Nei Gong Notes, August 20, 2024

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.