This week’s lesson was a Nei Gong one on Dredging the Channels. Turned out to be a Hunyuan exercise that I’d seen last summer and that I’d been curious about, so I’m glad to have made it up to it in the course.

I had a good Calm Abiding on Wednesday – I was worried I’d fall asleep, but that was fine, and I was getting tons of Qi. I set the timer for an hour but I kept going for half an hour after that, honestly I would have kept on going longer if there hadn’t been Christmas-related stuff that I had to do.

I wanted to do an hour and a half of Wu Ji on Friday, but I only lasted an hour and 15 minutes, and it was really rough at the end. I’d thought at the start that I was a little tired but not out of the norm (honestly, just being a little tired is a pretty good day, I’ve had perfectly fine Wu Ji sessions like that), but clearly I was wrong and I pushed it too far. And, in fact, on Sunday I came down with a mild cold; I’m not sure if my experience on Friday was an early warning sign of the cold or if Friday was just tiredness and pushing it too far made me vulnerable to getting sick; either way, the lesson is that I should be more attentive to my body in situations like that.

My Chen Tai Chi teacher went over my Xin Jia form for the first time on Saturday. Lots of good advice; I was correct that I know it well enough for it to be worth showing him, but that also I’ll learn a lot from showing it to him. I’ll probably keep that up as my default form to show him for the next few times.

I took it easy on Sunday and Monday: I didn’t avoid Nei Gong as much as I would have if I were sicker, but I tried to avoid going into my body too much. So I mostly went through the new breathing exercises and the Jade Pillow neck stretches. I was feeling better this morning, so I did a little more Nei Gong today, but not like a usual day off; hopefully by Friday I’ll be feeling good enough to have a regular session, we’ll see.

And then on Saturday we’re getting another puppy, so that will throw another wrench into things. But I like puppies, so it will be a good change even so!

A Tai Chi lesson this week: Turn Body, Chop, and Push. Seems fine, though I should work on it more (and, honestly, the previous bit of the form too); reminds me a little bit of the silk connections I get from Chen Tai Chi.

I did a 1h15m Wu Ji session on Wednesday. It went fine, I kept my head up and got a stretch on my back, so that nicely solved the back pain. (My lower back actually ached a little bit from the stretch, but that was entirely manageable and, I’m fairly sure, healthy.) Mentally, it was fine too; I wanted it to end more than I’d like but it was manageable; I’ll bump it up to 1h30m next time. I worked on the Reverse Breathing upgrade in the afternoon; probably haven’t done that as much as I should, to be honest. I was also hoping to do a fair amount of the Chen Xin Jia first form that afternoon, but it was feeling a little off, so I stopped after going through the form twice, and honestly I didn’t go through it as seriously as I would have liked during those two times through the form.

I did some Shui Gong 2 on Wednesday night; I fell asleep before I finished, it didn’t particularly help or hinder sleep. And I did it last night; the quality of my awareness has changed there, in ways that I think are related to it no longer causing me sleep problems. Still isn’t actively helping with sleep, but I no longer feel like I have to careful about when I try that one. Which reminds me that I should start Shui Gong 3 at some point; I think I’ll keep on going with 1 and 2 for a while before I start that, though.

I did the Spinal Dao Yin on Friday. And I had an acupuncture appointment, and my doctor complained again about my neck vertebrae; so maybe I should get back to the Jade Pillow exercise? I did that a couple of times over the last week, and my sleep might actually be getting better; also, I’m feeling really tired right around when I should be going to sleep, I remember that happening before when Jade Pillow was helping me get things in order. So maybe that theory is correct, and I should work Jade Pillow into my regular routine (once a week? or when I’m noticing sleep problems?) instead of assuming that I’ve accomplished what it is designed to do.

I was hoping that my Tai Chi teacher would go over my Xin Jia form this Saturday, but he was out on holiday; hopefully he’ll be able to do that this week, but we’ll see, sometimes it takes him a while to catch up to skipped weeks. Wouldn’t hurt for me to have more time to practice it.

On Sunday I had a so-so arm stretch session, but a pretty good Calm Abiding session. Not as good as the one two weeks earlier, but better than any other one I’ve had since then.

Today I went through the new class on Breathwork for Qigong. My main takeaway there is that I really do have problems with the basics of that: my breathing is too fast and shallow. Which I’ve kind of known but it hasn’t been a priority; healthy to get a nudge, and to get a wider range of exercises to attack that, but I’m not yet committing to spending time on that. (Especially since I need to make time for doing Jade Pillow a little more often.)

Nei Gong lesson week, with the topic being Reverse Breathing Upgrade. Seemed pretty straightforward, and I think I could feel what it’s going for to some extent, but I’ll definitely want to practice it a decent amount more. (Cue ongoing refrain that I have too many seated exercises that I want to work on.)

I did Wu Ji for 1h15m on Wednesday, my first time doing it that long at home. It mostly went well; my back started aching a bit 45 minutes in, and around 55 minutes in my legs deflated noticeably, but I managed to re-establish the inflation. Around 65 minutes in, my body started feeling full and connected. I kept my eyes closed the whole time, so while I certainly wasn’t free from mental turmoil, it was manageable.

After thinking about it a bit, I suspected that the back ache meant that I’m not raising my head enough during Wu Ji, so my lower back is getting compressed instead of hanging off; and a more senior (I think?) student on the IAA Discord suggested the same thing. So I focused on that during a (much shorter) Wu Ji session later on in the week; sure enough, there’s a lot more room for me to maintain stretch in my back. Definitely something to work on next time; I’ll keep the 1h15m duration, we’ll see how much more comfortable it is.

And I think the feeling of connection was a sign of more Qi getting into my body? It’s hard to say 100% for sure, because I’d already been feeling a little full because of the really good Calm Abiding in the previous week, but I think the Wu Ji topped me up again.

I also did Shui Gong 2 that night for the first time in a while. At first I thought that it had gone kind of badly, keeping me awake a little bit, but then my sleep was fine, maybe even a little better than normal? So something to keep on experimenting with.

On Thursday I had a pretty good Ji Ben 2, and I did find time to work in Concentration 2; maybe I’ll be able to get in the habit of doing that on Thursday evenings, though I don’t know that doing it once a week will be enough for that to matter. And I’m also a little worried that doing it in the evenings might affect sleep; I did it then because Damo recommended it for that specific exercise, but still. My sleep wasn’t good, at any rate, though it could just have been congestion, hard to say.

On Friday, I had an okay arm stretch, but my Calm Abiding was bad, probably because my sleep was short. On Sunday my Calm Abiding was better, but still not great; I’m also wondering if doing Calm Abiding late in the morning (which is where it often ends up on Wednesdays and Fridays, often not even starting until around noon) is actually just a bad idea for my body’s rhythms, and so I should do it in the afternoon after lunch and after a brief nap if I’m sleepy? Not sure, I might experiment with that this week.

Today I was doing the Spleen Hui Chun, and, inspired by Calm Abiding, I decided to soften my attention more (e.g. during the bit with my hands on my Yellow Court), and it felt like it strengthened that exercise. So I should do that more, in a wider range of exercises.

Not much to say about Chen Tai Ji; I kept on plugging away, nothing particularly special happened. It was my week to lead the silk reeling at the start of class, so I didn’t do a long silk reeling exercise; and that means that my teacher will review my form next week. I’m planning to show him the Xin Jia first form the first time, so I’ll spend extra time reviewing that this week, even if it means that I don’t review all the other forms.

I started rereading Chen Taijiquan: Masters and Methods, which is a series of interviews with famous Chen masters. It’s really good, and there were some bits that connected specifically to stuff I’ve been thinking about recently, e.g. a couple of bits about Song and one bit about using Wu Ji to build Qi. Those topics are both quite relevant to a course I was thinking of giving next year, so it’s really good to get the take of people who know so much more about the subject than I ever will.

Taiji week, covering the third of those 37 static positions, this time on pressing / Ji. If I had more time to spend on Damo’s Taiji class, I would want to put in a decent amount of time on these positions, I think; unfortunately, my time budget lets me work on the form and sometimes go through the Wu Song Shen Fa sets, but not much more, and I think for now I’m right to prioritize the WSSFs over the static postures. Still, something to think about in the future. It was interesting seeing how my body reacted when I tried to push my elbows toward each other; I wouldn’t have expected it to feel like much, but it was a noticeable push, and did lead to some movement elsewhere in my body.

On Wednesday, I did an hour of Wu Ji; it went well, I was more comfortable than the previous week, and while I was kind of hoping it would be over soon during the last 15 minutes, I also was surprised when the bell rang after that. And I didn’t open my eyes the whole time. I did an hour of Calm Abiding after that, and that was a mistake: I was a little sleepy going in (which actually made me a little surprised that the Wu Ji went well), and also my back ached a bit after the Wu Ji, so between those two I didn’t ever really get into any useful state. So, going forward, I’ll avoid that combo; if I feel like doing a decent length sitting session after the longer Wu Ji, I’ll do something moving (maybe the hour-long MCO prep set?), but also maybe I’ll just do something shorter or have lunch and then sit in the afternoon. At any rate, I’m glad the Wu Ji went well, I’ll bump it up to 1:15 next time.

On Wednesday afternoon, I did an hour of Wu Song Shen Fa 4. Nothing particularly special happened then, these hour-long WSSF sessions continue to mostly be a bust for me. (Don’t get me wrong, I still think the WSSF are valuable for me, it’s just not at all clear that doing an hour buys me much compared to doing them for 20 minutes, except maybe for WSSF 3.)

On Friday morning, I had a bad Nei Gong session in the morning, enough so that I stopped during my preparatory Wu Ji (I was planning to do a shoulder stretching session). I was even a little worried that I was feeling sick, but I also thought that maybe I was just too tired, so I ate lunch and took a nap. (I did do a stretching session on Sunday to make up for that.) And I was feeling good enough after that that I decided I’d try out a Calm Abiding session, and it might have been my best one yet? I won’t say that I felt as chill coming out of it as after some of my ones in the summer, but I wasn’t sleepy at all (which is surprising, given the circumstances!), but even though I was, in some sense, alert, it didn’t actually feel like an hour had passed, and I could definitely feel the Qi was building in my body. And my body continued to feel subtly energized over the upcoming days, and sometimes not so subtly: right now as I’m typing this, I feel a tingling in my stomach at the front of the Ming Line, and when I was doing Compressing the Pearl earlier today (which went very well), I was actually feeling a kind of weird Qi-ish tingling in my neck.

As to Chen Tai Chi, I haven’t been talking so much about the regular part of my practice, but it’s been going well. I’ve gone through all the forms every week for the last several weeks, and I’m doing a good job of trying to do more and more of the forms well instead of just trying to keep the basic moves in mind. I’m not actually going through bits of them over and over again (other than the specific new forms that I’m learning), but still, there’s a difference between going through forms seriously versus just going through the motions. I’m particularly focused on the Xin Jia first form now, I’m going to show that form to my teacher the next time he gives me solo advice (which should be in two or three weeks).

My long Silk Reeling exercise this week was Dantian to Wrist Circling In; there was more going on in my hips than normal, and about 35 minutes in, the end of the spiral out on one hand turned in a stretch all the way through to the other hand that helped me maintain a feel of connection there; that’s good, that was the one part in that exercise that had felt like a gap to me.

Also, at some point during the weekend, I was working on the Lao Jia punch, and my body was really spiraling well during that, with a lot more of my body working together to generate the punch.

This week’s lesson was a Nei Gong one, showing a Du Stretch. I was a little worried because, towards the end of year two, there had been an Opening the Du lesson that I couldn’t do because it messed with my sleep, but fortunately this one didn’t come with that warning. And, even more fortunately, it’s an awesome stretch: I honestly think that I could bend further down after doing that once than I ever could before. So it’s helping open up my spine; and, a few days later, I realized my leg muscles were aching in ways that made me think it’s helping with my hamstrings, too. Both of which are parts of my body that I definitely could use help with, so I’m going to work this one into my regular routine.

Pretty solid Nei Gong week in general. A good Calm Abiding on Thursday; an hour of Wu Ji on Friday (still getting antsy towards the end, but a little better this time than last time); an okay Calm Abiding on Sunday and a good 15 minute arm stretch; and a good Compressing the Pearl on Monday, I’m doing a much better job of maintaining contact on the way down. A good mixture; I’ll want to stick with the hour-long Wu Ji session every week.

On Saturday, I did 40 minutes of Dantian to Wrist Circling Out. Pretty interesting, I had a surprisingly strong correction between my hand and Kua. (Oddly, it was stronger with my left hand than with my right.) And I did high Zhan Zhuang on my pre-Tai Chi-class standing, I’ll probably stick with that through December.