Nei Gong Notes, January 2, 2024

Solid week. I think my energy levels are normalizing (or my response to them is normalizing), at a level that’s a noticeable improvement but not as good as it was in the first week and a half when it spiked. Still mostly not wanting to nap during the day, and most of the time when I do want to nap, there’s a decently clear sleep-related reason for that. Still practicing both Nei Gong and Tai Chi noticeably more than I had been (though of course having the holidays give me more time for that is relevant too!), but it takes a little more effort to stick with it sometimes.

This week’s I did a Nei Gong lesson; on concentration, it felt like a traditional Buddhist instruction of paying attention to your nostrils while breathing. Related, presumably, to the concept of attention that Damo’s constantly talking about, but I guess this is fixed attention to a small area. Definitely a good lesson to have come across, it’s an area where I’d been thinking that I should improve on and I’d been feeling like I was missing something compared to Buddhist approaches; the only annoyance is that it’s important enough that I’ll want to keep on working it into my practice, and I’ve got other stuff that I want to work on too!

I’d been being thinking I wasn’t feeling as much Jin as I should while doing Tai Chi; so I spent more time doing standing exercises, on the theory that I probably needed to go back to basics. And, annoyingly, it didn’t seem to help! But then I watched the Wu Song Shen Fa 3 video again, and that got stuff flowing again; not sure if I just respond better when watching Damo, or if I was doing the mechanics wrong (I think I might have been moving my arms side-to-side too much when doing that exercise earlier in the week) or if actually the extra work that I’d been putting it was about to pay off and it would have gotten better even if I hadn’t watched the video; glad to have that feeling back, at any rate.

Not much else to report in general; back still feels better, maybe a little tight in the upper third, I might ask my TCM doctor about that, but I think that’s much less of a problem than the lower back problems I’d had. And I do want to get a bit more Qi in my head, now that I’ve felt an improvement there I know what feeling to go for and that it’s possible to improve that; my Wu Ji hasn’t been helping quite as much as I’d like, unfortunately, but hopefully chipping away will improve it. And I should work on Shui Gong 2: it’s actually focusing on pretty much exactly the parts of my head that don’t feel right, and now that I’ve improved things that exercise no longer gets my head buzzing in a counterproductive way.