Nei Gong Notes, November 9, 2021

The good weeks continue. Last week I was thinking it was time to get back to 45 minute Wu Ji sessions; I did that on Wednesday, but I actually felt fine after 45 minutes, so I stayed in Wu Ji for another 15 minutes, making it the first time I’ve had an hour-long Wu Ji session. I don’t think I sunk quite as much as in my best sessions, and maybe I should have been a bit lower, but I also wasn’t phoning it in. And I actually could have gone a little longer if I’d wanted to; I should probably do this another time or two first, but maybe I should try a full 10-exercise Dantian Gong session pretty soon?

Also, on Sunday, I tried out the Jing Gong exercise from near the end of year 1 for the first time in a while. And I’m pretty sure I did feel something bouncing around in my Dantian while doing that? Not super strong, but distinct enough that I’m fairly sure I wasn’t imagining it. So I should start doing that once a week or so, to monitor (and hopefully advance) my potential progress there.

This week in the course was a theoretical lecture, on Clinging; interesting enough. It looks like those will be showing up every other week for the next couple of months; encouragement to work on consolidation, I guess, which is certainly fine with me. It was good to not have a new seated exercise to work on, so for the first time in almost two months I could get back to my previous seated exercises. Which I’m glad to be doing, they were good exercises! I’m still going through the longer versions of the seated five elements exercises, I did Fire and Earth this week; I’ll certainly go through Metal but then maybe I’ll switch to doing all five in a single stretch with a 3-minute timer once a week?

As for Tai Chi, in the posture in Hunyuan Dao where you do sort of a skewer motion over the left side, I should go forward somewhat, not straight over the side. And the corresponding posture in Laojia Dao is a block, up and a little forward.

I’m trying to spend more time working on my Xinjia when practicing at home. Which, on the one hand, is good, because I’ve got bits to improve! But, on the other hand, I’m getting a little frustrated that we seem to be stalled out on that in Saturday, I think it’s been two months since we’ve advanced in the form, and my teacher has started going back to the beginning of the form. I think he intends to continue with the final bits, but he hasn’t been finding time in the class to do both… I’m really close to the end, though, maybe I should just look at videos and read books and try to solidify the rest on my own?

We’ll be starting the spear next week, it’ll be good to learn that. I probably learned three-quarters of the form last time, though I haven’t been practicing it so I’ve forgotten how it went; should be well within reach to learn the whole thing this time.