What is important?

Currently I'm doing summer training a couple of times a week with my sensei and a few other students.  We are primarily going through 3rd dan curriculum material (I'm 1st dan, and won't have to worry about a 3rd dan grading for quite a few years yet), so am in the peculiar situation of having exposure to a major component of my style's technical content without the pressure of needing to recall it or demonstrate it in the near (or even reasonably distant) future.

To give you an idea, we have been doing: ba duan jin, the beijing 24 taichi form, some yamani ryu bo (shuushi-no-kon), shisochin + applications, seisan + applications, happoren, a variety of advanced flow drills involving knee techniques, joint locks, elbow techniques and using the same hand to receive and counter.  It's a fair bit, and almost all of it is new to me.

I'm keeping notes, videoing myself as soon as possible as a future reference and trying to practise solo what I can, but if I can't remember all the techniques, applications or drills, I'm not too concerned.

For me, the important things for me to get from this month are the principles underlying the techniques:  grounding, moving off the line of attack and through their line of weakness, breaking and controlling the opponent's balance, never losing contact, keeping "live" and compact at all times (except when using expansion as a method of power generation), focusing on the different methods of power generation, attacking low to hit high (and vice-versa).

And those, for me, are the important things.

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