Nei Gong Notes, November 26, 2024
A Tai Chi lesson this week; continuing through the form, Needles to Sea Bottom and Fan Through Back; seemed fine. If I’m remembering correctly, my energy was a little low on Wednesday, but I did my once-a-month Spinal Dao Yin exercise anyways; went fine, even though that takes an hour it honestly just isn’t that draining once I sit down and do it. And I think I’m probably getting a little better at just doing longer exercises instead of being distracted constantly during them? Still work to go there, to be sure, but it’s something.
And this weekend was the second Foundations in-person session. I was a little worried at the start, because I thought I might be coming down with something, but I was feeling fine when I woke up on Saturday, so I went anyways and fully participated, and even Saturday was totally fine. (Much better than the Saturday of the first session!) Nothing super deep during the weekend, but a good solid practice; some interesting Dantian Gong variants on Saturday morning (and actually at least one of them set up connections between hands and other parts of the body), I feel like my hands are getting better and better synced up with various parts of my inside. Among other things, we did Ji Ben 1 on Saturday afternoon, and there my hands really were lifting basically entirely on their own as I stood up. (So it’s a two-way connection; actually it feels like the connections from Silk Reeling are helping here too.) Going down wasn’t as good, there continues to be this bit at the beginning where the correct level drops suddenly at the start of the descent, and my hands don’t come along with that.
Sunday morning was some sitting; Sunday afternoon was standing (for about an hour and a half), some Ji Ben 1, and some Ji Ben 2. Less good hand connection that day compared to the previous day, and going down continued to be rough; Rick said at the time that I should move my pelvis back more, that I was sinking into my knees too much, but I wasn’t able to get that to really help me on Sunday. I practiced Ji Ben 1 at home yesterday, though, and I worked on what Rick said, and that did actually nicely solve my problem, I’m managing to get an internal pull basically the whole way down now.
The main changes in my practice coming out of that are that I should work Ji Ben 1/2 into my practice pretty regularly (once a week, maybe?) for the next while, and also I should bump up the length of my Wu Ji practice; we said that, for the third session in February, we wanted to target 2 hours of Wu Ji, so I should clearly start doing 1 hour sessions pretty regularly but I should also probably try 1.5 and 2 hour sessions at home. I’m pretty sure I can do that physically: won’t be the most comfortable thing, but my legs can hold themselves up for a while these days, so while I expect my legs, feet, and back to hurt some after a couple of hours, it’ll be manageable. I expect the mental side of it to be more of a problem: between boredom, pain (manageable but still it exists) and a feeling that my mind has that it should be feeling bothered by this even though the physical symptoms aren’t that bad objectively, two hours will be a problem. But if I can make 1 hour of Wu Ji be a routine thing and work on Calm Abiding (while standing, but probably doing it sitting will help too), hopefully I’ll get to where 2 hours isn’t a massive struggle by February? And even if it is still really hard to do at home, hopefully I’ll manage to do it in a group…