Pretty solid week. At least modulo sleep issues – definitely caused by allergies (I’m getting telltale sleep apnea signs), hopefully getting the air ducts cleaned will help with that, that’s scheduled for a week and a half from now. And I’ve bumped up my allergy medicine mix a bit.

Tai Chi week, covering the next move in the form, White Snake Creeps Down. Seemed pretty straightforward, and I was glad that my body is flexible enough for it not to be a problem. I also watched the next Year Three one, Practicing with Incense: my wife is allergic to all sorts of things so I’m not about to burn incense in the house, so I figured I’d just watch it but not worry about it otherwise. Interesting enough, but not so interesting that I’m sad to not be able to easily practice it; honestly, even if my wife weren’t allergic, I don’t know that I’d spend the money on getting incense and an appropriate pot now?

On Wednesday I watched the second Uluwatu video; feels good to sometimes do sessions of that length. (Admittedly, it’s not that much longer than my solo sessions on good days.) And some different stuff than I’m in the habit of doing in my weekly practice, e.g. a shoulder blade loosening exercise. Other than that, pretty normal stuff on Wednesday and Friday; and I did get back on track going through all my forms over the course of the week. And on Sunday I spent some time with the beginning of a video on the Double Dao form, so I think I more or less understand the basics of what I’m supposed to do there; I’ll definitely want to review that but it should be in acceptable shape by the time of the November Sunday class.

On Saturday, I continued focusing on a single Silk Reeling exercise; this time I did Wrist Rotations and Arm Circles. I was surprised how strongly the sensation went from my arm to my hip on the same side: I was expecting it to go to my Dantian but really it kind of touched the Dantian and then moved down to my hip. And when I did it with both hands, it got even stronger, especially on the direction where I was rotating inward; eventually I got to where it was going down my leg and then bouncing off my foot, which is pretty cool. (And vaguely reminiscent of what happens with the Wu Song Shen Fa, but I think the mechanism of force transmission is different.)

I was feeling like I should do more shoulder opening, so I went back to the arm stretching exercise that Rick taught in a workshop that involves stretching via how you put attention in and then above your body. I did that a couple of times; still works, wasn’t as strong as it was during / after that workshop, so I think I’ll keep at it more.

I read an interesting Tai Chi book, The Heart Treasure of Taijiquan by Ren Gang. Honestly kind of inspiring, I liked the view of high level Tai Chi that it provides, and it was nice to see enough in there that was familiar that I felt like I’ve at least taken a couple of steps along that path. But also kind of frustrating, because his guidance as to how to actually progress along that path isn’t nearly as concrete as I’d like: way too much advice to have your teacher show you stuff in picture. And I do like and respect my local Tai Chi teacher, but also I think the route that my Tai Chi Teacher shows for advancing isn’t particularly closely aligned with the details of what Ren Gang is showing, so I don’t think asking my teacher about something specific that Ren Gang mentions will be too helpful? Still, hopefully between my local teacher and the online stuff and that book, I’ll make progress; I certainly feel like I am.

Also on the Tai Chi not, I’d been a little unsure as to whether I would teach the same Silk Reeling Principles course next summer as I taught this summer. But I got another idea today: I’ve been thinking a fair amount about Song recently, and maybe I understand enough about that to help beginners step up their game a bit? So I’ll think about that more, and see if I can flesh that out into a sketch of a course; if it seems plausible, I’ll ask other local students what they think and if they’re more interested in that than in the Silk Reeling Principles course then I’ll give that a try.

It was a Nei Gong week this week, the lesson was on Prostration. I did the sequence there a few times, it was interesting how the changed hand position felt inside my body, but I didn’t actually feel any desire to prostrate. I don’t think I’ll keep this one up at all regularly, I’ve got enough other stuff to work on. (Though admittedly most of the things I really want to work on now are seated work! But I can always stand to do more Wu Ji, and I should continue to work on my shoulders.)

I went through the first Uluwatu video on Friday; nothing super dramatic, just going through Wu Ji, and the video didn’t have us do a long stand or anything. I didn’t feel up for a single long Wu Song Shen Fa session in the afternoon but I did do 20 minutes each of both WSSF 4 and WSSF 5.

On Saturday, instead of doing Silk Reeling along with the class, I did another long Hand Maneuvers session, 10 minutes with each single hand and then 15-20 minutes of both hands. The distinctive thing about the single hand ones was how the four energies showed up; with two hands, it was again how strongly the hand turns after the vertical part translated into a torso turn, and how the back foot’s energy eventually translated into the Peng on the other side. Also I noticed my back getting quite warm, I guess it’s pretty good for my back.

Also on the Chen Tai Chi note, I’m no longer feeling completely at see with the Hunyuan 48. Doesn’t mean that I’ve got it (or the parts of it that we’ve done in class) down particularly solidly, though, so I’m going to stick with reviewing it on Thursday evenings. I did make it through all of my forms this week, so that’s good. Also I’m experimenting with doing the first form without any Fa Jin, to see if I can understand where the power comes from when I’m trying to minimize the use of my muscles; some from coordinated turning and some from expansion. (Maybe just expansion related to Song, maybe some related to what Damo talks about in his Tai Chi course, I’m not sure.) Seems like an experiment worth continuing.

I’m having ups and downs with tiredness (and with sleep, I definitely had some sleep apnea one night, I think caused by the heat kicked in, I’ve made an appointment to get the air ducts cleaned in a couple of weeks), but I’m also having several days when I’m feeling like doing noticeably more than the minimum. I already talked about what I did on Friday; on Sunday, I did 30 minutes of prostration, 30 minutes of Anchoring the Breath, 1 hour of Calm Abiding (nothing dramatic but a decent amount of tingling; also, in retrospect, I’m not sure where all the time went, I wasn’t sleepy enough to account for that, so maybe I’m starting to get at where time disappears from the exercise itself??), 40 minutes of Spleen Hui Chun. And today I did an hour of Nei Gong and 20 minutes of WSSF 5, which is more than I normally manage on a week day.

Also on the sleep note, I’m thinking that it probably doesn’t help that my breathing is a little shallow, so I should either work on the exercise where you pay attention to your breath or else work on Anchoring the Breath. So for now I’m trying to work the latter into my routine, not necessarily as a priority (I don’t know that it will fit more than once a week in my regular schedule) but hopefully I can do it on days when I feel like doing extra stuff.

Good week; my sleep is definitely getting better, and my energy is sometimes better too. I think, in my next acupuncture appointment in a week and a half, I’m going to ask my doctor if he can switch my herbs from a Liver/Kidney mixture to something that only focuses on my Kidneys: I haven’t been taking any herbs this month and my sleep is being under control now that it’s not so hot, so I don’t think the Liver part is particularly important these days. I’m actually thinking I should get back to Shui Gong and in particular give Shui Gong 2 a try again (it’s led to bad sleep when I’ve tried it in the past); I reviewed the videos for those but the timing hasn’t worked out right for trying them yet.

Also I feel like my ribcage is opening up. Not sure if that’s related to the Heart medicine that I’ve been taking, or if it’s just that the stretching that I’ve been doing in that area is having an effect; seems healthy either way. And I’m Songing more in daily life; mostly physically but also maybe mentally a bit? I like the way it feels on my spine and neck; I’m also noticing one kind of achy bit in my back, hopefully it’ll start working itself open? I’m trying to be somewhat aware of it but not worrying about it.

Anyways, in terms of specific practice stuff: this week’s lesson was a Tai Chi lesson, on Wu Song Shen Fa 5. Interesting exercise; I feel like the first half of it is going pretty well, but I don’t feel like I’m doing the part right where you rock your foot. I’ll keep up with that, and also hopefully find time to do a long WSSF 4 practice; didn’t happen last week and it won’t happen this week, I had unusual stuff going on both weeks.

That unusual stuff also meant that I didn’t go through all of my Chen Tai Chi forms last week, but this week I’ve already gone through all of the weapons forms I know and the longest of the empty hand forms that I know, so hopefully we won’t have a repeat. I was a little worried that the handle of my new Jian was feeling funny, but it turned out that I just needed to tighten the nut more than I had been; glad the outcome was that simple, I prefer the heavier weight of that Jian in general.

The timing of the Foundations Zoom sessions is horrible for me to participate in them live, but they released the videos of the first of them, so I spent 5 hours on Friday going through them. They covered the Hui Chun exercises; nothing super new, though there were a few details I didn’t do quite right. Maybe I should spend a little more time on those; right now I do the Kidney one once a week and the Spleen one most weeks but I don’t do the others, so conceivably I could try to rotate between the other three, doing one of them a week? But I’m not convinced that that’s the best use of my time right now; honestly I feel like I’d pretty much always prefer to do either Calm Abiding or Concentration 2 instead of those. Still, good to have an excuse to have an extra long Nei Gong day. And now there are some (five? four?, average time around two and a half hours) videos from the first in-person classes that Damo led; presumably there’s significant overlap between what he presented and what Rick presented in person (though who knows), but it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea for me to go through one of those a week.

Good Chen Tai Chi class on Saturday. Push hands in particular went well: I felt like I wasn’t getting jammed as much as I sometimes do when doing two handed fixed step push hands, and it felt like circles were going between our bodies. And we had the monthly Sunday Tai Chi class; people showed up earlier to do some standing practice, and I decided to do some regular Zhan Zhuang (instead of the lower / gentler variant that I’ve been doing on Saturdays), that went well, I got a good stretch out of that, I’ll probably switch back to doing that variant on Saturdays for a while. And then I randomly decided to do 15 minutes of Hand Maneuvers after that, and that turned out to be a good choice, too: about 5 minutes in, the way my body was doing it changed significantly, with the hand going down actively propelling the turn of my body, so I ended up turned a good amount by the time that hand reached the bottom, before the hand was moving horizontally. Not sure how much of that was from the extra time doing it and how much of it was a side effect of the Zhan Zhuang affecting my internal connections, but it seemed like a good thing either way.

We did the first couple of moves of the Double Dao; we’d done a preparatory practice the last month, and I thought I’d been doing that right, but I think in retrospect I wasn’t, because the same bit showed up in those moves and I was clearly doing that wrong. So I’ll have to figure out exactly what I should be doing there; I ripped the relevant DVD from Chen Qingzhou’s set yesterday, presumably watching that will help.

And that afternoon I had a decent Calm Abiding practice; I think I’m doing better at getting into a Shen Up state, or at least in a “Shen not being so far down as to put me asleep immediately”: I’m trying to not let the source of my attention wander to the lower back of my skull, keeping it more in the middle, and also when I relax my attention, I’m trying to let it expand out (as I do when Songing physically) instead of having my attention sink in a way that collapses.

And then on Monday I had a very good Calm Abiding practice: I was planning to do it for 45 minutes, but it was going well so it ended up more like 65 or 70 minutes. In the last third or half, I was getting this feeling that my mind was everywhere in the upper half of my body (basically everything above my waist), almost like my body was wanting to glow and/or become a pyramid. And there was a very strong tingling sensation and expansion sensation. That definitely felt like progress; on a mental level I maybe didn’t come out of it quite as chill as in my prior best Calm Abiding sessions, but I’m pretty sure that whatever was going on with my body was something useful. The only thing I’m not so sure about was that my sleep last night was weirdly interrupted, in a way that didn’t feel like any of my normal patterns for sleep being interrupted; not sure what’s going on there, maybe it’s just a coincidence or maybe a subtler version of one of the normal problems, but it feels like it’s not completely out of the question for it to be related to the Calm Abiding session? Though if that were the case I would expect it to feel more like Liver Qi rising problems.

Low energy week, with my sleep often being not great. Not sure how much was the COVID vaccine, how much was the heat, how much was something else? I’ve been feeling like I’ve been slacking some on the Spinal Waves, so maybe that’s relevant; I’ve been trying to get back to that the last couple of days, hopefully that will help.

No new lesson last week, because I was definitely feeling the vaccine then.

On Wednesday, while I was doing Calm Abiding, the point from which I was perceiving sunk down in my body; not all the way down to my Dantian, but still, interesting to have happen. It happened to me a few times a few years back, doing Silk Reeling with a particular way of approaching those exercises, but it’s been a while. Though Calm Abiding has been too sleepy; partly my iffy sleep, but I think I need to work on figuring out what Shen Up means in that context.

I’ve decided that Thursday evening is going to be Hunyuan 48 review time, and I’ve done that a couple of times. I still have a pretty large amount there to catch up with, but hopefully I’ll be able to chip away… And I did manage to review all of my Tai Chi forms this week, so that’s good. I noticed my Jian behaving oddly (weight shifting in the handle) while practicing that one, so I emailed the folks who sold it to me about that; fortunately, tightening the bolt at the bottom with a wrench seems to have fixed the problem.

Chen Tai Chi was going well this week; I’m starting to viscerally understand what Silk Reeling means, I think. I definitely got a lot out of figuring out how to present that last lesson in my Silk Reeling course.

This week’s lesson was Channel Opening 4, a seated exercise opening channels from the bottom of the torso up. And my sleep Tuesday night after doing that exercise was crappy, I think too much stuff was going on; I tried it a couple of other times in the week doing Channel Opening 4 followed by Channel Opening 3 and spending more time closing down at the end, and that was better? Still, not my favorite exercise.

Not a particularly notable week; not super energetic this week, so while I got decent amounts of practice done, there wasn’t anything special going on. And I was out of town on Saturday and some of Sunday, so I had less weekend practice than normal. I did make it through all of my Tai Chi forms, at least, so that’s something.

I got vaccinations yesterday and I’m definitely feeling the effects of it, so I’m going to skip doing a new lesson this week. I think I’m over the worst of it now, but still, no sense pushing things.