing, the happiness from perfectly improvised movement. It has always been something that lurks at my peripheral when I’m practicing my forms, always there, but sitting quietly in the background. Now as I’ve been creating this form, it has been front and center and that’s why I’ve been having such a blast making it so far!

(need to start workshopping a name for it)

Current Total

Push-ups

1790

Sit-Ups

1258

AOK

50

Km

95

Blogs

3

Sparring

5

Hand Form

58

Weapon Form

24

Repair Relationship

0


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