Nei Gong Notes, October 26, 2021

Oct 26 2021

Good week. I learned the last of the new set of seated Wu Xing exercises, this time on Metal / Spleen; nice to have that set learned. This one has a couple of positions with your arms held relatively high, so it’s a bit more strenuous than the others, but that’s probably not a bad thing for me to work on? And the video for that talked about doing all of them in sequence; that seemed like it would take a while (close to two hours), but I figured it was worth a try? It’s seated, so it’s not going to be strenuous in a way that a long standing exercise would be, and it has a bunch of different movements, so I wouldn’t be so likely to fall asleep.

So I did that on Friday, and I’m glad I did. In particular, my the time I got to the fourth part, my abdomen was feeling surprisingly puffy, so it feels like it was effective in terms of building up Qi. And sitting for a long time turns out to be pretty manageable; for the last ten minutes or so, the area near my sitz bones hurt enough to start to get distracting (and I can still feel an ache there a few days later!), but it fine, and presumably if I do that more I’ll get used to it.

Having said that, talking it over with one of the senior students, he said that he’d found it useful to do a single element but with 10 minutes per section (80 minutes in total). And that also seems like a good length, and I’m hoping that it’ll help me get more out of each individual element, since I kind of feel like, when I was doing all of them, the later elements were more effective. So I’ll give that a try.

I also watched a video on Thursday talking about how Wu Ji works and what we’re trying to accomplish in our body, and inspired by that (?), I had a quite good Wu Ji session on Friday as well. I set my timer for 30 minutes, but it was going well so I went a few minutes longer; if I hadn’t been planning to do a very long sit after that, I would have gone longer. As it was, I felt like I was doing a good job of relaxing and connecting my body, and also of dropping my weight into my feet and activating my Yong Quan. And I had decent Wu Ji on Sunday as well, not quite as good but not bad.

One interesting thing from Tai Chi on Saturday: in Kick with Two Feet Up, you’re apparently supposed to land stably on your left foot, being similarly stable to how you’d be if you did the version where you don’t jump. That was from a senior student who sometimes disagrees with my teacher, so I’ll have to watch my teacher to make sure he does it that way, but I know my teacher does it that way in Xin Jia, so it seems plausible that Lao Jia works the same way as well. And I tried it out and found it a lot easier to land stably than I expected; that was a pleasant surprise.

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