Nei Gong Notes, September 27, 2022

My sleep was better this week; I did quite a lot more shutting down after exercising (especially the standing exercise that I’ve been doing), and my hypothesis was that it helped? My doctor didn’t think that that standing exercise was relevant to my problems, though, so I’m probably wrong about that.

At any rate, I’m going to switch back to some of the basic standing exercises for a while now, Dantian Gong and Wu Ji and Ji Ben Gong or something like that. The Chen Qingzhou version of Zhan Zhuang actually was starting to get slightly interesting, probably helping my legs more than some other exercises that I do, but I think right now I’d rather avoid doing an exercise that sends energy straight to my head like that. And hopefully if I get better at relaxing my legs during Wu Ji then I’ll be able to get more benefits on my legs that way as well.

Not a ton to report on Tai Chi, though I’m glad to be going through the Jian again, I definitely have fine ponts to work on there. When practicing push hands, I asked my partner to try out the exercise where one of us pushes harder and harder on the other person’s torso and that person tries to ground it; kind of interesting, though I think I’ll need to try it a lot to get significant benefit out of it? I don’t think he’s interested enough to want to work on it regularly, though, but maybe I’ll be surprised, I’ll see if he brings it up.

I haven’t been doing a ton of Tai Chi practice on my own, I should get back to that; this week was a little busy and while my energy levels weren’t horrible, they weren’t enough to get me actively excited. I did at least work on the Guan Dao a couple of times, though, so I’m pretty close to having the stuff that we’ve covered in class so far memorized. Which is good, because I’m going to have to miss the next Sunday class, so it’s important for me to keep up with things on my own…