Nei Gong Notes, September 8, 2020

I took a stay-at-home vacation this last week, and one hypothesis was that I’d spend more time doing Nei Gong and Tai Chi. That hypothesis didn’t pan out; I didn’t do less overall, I think, but I didn’t do more? I think the main takeaway there is that I have a noticeable enough dip in energy during the afternoon that it’s hard for me to do a sustained session then; and so, if I spend the whole morning (until, say, 1pm or so) doing something else (playing Yakuza, say), then it’s an uphill battle to even do my normal Nei Gong amount that day.

Still, vacations are good just to relax, there’s something healthy about me letting myself do that instead of saying “I’m not spending time doing work that I’m paid for so I should spend time doing a different kind of work!”.

In terms of Damo’s course, this week’s class was pretty odd: it was a sort of memory training, where you’re supposed to mentally go through a part of your day (he suggests right after you get up) in real time, trying to use your body to help you remember. One thing I realized was how much I had to work to find a good 10-minute chunk where remembering things physically even makes sense: I spend a lot of time reading or doing puzzles or whatever! But, even with that, the exercise really didn’t click for me: I did it almost every day, but it was a struggle, and of all the classes so far in the course, this one was the worst match for me. I’m not particularly planning to come back to this one until my life changes in a way where I’m more regularly doing physical stuff, beyond the same morning stroll.

I also watched a recording of a two-hour Zoom course he gave the previous weekend that I couldn’t attend: it was on preparing for seated meditation, and it was pretty interesting. One specific thing that struck me was that he said that, once you get to a certain stage, your body will naturally sit quite upright instead of slumping, and that even before you get to that stage (some central channel opening up), you should still maintain some upward pressure in the center of your body.

The Saturday course was doing Dao Yins again; interesting enough, though I’m still not sure I’m going to work that into my regular routine.

Right now, in my morning meditation, I’m mostly working on breathing and sinking; I’ll try to get back to the Ting exercise and the exercise of setting up a bridge between your Huiyin and Dantian soon. (I did some of those a little bit, just not a lot.) And for my main session I’m mostly doing Dantian Gong (6 sections of it, 35-40 minutes), and making sure I go the Ji Ben Qi Gong over the course of the week, but sometimes I do ~20 minutes of Wu Ji instead of the Dantian Gong and/or mix in the Wu Xing Gi Gong or Thickening the Qi.

I did Tai Chi a couple of times over the vacation; again, I should keep that up. I didn’t do any Silk Reeling, I should make sure to do that during meetings now that I’m back at work.