Making Mistakes

My teacher, and also one of his senior students (he has been with my teacher for over 20 years) said the same thing to a fellow student today. "Making mistakes is making progress." When I first heard this, I was wondering, huh?

The explanation soon followed. When you become aware of your own mistakes, that is the first step towards making progress, towards improving. When we first start learning, we are more focused on trying to remember the steps, and fail to pay adequate attention to the little details as well as the principles of taiji. But as we progress, when we start to realise our own mistakes in details or principles, that is when we know what we need to change. Being aware of our mistakes is the first step towards being able to change them.

Which is why my teacher and senior student bother said the same thing. Once you know your own mistakes, you will start to think about how to correct them. You will start to tell yourself to watch out for the same mistakes, and try not to make them again. In doing so, you are actually improving your form, and it brings practice from "remembering the steps" to the next level of "correcting mistakes".