When we paused in-person training back in March 2020, we hoped for a temporary closure of a few weeks, maybe at most a few months. Instead, two years of pandemic have passed, and the global crisis is not over yet. To assist our members with their at-home training, I developed the Solo Taijutsu Lesson Series, presenting weekly materials that can be trained alone, at-home, inside or outside, empty-handed or with traditional or improvised training tools. At first, weekly homework was a written pdf and usually contained several items for practitioners to focus on, from familiar foundational Taijutsu to dexterity and stamina drills that provide a challenge point from which individual explorations might evolve. Later, we added a few short videos to demonstrate the movement. As time and the pandemic had gone on, the amount of material in each lesson has decreased while the amount of instruction in the video component has increased. My video-editing / creating skills are still improving, and while the learning process / results can be a source of amusement, the point is the process and the movement itself - to keep going even in the face of great challenges, and even when a new skill is not easy for us to embody. After 88 Solo Taijutsu Lessons, I'm still learning how to provide online instruction and we still haven't run out of material that can be trained at home. And how could we? There is always something more that can be practised, and there is no level at which the foundational movements need no longer be practised. At each new phase of study, something more can be gleaned. I hope our online Solo Taijutsu Lesson Series will inspire you to keep innovating in your own at-home practise, such that we all might inspire and learn from each other.
Ganbatte!