Nei Gong Notes, November 15, 2022

It was a good week overall. On Wednesday, I did the Liver Hui Chun; I’d been a little worried that that would make my Liver Heat situation worse, but I figured I should give it a try, because if it helped regulate my Liver Qi, that would be good. And I’m glad I did; I was worried for a bit because, after the first three parts of the middle section, I was feeling kind of buzzy. But then when I got to the last part of that section, where I’m encouraging the Qi to go down, it did; I was glad I was doing 5 minutes per section, because it took a minute or two to get started, but eventually the sensations moved from the top of my head to the middle of the back of my head to lower down in my body, and while they weren’t all the way down my body, they were far enough down to make a difference, I think, because I slept pretty well that night. (Which hadn’t been the case earlier that week.) So I’ll definitely keep that up; not sure yet if it will be an every week thing or every other week or what, and I don’t think I’ll do 25 minute sessions on work days of the week, but I do want to experiment with that one more.

On Friday, I did Jing Gong for the first time in a while. And there was noticeable bouncing in my Dantian; it came and went a bit, and when it was present it wasn’t intense or anything, but it was definitely strong enough to be noticeable, probably actually a little stronger than I’ve felt it before. So it’s nice to see another piece of evidence that my Dantian is filling up; not sure how often I’ll do the Jing Gong, but I’ll probably return to it occasionally.

In general, right now, I’m actually not sure what I should be doing as my set of standing exercises; though the good news is that I’m continuing to feel that Wu Ji is more productive than it has been, so defaulting to that is probably a fine thing to do! One thing I was noticing during this last week is that my stomach muscles are starting to relax more while I do Wu Ji, and I’m feeling a sensation like a fairly large mass of liquid is going down my torso (more like a big ball going down than fluid seeping down); I guess that’s the liquid center of mass that Damo sometimes talks about? I’m still not 100% sure whether or not it’s going down quite to the right level or if it ends up an inch or two too high (maybe around my belly button height instead of my Dantian height?), but it’s either in the right position or close to it.

Acupuncture on Friday went well: it felt surprisingly refreshing, and I slept through the whole night after that. And my doctor said that he saw improvements from his side; in particular, he mentioned that my neck was doing much better, which he thought would help with sleep issues. Which links with what I’ve been feeling: I had been feeling that my neck was occasionally wanting to stretch on its own, and while I’m not feeling that so much these days, I’m now feeling much more often that my head is just floating (and, even when I’m not feeling that, if I just relax a bit, I can get it to float), so I think it’s pretty plausible that the stretching open has had an effect and now my neck is doing a decent job of maintaining an open state.

I’m also noticing other parts of my body feeling more open. In particular, when I’m doing Tai Chi, by body is also feeling more spacious, so it’s not just a Nei Gong thing now. Which is probably helping with my Tai Chi, and it’s certainly making it more interesting, giving it a bit of a Qi Gong feel.

On my Saturday Tai Chi class, my teacher told me that I should get my Kua involved more when I’m punching, so I should work on that. He showed a couple of ways of doing that, once of which involved spiraling energy up my leg that involved a knee shake; I think I’m going to avoid that second method now, though, because actually my knee is giving me noticeable problems when I’m doing Tai Chi. I don’t know that it’s gotten any worse, but I’m wanting to sink more, and when I do that, even with good posture, I think it’s a bit more than my knee is comfortable with. It would be nice to find a way to improve my knee, but for now I think I should probably not sink as much as I would like.

I’ve made it through Damo’s set of recordings from his various summer classes; there’s probably more stuff in the library that I haven’t watched (though I have gone through a fair amount of it), but I think I should probably react to that by spending Thursday evenings working on my Silk Reeling notes. Because I’ve been stalled on that, but I still think it’s a good idea, so I do want to get it out there.