Tai Chi week this week; I reviewed the next-to-last lesson from the First Road, and then on Friday I reviewed the last lesson, so I can get back to new lessons from that course now. I actually realized in the middle of the week that I forgot to hit the blue button on the Nei Gong course, so I could potentially do Tai Chi today; but given that there were new year 1 lessons released recently for the Nei Gong course, I think I’ll do one of those instead.

I wasn’t feeling 100% on Wednesday so I didn’t do my MCO prep exercise then; I did it on Friday and Sunday, though, and Monday was a holiday, so I took advantage of that to try kicking off the MCO again. I wasn’t super optimistic at the start of that (I felt fine but not any more energized than the previous week) but actually my Dantian got pretty tingly during the prep? Unusual feeling when I got to the bit while I was actively trying to kick it off: felt like there was a massive blob of stuff going up my back. It didn’t go up particularly far, though; not sure what was going on there, not going to spend much time thinking about it. My Dantian did feel nice and active this morning while doing the Kidney Hui Chun, though, which was nice; we’ll see how this week goes.

As to Chen Tai Chi, I went to a workshop on Saturday with Zhu Tiancai and Zhu Xiangqian. They’re from Chen village; their form was a little different from my teacher’s (Zhu Tiancai is from the same generation as my teacher’s teacher), but basically the same Lao Jia first form. Most of the class was talking about Silk Reeling; their take is interestingly different from what I’m used to, with sudden Fa Jin followed by relaxation in the middle of each movement. I’m not entirely sure what I think about that, but it feels worth poking at to understand the pros and cons; and my shoulders and elbows were aching a bit the next day or two, so it was opening things up. I don’t think I’ll make time to try that out any time soon, though, because I’ve got enough else going on; I do have a video of the set saved on my phone if I want to do so at some point, though.

Nei Gong week this week, and I reached the last lesson of Year 2, yay. I’d been hoping that it wouldn’t be a long seated lesson, because that would interfere with my MCO prep, so I was a little nervous when I opened the lesson and saw a decent length seated exercise! But it turned out to be an outside practice, to do during sunny days; so it was something that I would want to fit into my afternoons when I’m out in a park doing Tai Chi there instead of something that I would want to fit into my morning Nei Gong at home.

I tried the exercise a couple of times; no particular effects yet. It is interesting when doing it how noticeable the different aspects of the exercise are, though: yes, there’s one point on my forehead that stands out, yes, I can leave my gaze far away but move my attention along a line, yes it goes inside my head when I do that, and yes there’s one point in my head that feels distinctive in a way that plausibly seems like having my vision become a little lighter. So I’ll keep on poking at that a couple of times a week.

On the MCO prep note: I had a bad practice on Wednesday; I didn’t feel quite right going in but I decided to practice anyways and that was a mistake. Not a horrible mistake or anything, but now I know to listen to my body when it’s doing that. Did MCO prep again on Friday and then tried kicking it off on Sunday; better than the previous week, but the Qi was only making up to just above the middle of my spine. Still, things are feeling more active in my body: e.g. when doing the Kidney Hui Chun yesterday, stuff was moving around quite noticeably even in the preparatory hand movements of that set, and today I did just a bit of Wu Ji as a preparation for a different exercise and my body started tingling almost immediately. So I’m pretty optimistic that I’ve hit upon a practice routine that has me actively building up Qi.

I also went through the third Zhan Zhuang lesson in the Taiji course. Still no putting the hands up; I guess that only shows up in the third year, but I’m not going to try to skip ahead to that. A very interesting lesson, at any rate, adding releasing from the feet to the mix; and it did indeed add another aspect to the interior stretch. On Saturday I did Zhan Zhuang with my arms up; hard time sinking my mind through my body in that position, but I still felt a good amount of inflation as I relaxed my arms, tried to sink my mind, and tried to relax my feet.

And on Sunday I did Zhan Zhuang as in the new lesson, I got a lot of inflation then. And actually on Sunday afternoon, the insides of my elbows were aching a bit; I’m not sure that was caused by the inflation from Zhan Zhuang or if that was caused by something else, but nice to feel that my body was working. If it was caused by something else, it’s probably that my Tai Chi teacher was having us do an exercise where you used your Dantian to flash your arms up and down, and I did a hundred iterations or so of that on both Saturday and Sunday, so that would also have put stress on my arms. Interesting exercise, one which I’d done before but not as effectively in the past: one I did it enough, I started to get a time delay where the movement was moving from my arms on down. Which is a good sign because it’s showing force moving from one part of my body to the other (setting up a causal relationship instead of muddling all the different parts together); but then when I asked my teacher about it, he said that it should go from my legs to my Dantian to my arms, so I had the causality reversed! Something to keep working on.

Also on Saturday I worked through an exercise about grounding your opponent’s force from Ken Gullette’s Internal Body Mechanics book; interesting to feel it both within my body when receiving force and within my partner’s body when I was giving force, I could tell when he was adjusting. And there was a Sunday Tai Chi class this week; we finished the staff form, yay. Next month should be a staff review, but then we’ll start the double dao after that; I think that’s the last weapons form that my Chen teacher teaches? Still a few empty hand forms to learn, though, and at some point it would be nice to see the Taiji ball.

Just Taiji review on Tuesday; I think only two sections to review and then I’ll be back to progressing on those lessons? I would say that I should try to review more sections midweek, but I’ve been spending that time on watching the Zhan Zhuang lessons; hopefully I’ll do the third of those this week. I’m definitely glad that I went through the Zhan Zhuang prep lessons: yesterday in particular I had a quite strong internal stretch while practicing that, and while I didn’t feel as strong an inflation today, I felt like maybe my mind was stabilizing a little more inside my body? Also I’ve been feeling random tingling (in a good way) in my back pretty often, and I’m continuing to feel bits of my back want to relax and expand at random points during the day.

I had an acupuncture appointment on Friday, and my energy levels have been a little better since then; not sure if it’s the treatment or getting restocked on my herbs or random chance or what.

I’m trying to get back into MCO work. I did a one-hour MCO prep set on Wednesday, then tried out the MCO on Friday. Didn’t make it very far, though; I clearly didn’t have much juice, which didn’t surprise me. But I did the prep exercise on Sunday, and then when I was doing the Kidney Hui Chun on Monday, it went really well, in a way that made me think that stuff is starting to build up. I’ll try to keep up that routine, doing the prep twice a week and trying to kick it off on a third day during the week, plus some other exercises that hopefully will help out some. We’ll see if anything happens that interferes with that; and hopefully I won’t come across any long seated Qigong exercises in the course for the next few weeks that I have to spend time on.

It was a Nei Gong lesson week; this time it was on Give It All Away. I’ll have to think about that one, figuring out what my approach should be; I don’t think I’m currently approaching Nei Gong in too instrumental a way, but I’m also not approaching it in the sort of attitude of devotion that that lesson recommends. And, honestly, I’m not good at that sort of attitude! Maybe I should listen to it again to see what options he recommends and see if I can find one that fits.

I also watched the Zhan Zhuang 2 video on Friday. Still doing preparation, this time about sinking your mind through your body; I was surprised how much my body was reconfiguring while doing that. Definitely seems good to work on, for Nei Gong purposes as well as Tai Chi. I did regular Zhan Zhuang on Saturday; I don’t know that I felt like my mind was doing a particularly good job of soaking through my body (maybe because of the arm position, maybe because it was raining pretty hard), but even so my body felt like it was supporting itself surprisingly well.

Also on Friday I had an interesting Wu Song Shen Fa 1 session: when the Jin reached my shoulders, my arms lifted on their own more strongly than I’m used to them doing.

In general, I feel like there’s interesting and productive stuff going on inside my body. I wish my energy levels were better, though, still room for improvement on that front.

On Sunday, I taught my first class in this iteration of my Silk Reeling Principles course. Only two students, which was less than I’d hoped; I knew some people had a conflict (so I’ve already scheduled a makeup session of it for this Saturday), but I’d thought a couple more people might show up? But the two people who showed up were super involved, so that was great, we ended up talking enough that the class went about half an hour over. Part of that was that I probably stuffed in a little too much material this time; also, I feel like I need more calibration about how hard people find it to pay attention to their body, and to what sort of attention I’m looking like: I think people are looking for big insights but I want people to start small, and initially with stuff that isn’t even surprising. So still a work in progress.