Tai Chi Notes, March 10, 2020

Not the best week for Tai Chi, unfortunately: I started feeling like I might be coming down with something on Thursday evening, so I skipped my Wu Ji practice for the rest of the week, and I skipped most of Tai Chi on Saturday, only going in for the Jian bit. And I skipped Tai Chi tonight, too.

Fortunately, the cold or whatever it is hasn’t been too bad; I think I’ll start venturing out in the world again tomorrow, and I probably would have actually gone into work instead of working at home yesterday and today if it wasn’t for the COVID scare. And hopefully I’ll be able to go to a Lotus Nei Gong course from Saturday through Monday; focusing on the Ji Ben Qi Gong, which I would like to learn better.

Anyways, during the Jian practice, in the hop near the end, you should keep your sword angled up, in the direction where you’ll be thrusting it next; also, the hop should be a little bit forward.

On Sunday I at least did Silk Reeling at home. And one thing I noticed there: in exercises where I’m moving forward and back some (e.g. during shoulder rotations), there’s more room to open my Kua than I’ve been doing. And I think that’s what I should do, that my teacher might say that I’d been collapsing my back knee slightly? Keeping my Kua open more requires me to maintain a bit of an active stretch, which I think is probably good?

The funny thing about Thursday is that I actually felt like I had a really good Nei Gong practice over lunch; but I also felt relaxed and open in a way which somehow fit with the ache that was the start of being sick. And, similarly, doing Silk Reeling on Sunday felt good but also left me feeling vulnerable. It’s nice to think that this internal work helps protect from disease, but I don’t have any real reason to believe that that’s the case, and it almost seemed like it opened me up to disease moving around this week a little more. Dunno…