Tai Chi notes, December 4, 2018

My exciting discovery for this week: my shoes have always had their backs start tilting towards the inside as I wear them. And when I’ve been thinking about sinking into my kua, I’ve realized: by default, I stand a little knock-kneed. So that’s why my feet are tilted the way they are; and if I open up my kua a little bit, then that puts my knees in the correct position. And maybe that’s also part of the reason why my kua feels better when I open it up: maybe something is getting a little compressed by default? I don’t think that’s all of the explanation, but it could be part of it.

Another potential part of the explanation is that I’ve been continuing to do slow squats, with an emphasis on my kua rather than other parts of my thighs; I think that that’s slowly making my thighs stronger, with an emphasis on the upper parts. And that in turn makes them tingle, kind of by default. So if I’m thinking about how my kua feels, I notice that. But I think that that’s independent of opening up my kua. So, I still feel like there’s a third component of what’s going on, that there’s still some sort of sensation trigger specifically by opening my kua, relaxing, and letting attention or something fall from my dantian to a little lower in my body…

Anyways, a pretty normal week other than that. On Saturday, I asked about Dantian rotation, and had it confirmed that the center of the rotation should be lower than my navel. (I.e. it should be in my Dantian!) And Qigong went well today over lunch, I managed 20 minutes of Wuji without being distracted out of it without too much trouble. We’ll see how I keep that up over the winter, as it gets rainy; I’ll probably start doing meditation in conference rooms instead of outside, I did that once last week.

And I’ve been thinking I should write a piece over on my main blog about what I pay attention to during Silk Reeling Exercises. So I’ve taken some notes towards that, hopefully I’ll get it written over the next couple of weeks.