Nei Gong Notes, November 1, 2022

Good week. Not an abnormally large amount of practice or anything, but a decent quantity, and my body is doing well. In terms of stuff that I’m getting TCM treatment, this weekend I slept through the night once for the first time in ages; sleep had been getting better, but still, nice to see that. And I’m also not feeling like I need to pee as often, which can be a problem if your kidneys aren’t doing well. On which note, Damo posted a public video about the Kidney system in TCM, and it’s really interesting, makes me wish I could watch all of his TCM videos. (But it doesn’t make me wish it enough to actually sign up for that course!)

And I like how my body is responding to Nei Gong. It was definitely feeling active over the weekend, and today was interesting too: I was doing the Kidney Hui Chun this morning, and for whatever reason I felt an unusual (but, I think, good?) sensation on the front of my forehead, at about the level of my upper Dantian, so I sat with that for a while longer. And I was doing Wu Ji at the end of the day today, and that felt really good: energetic stuff going on in my body, good connection and relaxation, and my mind is doing better at sinking and paying less attention to the physical details of what’s going on in my body.

A couple of times over the last week or two I’ve done other sitting exercises, like Anchoring the Breath. At first I was wondering if I should stop the constant Hui Chun and go back to my prior practice regimen, since things are going better. But I think that what I should do instead is mostly keep up with the push to get better: I don’t want to backslide from the current state, and my energy levels could still use a boost. So I should keep things up, and try to get things to a level where I can stop the TCM treatment: I certainly don’t want to be doing that forever!

Oh, and one other thing I’ve noticed over the last few weeks but I’ve forgotten to write about: when working on reducing my intensity when paying attention to things during my practice, I’ve realized that my default state has my brain feeling like it’s going forward pretty much all the time. When I relax it, my eyes also go back a little bit; I wonder if it’s related to my vision? Something to work on when I’m relaxing, at any rate.

In terms of Tai Chi, Saturday’s class was fine but nothing special. But then on Sunday, I went through the first form; I’d occasionally been noticing that I was leaning forward a bit, but this time I realized that I’m literally doing that in almost every single move. Which is a little embarrassing to only notice this now, given that I’ve been doing this for seven years! But hey, good to be getting more in touch with my body. So I did the form a couple more times trying to fix that. I realized that, if I don’t lean forward, I feel like I’m not going forward enough, so apparently I’m doing that to try to lower myself in a way that avoids my legs, for whatever reason. But once I was aware of that, I started lowering myself with my legs more, and it felt fine, not sure why my body didn’t want to do that? And actually it felt better: I’d been feeling stress on my right knee some while doing Tai Chi, and when I didn’t lean forward, that went away. So hopefully making this change will actively help reduce the strain on my body; that would be nice.

And I think I’m more or less caught up on the Guan Dao form? (At least up to where we were two months ago, but I heard that we didn’t do anything new last month.) I’m getting to the stage where I forget bits but can then make sense of what I’m doing wrong on my own, which is a good sign in terms of actually solidifying my knowledge of the form, it gets it in a better state in my memory than when I do it right but can’t, for example, replay it by memory in my head.