Nei Gong Notes, September 24, 2024

Pretty good week. It’s a Nei Gong week, I learned Cloud Hands; I spent some time on it as an isolated exercise, it’s coming together, though I’m definitely still learning something from it. E.g. partway through today’s practice I got the feeling that the Jin from my leg was both going down the opposite side to the An and my leg but also up in the same arm and turning into the Peng.

And I’ve done the Jade Pillow exercise most days, sometimes adding it in as a second seated exercise even when I was mostly working on something else. It might be helping with my sleep; maybe it’s just a coincidence, but I’ve noticed that, at bed time, I’m feeling quite sleepy in a healthy way, like my body is sending the right signals. I’ll probably start dialing down the frequency of the exercise, but I’ll keep it up occasionally for a little while longer.

I can’t remember what all I was doing on Wednesday; not much Tai Chi because I normally do that in the afternoons but I had an allergy shot appointment that kind of got in the way. Friday was good, though: I did a version of an arm / shoulder expansion exercise that Rick taught in a workshop a year or two back, and I’m glad I did that variant: definitely effective, but there’s more to do there, I remember it going deeper when I was focusing on it before (it hit my bone once), and I remember Rick even saying that it could go inside your bone. So I think I’ll start throwing that back into the mix.

And then I had a very good Calm Abiding session. I was worried that I was too sleepy to have a good session, and honestly I was dozing off some during the first 30 minutes. But then I woke up and I had 40 quite solid minutes after that.

Not as much Tai Chi as I’d hoped on Friday afternoon – I was starting to get tired in a specific way that I’ve noticed happens when I do a lot of Tai Chi or internal work, so I thought I shouldn’t push myself, so I didn’t put in my hour of Wu Song Shen Fa that I’ve been doing most weeks. But I did do my regular form work, so I got in all of the forms I know this week for the first time in a month or so. Still work to do: there are bits of the staff form that I need to solidify and one bit of the guan dao. And there is a bunch of the Hunyuan 48 that I have not learned at all solidly; I have to make a decision as to whether I’m really learning it or not this time, and if I am going to try that, I need to find significant time to carve out and work on videos. (Hmm, maybe Thursday evenings would work for that?)

My Chen teacher reviewed my form on Saturday, and I got some useful advice from him. He said that I shouldn’t be so external and I shouldn’t telegraph my movements so much: e.g. if I’m going to do something to the left, don’t move right first, keep that inside. And he said to expand a wider range of my body inside. I tried that second one out while he was talking, and it was pretty interesting; I think it might be a way into understand how to build and use Qi in a Chen Tai Chi context?

I was feeling energized after the Calm Abiding on Friday and a good Zhan Zhuang on Saturday, so I decided to try kicking off the Microcosmic Orbit on Sunday for the first time since the beginning of the summer. The prep stuff went okay but it didn’t seem quite as thick as I would have liked, so I wasn’t too surprised when stuff got stuck in the middle of my back. It probably also didn’t help that I was rushing stuff so I didn’t prepare as much as I should have, maybe it would have been different if I’d stretched out my back some first…

And I taught the final lesson of my Silk Reeling course on Sunday, about connecting up your body. I’m pleased with how that lesson went: while writing up the notes, there’s one exercise in particular that I figured out how to show mechanically how rotational movement has effects across your body; definitely helped my understand, and hopefully it made sense to my students too? And it’s having a real effect on my form, too: e.g. my body is moving quite differently now in the second move of the form. We’ll see if I teach the course again next year or if I decide to take a year off; depends on how much interest I can drum up, I guess.

My arms are wanting to sink pretty heavily during Wu Ji now; I wonder if this is related to the form of Zi Fa Gong where people fall prostrate? My arms are often ending up a little forward, which feels like it’s collapsing my body; I don’t think the forward pull is a Zi Fa Gong thing, though, I think it’s just bad positioning? So I’m moving my arms back further to my side, so the pull goes straight down my torso. That then raises the question of how worried I should be about my spine compressing; sometimes I’m trying to pull up physically more than I normally want to do, but on Monday I also experimented with letting the sink really make it down my spine into my pelvis and that was interesting, that felt like the way to go. Even with that, though, stuff might be compressing too much; maybe the answer there is to put my attention into my whole torso and hope that that leads to an inflation that protects me? I’ll see how it goes.