Nei Gong Notes, September 28, 2021

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.