I was feeling mostly over my cold by Wednesday (and my sleep was better Tuesday night than it had been), so I restarted my Nei Gong then; nothing strenuous, a bit of Wu Ji and some Kidney Hui Chun. And I rewatched a couple of the Sweden videos, the one on the Spine and Pathogens and the one on Dao Yin Mechanisms; both good and timely, I should watch the Spine one a second time I think and I should look to see what other lectures are in there.

I slept decently well on Wednesday night too, and I could really feel it on Thursday, my body was noticeably more active inside. So I guess you really do build Qi while you sleep! So I did a little more practice than I normally do on days when I work: some full moon practice, some San Dan Tian Gong, and the Taiji Peng Lu Ji An exercises. (And some Hunyuan 48 review, as I usually do on Thursday evenings.)

Not as good sleep on Thursday night; I do wonder if the San Dan Tian Gong makes my sleep worse, it didn’t feel like allergies were worse than normal. So on Friday I did the Spinal Dao Yin set (I do those once every four weeks) but I cut it down a bit, and the full moon seated practice. And I had an acupuncture appointment, but I didn’t make a followup appointment: I feel like I’ve gotten what I’m going to get out of that, it seems pretty clear that my main issue right now is sleep problems caused by allergies, and I don’t think he helps a lot with that. Having said that, he pointed at one disk in my neck that’s relevant to that, so I should probably get back to spending a bit more time on neck exercises? (I should pay attention to that when I rewatch the Spine and Pathogens video, to see if Damo says anything about the neck specifically.)

Crappy sleep on Friday night; that almost always happens after acupuncture appointments, which certainly doesn’t make me want to do it! Though also we had pho, so maybe I had too much food / too much beef and that interfered with my sleep. At any rate, it didn’t feel like it was caused by allergies, so I did some liver Wu Xing on Saturday afternoon, in hopes that that would help. And I did go to my Chen Tai Chi class but I showed up late, so I didn’t do my normal pre-class standing or a long silk reeling exercise. Also we were washing the sheets that day and I took the time to vacuum the pillow and the mattress, I feel like that really might have helped? Pretty good sleep on Saturday night and quite good sleep on Sunday night, I feel like I might have slept through the whole night on Sunday if one of my dogs hadn’t vomited a bit at 5:50am, but even with that that’s close to seven hours of sleep, which is way past the regular sleep apnea middle-of-night wakeup times.

On Sunday I did a long arm stretch: I figured I’d try to go past 35 minutes but I approached it with the attitude that there was a good chance that I’d make it an hour. Which I wasn’t at all sure of for the first half hour, it actually was feeling rougher than last time I did a long arm stretch, but I made it to 35 minutes and wasn’t tapped out so I kept going. And then I made it to 45 minutes and was still okay, and pretty soon after that my brain flipped from “not sure how much longer I can make it” to “I am definitely lasting the whole hour”, and sure enough I did. And it wasn’t that bad, honestly. So yay at succeeding on that, though of course I’ll want to repeat that more times to help normalize the stretch in my arms / help continue open things up. And I’m still not really holding them open the right way, I’m not getting as much Qi inflation as I’d like, so I’ll want to immerse my mind more. (And I’ll try out the technique I saw in one workshop involving changing the location of where my mind rests.) And I did practice my long Chen weapons on Sunday, as well as going through the Xinjia first form; my teacher will be going over my form in a couple of weeks, I think I want to show him the Xinjia form again, so I should practice that several times this week.

Because I’d been thinking I should stretch out my neck and back more I did some Coiling Snake today, even though I’m supposed to avoid Dao Yins in the winter. (After all, I live in California, it’s not like it gets all that cold here! Though it has rained some this week; not today, though.) I didn’t get as much stretch as I’d like, and my lower back ached in a way that made me think I’m probably bending it too much; so I should probably work on that some more to get back into proper form. (Though maybe I should wait until we’re more into Spring.)

This week’s lesson was San Dan Tian 1. Which I’d vaguely expected to be the snowman exercise, given the name, but it wasn’t that at all; seemed like maybe a Hunyuan thing, though Damo didn’t explicitly say that in the video. At any rate, interesting enough; as with anything that involves stuff in my head, I’m a little worried that it might make it hard for me to sleep; and in fact my sleep was crappy on Tuesday night, but I actually don’t think it was this exercise, I think it was sleep apnea being unusually bad.

Still, Wednesday was okay; I didn’t do as much Nei Gong as I normally do on Wednesdays, but I did a 40 minute San Dan Tian 1 session and a 40 minute Earth Hui Chun at least. And I didn’t do as much Tai Chi as would have been ideal but I did finish going through all of my Chen weapon forms. And on Thursday I was a little iffy during the day, and because of timing of some things that were going on, I didn’t do my normal Nei Gong practice during the day, but when I did it at night I decided to do arm stretching, and I lasted 35 minutes, which is 15 minutes past my previous; that was a pleasant surprise! And also the stretch itself is starting to feel pleasant in some ways: in the past the stretch had been unpleasant but in a way that doesn’t get worse and worse (unlike the muscular tension from my shoulders), but now I kind of think that, the next time I do this on a day when I’ve had good sleep, there are good odds that I’ll be able to make an hour.

Unfortunately, the “on a day when I’ve had good sleep” is a significant limitation: on Friday I think the effects of the bad sleep on Tuesday night and the less-than-ideal sleep Wednesday and Thursday nights caught up with me. I finished going through my empty hand Tai Chi forms in the morning, but by the afternoon it was pretty clear that I’d gotten a cold. (So maybe that was what was going on on Tuesday night; though I suspect the causation went in the other away.)

Unfortunate timing, it meant that I missed my regular Chen Tai Chi class on Saturday and my once a month class on Sunday, and a couple of personal things that I would ideally have done this weekend. But the flip side: just a cold, nothing horrible. But then the flip flip side: I feel like, for the last couple of months, my breathing overnight has gotten worse; maybe it’ll get better once it warms up and the furnace stops pushing dust through the air, but that’s a while off and also I could be wrong about that?

Fortunately, I saw my allergist this weekend; no immediate solutions there (and actually some possibilities mentioned that I could imagine finding scary, though I’m not reacting that way), but we’ve got some deeper diagnosis planned that hopefully will give us some ideas. And paying attention to exactly how my body is reacting where, I’m starting to suspect that my pillow currently has a heavier load of dust mites than I can handle. (We do dust mite treatments in bed but they’re not perfect.)

So if that’s the case, it’s tractable: when we wash sheets this weekend, I’ll vacuum off the pillows and mattress thoroughly, and if that doesn’t help, then next time I’ll replace the pillow entirely. (I got a spare one the last time my pillow was causing problems.) And, talking it over with my wife, we were thinking that the timing matched Ulli’s arrival pretty well; I hadn’t been worrying about that so much because he’s a poodle and I’m not allergic to them, and also we’d been washing his main bed toys with the sheets, but in the past our small poodles have been sleeping more at the foot of the bed than the head, and also it’s not too surprising for other toys to end up in bed. And it’s been a while since we’ve given him a bath (and he’s never had a haircut), so who knows what’s on his hair now.

If Ulli does turn out to the issue, then we’ve got a plan: we gave him a bath tonight, we were already thinking we’d give him a haircut over the next few days, we can be more disciplined about toys, and also now he’s housebroken enough at night that we can start nudging him to spend most of the night at the foot of the bed. So the optimistic scenario is that, doing all of that plus cleaning / replacing the pillow will get things to a much better shape. And that scenario sounds plausible to me, I think it matches all of the evidence? (And also: things actually were going genuinely well not too far back in 2024, for a while it wasn’t a surprise if I slept through the night completely. So that really is possible.) If not, I’ll see what my allergist suggests next.

Anyways, no new lesson tonight, given that I’m still on the mend and that I haven’t had enough time to practice stuff from the most recent Taiji and Nei Gong classes. But I’m planning to start ramping my Nei Gong practice back up tomorrow and go into work like normal (instead of working from home) on Thursday. And I have at least been watching more Nei Gong videos than normal: I’m all caught up with the 2025 videos that Damo’s been posting and with his latest podcast episode.

This week’s lesson was the Peng Ji Lu An lesson in the Taiji course. Which was really interesting: conceptually, the idea that these are qualities rather than techniques, and the way that it talked about how the Peng expansion should arise as a response to sinking. And I’ve done it a few times this week; it’s pretty strong, there’s something going on in there, I’m definitely going to want to keep that up. I feel like I feel the Peng part most strongly, but there’s something there in all of them?

On Wednesday, I decided that I wasn’t up for a long Wu Ji, so I decided to do an arm stretch, and actually it lasted 20 minutes; I don’t think I’ve ever lasted longer than 15 minutes before? So that was neat; honestly, I probably could have gone longer if I’d really been wanting to push myself and/or had felt more energetic, so it’s even better than it sounds. So I’ve set a goal to do that for 1 hour; not sure exactly what my path there will be, maybe I’ll hit a plateau at some point but for all I know the next time I try it my arms will just tune in properly to expansion and I’ll be able to hold it for an hour quickly. I’m still going to try to prioritize long Wu Ji over this for a bit (though I gave myself permission to not do a long Wu Ji session this past week), but I think I should be able to work in both.

I watched the Calm Abiding talk from the 2025 talks on Friday; a good one, maintained my feeling that it’s important for me to keep on working on that.

Not a particularly big Nei Gong session on Friday, closer to a normal day than my Wednesdays / Fridays usually are. A decent amount of Tai Chi, at least; I didn’t quite manage to go through all my Chen forms by Friday, but I did all but two, and I did the last two on Sunday. And I did 20 minutes of WSSF 1 and 20 minutes of the new Peng Ji Lu An back to back; that was a good combo, I was surprised how powerful the latter felt, but honestly it probably felt similarly powerful when I did it alone on Monday, so I don’t know if doing them together made a difference?

And on Sunday I did a long Calm Abiding session; I made sure to take a nap first, because I’d gotten the feeling that recently the sessions hadn’t gone well because I was too tired. I mean, they definitely didn’t, because I couldn’t really stay awake! But I think the tiredness messed up the absorption at the start, too. And that was a good call, because I managed to absorb well right at the beginning, and it was a very good session, maybe my second best Calm Abiding session ever? I didn’t get quite as much strong expansion as I sometimes do, but I got some of that, and I felt better absorbed / tuned into the right areas of my body than normal.

I got back to the long Silk Reeling exercise experiments on Saturday. This week’s one was Hand Shaking and Stretching; I was honestly dubious about that one, because it doesn’t really feel like it’s too related to the silk, especially the hand shaking part. I really didn’t expect the hand shaking part to turn out as badly as it did, though: in that part, you’re quickly rotating your hand (like you’re screwing / unscrewing a lightbulb except that you’re doing it super quickly), and like 30 seconds in, my hands basically forgot how to rotate. So that was a weird experience! Not harmful, at least. The hand stretching wasn’t bizarre like that, but I also didn’t get much out of doing it for a long time; maybe there was a little bit of unusual shoulder opening when I did the version of the stretch where my palm folds in towards my forearm, but not much.

I’ll try to get back to long Silk Reeling this week. And I’m thinking that, on Wednesdays and Fridays, I should switch to defaulting to my Nei Gong after lunch (and a potential nap). (At least on days when I don’t have a doctor’s appointment or something in the afternoon; on those days, I’ll probably do it in the morning because Nei Gong is a higher priority than Tai Chi.) So I’ll try doing Tai Chi in the mornings and Nei Gong in the afternoons, hopefully that will work better; I don’t think Tai Chi is affected as strongly by being tired, and for all I know moving around will give me more energy.

(And actually my sleep has been better the last few days, much less feeling of sleep apnea; not sure if it was a different nose strip variant or some antibiotics that I’ve bene taking or doing a better job of airing out my bedroom, but hopefully it will stick. Still room for further improvement, but it’s going in the right direction. Nice that Ulli has sometimes not even needed to go out at all in the middle of the night, too.)

A Nei Gong class week, on the Ming Men. A good topic, an exercise that you do for a couple of weeks to open up the Ming Men / ignite the Ming fire. Which sounds useful to me, my lower back is iffy, so I could definitely use opening up there. And going through the lesson the first time was quite interesting: there’s a bit where you Song the end of your tailbone and I was pretty well absorbed in then, the Song was pretty powerful and it almost felt like something was coming out of the tip of my tailbone. And then you Song on your Ming Men, and that was pretty powerful too. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been that powerful when I’ve done it on subsequent days: I think I wasn’t getting absorbed enough. But I’ll keep at it; and maybe I’ll listen to the video again, to see if listening to Damo helps get me back in the right mood.

On Wednesday, I went through the Informal Zoom Session from Japan.

And the weekend was the Foundations course. I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to do a long Wu Ji session – when I woke up on Saturday I felt surprisingly awake but that didn’t last, I was flat out yawning half an hour into the Wu Ji session that morning. Fortunately, that turned out to only be a 1h session, and I lasted okay to the end of it; the longer Wu Ji session turned out to be Sunday, and while I wasn’t as energetic as would be ideal, I was awake enough to last fine through that. I think it was more like 1h50m instead of a full 2h, but still, the longest Wu Ji session I’ve done; and doing it without bells at fixed intervals turned out to be fine, my brain reacted to that by underestimating how long it had been, so I was pleasantly surprised when it ended.

Other than that, some shoulder opening; not a ton, but Rick says he’s thinking of putting us through that more next time, so maybe I’ll get back to working on that? Not sure; and I still do want to actually make it to two hours, so that will remain my focus for now. And we spent more time going up and down with good bodily connection, both as an isolated exercise and as part of Ji Ben 1-3.

Interesting Wu Song Shen Fa 1 session today: felt like stuff was moving more actively down my leg, and I also think I’m getting better at relaxing my foot quickly. Not yet getting as much upward movement as I’d like after that relaxing, though.

Anyways, I’ll try to mostly get back to normal this week. I definitely want to get back to Tai Chi, going through the various Chen forms and also spending more time on the Yang form. (It’s a Taiji lesson week, and I’d think about skipping a lesson if we were progressing with the form, but the next lesson is about something else.) And if I’m feeling energetic on Wednesday or Friday then I’ll try to do 2h Wu Ji, but I won’t worry about it otherwise, I put in enough work this weekend that I don’t feel like I need to press on that this week.

This week’s lesson was a Tai Chi lesson, on Fair Maidens Weave the Shuttle. Not much to say about that, just progressing through the form. I’m a little iffy on the details of the last few bits of the form, but I know basically how it works; I’ll definitely want to spend time consolidating that when I’m done with the form. (Which isn’t all that far from now!)

On Wednesday I did 1h45m of Wu Ji, my first time at that length. It wasn’t too tedious, given that; didn’t go nearly as well as last week, though, for whatever reason I had a hard time getting into anything like a Calm Abiding state. But hey, at least I’m getting used to these longer periods; 2h honestly feels like it will be not particularly pleasant but manageable. At least with bells going off (the bells in my last attempt were 35 minutes apart, so two bells in the middle); a 2h stand without any intermediate bells still feels like it might not be so great.

On Friday I went through the Spinal Dao Yin.

On Saturday I’ve normally been doing long single exercise Silk Reeling sessions but I skipped that this week, I wasn’t feeling great on Saturday. In general sleep has been off, though it’s been getting better – my younger dog is getting much better at sleeping through the night, and my older dog had something funny going on with his gut that was causing him to need to go out multiple times in the night for several days, but that’s done now. Though I noticed that my sleep was still not at its best, so I did a Wood Wu Xing session and a Jade Pillow session on Monday, hopefully that will get things back on a good pattern.

I also have been realizing that I haven’t been keeping up with several exercises – not doing Spinal Waves as frequently as much as I was for a while, or that Du channel stretch from the Nei Gong program. And also I haven’t been doing the Taiji standalone exercises, just the form. But I’m getting back to that now – for whatever reason, my brain was actually okay doing more of those yesterday even though I was pretty tired, so I did some WSSF 1 then and more back stretches, and some WSSF 3 today and more back stretches. So hopefully I can re-establish those habits. And they’re definitely necessary: my WSSF 1 wasn’t nearly as strong as it had been for a while, and even the level it had been was only starting to get interesting, there’s a lot more work in my body that I need to do to really build good Yang Taiji skills.

Another Foundations program this weekend, I’m looking forward to that. Will also be nice to see some people in person that I’ve been interacting with online in regards to my 2h Wu Ji attempts.

As noted in my last post, I was on a work trip in the middle of last week, so not as much Nei Gong as normal and much less Tai Chi than normal. And I didn’t find time to do a new lesson last week, either. I did keep up my daily Nei Gong, so it wasn’t a skipped week, but definitely a light one.

Having said that, the weekend was pretty solid. I had Tai Chi classes on both Saturday and Sunday; on Saturday, my long silk reeling exercise this week was Elbow Rotations. There wasn’t much of interest going on in the single arm versions, but the double arm version was pretty interesting, with a rather strong unfolding feeling going out through my chest to my elbows in the outward direction, and on the inward direction there was an unfolding lower down in my body. Other than that, nothing in particular to report; I am glad that we’re going through the Xin Jia first form pretty seriously in the Sunday class, though, there are details that I was getting wrong.

And I did do a long Wu Ji on Sunday; 1h30m again this time, but with 30 minute bell intervals instead of 15 minute. And it was surprisingly okay; it continued the pattern of a given duration not being particularly bad the second time I do it, even with the less frequent bells. I still think that no bells is going to be a problem, but hey, maybe I’m wrong about that?

I’m feeling a decent amount of ambient fullness in my spine during the day, and also there might be something interesting going on in my shoulders? (Maybe more Qi being present, maybe just more space being present.)

I’m going on a work trip on Tuesday and tomorrow is a little busy, so I’ll just do my weekly post today. And we’ll see if I do a new lesson this week or not; I might have time for that tomorrow, I’ll see. A Nei Gong class this week, Dredging the Channels 2; not much to say about that. On Wednesday I was sleepy enough that I didn’t want to try a long Wu Ji; I tried to do a decent length Calm Abiding, but I was sleepy enough that it wasn’t particularly effective. I got some good Tai Chi in during the afternoon, though; my first Wu Song Shen Fa for a while (20 minutes of WSSF1) and I also did 20 minutes of that exercise where you try to relax beneath the surface of the ground.

On Friday I was a little sleepy but not too bad so I decided to do a long Wu Ji; I ended up doing an hour and 30 minutes for the first time, so I guess that was a good choice! Not a particularly good long Wu Ji session, certainly not as good as the previous week, but it was fine until the last 15 minutes, and I stuck it out. Not sure if I’ll do 1h45m next week or stick with 1h30m but set my timer interval to 30 minutes instead of 15 minutes, but I’m leaning to the latter.

I didn’t have as much time for Advanced Dantian Gong a normal on Saturday so I wasn’t optimistic as to how it would go, but actually I felt a surprisingly strong connection between my hands and Dantian. (Maybe because of the Wu Ji the previous day.) And I had a good Calm Abiding session today; not the longest but pretty strong.

My long silk reeling exercise this week was Chest Opening and Closing. Didn’t feel much in terms of reeling the silk; my Yong Quan got a good workout, at least, and my lower back was surprisingly warm at the end, so that’s something.

This coming week is supposed to be rainy, so, between that and the trip, we’ll see how much Tai Chi practice I manage.

Good week; sleepier than I would like, Ulli is still having an effect, but manageable. I did the next Tai Chi class in Damo’s course: the straight line section of the form, plus a push hands exercise involving spreading your lower back. I can actually feel my back rearrange in a way that goes out my arms when I do that, so it seemed like something that I might be able to work; I tried it out on Saturday, though, and my push hands partner didn’t feel anything. So that reinforces my feeling that, if I’m going to ever get those to work, then I need to spend significantly more time on that course…

Anyways, on Wednesday I was a little sleepy so I just did some Wu Ji and 40 minutes of breathing exercises from the December workshop. I did a good amount of Tai Chi in the afternoon, though. And similarly on Friday (different Nei Gong but still not all that much for a day off); I finished going through my list of forms, and I’m starting to feel like the Hunyuan 48 and Yang 37 sequences are familiar, at least, even though I’m also getting a lot of the details wrong.

That feeling tired meant that I hadn’t done a long Wu Ji yet this week; so on Sunday I took a little bit of a nap and then tried to get back to doing a 1h15min Wu Ji. And it went quite well, possibly my best Wu Ji session ever? I had a good back stretch starting from the beginning, and I had a decent amount of internal inflation as well. I still need to try to get longer stretches of Calm Abiding during Wu Ji, but even short bits have an effect. (No long sitting Calm Abiding this week, alas.) I’ll try to do a 1h30min session of Wu Ji this week.

In terms of Chen Tai Chi, on Saturday I continued my long silk reeling, this time trying out Shoulder Rotations. I was planning to do it in 5 minute sections (adding to 50 minutes, because there are 10 parts to that one), but my shoulder was feeling a little funny so I dialed it down to 3. And at least I didn’t overstress myself, but also I got very little actual feeling of reeling the silk during that one. Which didn’t shock me too much, that one feels more about loosening up the joints than connecting the body.

Getting back to normal. I had a good sleep on Tuesday night, so I did a 1 hour Wu Ji session on Wednesday, it went fine. And I did some Tai Chi in the afternoon, too. On Friday I hadn’t slept as well; I did a sort of half-assed Spinal Dao Yin, a sleepy Calm Abiding, and no Tai Chi; still, something, better than the previous weeks.

On Saturday I continued to work on long versions of my teacher’s Silk Reeling Exercises. I’ve run out of the ones that clearly seem like good ideas, so I’m just doing the ones I haven’t done before starting in order. Which meant Neck Rotations today; I was thinking I might just do it for 20 minutes instead of 40, I was worried that it might overstress my joints. But then actually the first half of it, where I’m moving my chin from one shoulder to the other, really did feel like it was reeling the silk. So I did that for a full 20 minutes; and then I did 20 minutes of the second half, rotating my head (10 minutes in each direction). My TCM doctor has me do that (though not nearly as long), so I figured either doing it for a while would be extra helpful or a quite bad idea, and I hoped I could tell if it was the latter. And it seemed fine at the time, but then, later on in the class, my lower back started spasming a little; maybe it’s unrelated, but I assume it was caused by one part or the other of the silk reeling, with the head movements affecting my lower back? Nothing too bad, fortunately; annoying at the time but not a big deal, and I’m pretty much better now.

I had a pretty good Calm Abiding on Sunday; not one of my very best but entirely reasonable. I didn’t feel like doing Tai Chi on Sunday but I did some on Monday, we’ll see if I go through all the forms this week.

And I reviewed the last Nei Gong lesson this weekend and the last lesson from Damo’s Tai Chi course earlier in the week, so I’ll start doing new lessons again; today is a Tai Chi day. Though I will say that I’m not doing great at Damo’s form; ideally, I’d spend more time on that. And also ideally I’d get back to doing more of those various standing practices and the Wu Song Shen Fa, I’ve definitely been slacking there.

I was exhausted through Tuesday last week because of the (excellent) new puppy, but starting from Tuesday night my sleep started to get a little better. Yesterday I actually felt pretty awake even compared to pre-puppy days; that was an outlier, but being just manageably tired seems reasonable to expect now. I’m still not going to get back to lessons this week, but I think I might review my last Nei Gong and Tai Chi lessons this week with a goal of restarting lessons next week.

And similarly I didn’t do any long standing this week; I did a 30 minute session and some 20 minute sessions, but that’s it. Though actually those sessions felt surprisingly active inside, so hopefully I’m still in decent shape? My goal this week is to do a 1-hour session; I won’t sweat it if I’m not up for that, though.

In my Saturday Tai Chi class, I started doing the version of Wu Ji that my Chen Tai Chi teacher teaches; not too dissimilar from the Tai Chi Wu Ji in Damo’s class, though some details are different. Nothing too much to report there, though I’m glad I’m doing it. And I got back to doing my long silk reeling, this time spending 40 minutes on Diagonal Circles and Lie Splitting. Decently interesting, definitely worth spending the time on; though I feel like I’m approaching the end of the exercises in that set that will work well in a longer format. We’ll see; I’m planning to go through them all, though if some of them feel like they’re not a good idea then I won’t press them. There’s one in particular that’s a lower back opening exercise that I feel like wasn’t actually great for my back when I tried doing extra of it in the past; we’ll see how that one goes this time, but even if it doesn’t cause problems, I don’t know that it will actually help with developing the silk inside my body.

It was a Sunday Tai Chi week; went pretty well, and one of my fellow students was commenting that my Xin Jia was looking good, glad too see that my effort there is paying off visibly.