Nei Gong Notes, June 9, 2020

This week’s topic for the Internal Arts Academy was some standing exercises for building the Dan Tian. Which is good: building that is something that I definitely need work on, but I could also use more standing practice, just to work on my ability to stand in Wu Ji or similar postures for longer. The new exercise had four parts, so I’m doing 5 minutes of Wu Ji, 5 minutes in each of the parts, and then maybe another couple of minutes of Wu Ji; so 25 minutes or maybe a little more, good to have that bumped up from the 20 minutes I had been doing the last few weeks. And most days I’m doing a couple of the Ji Ben Qi Gong exercises after that; and frequently at the end of the work day I’m fitting in some time for the seated Dan Tian exercises.

Still not seeing a particular effect of this Dan Tian work most of the time. In the start of the morning sitting, I’ve been going back to just working on breathing, because I’m still nowhere near hitting the stage where I’m having my breathing get naturally longer. Though today I decided to work on sinking my awareness first, and that was kind of interesting; felt like the breathing was naturally deeper, and more twinges on my Dan Tian than normal? So I’ll stick with that for the next week and see how it goes.

One surprise that I noticed this week is that I’m naturally starting to tuck my pelvis more: e.g. when I go down into a squat, my butt starts curving under a little instead of going out back. So that’s cool, and presumably a sign that I’m starting to relax more there.

We had the second week of the online Nei Gong classes from our local teachers. We were going over Compressing the Pearl, and I asked about the fact that my hands lose contact at the bottom of the arc. They said I wasn’t going deep enough, so I guess my sense of how high I am needs to be a little more tweaked; and when I went a little deeper, I did keep contact further, but I also noticed that some of that contact manifested in feeling like I was spreading sideways in my Ming Men. Which seems like a good thing?

Haven’t been doing Tai Chi as much: I didn’t do it at all this weekend, in fact. Though I did do it on two weekday end of the afternoons; I’ll try to keep that up? And one unrelated thing that I had been doing on Sundays has now come to an end, so I’ll have a little more time on Sundays, hopefully I’ll be able to slot in Tai Chi there. My back was feeling a little achy today, which made me think that I would probably be helped by exercising a bit more, even setting aside the other potential benefits of Tai Chi.