Nei Gong Notes, March 7, 2023

I’m finally back to my normal practice: I stayed inactive through Wednesday, but I restarted practice on Thursday. And sometimes in the past when I’ve been actually sick, I’ve had to spend a few days ramping up, but I didn’t have to do that this time: I had a normal workday practice on Thursday and on Friday I had a 40 minute Wu Ji plus arm stretching Dao Yin session followed by a 40 minute Hui Chun, and it went fine. And decent practice over the weekend, too.

The arm stretching Dao Yin was kind of interesting: I was in a part where my arms were stretching diagonally down, and then at some point I felt like something was releasing out, like I was pulling and some lines were pulling over my shoulders. Though I also realized that I was leaning forward more and more as I did that, so I’m not 100% sure how much something was actually stretching internally and how much the movement was external.

Also, my sleep stuff is getting better. Over the trip, I was feeling like sleep was correlated with food; so, since I’ve gotten home, I’ve been putting less food on my plate at dinner. And it has been definitely helping: I’ve switched from normally waking up twice in the middle of the night to normally waking up once in the middle of the night, with me sleeping for about 6 hours, then waking up briefly and going back to sleep. So that change is great. (And it’s not like I feel hungry or anything: I’m full when I stop eating, I’m just not eating past that point. Heck, for all I know I could eat even a little less?)

And that made me wonder whether my overall energy problems were also sleep-linked. While I was wondering that, I had a random conversation with a coworker who mentioned that a friend of his had felt like he had a lot more energy after going off of gluten, and that’s not the first time I’ve heard that sort of thing. So I decided to experiment with going off of gluten for a few weeks to see if that has any effect; I’ve started that experiment this past Sunday, we’ll see how it goes.

If that does fix things, I will have mixed feelings, because I really do like having a bit of baguette for breakfast in the morning once or twice a week, and because we cook a lot of pasta; hopefully gluten-free pasta tastes okay? And it turns out that soy sauce generally has gluten in it, which isn’t great for eating Chinese or Japanese food. Still, there will be a ton of things I can eat without gluten, so if it does give me a lot more energy, then that would be a good tradeoff.