Nei Gong Notes, April 28, 2020

This week’s lesson in the Nei Gong course was on a seated Dao Yin exercise; fine, but I’m not feeling anything super interesting while doing it.

I chipped away some more at the stuff in the library on Wu Ji, making it up to my pelvis. And that was interesting; I tried relaxing my pelvis and it actually does sink more than it had been in the past. And sometimes I feel a little tingling around there while doing that. Still feels like there’s more work to be done in terms of sinking, and hopefully eventually things will start feeling differently supported in my abdomen?

Or maybe it’s tilting enough; eventually once it’s tilted enough you’re supposed to be able to sink your tailbone in a way that kind of locks your stance into place. And today, when relaxing and sinking my pelvis, I could feel a tug down my spine all the way down to the back of my neck. So it feels like it really is helping open up my spine, which is at least something.

(Though, on the note of feelings in Wu Ji, it’s actually been a while since I’ve felt the same sort of pleasant fluid tingling sensations that I had been feeling in the winter. I kind of miss that, but I’m not worrying about it for now, I’ve got enough other stuff to focus on now.)

When doing breathing practice, I found that I was able to observe more and controlling less, so I rewatched the abdominal breathing video. The five stages are: 1) quiet, 2) deep, 3) at ease, 4) slow, and 5) soft. So I’m doing better at quiet, and actually deep is going pretty well, too. In fact, I was making it pretty quickly / reliably to feeling like my breath is locked into my Dantian, so yay, I guess I’d been making progress on sinking my Qi to there and this is related to that? Still a little bit of consolidation work to do there, though, and then I’m waiting until slow starts showing up, I’ve only gotten one slightly twinge of that, mostly it doesn’t appear at all.

Did a bit of Tai Chi this weekend. One thing that I noticed while doing the form was that I felt noticeably more solid and rooted than I had been; maybe I’ve made an improvement in my posture that’s having an effect there?