Nei Gong Notes, February 13, 2024

It was a Tai Chi week; in this week’s lesson, I finished the first third of the form. Damo recommended going back through all of the earlier lessons of the form after this one, to make sure you have the first third down well; I should probably do that. We’ll see when I manage to work it into things; hopefully I’ll have time to do it some during midweek practice sessions, but I’m not sure. There was also a push hands video, on an exercise having you pushing into your opponent via release from your foot; I tried it on Saturday, and failed completely. Which, honestly, wasn’t a huge surprise: I feel like I sometimes get glimmers of that, especially while doing Wu Song Shen Fa 3, but I never feel it super strongly. I should work on that while doing the form, too.

I had a good Nei Gong session on Friday. I’d been thinking after the workshop that I should do Pushing the Tides more, so I had a decent session of that, and I also did a one-hour Qi Thickening set from the Maryland workshop.

Unfortunately, I was a little more tired than I would have liked on Friday, and a lot more tired than I would have liked on Saturday morning; it had been three weeks since my last acupuncture appointment, so maybe I needed that more than I thought? But then I went to Tai Chi class on Saturday and I immediately started feeling better during Silk Reeling; so I guess my back had just gotten tight. I would have expected the workshop to have helped with that, but I guess it didn’t make a huge difference; probably driving two and a half hours each day didn’t help? And then it had been raining, so I hadn’t done my regular Tai Chi, either. At any rate, I was very glad to be feeling better; and probably I should start doing mid-week Silk Reeling, since it’s clearly helpful for me.

The other interesting thing from Saturday’s Tai Chi class was that our teacher had us do an exercise that he called something like the Dragon posture but that was almost identical to Coiling Snake from Nei Gong. And my back was definitely tingling in interesting ways after that; and, in retrospect, I remember it making my back feel good after that lesson. So I should spend time on that; I reviewed that lesson yesterday, Damo was indeed talking about effects that are very relevant to my situation, and there were some details that I’d forgotten, so rewatching the video was useful.

We had Sunday Tai Chi this week as well; fortunately, I’d done a good enough job of reviewing the Staff form (despite the rain) that I didn’t feel like I was particularly behind. I didn’t feel like I had every move down pat, but we just reviewed it this time instead of moving on to new moves, and I think the review has put me in pretty good shape for next month.

I’m still a little more tired than I’d like, but it’s manageable, and my back is tingling in interesting ways. And doing other odd but good things, too: e.g. it was randomly wanting to spread sideways while I was sitting down today. So hopefully I’m still making progress; and hopefully I’ll get back to making improvements on my fatigue levels?