Nei Gong Notes, February 22, 2022

This week started out as my best practice week in a while. I liked the lesson in the Nei Gong class: continuing the seated bellows breathing / huiyin lesson from a few weeks earlier, with a change in the mudras; I’d been continuing the earlier lesson some of the time anyways, so I’m glad to have a way to level it up slightly.

And then on Wednesday morning I had a quite solid practice, over three hours; first time I’ve done that in weeks, and it felt good.

But then on Wednesday afternoon I got a shingles vaccination, and it unfortunately turns out that that messes you up in a similar way that the COVID vaccination does. So on Thursday and Friday I did minimal seated work and no standing work or Tai Chi; ditto for the Nei Gong on Saturday, though I went to most of the Saturday Tai Chi class.

But on Sunday I felt pretty normal; I didn’t do quite as long a practice as my regular Sunday morning practice, because I figured I should ease back into things, but I did at least do a solid 20 minutes of Wu Ji and the new seated lesson. And then things were normal after that; I had a good 45 minute Dantian Gong session over lunch today.

I’m not going to do a new Nei Gong lesson this week, though, and I also won’t do a new lesson in Damo’s Tai Chi course: I don’t want to rush stuff, and I definitely don’t feel like I’m ahead of the expected progress in the Nei Gong course.

In terms of my Tai Chi practice, I’m finding both the Guan Dao form and the Hunyuan 48 to be surprisingly hard to learn just in class. Fortunately, I’ve got videos of my teacher doing both of them, so if I go over the video enough time, I can learn them. I think the Hunyuan 48 video is only the beginning of that form, but it’s enough for now, and it turns out that my teacher has a DVD of that form, so I’ll be able to get the whole thing by the time that we reach that stage.

The other thing that’s going on is that I’ve decided that I spend enough time thinking about how to do the Silk Reeling Exercises well that I really should write something about that down. So I’ve started writing some notes that I’m planning to turn into a standalone website. We’ll see whether I really manage to find time for that, and how it turns out; I don’t actually want to explain the exercises, I want to assume that people already know the basics of those exercises, and that probably limits the audience to people who are students of my teacher and who like to read about that sort of thing, which isn’t a lot of people? But I do want to get this out of my head, so I think it’s worth doing anyways…