Nei Gong Notes, January 16, 2024

This was a week for the Nei Gong course, so I did the Opening the Du lesson on Tuesday. Damo warns in that lesson that, unless you’re particularly well grounded, you should avoid this lesson; and, sure enough, my sleep was lousy that night, so clearly that one wasn’t wise for me to pursue. So on Thursday I did the next lesson in the Taiji course, Releasing the Feet for Taiji and Shoulder Dao Yin. Both of which were interesting; I’ll want to keep at the Releasing the Feet exercise to see if it affects my rootedness, and that particular Shoulder Dao Yin does get my body shifting around a bit more than most of those shoulder exercises do.

Chen Tai Chi was going pretty well. We had the Sunday class, I picked up a decent amount of refinements on the Lao Jia second form and on the Xin Jia first form. (The second form is good cardio if I do it enough, I should do it repeatedly more often because I don’t get enough of that currently…) I’m behind on the staff, though one of the other students was helping me with some of the bits that I was getting wrong; yesterday I watched Chen Qingzhou’s DVD on that and I ripped it today for easy reference, so as long as I put in the time I should be able to catch up.

As part of my Microcosmic Orbit preparation, I watched the practice video from the Maryland course. It was pretty effective, as it had been the last time I was watching it, my Dantian was rotating on its own. So I decided to try actually kicking off the orbit, my first time attempting that in over a year; it went pretty well, I think? Stuff definitely went most of the way up my spine; not sure it made it all the way to the top of my head and down, but that’s okay, it went as well as it did during my first attempt in the workshop itself, I think.