Tai Chi Notes, August 1, 2019

I was visiting my parents for a few days, so a slightly late update.

I did Wu Ji as normal on Thursday, and did the Animal Frolics for the first time in a while. And I also set up Streaks on my phone to prompt me to do Wu Ji every day: I’m not yet committing to doing it daily, but I want to at least consider doing it every day. Which worked on Friday, I did Wu Ji then as well.

Unfortunately, on Friday evening, I started sneezing and having a runny nose like crazy, like my cold was having a resurgence. I’d had an allergy shot that morning, so I’m pretty sure it was the shot, but it was a quite bad reaction. So on Saturday I mostly skipped Tai Chi class – I showed up near the end to learn the next Jian move and to see if we were going to learn any new Xinjia moves (we didn’t), but I didn’t feel up for the whole thing.

On Sunday I traveled to my parents, and on Monday I was having coffee with a former teacher of mine downtown and decided I was feeling good enough after that to do some Tai Chi; I ended up going through the full Silk Reeling Exercises and going through the form twice, and then after lunch I did some Wu Ji. And I was actually feeling diligent enough that, at the end of the evening, I did a bit of Wu Ji and some meditation before going to bed.

Unfortunately, my stomach really wasn’t feeling great the next day; almost positive that it was just mucous rather than anything associated to what I was doing, but at any rate I skipped practice on Tuesday and Wednesday. (Other than Dantian Rotations; which, thinking about it now, might be a mistake, my stomach muscles actually don’t feel great because of all the coughing, so maybe that’s what I should be skipping.) But I’m feeling better today, so I decided to do a bit of Wu Ji; ended up only doing 10 minutes instead of my current goal of 19 minutes, but hopefully I’ll be able to get back into the saddle pretty quickly.

And I decided to go to a local Lotus course in a couple of weeks, so hopefully I won’t have the same allergy problems before that happens! I’ll want to dial down the dose next week, to increase the chance of that. I’d been thinking I would skip the local Lotus courses for now, just going to courses when Damo Mitchell is visiting, but the next course is a three-day one (Saturday-Monday) on standing postures, so I’d only have to miss one day of work and it’s a topic that I’m interested in. A pity that it’s only a couple of weeks after getting back from vacation, but not much I can do about that…