Tuesday of this week was the first Tuesday in five months I didn’t attend a two-hour writing class. Knowing this would be the case, I purposefully set an intention to practice with my Tai Chi Chih teacher and class members – the class I missed when attending the writing class.
Would you believe that when Tuesday morning at 10:30 rolled around, I plum forgot all about Tai Chi Chih class?
Freud likely would categorize my forgetting as a type of Freudian slip. I decided to look in A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis a book I had just discovered on Instagram. Here’s what I found: “To forget would be the result of mutual interference of two different intentions, of which the one can be called the intention interfered with, and the other the interfering intention.”
I laughed out loud! The language seemed hilarious to me. Psychoanalytic language at its finest. So I set to work to figure out what it meant that I had forgotten the class. Clearly I had set an intention to attend Tai Chi Chih class. But what interfered? This was the mystery that needed investigation.
I mused that I began attending TCC classes regularly on November 1, 2020 – the day after I terminated psychoanalysis and said goodbye to the psychoanalyst. Very interesting! I kept thinking.
I had to admit that on some days when we begin practicing TCC on Zoom, I encountered resistance of the sort Freud would understand. What did they actually mean by chi? It sounded pretty flakey to me. I stood there in class and felt as if I wanted to jump out of my skin. I didn’t want to be there. I would rather be reading the novel I’m into at the moment, taking a nap, writing and revising my second memoir. How could I escape? Each of the nineteen movements seemed to take forever. My mind was not focused on the soles of my feet as it should have been, it was cavorting like a monkey mind.
But then I recalled with fondness there were other days, the days when my hands felt warm and tingly, the days when it was easy to concentrate on the bottoms of my feet as the teacher instructed, the days when I began to touch into the energy that was named as chi, I felt so grateful to be there. I loved all my faithful fellow classmates.
Freud might speculate that I hadn’t completely said goodbye to the writing class. He probably would guess that I was resisting returning to my normal routine of Tai Chi Chih.
Me, I’m just going to pay attention. Because my pattern is to hang on too long, this might be difficult for me. What should I make of forgetting this class? Do you ever forget important things?
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