Not much in the first part of last week: I was over my cold but still easing back into things, and also I had an allergy shot on Wednesday.

The first day of the workshop didn’t go particularly well; it was a low energy day, probably because my sleep was pretty interrupted the previous night? So I bailed out rather more than I would have liked; understandable, but also, it’s a little dangerous to have that idea in my mind, I was worried that I’d keep on bailing even if I didn’t need to. There were some good parts of that day, though: there was a leg/Kua exercise that I liked, and actually part of the reason why I had a hard time standing was because I was doing an unusually good job sinking, my feet were feeling a lot more pressure than normal!

Fortunately, I slept quite a bit better on Saturday night, and Sunday went well. (Both for me and for a lot of the other attendees.) We had a good stand that day: maybe 50 minutes in Wu Ji plus 25 minutes of Dantian Gong? So that felt good.

Not sure that I have any big takeaways of things I want to do differently, but I am going to try to fit a little more exercising in random holes in my day. Rick mentioned doing 50,000 Spinal Waves as a benchmark a couple of times; I’d already been thinking I should do more of those, and I was thinking that, if I do 20 Spinal Waves each time my watch tells me to stand up, it shouldn’t be too hard to get in 100 a day? And if I keep that up for a year and a half, then that’ll be 50,000 of them. (Though, to be sure, I’ve already done some amount. Not nearly that much, though.)

Another thing that Rick mentioned a few times is that, if you’re having a hard time sinking, it’s probably because part of your brain is a little scared to do that because your legs aren’t strong enough. And I think that’s probably more accurate for me than I’d like: my legs have gotten better with the Tai Chi but there’s still more room to go. Rick showed us a leg / Kua exercise that I rather liked, and mentioned starting with 10 times on a side and working up to 25 times; that seems like something I can do while waiting for a train or waiting for my lunch to heat up in a microwave? I’m pretty sure I can actually do 25 on a side just fine now, actually, but still, doing them more often will help. I should probably also work on my arm strength too; maybe I’ll throw some pushups into my warmups on practice days, but I’m not committing to that yet.

I was doing Wu Ji today, and all of a sudden my abdomen started feeling warm, like there was warm liquid in there (or on there). Never felt that before, I’m curious if it’ll come back again; presumably a sign of progress of some sort.

I was sick for most of the week, so no new lesson last week; and no new one this week, given that I’ll be at a Foundations workshop this weekend. And no practice most of the week, but I started getting better on Friday and so I started dialing things back up a little bit over the weekend. I had a good Calm Abiding on Saturday; I’m still bad at sustainably relaxing my mind but at least I’m starting to get a feel for when my mind isn’t relaxed at all! I’m back up to normal today, fortunately, so no worries about going to the workshop; energy levels are good, I actually ended up doing a little more practice than normal on my work days.

I was enjoying my back stretches once I was feeling better. And I’m getting a sense for where issues are there: there’s one spot in the middle of my back in particular that feels off. So I should probably work on that; maybe Coiling Snake (I did some today, though unfortunately I get the feeling that it’s actually not so great at dealing with the middle of my back?), maybe Spine Waves, maybe something else.

One thing that I forgot to mention from the workshop: a regular part of Chen Xiaowang’s instructions while standing was to listen behind. Which I’d started to do sometimes when doing the form a few months back, but I’d lost the habit, and I hadn’t been worrying about that at all when standing.

Also I was thinking a bit about Qi and my Dantian in a Tai Chi context, and I decided to play around a little bit with seeing if I can send Qi / Jin out from there the same way I can send it up from my feet while doing the Wu Song Shen Fa exercises. And I feel like I can? I haven’t experimented with it too much, though; and I’m still curious if that has anything to do with how Chen Tai Chi uses Qi, or if it’s just a Yang thing.

I was going through the Lao Jia first form on Sunday, and for whatever reason my body was rather mor interested in doing strong punches and what not than it normally is. (And they seemed higher quality than normal, too.) No idea what was going on there, we’ll see if it continues, but it was interesting, I wouldn’t mind leaning into that a bit. We’ll see whether I have much time to practice this week, though; Wednesday and Friday are my normal heavy practice days but I’m traveling on Friday and I’ve got an allergy appointment on Wednesday afternoon.

It was a Tai Chi week for me in the Internal Arts Academy; continuing with the form, Punch Under Elbow this time. The most interesting bit for me there was hearing Damo explain what Silk Reeling Energy means in that context, and how it’s different from other kinds of energy; good to hear, though I’m not sure how similar it is to the use of the same term in a Chen Tai Chi context. At any rate, it took me a few practice sessions to get that part of the form into my body (and I’m actually still working on the previous section, though I’m getting better at it), but I do rather like it now that I’m used to it. And I’m also getting noticeably more used to the Eight Energies drill, I like how that affects my body too.

Good practice on Wednesday; okay morning, 40 minutes of Wu Ji plus 20 minutes of Concentration 2. (In general I found more time to do Concentration 2 this week than I had been, though I definitely need to keep on working on that, no real progress there yet.) And then in the afternoon I decided to do a single hour of Wu Song Shen Fa 1, instead of doing three different WSSF exercises for 20 minutes each; I was actually a little disappointed with that, it didn’t feel particularly different, but I did some silk reeling after that and it felt noticeably more interesting than normal, so that might have been related? I’m honestly not sure; I’ll probably keep up the experiment over the next month or so.

And then this weekend Chen Xiaowang was in town giving a workshop. And that turned out to be really good, much better than I expected. On Friday morning the main event was having us all stand while he methodically went over to each of us and adjusted our posture. Which took quite a while, but that was okay, it just meant that I got extra standing practice. Some people got a huge amount out of that, it felt like it had been really transformative to them; he didn’t adjust me so much, though he had me lower / relax my arms quite a bit compared to the position I’m used to doing Zhan Zhuang in; some other little tweaks, especially on my Kua, and there was also a bit where he just kind of held onto my hand and, after a few seconds, my lower back and other parts of my body started wanting to relax, that was interesting.

I talked to my regular Tai Chi teacher about the difference between that and the way I’d been doing Zhan Zhuang; his take was that, because it was a more introductory workshop with a range of students, Xiaowang was having us do an easier version. Which has its virtues: people were really interested in it, they got him to do it some on Saturday morning too, and some people who are in my regular Saturday class asked me if I’d be up for doing Zhan Zhuang with them regularly at the start of class.

That got me in a mindset to do more work, and we had a two and a half hour long lunch break; I was walking past a church on my way back, and it had a labyrinth, so I slowly walked that, and also had a good Tai Chi practice session after that. (Yang instead of Chen, hopefully I left enough break between the two.) And then in the afternoon Xiaowang was talking about Silk Reeling; I was unfortunately kind of sleepy so I didn’t really pay attention during the first half of the afternoon, but during the second half of the afternoon, it was pretty noticeable how my hands were rotating together, kind of like they’re on gears.

And then somebody asked him a question about pushing off from your foot, and he gave a really interesting answer. He pushed off from his foot in a clumsy way and said that doing so is contrary to all Tai Chi principles; and then he talked about a car, where you move from your engine instead of from the tires, with the engine being your Dantian and the tires being your feet.

So that’s pretty clear: I’ve heard Chen folks (including my teacher) talk repeatedly about moving from your Dantian, but that was a very clear statement that yes, that’s the way you should move. And the car analogy is kind of suggestive: the engine doesn’t move the car on its own, power has to go from it through the drive train. So, in the body, the drive train is connections along the inside of your body; I’m already feeling those (I think the coordinated hand rotation is an example of that), I should keep on working on that, and also try to make sure that the direction of force goes in the appropriate direction.

That makes me feel like I understand Chen Tai Chi better, and in particular how it differs from Yang Tai Chi as Damo explains it, because that method of energy generation is completely different than what Damo’s videos talk about. Thinking about it more, though, I guess there’s still one important part I don’t understand in Chen Tai Chi: I still don’t understand what Qi is and how it works in that context? Xiaowang brought up Qi several times in the workshop, it’s definitely a thing in Chen Tai Chi too, but he didn’t talk about it in enough detail for me to really understand it.

Anyways, that was Friday; on Saturday and Sunday we went over the first half or so of the Xinjia first form. I got more reinforcements on the coordinated hand movements; and there were some details that either I hadn’t noticed or that were a little different from how my teacher has been teaching it. Xiaowang did a good job of teaching us that; he clearly has a lot of experience running large workshops!

I had another good practice over lunch on Saturday, but I was again a little tired in the afternoon; on Sunday I rested some and had a pretty good Calm Abiding session, and that felt better. In general, I felt like I was stressing my body, but in productive ways.

Unfortunately, on Monday it seemed like my body might have been going through some less productive stress: I woke up and was clearly sick. I assume I picked something up at the workshop: several people were sneezing and COVID is going around in general, and while I put on a mask halfway through, that still left a day and a half when I wasn’t protected. Or maybe I picked up something before then, or was just a little weak from overexerting myself; who knows. Nothing horrible yet; and I was expecting it to be worse today but actually I felt about the same, maybe even a little better? I’m not even sure what I have; it’s a little unusual, I would normally expect to be a lot more congested by now, whether from COVID or from a regular cold or flu or what. Anyways, hopefully it won’t be too bad, I’ll be annoyed if it means that I have to miss the first Foundations workshop next week.

No new lesson this week, given that, I’m mostly going to be taking things easy.

This week was a Nei Gong week for lessons, I did Concentration 2. One useful thing about that one was how he was talking about concentration in terms of attention, which was something I’d been wondering about; honestly, I should probably rewatch that part of the video. So that increased my chances that I should keep at this exercise for a longer period of time: concentration is clearly important, and if it’s closely enough linked to attention then it’ll fit in that way too. Though, unfortunately, because of the way various things went this week (some random timing stuff, some health), I didn’t do it much this week!

Wednesday was a pretty good day. My sleep was a little more interrupted than I would have liked, so I didn’t have a great Calm Abiding session that morning. But I did go through the Spinal Dao Yin set without the video for the first time, that went fine, and my afternoon went well: some Ping Heng Gong, an hour of Wu Song Shen Fa, another hour of miscellaneous Tai Chi stuff, and I actually had energy to do more, I just needed to go home and make dinner. (And something about that day also made me think that I should spend time doing longer Wu Ji sessions, I can’t exactly remember what triggered that.)

Unfortunately, my sleep got worse. (And my dog didn’t help on one of those nights, though actually she was sleeping in more than normal on others.) I had a TCM appointment on Friday, and my doctor said my Kidney levels were the lowest I’d seen in months; actually lower than I expected. And he mentioned Liver Heat too; not sure if that was just a response to me mentioning sleep problems or if it’s something he saw? My sleep was really lousy that night; I actually normally don’t sleep that well after acupuncture, so maybe it was that, but there were various bits of it that felt like they might be allergy-related? So we did all the dust mite treatment we could on Saturday, and I ordered some more dust mite covers; we’ll see if that helps. It could be that, but maybe it’s something else, I’m honestly not sure; Friday night was the worst but the last two nights haven’t been good so there’s something I need to stay on top of. I’ve been doing Wood Wu Xing too in case it’s related to stuff rising to my head somehow.

On Sunday, I gave my fourth Silk Reeling Principles lesson, this one about paying attention to the Dantian. This one was my most experimental one, because I have a technique that I kind of cobbled together on my own that I don’t know if it works for other people; it seemed like it worked for one of the students but not for the other three. We’ll see if they get it to work over the next month; even if it doesn’t, it could be okay, they can get their attention in their Dantian other ways.

I also did a bit of Zhan Zhuang on Sunday, and that actually went really well. My Tai Chi teacher had mentioned that, if you want your arms high while doing Zhan Zhuang, you should squat lower, so that got me playing around with how those two related, and I realized that there was a certain height that my arms naturally wanted to rise to, and that height was lower than I thought. (And that height was indeed related to how much I squatted.) So I squatted a little more than I had been and lowered my arms until it felt like the correct position; and I ended up with really strong pressure on my feet but feeling like I was basically floating otherwise. That was pretty cool, I’ll definitely keep on investigating along that line.

Chen Xiaowang is giving a workshop this Friday through Sunday, I’m looking forward to that. And hopefully my sleep will improve soon…