Nei Gong Notes, March 1, 2022

Quite a good week. As I mentioned last time, I decided not to do a new lesson this week, so I was just continuing with the exercise from last week. And I was definitely feeling better for most of the week; I had a solid three+ hour practice on Wednesday, and while Friday was only a two hour practice, that’s still an okay amount. I decided to try a long Wu Ji but only made it for, if I’m remembering correctly, 45 minutes; I feel like I should work on that, because I bet that there will be some long sessions in the retreat in June?

And then on Saturday something interesting happened: I didn’t have time to do the new seated exercise before Tai Chi, so I did it at the end of the afternoon. And I honestly wasn’t expecting it to go well, because I was pretty tired; but, unexpectedly, I felt two strong sensations on the outside of my abdomen, one in the back on my Ming Men, one in the front on my Qi Hai.

Which rings a bell: I haven’t gone back to listen to it, but my memory is that, in the Microcosmic Orbit preparation video series, there’s an exercise that involves connecting those two points, and in fact it’s the next exercise after the one that involves connecting the Huiyin up to the Dantian. Given that the current exercise is about the Huiyin and Dantian, I’m expecting one connecting the Qi Hai and Ming Men to show up soon, but I wasn’t expecting to start feeling something there now without doing an exercise that directly dealt with those points? But the feeling really was unmistakeable.

No idea why it was so strong that time; it was significantly weaker on Sunday (I’m not sure I would have noticed the Qi Hai part on Sunday if I hadn’t been listening for it), and either not present or barely present on Monday and Tuesday. Still, it was pretty cool.

I also had a good practice over lunch yesterday. I was feeling tired, so I decided to just do 20 minutes of Wu Ji, but they ended up being a very solid 20 minutes. Basically, my whole body felt like it was hanging together in a sort of tensegrity way, I felt a pretty clear line down the inside of my thigh, and I felt really heavy in my feet. Also, in general over the weekend I felt like my back was loose; in general it seems like my back is hanging nicely, with my pelvis providing a tug down and also with a tug down around my neck. So I really do think that I’m making progress towards building up a Nei Gong body?

And Tai Chi also went well this week. In particular, on Sunday I had an unusual amount of energy for doing Tai Chi, so I threw in a practice of Damo’s stuff, and it went pretty well; I did 15 minutes of that form of Wu Ji and was sinking a ton there (with very heavy feet), and then I did the new exercise. Which I’m still learning, and in general I think it will be quite a while before I’m good at using Song to generate significant energy, but I’ll keep on chipping away?

My sleep has been pretty crappy the last couple of days, but I had an appointment my allergist on Wednesday and she gave me a couple of suggestions, one of which I’m pretty optimistic about. So I’ll give that a try this weekend, hopefully it will make a difference.

And I’ve managed to get started on content that I’m planning for my new Silk Reeling website. And I’ve been fitting it into random evenings, which is good: being able to do it in bits and pieces increases the chance that I’ll actually get it done. It certainly helps that individual pages there are quite a bit smaller than my posts on my regular blog, that makes it a lot easier to write it a bit at a time.