Nei Gong Notes, September 7, 2021

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.