Nei Gong Notes, March 14, 2023

Decent Nei Gong practice week. I did solid practices on Wednesday and Friday (and I got back to doing the Spinal Dao Yin video on Wednesday); I’d hoped to ramp up still more, but I was happy with what I did, probably close to two hours on Wednesday (at least if you include the stretching) and an hour and a half on Friday? And weekdays were fine, too.

I’m actually thinking that I want to get back to Microcosmic Orbit prep: maybe for seated practice I’ll do 40-minute Hui Chuns three days a week, Anchoring the Breath one day a week, and MCO-related stuff the other three days? (And ideally I’d get in two seated practices on at least some Wednesdays and Fridays, letting me work in more MCO stuff.)

It’s been a while, though, so I have to remind myself what the MCO prep exercises were. I watched the video today that’s a combination of Bellows Breathing and plucking up from the Huiyin. And I’ve got notes about Advanced Dantian Gong, so I can do that. I should probably do something about mixing / thickening Qi; looking through the academy, I see one about The Line of Ming and one about Mixing Kan and Li, which both seem relevant, I can’t remember if the second of those is an evolution of the first one or what, I should rewatch them. And maybe the Lesser Orbit one is also about mixing / thickening? And if that goes well, then maybe after a month or so I can go through some of the hour-long sequences from the Maryland retreat; there’s a video of one of those in the library, and I have notes about another one. We’ll see how it all goes.

My sleep, unfortunately, hasn’t been as good as it had been the previous week. Not sure what’s going on there, but if I had to guess, there’s a game I’ve been playing on my iPad a little bit too much, I should probably stop playing that earlier and in particular just read in bed instead of playing it, maybe that will help.

I haven’t been practicing a ton of Tai Chi, mostly because it was raining a decent amount on some of the days when I would normally practice. When I did practice, I spent my time on the Guan Dao; hopefully I’ll at least be able to get back to where I was before I went on the trip before this month’s Sunday class (which is this weekend); I’ll still be behind, but only one class behind, which should be manageable. And at least it wasn’t raining on Saturday, so we had a full Tai Chi class, that was nice.

My Tai Chi teacher is holding some Push Hands workshops in April; it would be nice if enough students from the Saturday class came that we got a critical mass, but that seems a little optimistic; we’ll see. Maybe I should lobby people to join, trying to convince them that there’s more to Tai Chi than memorizing form after form. And Rick has announced a workshop in April; unfortunately, it overlaps with the Push Hands workshop, so I’ll have to miss one of the days, but still, two days of workshop should be useful.

I haven’t been working on my Silk Reeling notes, but I’ve still been thinking about that; I’m actually now leaning towards having the next step to be to see if any of the people in the Saturday course would be interested in me running a Silk Reeling course before the regular class for half an hour for five weeks, as an experiment. Not sure; if I do that, it wouldn’t be until May, because March and April are pretty busy.

I get to have my first colonoscopy on Monday; the joys of getting older. So my diet is even a little more restricted this week compared to the gluten-free diet that I started the previous week. Not too bad, though, there’s only a day and a half when I really have to restrict it, hopefully the procedure itself won’t be too annoying.