Nei Gong Notes, May 23, 2023

Not a ton to say about Nei Gong this week. The most interesting that happened was on Thursday: I was doing a Wu Ji session, and I decided to work on making sure my feet felt properly pressured (and that that pressure made it up my legs), and I did it particularly well, because I pretty quickly felt pressurized / inflated all over my body, and my insides just kept on stretching out. So that was neat; the downside was that it was effective enough that I think I stretched my neck in a way that affected my sleep, and I didn’t think to take ibuprofen that night; whoops.

(In general, sleep this week has actually been pretty bad. I think it’s neck strain plus overeating a few days plus drinking coffee once in the afternoon, so hopefully I’ll be able to get back to decent-to-good sleep soon, possibly even tonight? But we’ll see, I don’t want to fall back into the decent-to-bad range. At least it hasn’t been horrible: I’ve been waking up more times than I would like but I haven’t been staying awake.)

In terms of Tai Chi, I had the second lesson in my Silk Reeling Course. This time only three people showed up at the start, instead of 5, but more people showed up halfway through, so we actually had 9 at the end, which was pretty cool. Hopefully those people will come back next week and will actually show up on time; but even if it goes back down closer to the 5 person range, that’s totally fine, as long as there’s a handful of people who seem to find it useful, that’s great. Anyways, we talked about sinking into the Kua, plus a little bit about the Waist Turning exercise; that latter one is both a useful exercise that people frequently get wrong and a good prep for next week’s topic of opening and closing the Kua.

We had Sunday Tai Chi this week; we finished off the Guan Dao form, hopefully I’m okay with it now, at least okay enough to be able to solidify it? Some notes for future reference: when offering the teacup, the curve of the blade points left. When doing the spin at the end, go to the right; you sweep down and up, make sure to clear the bottom of the Dao past your legs. Then when presenting the Dao next, the curve of the Dao is up.