Nei Gong Notes, May 7, 2024

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.