Tai Chi Notes, June 15, 2019

I was busy evenings this week, so late notes! I’m not going to talk about today, I’ll put that in next Tuesday’s notes.

On Thursday, I did Wu Ji like normal (well, almost like normal, it was later in the afternoon than normal), with Ji Ben Qi Gong after that. And, for whatever reason, I felt different (more energy popping up in my body) for something like two days after that? Which was good news: I’d kind of been feeling like I was on a downward trajectory since the seminar ended, so it’s good to know that I can have sustained upward bits too.

The next question is: how can I do that again? Might have been a fluke, might have been doing Ji Ben Qi Gong instead of Animal Frolics, might have been something less obvious (the time of day??). For now I’m going to switch to alternating Ji Ben Qi Gong with Animal Frolics, instead of doing two-thirds Frolics and one third Qi Gong.

On Saturday, it was my turn to lead Silk Reeling and the first time through the form. I think it went well? One of the senior students mentioned after that that, when doing the block with my left hand in Flash the Back, my elbow is above my hand, so that’s something to work on.

On Sunday, when practicing, I started to feel not so great about about how I do Thrust the Right / Left Foot: I’m not really putting in energy in either the push or the kick. So I’ll work on putting more force into both of those.

On Monday (I think, maybe it was Friday?), I was listening to an episode of Mitchell’s podcast and I decided to practice sinking my Qi while walking around, and I think I’m getting to where I can fairly quickly and reliably sink it to about the height of my bottom of my sternum? Whereas, once it hits that level I can sink it further, but that’s quite a bit slower and less reliable. And, perceptually, it kind of feels like there’s a V shape going down, so I should aim at reliably drilling it down further? Not actually sure that what’s going on there is really the same thing as sinking the Qi, I should try paying attention in other circumstances where I have a slightly better feel for the latter. So it might just be physical relaxation of muscles inside my body; or maybe that’s all that sinking the Qi is… But I think it’s probably a good thing either way – even if it’s just relaxing, being able to easily get relaxed that way seems good, and working on improving that also seems useful.

On Tuesday, it was my next time to do Ji Ben Qi Gong after Thursday; and, unfortunately I didn’t have the same persistent experience. So, whatever’s going on, it’s not as simple as Ji Ben Qi Gong reliably triggering that. The one interesting thing that happened then was that Compressing the Pearl felt quite a bit more physical than it normally does, like there was real resistance there; I feel like I’ve experienced that in a class but not during my normal practice. And, incidentally, I’m definitely glad that I’ve stuck in bits of Wu Ji between each of the exercises there, that feels helpful.

I skipped Tai Chi class on Tuesday evening, because of other stuff that was going on. And I skipped Wu Ji on Thursday, because I was super sleepy and was almost positive that I wouldn’t be able to put in anything like a productive session…