Nei Gong Notes, May 26, 2020

Not a ton to say this week. I’ve been getting back to doing the Ji Ben Qi Gong after going through those videos; and I’m immediately realizing that I’d been doing it a lot of it wrong, especially in the second half. (Basically, it’s less like the Silk Reeling Exercises than I’d thought.) So I should rewatch those videos at some point, but I should probably get my new normal in place first, so I’ll be able to more easily be surprised at my next set of mistakes when I watch it.

I’m continuing to go a little lower than I had been during Wu Ji, because I think that gets my center of gravity at my Dantian height instead of at the height of my navel. Which is more strenuous; for other reasons, I’m normally doing 20 minutes a day instead of 25, and that’s enough work! (But on weekends I’m trying to do 25 minutes.) I am trying to spend more time relaxing into my breathing during Wu Ji; I won’t say I’m doing a great job of relaxing, but it’s something. And I’m still needing to tweak my shoulder positioning, and finding it useful to do so; weirdly, I’m no longer finding that I can sink my pelvis very much, I’m not sure if that means that my pelvis is naturally sinking more or if I’m tightening up (maybe because of the lower position) in ways that make that harder.

Most days I’m doing two Ji Ben Qi Gong exercises, and I’m also trying to work in some Dantian-specific seated exercises, since Damo says that’s important right now. When doing the latter, I decided I didn’t feel super comfortable with my breathing, so now when I’m sitting at the start of the day, I’m trying to mostly just observe my breathing, thinking about what it means to be quiet. Right now I’m playing around with the transition between breathing out and breathing in, not having that feel like a jerk but also not having it be under conscious control; it’s hard! Still haven’t made much progress in having the breathing be naturally slow; presumably that will come eventually…

The Dantian exercises have been a little hit or miss: sometimes I feel like it’s actually harder to locate my Dantian at the start than it had been before! But today’s practice was quite good, I felt pretty noticeably buzzy inside. (Not a super strong feeling, but definitely present.) And sometimes when sitting around I’m feeling that if I quiet my breathing, too. So hopefully I’m making progress; a ways to go, though.