Nei Gong Notes, January 21, 2025

Getting back to normal. I had a good sleep on Tuesday night, so I did a 1 hour Wu Ji session on Wednesday, it went fine. And I did some Tai Chi in the afternoon, too. On Friday I hadn’t slept as well; I did a sort of half-assed Spinal Dao Yin, a sleepy Calm Abiding, and no Tai Chi; still, something, better than the previous weeks.

On Saturday I continued to work on long versions of my teacher’s Silk Reeling Exercises. I’ve run out of the ones that clearly seem like good ideas, so I’m just doing the ones I haven’t done before starting in order. Which meant Neck Rotations today; I was thinking I might just do it for 20 minutes instead of 40, I was worried that it might overstress my joints. But then actually the first half of it, where I’m moving my chin from one shoulder to the other, really did feel like it was reeling the silk. So I did that for a full 20 minutes; and then I did 20 minutes of the second half, rotating my head (10 minutes in each direction). My TCM doctor has me do that (though not nearly as long), so I figured either doing it for a while would be extra helpful or a quite bad idea, and I hoped I could tell if it was the latter. And it seemed fine at the time, but then, later on in the class, my lower back started spasming a little; maybe it’s unrelated, but I assume it was caused by one part or the other of the silk reeling, with the head movements affecting my lower back? Nothing too bad, fortunately; annoying at the time but not a big deal, and I’m pretty much better now.

I had a pretty good Calm Abiding on Sunday; not one of my very best but entirely reasonable. I didn’t feel like doing Tai Chi on Sunday but I did some on Monday, we’ll see if I go through all the forms this week.

And I reviewed the last Nei Gong lesson this weekend and the last lesson from Damo’s Tai Chi course earlier in the week, so I’ll start doing new lessons again; today is a Tai Chi day. Though I will say that I’m not doing great at Damo’s form; ideally, I’d spend more time on that. And also ideally I’d get back to doing more of those various standing practices and the Wu Song Shen Fa, I’ve definitely been slacking there.