Nei Gong Notes, December 24, 2024

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.)