Tai Chi Notes, May 28, 2019

The immediate physical aftereffects of the Nei Gong seminar have, sadly, basically completely disappeared by now. I’m not entirely sure what the implications of that are: worst case would be that going was a no-op, but hopefully there’s knowledge, behavioral, and physical restructuring which are still having an effect?

Speaking of behavior, I’ve tried to change my start-of-the-morning schedule to replace 10 minutes of reading Twitter with 10 minutes of meditation; that’s probably a good change straight up (honestly, replacing Twitter with almost anything is probably good…), but I do feel physically different after the meditation, and those effects are lasting for several hours after the meditation itself: e.g. I feel different walking from the train station to work. So that’s something to build on. And sometimes I’m meditating longer; that gives me more of the physical sensations through my torso and limbs (Yang Qi?) but not yet as much as I’d like in my Dantian.

I’m still feeling like my thighs need a bit of a break, so I’m back to doing Lotus Wu Ji three times a week (Sunday / Tuesday / Thursday). Hopefully I’ll be able to work that in more days, though, as I get stronger. I am trying to work in more meditation sessions on other days, though.

In terms of Tai Chi stuff, one note from the Saturday class: In sweep after Two Feet Up, move your right foot forward a bit so that, when doing Protect the Heart Fist, you have space between the two feet to make it easier to turn the waist when striking. (At least that’s what one of the relatively advanced students told me.) And, in that strike, you strike with the right arm turned so the back side is in the striking direction.

We’re getting near the end of the spear form; I’ve missed enough classes recently that I’m not super optimistic that I’ll be able to reliably do the whole form after we’re done. We’ll see; hopefully at least it will be something to build on. On which note we’ll be doing the Jian form next; that one was really hard to learn the first time, and I more or less gave up about two thirds of the way through, we’ll see how it goes the second time.

Today was rough; I normally do allergy shots on Wednesdays but this week I did it today instead, and maybe because of that I had a really hard time doing Wu Ji over lunch. And almost certainly because of that I was very tired when I got home, so I decided to skip Tai Chi. Hopefully just a one-time thing, though…