Nei Gong Notes, April 6, 2021

Not a whole ton to report on my practice this week; the main thing that I noticed was that, when I was trying to do Wu Ji, I found it surprisingly hard to maintain my willpower. Not sure how much of that was me happening to feel more tired than normal when doing that (which was certainly the case one of the times, not so clear the other time), how much of that was me getting out of the habit of doing Wu Ji standalone now that so much of my practice is taken up with Dantian Gong, and how much of that is potentially something else. Though when I did Wu Ji today (intentionally short, because I had some one-off sleep issues last night), I felt unusually connected, so that’s something good at least.

Anyways, this week’s lesson was on Preparation for Alchemy. Which was doing two things: one part was a recommendation to take up a more ascetic lifestyle for some temporary but unspecified period in preparation for something that’s coming up in year two of the course, and the other part was some exercises mostly related to opening up channels. (Gives me vague memories of the Heavenly Streams course.)

I haven’t seriously started the former yet, partly because I’m not planning to go straight into Year Two: I’m thinking that the fact that the Jing Gong exercises still aren’t doing anything for me is a sign that I might not quite be ready, so I’m going to spend some time reviewing old lessons and trying to learn the Dragon Dao Yins. But the other part is that I’m not entirely sure what things I want to give up, and also because I’m bothered by the open-ended nature: if I were single and living alone, I’d probably just do it, but I don’t feel great about giving up things in ways that affect other family members?

Also, I feel like there’s some kind of deeper motivation for what’s going on that makes the description in that lesson seem a bit off. E.g. giving up media seems a little off for me – I’m more worried about compulsive behavior than media in general. So it actually feels healthier to me to get better at watching movies without having a second screen open, or to just concentrate on reading books, than to give up movies / books? And if there’s one form of media that does feel healthy to me to give up, it’s social media, but Damo was pretty clearly talking about other forms of media. (Not that he said to keep on doing social media, I’m fairly sure he’d agree with pausing that, it’s just that his examples were other forms of media.) So I need to figure that out for now – should I focus on reducing compulsive tendencies instead of reducing other forms of media, or reducing both, or what?

I don’t have to worry about it too much right now, though, I can wait until I think I’m ready to start year 2.