A Nei Gong class week, on the Ming Men. A good topic, an exercise that you do for a couple of weeks to open up the Ming Men / ignite the Ming fire. Which sounds useful to me, my lower back is iffy, so I could definitely use opening up there. And going through the lesson the first time was quite interesting: there’s a bit where you Song the end of your tailbone and I was pretty well absorbed in then, the Song was pretty powerful and it almost felt like something was coming out of the tip of my tailbone. And then you Song on your Ming Men, and that was pretty powerful too. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been that powerful when I’ve done it on subsequent days: I think I wasn’t getting absorbed enough. But I’ll keep at it; and maybe I’ll listen to the video again, to see if listening to Damo helps get me back in the right mood.

On Wednesday, I went through the Informal Zoom Session from Japan.

And the weekend was the Foundations course. I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to do a long Wu Ji session – when I woke up on Saturday I felt surprisingly awake but that didn’t last, I was flat out yawning half an hour into the Wu Ji session that morning. Fortunately, that turned out to only be a 1h session, and I lasted okay to the end of it; the longer Wu Ji session turned out to be Sunday, and while I wasn’t as energetic as would be ideal, I was awake enough to last fine through that. I think it was more like 1h50m instead of a full 2h, but still, the longest Wu Ji session I’ve done; and doing it without bells at fixed intervals turned out to be fine, my brain reacted to that by underestimating how long it had been, so I was pleasantly surprised when it ended.

Other than that, some shoulder opening; not a ton, but Rick says he’s thinking of putting us through that more next time, so maybe I’ll get back to working on that? Not sure; and I still do want to actually make it to two hours, so that will remain my focus for now. And we spent more time going up and down with good bodily connection, both as an isolated exercise and as part of Ji Ben 1-3.

Interesting Wu Song Shen Fa 1 session today: felt like stuff was moving more actively down my leg, and I also think I’m getting better at relaxing my foot quickly. Not yet getting as much upward movement as I’d like after that relaxing, though.

Anyways, I’ll try to mostly get back to normal this week. I definitely want to get back to Tai Chi, going through the various Chen forms and also spending more time on the Yang form. (It’s a Taiji lesson week, and I’d think about skipping a lesson if we were progressing with the form, but the next lesson is about something else.) And if I’m feeling energetic on Wednesday or Friday then I’ll try to do 2h Wu Ji, but I won’t worry about it otherwise, I put in enough work this weekend that I don’t feel like I need to press on that this week.

This week’s lesson was a Tai Chi lesson, on Fair Maidens Weave the Shuttle. Not much to say about that, just progressing through the form. I’m a little iffy on the details of the last few bits of the form, but I know basically how it works; I’ll definitely want to spend time consolidating that when I’m done with the form. (Which isn’t all that far from now!)

On Wednesday I did 1h45m of Wu Ji, my first time at that length. It wasn’t too tedious, given that; didn’t go nearly as well as last week, though, for whatever reason I had a hard time getting into anything like a Calm Abiding state. But hey, at least I’m getting used to these longer periods; 2h honestly feels like it will be not particularly pleasant but manageable. At least with bells going off (the bells in my last attempt were 35 minutes apart, so two bells in the middle); a 2h stand without any intermediate bells still feels like it might not be so great.

On Friday I went through the Spinal Dao Yin.

On Saturday I’ve normally been doing long single exercise Silk Reeling sessions but I skipped that this week, I wasn’t feeling great on Saturday. In general sleep has been off, though it’s been getting better – my younger dog is getting much better at sleeping through the night, and my older dog had something funny going on with his gut that was causing him to need to go out multiple times in the night for several days, but that’s done now. Though I noticed that my sleep was still not at its best, so I did a Wood Wu Xing session and a Jade Pillow session on Monday, hopefully that will get things back on a good pattern.

I also have been realizing that I haven’t been keeping up with several exercises – not doing Spinal Waves as frequently as much as I was for a while, or that Du channel stretch from the Nei Gong program. And also I haven’t been doing the Taiji standalone exercises, just the form. But I’m getting back to that now – for whatever reason, my brain was actually okay doing more of those yesterday even though I was pretty tired, so I did some WSSF 1 then and more back stretches, and some WSSF 3 today and more back stretches. So hopefully I can re-establish those habits. And they’re definitely necessary: my WSSF 1 wasn’t nearly as strong as it had been for a while, and even the level it had been was only starting to get interesting, there’s a lot more work in my body that I need to do to really build good Yang Taiji skills.

Another Foundations program this weekend, I’m looking forward to that. Will also be nice to see some people in person that I’ve been interacting with online in regards to my 2h Wu Ji attempts.

As noted in my last post, I was on a work trip in the middle of last week, so not as much Nei Gong as normal and much less Tai Chi than normal. And I didn’t find time to do a new lesson last week, either. I did keep up my daily Nei Gong, so it wasn’t a skipped week, but definitely a light one.

Having said that, the weekend was pretty solid. I had Tai Chi classes on both Saturday and Sunday; on Saturday, my long silk reeling exercise this week was Elbow Rotations. There wasn’t much of interest going on in the single arm versions, but the double arm version was pretty interesting, with a rather strong unfolding feeling going out through my chest to my elbows in the outward direction, and on the inward direction there was an unfolding lower down in my body. Other than that, nothing in particular to report; I am glad that we’re going through the Xin Jia first form pretty seriously in the Sunday class, though, there are details that I was getting wrong.

And I did do a long Wu Ji on Sunday; 1h30m again this time, but with 30 minute bell intervals instead of 15 minute. And it was surprisingly okay; it continued the pattern of a given duration not being particularly bad the second time I do it, even with the less frequent bells. I still think that no bells is going to be a problem, but hey, maybe I’m wrong about that?

I’m feeling a decent amount of ambient fullness in my spine during the day, and also there might be something interesting going on in my shoulders? (Maybe more Qi being present, maybe just more space being present.)

I’m going on a work trip on Tuesday and tomorrow is a little busy, so I’ll just do my weekly post today. And we’ll see if I do a new lesson this week or not; I might have time for that tomorrow, I’ll see. A Nei Gong class this week, Dredging the Channels 2; not much to say about that. On Wednesday I was sleepy enough that I didn’t want to try a long Wu Ji; I tried to do a decent length Calm Abiding, but I was sleepy enough that it wasn’t particularly effective. I got some good Tai Chi in during the afternoon, though; my first Wu Song Shen Fa for a while (20 minutes of WSSF1) and I also did 20 minutes of that exercise where you try to relax beneath the surface of the ground.

On Friday I was a little sleepy but not too bad so I decided to do a long Wu Ji; I ended up doing an hour and 30 minutes for the first time, so I guess that was a good choice! Not a particularly good long Wu Ji session, certainly not as good as the previous week, but it was fine until the last 15 minutes, and I stuck it out. Not sure if I’ll do 1h45m next week or stick with 1h30m but set my timer interval to 30 minutes instead of 15 minutes, but I’m leaning to the latter.

I didn’t have as much time for Advanced Dantian Gong a normal on Saturday so I wasn’t optimistic as to how it would go, but actually I felt a surprisingly strong connection between my hands and Dantian. (Maybe because of the Wu Ji the previous day.) And I had a good Calm Abiding session today; not the longest but pretty strong.

My long silk reeling exercise this week was Chest Opening and Closing. Didn’t feel much in terms of reeling the silk; my Yong Quan got a good workout, at least, and my lower back was surprisingly warm at the end, so that’s something.

This coming week is supposed to be rainy, so, between that and the trip, we’ll see how much Tai Chi practice I manage.