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.

Basically nothing to report this week. I was taking it easy on Wednesday and Friday because of aftermath of the cold, and we got a new puppy on Saturday; he’s excellent, but also that meant no Tai Chi on Saturday and it’s basically wrecked my sleep. (And depleted my Jing, based on the way the back of my knees feel.) I haven’t been completely skipping my Nei Gong, but I’ve also only been doing the minimum.

No lesson last week because of the cold, and I won’t do one this week either: I’m going to hunker down and be in maintenance mode until sleep is better. We’ll see whether things get better before the February Foundation course; but if they don’t, they don’t, they will eventually.

This week’s lesson was a Nei Gong one on Dredging the Channels. Turned out to be a Hunyuan exercise that I’d seen last summer and that I’d been curious about, so I’m glad to have made it up to it in the course.

I had a good Calm Abiding on Wednesday – I was worried I’d fall asleep, but that was fine, and I was getting tons of Qi. I set the timer for an hour but I kept going for half an hour after that, honestly I would have kept on going longer if there hadn’t been Christmas-related stuff that I had to do.

I wanted to do an hour and a half of Wu Ji on Friday, but I only lasted an hour and 15 minutes, and it was really rough at the end. I’d thought at the start that I was a little tired but not out of the norm (honestly, just being a little tired is a pretty good day, I’ve had perfectly fine Wu Ji sessions like that), but clearly I was wrong and I pushed it too far. And, in fact, on Sunday I came down with a mild cold; I’m not sure if my experience on Friday was an early warning sign of the cold or if Friday was just tiredness and pushing it too far made me vulnerable to getting sick; either way, the lesson is that I should be more attentive to my body in situations like that.

My Chen Tai Chi teacher went over my Xin Jia form for the first time on Saturday. Lots of good advice; I was correct that I know it well enough for it to be worth showing him, but that also I’ll learn a lot from showing it to him. I’ll probably keep that up as my default form to show him for the next few times.

I took it easy on Sunday and Monday: I didn’t avoid Nei Gong as much as I would have if I were sicker, but I tried to avoid going into my body too much. So I mostly went through the new breathing exercises and the Jade Pillow neck stretches. I was feeling better this morning, so I did a little more Nei Gong today, but not like a usual day off; hopefully by Friday I’ll be feeling good enough to have a regular session, we’ll see.

And then on Saturday we’re getting another puppy, so that will throw another wrench into things. But I like puppies, so it will be a good change even so!

A Tai Chi lesson this week: Turn Body, Chop, and Push. Seems fine, though I should work on it more (and, honestly, the previous bit of the form too); reminds me a little bit of the silk connections I get from Chen Tai Chi.

I did a 1h15m Wu Ji session on Wednesday. It went fine, I kept my head up and got a stretch on my back, so that nicely solved the back pain. (My lower back actually ached a little bit from the stretch, but that was entirely manageable and, I’m fairly sure, healthy.) Mentally, it was fine too; I wanted it to end more than I’d like but it was manageable; I’ll bump it up to 1h30m next time. I worked on the Reverse Breathing upgrade in the afternoon; probably haven’t done that as much as I should, to be honest. I was also hoping to do a fair amount of the Chen Xin Jia first form that afternoon, but it was feeling a little off, so I stopped after going through the form twice, and honestly I didn’t go through it as seriously as I would have liked during those two times through the form.

I did some Shui Gong 2 on Wednesday night; I fell asleep before I finished, it didn’t particularly help or hinder sleep. And I did it last night; the quality of my awareness has changed there, in ways that I think are related to it no longer causing me sleep problems. Still isn’t actively helping with sleep, but I no longer feel like I have to careful about when I try that one. Which reminds me that I should start Shui Gong 3 at some point; I think I’ll keep on going with 1 and 2 for a while before I start that, though.

I did the Spinal Dao Yin on Friday. And I had an acupuncture appointment, and my doctor complained again about my neck vertebrae; so maybe I should get back to the Jade Pillow exercise? I did that a couple of times over the last week, and my sleep might actually be getting better; also, I’m feeling really tired right around when I should be going to sleep, I remember that happening before when Jade Pillow was helping me get things in order. So maybe that theory is correct, and I should work Jade Pillow into my regular routine (once a week? or when I’m noticing sleep problems?) instead of assuming that I’ve accomplished what it is designed to do.

I was hoping that my Tai Chi teacher would go over my Xin Jia form this Saturday, but he was out on holiday; hopefully he’ll be able to do that this week, but we’ll see, sometimes it takes him a while to catch up to skipped weeks. Wouldn’t hurt for me to have more time to practice it.

On Sunday I had a so-so arm stretch session, but a pretty good Calm Abiding session. Not as good as the one two weeks earlier, but better than any other one I’ve had since then.

Today I went through the new class on Breathwork for Qigong. My main takeaway there is that I really do have problems with the basics of that: my breathing is too fast and shallow. Which I’ve kind of known but it hasn’t been a priority; healthy to get a nudge, and to get a wider range of exercises to attack that, but I’m not yet committing to spending time on that. (Especially since I need to make time for doing Jade Pillow a little more often.)

Nei Gong lesson week, with the topic being Reverse Breathing Upgrade. Seemed pretty straightforward, and I think I could feel what it’s going for to some extent, but I’ll definitely want to practice it a decent amount more. (Cue ongoing refrain that I have too many seated exercises that I want to work on.)

I did Wu Ji for 1h15m on Wednesday, my first time doing it that long at home. It mostly went well; my back started aching a bit 45 minutes in, and around 55 minutes in my legs deflated noticeably, but I managed to re-establish the inflation. Around 65 minutes in, my body started feeling full and connected. I kept my eyes closed the whole time, so while I certainly wasn’t free from mental turmoil, it was manageable.

After thinking about it a bit, I suspected that the back ache meant that I’m not raising my head enough during Wu Ji, so my lower back is getting compressed instead of hanging off; and a more senior (I think?) student on the IAA Discord suggested the same thing. So I focused on that during a (much shorter) Wu Ji session later on in the week; sure enough, there’s a lot more room for me to maintain stretch in my back. Definitely something to work on next time; I’ll keep the 1h15m duration, we’ll see how much more comfortable it is.

And I think the feeling of connection was a sign of more Qi getting into my body? It’s hard to say 100% for sure, because I’d already been feeling a little full because of the really good Calm Abiding in the previous week, but I think the Wu Ji topped me up again.

I also did Shui Gong 2 that night for the first time in a while. At first I thought that it had gone kind of badly, keeping me awake a little bit, but then my sleep was fine, maybe even a little better than normal? So something to keep on experimenting with.

On Thursday I had a pretty good Ji Ben 2, and I did find time to work in Concentration 2; maybe I’ll be able to get in the habit of doing that on Thursday evenings, though I don’t know that doing it once a week will be enough for that to matter. And I’m also a little worried that doing it in the evenings might affect sleep; I did it then because Damo recommended it for that specific exercise, but still. My sleep wasn’t good, at any rate, though it could just have been congestion, hard to say.

On Friday, I had an okay arm stretch, but my Calm Abiding was bad, probably because my sleep was short. On Sunday my Calm Abiding was better, but still not great; I’m also wondering if doing Calm Abiding late in the morning (which is where it often ends up on Wednesdays and Fridays, often not even starting until around noon) is actually just a bad idea for my body’s rhythms, and so I should do it in the afternoon after lunch and after a brief nap if I’m sleepy? Not sure, I might experiment with that this week.

Today I was doing the Spleen Hui Chun, and, inspired by Calm Abiding, I decided to soften my attention more (e.g. during the bit with my hands on my Yellow Court), and it felt like it strengthened that exercise. So I should do that more, in a wider range of exercises.

Not much to say about Chen Tai Ji; I kept on plugging away, nothing particularly special happened. It was my week to lead the silk reeling at the start of class, so I didn’t do a long silk reeling exercise; and that means that my teacher will review my form next week. I’m planning to show him the Xin Jia first form the first time, so I’ll spend extra time reviewing that this week, even if it means that I don’t review all the other forms.

I started rereading Chen Taijiquan: Masters and Methods, which is a series of interviews with famous Chen masters. It’s really good, and there were some bits that connected specifically to stuff I’ve been thinking about recently, e.g. a couple of bits about Song and one bit about using Wu Ji to build Qi. Those topics are both quite relevant to a course I was thinking of giving next year, so it’s really good to get the take of people who know so much more about the subject than I ever will.

Taiji week, covering the third of those 37 static positions, this time on pressing / Ji. If I had more time to spend on Damo’s Taiji class, I would want to put in a decent amount of time on these positions, I think; unfortunately, my time budget lets me work on the form and sometimes go through the Wu Song Shen Fa sets, but not much more, and I think for now I’m right to prioritize the WSSFs over the static postures. Still, something to think about in the future. It was interesting seeing how my body reacted when I tried to push my elbows toward each other; I wouldn’t have expected it to feel like much, but it was a noticeable push, and did lead to some movement elsewhere in my body.

On Wednesday, I did an hour of Wu Ji; it went well, I was more comfortable than the previous week, and while I was kind of hoping it would be over soon during the last 15 minutes, I also was surprised when the bell rang after that. And I didn’t open my eyes the whole time. I did an hour of Calm Abiding after that, and that was a mistake: I was a little sleepy going in (which actually made me a little surprised that the Wu Ji went well), and also my back ached a bit after the Wu Ji, so between those two I didn’t ever really get into any useful state. So, going forward, I’ll avoid that combo; if I feel like doing a decent length sitting session after the longer Wu Ji, I’ll do something moving (maybe the hour-long MCO prep set?), but also maybe I’ll just do something shorter or have lunch and then sit in the afternoon. At any rate, I’m glad the Wu Ji went well, I’ll bump it up to 1:15 next time.

On Wednesday afternoon, I did an hour of Wu Song Shen Fa 4. Nothing particularly special happened then, these hour-long WSSF sessions continue to mostly be a bust for me. (Don’t get me wrong, I still think the WSSF are valuable for me, it’s just not at all clear that doing an hour buys me much compared to doing them for 20 minutes, except maybe for WSSF 3.)

On Friday morning, I had a bad Nei Gong session in the morning, enough so that I stopped during my preparatory Wu Ji (I was planning to do a shoulder stretching session). I was even a little worried that I was feeling sick, but I also thought that maybe I was just too tired, so I ate lunch and took a nap. (I did do a stretching session on Sunday to make up for that.) And I was feeling good enough after that that I decided I’d try out a Calm Abiding session, and it might have been my best one yet? I won’t say that I felt as chill coming out of it as after some of my ones in the summer, but I wasn’t sleepy at all (which is surprising, given the circumstances!), but even though I was, in some sense, alert, it didn’t actually feel like an hour had passed, and I could definitely feel the Qi was building in my body. And my body continued to feel subtly energized over the upcoming days, and sometimes not so subtly: right now as I’m typing this, I feel a tingling in my stomach at the front of the Ming Line, and when I was doing Compressing the Pearl earlier today (which went very well), I was actually feeling a kind of weird Qi-ish tingling in my neck.

As to Chen Tai Chi, I haven’t been talking so much about the regular part of my practice, but it’s been going well. I’ve gone through all the forms every week for the last several weeks, and I’m doing a good job of trying to do more and more of the forms well instead of just trying to keep the basic moves in mind. I’m not actually going through bits of them over and over again (other than the specific new forms that I’m learning), but still, there’s a difference between going through forms seriously versus just going through the motions. I’m particularly focused on the Xin Jia first form now, I’m going to show that form to my teacher the next time he gives me solo advice (which should be in two or three weeks).

My long Silk Reeling exercise this week was Dantian to Wrist Circling In; there was more going on in my hips than normal, and about 35 minutes in, the end of the spiral out on one hand turned in a stretch all the way through to the other hand that helped me maintain a feel of connection there; that’s good, that was the one part in that exercise that had felt like a gap to me.

Also, at some point during the weekend, I was working on the Lao Jia punch, and my body was really spiraling well during that, with a lot more of my body working together to generate the punch.

This week’s lesson was a Nei Gong one, showing a Du Stretch. I was a little worried because, towards the end of year two, there had been an Opening the Du lesson that I couldn’t do because it messed with my sleep, but fortunately this one didn’t come with that warning. And, even more fortunately, it’s an awesome stretch: I honestly think that I could bend further down after doing that once than I ever could before. So it’s helping open up my spine; and, a few days later, I realized my leg muscles were aching in ways that made me think it’s helping with my hamstrings, too. Both of which are parts of my body that I definitely could use help with, so I’m going to work this one into my regular routine.

Pretty solid Nei Gong week in general. A good Calm Abiding on Thursday; an hour of Wu Ji on Friday (still getting antsy towards the end, but a little better this time than last time); an okay Calm Abiding on Sunday and a good 15 minute arm stretch; and a good Compressing the Pearl on Monday, I’m doing a much better job of maintaining contact on the way down. A good mixture; I’ll want to stick with the hour-long Wu Ji session every week.

On Saturday, I did 40 minutes of Dantian to Wrist Circling Out. Pretty interesting, I had a surprisingly strong correction between my hand and Kua. (Oddly, it was stronger with my left hand than with my right.) And I did high Zhan Zhuang on my pre-Tai Chi-class standing, I’ll probably stick with that through December.

A Tai Chi lesson this week; continuing through the form, Needles to Sea Bottom and Fan Through Back; seemed fine. If I’m remembering correctly, my energy was a little low on Wednesday, but I did my once-a-month Spinal Dao Yin exercise anyways; went fine, even though that takes an hour it honestly just isn’t that draining once I sit down and do it. And I think I’m probably getting a little better at just doing longer exercises instead of being distracted constantly during them? Still work to go there, to be sure, but it’s something.

And this weekend was the second Foundations in-person session. I was a little worried at the start, because I thought I might be coming down with something, but I was feeling fine when I woke up on Saturday, so I went anyways and fully participated, and even Saturday was totally fine. (Much better than the Saturday of the first session!) Nothing super deep during the weekend, but a good solid practice; some interesting Dantian Gong variants on Saturday morning (and actually at least one of them set up connections between hands and other parts of the body), I feel like my hands are getting better and better synced up with various parts of my inside. Among other things, we did Ji Ben 1 on Saturday afternoon, and there my hands really were lifting basically entirely on their own as I stood up. (So it’s a two-way connection; actually it feels like the connections from Silk Reeling are helping here too.) Going down wasn’t as good, there continues to be this bit at the beginning where the correct level drops suddenly at the start of the descent, and my hands don’t come along with that.

Sunday morning was some sitting; Sunday afternoon was standing (for about an hour and a half), some Ji Ben 1, and some Ji Ben 2. Less good hand connection that day compared to the previous day, and going down continued to be rough; Rick said at the time that I should move my pelvis back more, that I was sinking into my knees too much, but I wasn’t able to get that to really help me on Sunday. I practiced Ji Ben 1 at home yesterday, though, and I worked on what Rick said, and that did actually nicely solve my problem, I’m managing to get an internal pull basically the whole way down now.

The main changes in my practice coming out of that are that I should work Ji Ben 1/2 into my practice pretty regularly (once a week, maybe?) for the next while, and also I should bump up the length of my Wu Ji practice; we said that, for the third session in February, we wanted to target 2 hours of Wu Ji, so I should clearly start doing 1 hour sessions pretty regularly but I should also probably try 1.5 and 2 hour sessions at home. I’m pretty sure I can do that physically: won’t be the most comfortable thing, but my legs can hold themselves up for a while these days, so while I expect my legs, feet, and back to hurt some after a couple of hours, it’ll be manageable. I expect the mental side of it to be more of a problem: between boredom, pain (manageable but still it exists) and a feeling that my mind has that it should be feeling bothered by this even though the physical symptoms aren’t that bad objectively, two hours will be a problem. But if I can make 1 hour of Wu Ji be a routine thing and work on Calm Abiding (while standing, but probably doing it sitting will help too), hopefully I’ll get to where 2 hours isn’t a massive struggle by February? And even if it is still really hard to do at home, hopefully I’ll manage to do it in a group…

It was a Nei Gong week, with the lesson being on Stretching for Lotus. Not going to spend much time on that: most of the stretches there are quite easy for me, and while I do definitely need work on my hamstrings, I don’t know that there’s anything super special about this set for that purpose. I did do the set again on Wednesday, and then did my Calm Abiding practice in full lotus; I stopped after about 40 minutes, the knee of my outside leg was hurting in a way that felt a little dangerous? Which relates to one part of the stretch set, where he said to put a foot high up on the opposite leg while doing a certain twist, because it would stress your knee if your foot was too far down; I imagine that’s what was happening to me, because my foot had slipped decently far down my thigh. So that’s something to work on, and maybe the stretching set would be useful for that if full lotus becomes a priority; but I also feel like having it basically be fine for over 30 minutes is good enough for me now.

Also on Wednesday I did 15 minutes of the arm stretch exercise I learned from Rick; still chipping away at that, still thinking I should do it a little more often. And I did a decent amount of Calm Abiding during Wu Ji on other days in the week; went pretty well (not that they were long Wu Ji practices), though I’m a little worried that it might cause sleep problems? Also I saw my allergist, and she said my allergies weren’t getting worse, I just had had a sinus infection for a few months; she started me on a medicine, it’s helping with my sinus cavity, though my sleep hasn’t improved the way I hoped, I’m not quite sure what’s going on there.

On Saturday I did 45 minutes of the Oblique Circles silk reeling form. It wasn’t super interesting in the single hand version: maybe a bit of a feeling of stretching out a sheet in front of my body, but that’s about it. The two hands version was rather more interesting, though: the bottom hand stretched out the sheet and then, once it got to the front of my Kua, the rotation of the bottom hand pulled my top hand over. Spear practice on Saturday was pleasant, too: the weapon is starting to feel good in my hand, I think my body is connecting with it more.

A good Calm Abiding practice on Sunday: 60 minutes without dozing, and while I didn’t get into a super chill state, I did manage to reliably get quickly back into an expansively abiding state with my mind when I got distracted.

Another Foundations class this weekend; I’m looking forward to that, I just hope that my sleep cooperates.

A Tai Chi lesson week, covering Golden Rooster and the kicks that follow that. Seems straightforward enough.

On Wednesday morning I watched the fourth Uluwatu Foundations video; nice to get in an almost three hour session. And on Sunday I watched a theory video about the Dantian that was added to that series even though it wasn’t from the Uluwatu class; I don’t know that there was any individual bit that I hadn’t seen before but it was a useful reminder of the mental state I should try to get into. Probably worth a rewatch in a month or so? Good to be all caught up with Foundations videos before the next course in a week and a half.

At the start of my Saturday Tai Chi class I did 30 minutes of Zhan Zhuang and then continued my series of focusing on one Silk Reeling exercise, this time Waist Turning and Punching. Nothing particularly special that happened this time as I kept on doing it; my Yongquan was buzzing but I think that’s the Zhan Zhuang setting things up. My punching did feel unusually solid, but it felt that way right from the start, it wasn’t from the repetition. Nice feeling of progress, though, I wonder what led to that? One other thing I noticed during the class: I’d recently been paying attention to the expansion in my arms during Reverse with Spiraling Forearms, but there’s also expansion in my Kua, I should pay attention to both expansions simultaneously.

We had Sunday Tai Chi class this week as well. I decided to do some Zhan Zhuang at the start of it as well, and in between my showing up early and the class not getting started until a bit after the official start time, that ended up as a 50 minute session. Which was my longest Zhan Zhuang session, I kind of wish the class hadn’t started for another 10 minutes so I could have put in a full hour; and I was pretty surprised that it had been 50 minutes, I knew it had been a while but it felt more like 40. For both of these sessions, I did a sort of medium height Zhan Zhuang – not the low version that Chen Xiaowang was showing us, but also at the height that my arms were naturally reaching to, so they felt internally supported, instead of having my arms be straight ahead.

We were going over a bit of the Lao Jia first form and some interesting connections came up between my shoulder and hip during the section from Dantian Change to White Goose Displays the Wings; I should pay attention to that. (In that section, but probably in the whole form.) Also I did a bit of push hands practice with somebody who was having me always be on his center, pointing out whenever I slipped of, I should try that more.