Nei Gong Notes, November 12, 2024
A Tai Chi lesson week, covering Golden Rooster and the kicks that follow that. Seems straightforward enough.
On Wednesday morning I watched the fourth Uluwatu Foundations video; nice to get in an almost three hour session. And on Sunday I watched a theory video about the Dantian that was added to that series even though it wasn’t from the Uluwatu class; I don’t know that there was any individual bit that I hadn’t seen before but it was a useful reminder of the mental state I should try to get into. Probably worth a rewatch in a month or so? Good to be all caught up with Foundations videos before the next course in a week and a half.
At the start of my Saturday Tai Chi class I did 30 minutes of Zhan Zhuang and then continued my series of focusing on one Silk Reeling exercise, this time Waist Turning and Punching. Nothing particularly special that happened this time as I kept on doing it; my Yongquan was buzzing but I think that’s the Zhan Zhuang setting things up. My punching did feel unusually solid, but it felt that way right from the start, it wasn’t from the repetition. Nice feeling of progress, though, I wonder what led to that? One other thing I noticed during the class: I’d recently been paying attention to the expansion in my arms during Reverse with Spiraling Forearms, but there’s also expansion in my Kua, I should pay attention to both expansions simultaneously.
We had Sunday Tai Chi class this week as well. I decided to do some Zhan Zhuang at the start of it as well, and in between my showing up early and the class not getting started until a bit after the official start time, that ended up as a 50 minute session. Which was my longest Zhan Zhuang session, I kind of wish the class hadn’t started for another 10 minutes so I could have put in a full hour; and I was pretty surprised that it had been 50 minutes, I knew it had been a while but it felt more like 40. For both of these sessions, I did a sort of medium height Zhan Zhuang – not the low version that Chen Xiaowang was showing us, but also at the height that my arms were naturally reaching to, so they felt internally supported, instead of having my arms be straight ahead.
We were going over a bit of the Lao Jia first form and some interesting connections came up between my shoulder and hip during the section from Dantian Change to White Goose Displays the Wings; I should pay attention to that. (In that section, but probably in the whole form.) Also I did a bit of push hands practice with somebody who was having me always be on his center, pointing out whenever I slipped of, I should try that more.