Nei Gong Notes, March 5, 2024

This week’s lesson was Shui Gong 3. Which I still haven’t tried, and honestly I’m a little nervous to: I usually slept badly after doing Shui Gong 2, and Damo warns about that at some point on this video too. I’ll try it out one of these days, but my sleep was iffy enough that it didn’t seem like the timing was right to try it.

On Wednesday I did the Spinal Dao Yin followed by the Maryland 2022 Practice Session video. Not as much Qi thickening through the torso as in some of the other variants from then, but it does succeed in getting my Qi rotating at the end; I’d forgotten that they spend some time going in a circle through the lower spine / diaphragm before letting it go and rotate on its own. And then I tried to move into MCO after that; barely successful, it was really weak once it reached my head, so I couldn’t feel much of anything going down in the middle, but on the other hand it did actually reach my head? Which is encouraging; and also gave me some ideas for what to play with next when kicking off the MCO, I’ll mix in some of the stuff from this video with some of the stuff from my notes, hopefully if I keep at it I’ll be able to get this working.

My energy levels were actually only kind of so-so on Wednesday, but still I managed to do three hours of Nei Gong and maybe two and a half hours of Tai Chi. So it might be that what feels like a moderate energy level is noticeably better than my energy levels had been.

Though unfortunately my sleep was crappy on Wednesday night. I think it’s probably the MCO’s fault: some combination of stuff making it most of the way up but then not down and/or me not properly closing down at the end? So I’ll have to be more careful about that in the future. Fortunately, the rest of the week wasn’t as bad as that one day, but it was also a little off on other days; at least once I was worrying about some house-related stuff, which wasn’t good. So, partly because of that, I didn’t try to kick off the MCO again on Sunday; hopefully I’ll sleep well enough tonight that I can give it a try again tomorrow. I did end up rewatching the Calm Abiding video on Sunday and then doing that for the first time in a while; glad I watched the video, I’d forgotten some of the details. And it’s hard, I’ve got a lot of work to do, but also strong, so I think I’ll try to find time to work that into the rotation.

I didn’t spend as much time this week doing Wu Song Shen Fa as the previous week, but I still did it enough that I don’t feel too bad. Feeling pretty good about 1 and 3, but 2 definitely needs work; I think I’m starting to feel the right feeling with 2, though. Also I had an interesting time in the park when doing that, some random person came up and asked what I was doing, we had an interesting talk, and I ended up pointing him at the IAA.

I rewatched the first of the Yang 37 form videos one day this week (Friday, maybe?); I’ll do another one or two tonight instead of watching a new Tai Chi video.