Nei Gong Notes, October 15, 2024

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.