Nei Gong Notes, March 29, 2022

Not a lot to talk about this week. Though actually this week’s lesson in Damo’s course was kind of surprising; it was another seated exercise involving pulling up your Huiyin, which sounds straightforward enough? But then he also talked about not letting stuff escape through the top of your Dantian, and I realized that I was in fact not closing that off. So I think that I’m going to watch that lesson again tonight instead of moving on to a new lesson; he said that this one was harder to get in place in your body than you’d expect, and I think that is proving to be the case.

Not great Nei Gong practice. The sleep stuff has taken yet another turn; I think that now with some bedding changes I’m actually not feeling too allergic overnight? So I can breathe okay, and I haven’t woken up startled for a while. But I’m still not reliably sleeping solidly. Not sure what’s going on there; maybe it’s my brain being funny, maybe it’s Widget spending more time in the bed than he had been, maybe there’s something else physical going on. For now I’m just letting it be; but at any rate I was doing minimal amounts of practice a lot this week.

Though there was one interesting thing related to going to bed – after sporadically trying the Shui Gong 2 exercise once every week or two for a year or so, I started to feel something going down my spine. My memory was that he talked about shaking going down your spine, whereas what I felt was fairly slow waves, so I’m not completely sure that what I was experiencing was what that lesson talked about. I guess it’s time for me to watch that lesson again.

Tony went over my form this Saturday; a bit of a let down, I kept on having Xin Jia leak into my form. We talked a bit about other stuff for me to do, though; he said he was willing to do Push Hands if I could get some people to commit to that. So I’ll give that a try.

I hadn’t been working much on my Silk Reeling notes; not sure how much is being past the initial flush of ideas and how much is that Damo’s generating a new set of videos from his current retreat that are keeping me busy on Thursdays. Having said that, I did realize that I wasn’t making as much progress as I’d like, and I put in some time on that on Saturday. So that’s okay; my goal isn’t to put in huge amounts of focused effort, I just want to chip away at it.