Nei Gong Notes, August 6, 2024

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…