Nei Gong Notes, December 21, 2021

Good week, now that we’re not a construction zone any more. Damo’s Nei Gong course continued with the Bellows Breathing / Hong mantra exercise, this time telling you to use the Bao Yuan mudra and giving more pointers on that mudra. Not much new in that mudra, though he did point out that you should spread open your Lao Gong while holding the mudra; not the most natural thing to do, I’ll have to work on that.

Anyways, it was good to be given more time to keep on working on that combo; I’m still not particularly good at that mantra, I could use extra practice. (The latest thing I want to try: not going so low in the pitch, staying closer to the middle of my range.) Also, he nudged us to keep up that exercise for longer, an hour or even two, alternating between Bellows Breathing and Hong as the mood took us. And I did put in a couple of hour-long sessions; I did the exercise for about 45 minutes but then I just felt like sitting for a bit, and it was another 15 minutes before I felt like I was done with that. I’ll want to keep all of that up this week; this week is another theory week, so I won’t have any new exercise to practice.

And on Wednesday I had a section that was probably around two and a half hours; I went through the full seated five elements exercise that I’d been doing, and I also did the standing exercise from the end of year one about gathering bouncy bits in your Dantian. Neither of those had me feeling stuff the way I have in the past; I’m chalking that down to not having practiced so much the previous couple of weeks and needing to get back into shape. And on Friday I had a good two hour session; I tried doing the whole standing Dantian Gong in a single session, and while I didn’t manage all of that, I did make it through 8 of the 10 exercises, whereas the most I’ve done before is 6. (Or maybe 7 once?) And my session on Sunday morning was a little over an hour and a half, which is longer than I normally manage on that day.

In Damo’s Tai Chi course, he covered Tai Yi standing; it’s a way of standing with your feet together, bringing attention to your spine. I’d seen a version of that before in the Nei Gong course, as part of the Dragon Dao Yin; significant differences here, though. I haven’t practiced it much yet, I’ll need to give it another week, and probably watch the video again.

In general, I didn’t do much Tai Chi this past week; I think it was raining on Wednesday, and on Friday afternoon, I got pulled into a work escalation, so I didn’t get to practice Tai Chi then either. And on Saturday, Tony was out, so it was a review day in class.