Nei Gong Notes, January 11, 2022

This week’s lesson in Damo’s course was a theory lecture, on Direct Experience. Didn’t give me too much that stuck with me, though I should watch it again. I used the week to focus on the concentration exercise that I mentioned last time; a few interesting experiences, but I have more work to do. Though I was also thinking that, before I go into that, I should ask if there are any prerequisites to that exercise, since there are some potentially related exercises in year one that I haven’t gone deep into.

For Damo’s Tai Chi course, I rewatched the four energies video; I’ll move onto a new lesson this week.

My Nei Gong practice went quite well. I’d been thinking for a while that I’ve sort of fallen into a rut of doing one seated and one standing practice a day; on days off, they’re long practices, so it’s a good length of time, but still. I’d originally been thinking I’d do a morning practice and an afternoon practice, but I really just do not reliably have energy to do a long practice after lunch: my energy level falls after eating and takes quite a while to recover.

So on Friday I decided to get started earlier than I had been doing, beginning a practice at maybe 8:30? So I was doing Nei Gong from about 8:30 to 10:30, then something else from 10:30 to 11:30, and then I did another practice session until some time between 1pm and 1:30. And that went well; I’ll definitely want to try to keep up that model on Wednesdays as Fridays as much as possible. (Though, sadly, not tomorrow, since I have an unusual work meeting on Wednesday morning, from 8am to 10am.)

The other thing that I noticed is that I feel like my posture is getting better while doing seated meditation? I’m getting more sensitive to the right angle, and to having my spine not curving inappropriately in the middle. So it’s getting easier to feel like I’m sitting stably with a good posture without being too tense or using too much energy.

In terms of my regular Tai Chi class, practice wasn’t quite as good; I had to deal with some HOA stuff on Friday, so I couldn’t practice then, though I had a good practice on Wednesday. Class on Saturday was pretty good; I got reminded of one bit of foot positioning right before Oblique Posture in the Xin Jia first form. And there was Sunday class; unfortunately, I had to leave that one a bit early (more HOA stuff), so I didn’t get to see the new bits of the Xin Jia form. Hopefully that won’t bite me…