Nei Gong Notes, November 2, 2021

Another good week for Nei Gong; maybe not quite as good as last week, but very solid. I’m finally done with learning the new Wu Xing seated sequence; this week’s lesson was on Bellows Breathing, a way to build up Qi in your Dan Tian. Kind of reminds me of the Nourishing the Jing exercise from a month and a half back, just with a different focus? And I tried doing an 80 minute version of the first two elements of the Wu Xing sequence on Wednesday and Friday; Wednesday was fine, but Friday was the Wood element, and some of the postures were a little physically strenuous, so I didn’t manage 10 minutes on every one of them. Still, it went pretty well; I’ll keep on going through those, though I imagine that, when I get to Metal, I’ll have a similar reaction. But once I’ve gone through the long version of each of them once, I think I might go back to doing them all in a row: I didn’t feel my Dantian buzzing quite as much after that exercise as I had when doing them all, and maybe it’s a little easier to maintain concentration when I’m changing moves every 3 minutes?

In general, though, between those longer exercises and the Bellows Breathing, my Dan Tian is feeling noticeably more active than normal. Not sure how much is due to what; I’ll probably want to keep on mixing in Bellows Breathing to keep that up?

I forgot to mention that, last week, my back felt really good; it’s fine this week but not quite as actively solid. So, when doing standing work, it takes me a little while to get to where things feel quite right, but I do get there eventually; in particular, yesterday and today, I did Dantian Gong even though I was feeling a little sleepy, and in the past that would frequently have caused me to do a short session, but now my legs are clearly up for it, so I ended up doing a longer-than-normal session instead of a shorter one, and in the Wu Ji at the end, my body really did feel like it was working together. So that was cool; probably means that I should try out a 45 minute Wu Ji session and see how that goes.

In terms of Tai Chi, we finished the Hunyuan Dao; we’ll be reviewing it for the rest of the month, but I feel pretty solid about it. Also, looking at the DVD, I think that, when doing the Kick with Two Legs in Lao Jia, I shouldn’t emphasize landing on the left leg: yes, I should land there than on both, but the right leg comes down soon after that, unlike in Xin Jia. In general, there’s stuff right around there that I should work on with Xin Jia; I’ve got the basic idea, but there are some details that I need to practice.