Nei Gong Notes, June 16, 2020

The topic in the Academy this week was a seated exercise sending your awareness outside your body, stretching farther beyond your skin a few millimeters at the time. Which I’m finding surprisingly hard to do: my awareness keeps on getting stuck just behind my skin, on places like the hairs on my arms.

Though I haven’t practiced it as much as I’d like: I felt on Thursday like I was on the edge of coming down with a cold. I ended up being fine (though I was very sleepy on Friday), but I only did maybe half of my normal practice the next few days, and I didn’t participate nearly as much in the Saturday Nei Gong class as normal. Getting back to normal practice now, though standing is being hard; some of the latter might be because I’m trying to stand lower than I had been, admittedly.

Because of that, I think I’m not going to start a new lesson this week: I’ll take advantage of the somewhat self-paced potential of online course and practice the current set of stuff for another week.

When doing seated stuff, I’ve often been working on just sinking, and that’s been a good choice. Partly because the sinking can sometimes be very intense: it creates a quite strong tug on the back of my neck, and gets my mind in interesting places. But also it seems like it might be being helpful on building up my Dantian: I was feeling an unusual amount of tingling around there today, for example. Might be a coincidence, but it seems like the direction I want to go in?

One thing I noticed while doing Wu Ji over the weekend is that I looked a little bit turned sideways in the mirror, even though my feet seemed like they were lined up appropriately. I think what’s going on was that I’m not folding into my right Kua quite as much as my left? So I’m working on that.

Not doing as much Tai Chi as I’d like, but I’ve done it a couple of times while Liesl was walking Widget. And I’m trying to alternate between starting with the Lao Jia first form (hopefully going through it three times) and following up with the Lao Jia second form, versus starting with the Xin Jia first form and following up with the Jian. I’d been skipping those last two too much; hopefully I can get back to where I finish off the Jian form and at least don’t slip further back with Xin Jia…