Nei Gong Notes, March 12, 2024

A Tai Chi week this week; I went back and reviewed a bit more of the form. I should probably do that more often midweek – if I only review one section every other week then it’ll take me a while to review all of the sections that I’ve learned! Nei Gong this week; I still haven’t actually done Shui Gong 3, I should find time for that too…

I tried again to do the MCO on Wednesday, but it didn’t go particularly well: even during the prep work, I didn’t feel much volume going through my torso, and when I got to the MCO itself stuff just did not go very far up my spine. So I think I didn’t have much juice in my Dantian that day, for whatever reason. And actually my energy level got worse as the day went on (e.g. I only managed a half-assed Silk Reeling session); might have been an allergy shot that I had at the start of the afternoon, admittedly.

So I need to figure that out. At first I was thinking that it just meant that I should get back to doing regular 40 minute Hui Chun sessions, and maybe start mixing in Calm Abiding since I was curious about that and it seems relevant; and those both sound like good ideas? But also I’d been feeling on Monday and Tuesday that maybe I was eating too much, and I had a really big lunch on Wednesday, so maybe the answer is that I should pay more attention to how much (and what?) I’m eating? I experimented with that over the rest of the week, and it seemed to help, so now I’m thinking that food might be the main issue. (Also I’m thinking I should be a little more mindful in my downtime, instead of reaching quickly for random puzzle games on my phone.)

At any rate, my energy levels were better the rest of the week; fading some in the afternoon, admittedly, but with good signs of Qi and/or general alertness in the mornings on several of the days. (Good Anchoring the breath on Thursday, good Ping Heng Gong on Friday; good Wu Song Shen Fa on Friday, too.) Though, for the third or fourth week in a row, I felt unusually drained after the Saturday Tai Chi class; not sure if I’m just overexerting myself or if I need to bundle up still more or what.

I also randomly tried doing Zhan Zhuang before Tai Chi; I’ve basically never really tried that since getting more serious about Nei Gong, so I wasn’t sure how long I would last, but I figured I’d be slightly disappointed if I only lasted 10 minutes whereas I’d be quite happy if I lasted 20 minutes. I ended up doing 25 minutes, and if I’d felt like pushing it and if the class hadn’t been about to start, I could have gone at least a little longer, so that was nice. And I started to feel some interesting inflation around 20 minutes in. So maybe I’ll make a habit of trying that once a week, assuming that I continue to regularly show up early to class.