Nei Gong Notes, March 15, 2022

This week’s Nei Gong lesson was on a new form of Dantian Gong; this one, instead of being focused on building up the Dantian as a container, was focused on adding more Qi to your Dantian. Which, interestingly, meant that you don’t want to stretch you Lao Gong as much during this exercise: you need to stretch it a bit to build the connection between your hands and Dantian, but if you stretch them too much, apparently that makes the boundary of your Dantian hard to pass through.

Anyways, interesting exercise: when learning it, I was pretty surprised how quickly / strongly my hands locked into my Dantian, given how far apart they were, and in general it got my Dantian feeling kind of buzzy? warm? Not sure how to describe it, but unusual at any rate. I won’t necessarily chalk that all up to this exercise, since I was feeling some of that after the previous exercise, but this one is definitely helping.

I was hoping to do it more, because it sounded like something you could do for a while. Unfortunately, my practice routine wasn’t great this week; I was working M-W this week and taking Th-F off, but unfortunately I felt mildly sick on Thursday, so I didn’t get serious Nei Gong practice in either day. (I think either a cold or just side effects from being tired; I took a COVID test on Friday and it was negative.) That also meant that I didn’t spend more time practicing stuff from Damo’s Tai Chi course this week, which I’d been hoping to do. So I’m not going to do new lessons in either course this week, to give them more time.

Saturday Tai Chi was good; I led Silk Reeling, which surprised me a bit, I thought it hadn’t been that long since my last turn? I’d been thinking I should ask Tony for advice on what to work on next, though, so it’s good timing. And we had Sunday Tai Chi this week as well. It continues to be the case that both the Hunyuan 48 and the Lao Jia Guan Dao are being surprisingly hard for me to pick up on the fly, but I’ve got good videos of both, so I’m managing to keep up with them both. And I do enjoy both forms; they make sense once I’ve learned them, they just take a surprisingly long time to learn.