Nei Gong Notes, August 27, 2024
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.