Nei Gong Notes, June 2, 2020

Feels weird to be writing this now. But anyways: my local Nei Gong teachers have decided to hold online classes over Zoom for an hour and a half for the next few weeks, this Saturday was the first one. They were focusing on the kua, so they had us spend a lot of time standing, folding into the kua, and seeing what that felt like. Which was surprisingly interesting; I got a much better feel for the pressure of my hip on my kua, what that feels like; and I think it probably also means that I’m doing a better job of relaxing that part of my body?

This week’s lesson on the Internal Academy was about shutting down at the end of practice; not a big topic, and one I’d seen before. So it’s not changing my practice routine particularly, I’m focusing on my breathing and locating / building my Dantian, mostly the former.

And the recommended side lectures for this part of the course are on the Heavenly Streams, i.e. channels. I went through a few of them; interesting, theory so far instead of practice, the one on the Five Pulses was material that wasn’t at all familiar to me and seemed like it might be interesting to experience internally? And then it talked about a set of Qi Gong exercises that I haven’t seen before, and I liked the conceptual framing. Looking ahead in the main course, I see those will show up there a few weeks from now, so I’m pausing watching those lectures; just as well, I’d been thinking I should rewatch some of the earlier parts of the main course, so this is a good excuse.

I’ve been slacking off on my Tai Chi: done it a little bit, but only a very little bit. Silk Reeling is starting to feel reliably fairly intense, though, so that’s something.