Nei Gong Notes, September 1, 2020

Been kind of tired this week, hasn’t been the best for practice? Hasn’t been as bad as some weeks, though, just not wonderful.

This week’s Internal Arts Academy lesson was on a form of mental training (not meditation, it’s more active than that) where you let through thoughts about immediate sensations but cut off other thoughts as soon as you notice them. Interesting exercise; I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about what different parts of my body feel like, and then sometimes switching over to sounds around me. (I’m usually in a pretty quiet space, so not tons of the other.) And of course sometimes I lost track of the practice and my mind wandered off, as to be expected; more interestingly, once or twice, it seemed like my mind was doing two sorts of thinking at once, one with the sorts of thoughts that the exercise allows and then another simultaneous track about something else; the second track would go along for a while before I noticed it? Also, in terms of a taxonomy of thoughts that I was supposed to cut off, some were just about something completely different whereas some where more editorializing on what I was doing right then, which was an interesting distinction to notice.

We did a couple of standing Dao Yin exercises this Saturday in the class with Joyce and Rick. Interesting enough, though I’m not sure if I’ll keep them up. Though I suspect they’ll show up soon enough in Damo’s course – one of them was a standing version of a sitting Dao Yin that he introduced earlier, so probably it’ll show up when Dao Yin exercises return later in the year?

I’m taking a vacation this week; we’ll see if that means I do more Nei Gong, or if I spend lots of time playing video games. Or maybe I do the same amount of time doing Nei Gong but work in Tai Chi more regularly; that would be a good outcome, I’ve been feeling kind of achy today…