Nei Gong Notes, October 22, 2024

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.