My back has been doing quite a bit better this week, the tightness there is almost completely gone. And I’ve been doing more Wu Ji than I had been, and it’s gone back to feeling effective, so that’s a good sign.

I’ve done a decent amount of practice, though for various reasons I didn’t do much extra practice on Wednesdays and Fridays. I did rewatch two old lessons this week and take notes, though; I’m going to try to get into a habit of doing that most weeks, there are definitely a bunch of exercises that I don’t completely remember and that I would like to occasionally get in the habit of doing. One of the ones this week was Thickening the Qi; that one I did remember, and I used to be in the habit of doing it once every week or two, but I’ve fallen out of that habit; a little depressing that my Qi honestly doesn’t feel so thick these days. Another sign that I would benefit from bumping up my overall practice level.

This week’s lesson was on a seated exercise sequence for building up your Water energy. It looked familiar, I think I might have seen a random video of Damo’s where he showed it? I haven’t actually practiced it before, though, but I rather like it; it’s soothing, it feels like it might be doing something useful around my lower back, and it feels a lot shorter than the 27 minutes it actually takes. So I’ll probably want to work that into my practice routine occasionally in the future.

This also raises an issue with my practice routine: I have a regular 25-minute slot in the morning where I do seated work, rotating through a sequence of exercises over the week. But now (and for the next four weeks, since we’re going through all five elements) that’s taken up by new lessons. So I think I should probably find more time to do a second round of seated work at some point; I certainly don’t want to repurpose my existing standing work slot for doing seated work, but just 25 minutes of seated work shouldn’t always be my answer. To be sure, right now I really do want to build up my stamina for standing work; but if I’m feeling physically tired but not sleepy, and if I’ve got some room in the day, it would be better to keep going with seated work than to stop practice just because I’m tired. Though unfortunately right now I am sleepy more than I’d like, and of course I also do have to actually do my job on work days, so there are real constraints, but still.

Tai Chi is going fine; not a lot to say there, just keeping on with stuff. I’m still optimistic that I’ll be able to learn the whole Xin Jia first form this time.

Not a lot to say this week; sleep has been iffy (hopefully that will get better as we make progress on house stuff), and my back is still feeling tight. I was doing some Wu Ji on Sunday, and I was feeling surprisingly little there, especially at the start; ten minutes in and I was starting to feel a little more going on, but the back stuff is affecting me more than I thought, especially first thing in the morning. So I should work on my back a little more (heating pad? ibuprofen? lots of back stretches?), and I should probably spend more time just doing Wu Ji instead of mixing brief Wu Ji bits in between other exercises so that I can build that back up.

I did review old lessons on both Wednesday and Friday last week, though; hopefully I can set up a routine of doing that twice a week. It’s definitely happening to me that I’m thinking “oh, I should do that one exercise” and I can’t quite remember how it went.

One note I forgot from Sunday Tai Chi a couple of weeks ago: in Big Forearm Fist / Small Forearm Fist in the second form, your hand/foot synchronization switches in the two halves: in the first one, your right arm moves in as your right foot moves, whereas in the second one, your left arm moves in as your right foot moves. (So it ends with your right arm, which matches with how your right arm/hand comes down to be ready for the next move.

Bad week for sleep, so I didn’t manage any long Nei Gong sessions. Though I did at least manage a decent variety of practice: going through all of Dantian Gong and all of Ji Ben Qi Gong over the course of the week.

This week’s lesson in Damo’s course was actually a theoretical one, around how the mind perceives objects. Interesting; I’ll probably want to listen to it another time or two before I get it? And, honestly, I appreciate not having a new routine to go through this last week, I already have quite a few of those.

In general my body’s feeling good. Muscles and sinews are feeling particularly integrated when I do silk reeling; and I’m having occasional urges to do snippets of Tai Chi moves when I’m walking around, and I feel connection in my Dantian when I do. So connections are being built; I still don’t really feel Tai Chi power coming out of my Dantian, but at least the connections are there.

My back was actually a little off this week; not sure if that was related to the sleep issues or if I’d overstressed it or something? Not awful, though, just surprising; it felt like I hadn’t done enough Silk Reeling, except that I had.

Also, I’ve had a couple of times recently when food that I normally like is feeling a little bit much, a little too flashy? Not sure what’s going on there: maybe I’ve just been eating the same things too often and gotten tired of them, maybe my stomach is starting to have different opinions about what I should eat. Which Damo talks about some in the course; honestly, I hope it’s not that, I like what I’ve been eating? But as long as it doesn’t go too far in the “eat plain food” direction, I’ll be okay.

This week’s lesson in Damo’s course was the same as the previous week, just with the second and third Ji Ben exercises. Which was also pretty interesting; at first it seemed maybe a little disappointing, I didn’t feel like I was compressing as much, but then I realized that something interesting was happening in my armpits. At first, the only thing I noticed was, that in the Wu Ji after doing the second exercise, my arms were floating noticeably higher than normal for two or three minutes; but then the third exercise started feeling odd as I lifted my arms, and then, a day or two later, I started feeling like there was kind of a ball of air in my armpits. Which I’ve heard is an expected sort of thing if I do enough Qi Gong, I guess this is what pushed me over the edge? And in general the joints in my arms are feeling a little more spacious.

Also, over the weekend, I noticed that I was sweating a surprising amount while doing this exercise; Damo had said in the previous lesson that that would happen, but I hadn’t noticed it happening then, but it’s happening now. And the other surprising thing about this exercise is how fast it feels: at the intervals I’m doing, the second and third exercise together take 27 minutes, but the time goes by amazingly quickly once I get started.

As predicted last week, I didn’t get my normal extra practice done last Wednesday, but I was back to normal after that day, and I got in a good two-hour session on Friday. This Wednesday will be a little busy, but Monday was a holiday, so I was hoping to get in a large practice that day as well; unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way, so while I got more done than on a work day, I didn’t do as much practice as I had on Friday.