Good week. My energy levels are doing better than they have been over the last few months; not sure if it’s that I’m managing my sleep better or if it’s because of the new herbs from my TCM doctor or what, but it doesn’t feel like a random improvement. There’s definitely room for further improvement, and who knows how sustained this will be, but still, yay for good signs.

On Tuesday night I did Shui Gong 2 for the first time in probably over a year; it actually went fine, it didn’t mess up my sleep, and it might even have helped my sleep? I haven’t done it since then, but I’ll definitely want to give that another try.

I did the third Uluwatu session on Wednesday; nice to have a session where I’m not doing my regular stuff and that’s a bit longer than my historical norm. I noticed that my stomach really wanted to move when I was doing Dantian Gong during tat session; another sign that my development is going well. There was a lecture in part of it, and one thing that he said was that, in the internal arts, the body moves in response to the hands, and he noted that this isn’t just a Qi Gong / Nei Gong thing, it applies in Tai Chi too. Which made me think I should try it in Tai Chi, maybe even Chen Tai Chi despite the Chen claim that everything comes from the Dantian: in the Xin Jia form in particular, moves frequently start out with some sort of hand movement, so maybe this is related to that?

I did try that out later in the work. And it does feel like this is relevant, especially in Xin Jia but also in some places in Lao Jia. (It’s less clear to me in Hunyuan.) Basically, I’d move my hand, it would set up tension inside my body somewhere, and responding to that tension would cause my body to move appropriately. I’m honestly not sure if, by doing things that way, I’m doing Chen Tai Chi wrong, or if the sequence is that the hand gives direction to the Dantian and then the Dantian still kicks off the movement or if different people feel differently about whether the Dantian is the source of everything or just has an important guiding force; though Chen Xiaowang is the foremost Xin Jia practitioner in the world and he was pretty clear that movement should come from the Dantian…

At any rate, an interesting exercise. And in general Tai Chi was interesting this week; e.g. when I was doing Jian practice, I was starting to get a feeling along the blade of the Jian, so hopefully I’m making progress there too. I did try out Damo’s Returning Force push hands exercise with my push hands partner on Saturday, and that didn’t work at all; not sure how much that’s because I haven’t been doing his push hands exercises in general and how much is those exercises potentially being at a higher level than it’s reasonable to have attained at that point in the program: they look to me like they’re pretty advanced but maybe if I’d found somebody to do them regularly with then they’d work out fine?

On Sunday, I did an hour of Wu Ji; I got a really strong stretch along my spine, and there was other stuff going on inside too, it might have been the best Wu Ji session I’ve ever had? (At least at a physical level; mentally I was a little more distracted than I would like.) And then I did an hour of Calm Abiding; it honestly didn’t go great, I wasn’t too sleepy but I also didn’t do a great job of relaxing my mind. And my back hurt more than it normally does when I’m doing that; nothing awful but enough to be a distraction, presumably it’s a side effect of how the Wu Ji session was tugging at my spine.

I figured that the right way to work on my mental distractions during Wu Ji was to try to get my mind in a Calm Abiding mode. So I tried that during a (much shorter) Wu Ji session on Monday evening, and honestly it went great: during the session, there was a lot more expansion inside and my mind was noticeably relaxed (I actually went a little longer than I intended because I lost track of my meditation timer going off), and my back and torso felt actively good during the evening. And I did that again today; not quite as dramatic, but it still felt good. So I’m definitely going to stick with that.

And I also felt like I’d done a good job of mixing things up during Nei Gong. I forgot to mention above this week’s lesson, which was another Channel Opening one; not dramatic, but probably a little bit of opening? Though also my sleep was a little iffy in ways that might have been related to that; a Wood Wu Xing session fixed that, though. And I did one or two sessions of stretching my arms from the insides.