Nei Gong Notes, December 7, 2021

Mostly a write-off week: we’re having work on our house done that means that I’m home all day with lots of noise in the background and with my usual practice locations occupied, and on Thursday I got my booster shot, which mostly knocked me out on Friday and had me tentative on Saturday. I was worried that I’d backslide, but fortunately, my Dantian continued to feel a little active when I was paying attention to it, so I think I’m doing okay? And I eased back into action yesterday and today, I had a solid Dantian Gong session over lunch today in particular. At any rate, I’m not planning to move onto new lessons this week, I’ll just repeat the previous week.

Anyways, this week’s lesson in the Nei Gong course was a lecture on Memory Distortion; didn’t make a big impression, and I didn’t do my normal re-listen yet, so it’s good that I’m not moving on! In Damo’s Tai Chi course, there was a sort of silk-reeling-ish exercise, loosening your joints but also getting energy into and back out of your legs; that was pretty interesting. (So actually I think maybe it’s not that much like silk reeling? I don’t want to map everything to Chen Tai Ji, that will cut me off from some of what I’m trying to learn by taking that course.) And I’m getting better at doing the Tai Chi version of Wu Ji, though I’ll certainly want to keep on plugging away at that.

As for the Saturday Tai Chi course, we didn’t do anything new, but Tony gave us lots of feedback for the start of the Xin Jia first form. Lots of little things that I should work on there…

One thing that I forgot to mention last week: I watched a video from Damo on Ting in meditation, and one thing he talked about there was doing the Ting via your breath instead of your senses; interesting thing to try, it’s been pretty intense once or twice when I did try it.