Nei Gong Notes, December 17, 2024
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.