Nei Gong Notes, July 31, 2024

This week was a Tai Chi week, and the lesson was Ba Men 3, where we add in the four corners to the first four energies. Interesting stuff there, e.g. how Cai is different from what I’m used to; it took me a while to get used to how to perform it, but I think I’ve mostly got it down now, and it felt surprisingly intense when I was going through it yesterday.

I also finished one more of the live lessons that got added to Nei Gong Year 1, so I’m now done with all of those.

My Chen Tai Chi teacher mentioned to me that, when Chen Xiaowang does Zhan Zhuang, he squats down lower if he wants his arms higher, but if he’s standing higher than his arms are lower. So I played around with that, and it makes sense from a mechanical point of view: there’s a natural place where my arms want to be that gets higher the further down I am. So I went down lower on Saturday when I did that, and it ended up being more comfortable.

I had a good Calm Abiding on Sunday morning, which was nice, and a pretty good Channel Opening 1 / 2. I’m realizing that, when doing Wu Ji, I’m slumping a bit, so I think I need to work on Bones Up Flesh Down more.

It probably wasn’t a coincidence that I did well on Sunday after sleeping well on Saturday. I noticed several times this week that my energy ran out part way through the afternoon; if I’m doing Tai Chi in the afternoon and I just don’t feel like it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m lazy, it might be early feedback from my body that I’m running low on energy. So I’m going to pay more attention to that, and figure out how to behave in those situations: what’s more important for me to push through and get done, what should I let slide.

And I had really crappy sleep on Monday – for the first time in a while I got startled awake. I’ve been off of one of my allergy medicines for most of a month, which is when this recent bout of energy level problems started; I wasn’t sure at the time if it was caused by the allergy medicines or by the heat wave, but the heat wave has gone away and the problems are still there. So as of yesterday I’m back on both my allergy medicines, hopefully that will help. I’m also still not sure how much of my energy problems are downstream of bad sleep versus just being caused by allergies taking stuff out of me; my experience on Sunday makes me think that sleep is important, so I should probably try to get to sleep a little earlier? And hopefully as the days get shorter, my dog will start waiting until the alarm before waking us up; the alarm goes off at 6:45 and sunrise tomorrow is at 6:14, so we’re getting close.