Pretty good week. It was a Taiji lesson week, on the Mingmen; a useful little practice to try. On Wednesday, I did a solid amount of Tai Chi practice (finished the Chen weapons for the week, did some empty hand forms, 20 minutes each of Wu Song Shen Fa 3 and the 4 Energies drill, plus the new Mingmen exercise); I also tried doing an arm stretch solely from expansion by placing my mind inside my arms (or sometimes a bit outside), I only lasted 25 minutes, I probably need to build up more Qi for that to work, but I’m glad I did the experiment.

One other thing that Wednesday reminded me of is that my breathing really has slowed down when doing Nei Gong. I noticed it on Wednesday while doing Anchoring the Breath, but I’ve noticed it at other times over the last month and a half: e.g. I used to breathe pretty fast while doing Wu Ji but now my breathing there is much slower. So I guess the breath work that I did two or three months ago has helped; I should probably keep working on that (among other things, my breathing isn’t naturally as low as I would like), but still, progress is good.

On Friday’s Tai Chi session, I mostly did a bunch of Xinjia practice. And for Nei Gong I had a surprisingly crappy Coiling Snake; I need to figure out what’s going on there. But I had a good Calm Abiding session.

Currently my main theory for what’s going on there is that I just haven’t been working my back enough: a combination of being in bad shape sleep/breathing-wise over much of the winter and also maybe overrotating on avoiding Dao Yins? So I decided to start doing the Dragons once a week again; I did that on Saturday, it felt like it was a good thing to have done. (And fortunately it’s getting quite a bit warmer now, it was actually really gorgeous yesterday and today; though the Bay Area being what it is, we don’t ever get real winter weather, just somewhat chilly and pretty rainy at the worst.)

On Sunday I tried doing a long Wu Ji for the first time since the workshop; I only lasted an hour and 20 minutes, partly because my back wasn’t feeling great and partly because my mind was scattered. Not worrying particularly about it, it’s just another piece of evidence that I should work on my back and I should get back to my longer Wu Ji. And I did like how the insides of my torso felt in the rest of the day, so that’s good. Another possible contributing factor is that I tried doing it with a slightly narrower stance than normal; that might interfere with stretching out my back. So I think next time I’ll go back to a wider stance and see if that helps.

I also did a pillow swap on Friday evening, and I think it’s helped – since then, my sleep has been back to the previously normal range of “not ideal, but not dreadful”, which is a big improvement. Which always happened sometimes, but now it’s been four days in a row, so I’m cautiously optimistic? And it’s been nice having the insides of my body feel more alive: e.g. I had a really good Spleen Hui Chun this morning. Also I had a CAT scan of parts of my head a week or so ago and I talked to my allergist about it on Friday, and it seemed like pretty convincing evidence of where my breathing is restricted. So that’s good news: a more concrete diagnosis combined with a recommendation to an airway specialist / surgeon whom she trusts. We’ll see how that goes, but maybe we’ll actually get a real fix for the breathing aspect of my sleep problems? (Which isn’t the only thing that has caused me sleep issues over the years, but I think I’ve got the other aspects under control; and, in turn, sleep problems aren’t the only thing that have caused me energy issues over the years, but I think there’s a reasonable chance that I’ve got the other aspects of that under control, and if I don’t, getting sleep and breathing under control will make those other aspects easier to deal with.)

I was feeling mostly over my cold by Wednesday (and my sleep was better Tuesday night than it had been), so I restarted my Nei Gong then; nothing strenuous, a bit of Wu Ji and some Kidney Hui Chun. And I rewatched a couple of the Sweden videos, the one on the Spine and Pathogens and the one on Dao Yin Mechanisms; both good and timely, I should watch the Spine one a second time I think and I should look to see what other lectures are in there.

I slept decently well on Wednesday night too, and I could really feel it on Thursday, my body was noticeably more active inside. So I guess you really do build Qi while you sleep! So I did a little more practice than I normally do on days when I work: some full moon practice, some San Dan Tian Gong, and the Taiji Peng Lu Ji An exercises. (And some Hunyuan 48 review, as I usually do on Thursday evenings.)

Not as good sleep on Thursday night; I do wonder if the San Dan Tian Gong makes my sleep worse, it didn’t feel like allergies were worse than normal. So on Friday I did the Spinal Dao Yin set (I do those once every four weeks) but I cut it down a bit, and the full moon seated practice. And I had an acupuncture appointment, but I didn’t make a followup appointment: I feel like I’ve gotten what I’m going to get out of that, it seems pretty clear that my main issue right now is sleep problems caused by allergies, and I don’t think he helps a lot with that. Having said that, he pointed at one disk in my neck that’s relevant to that, so I should probably get back to spending a bit more time on neck exercises? (I should pay attention to that when I rewatch the Spine and Pathogens video, to see if Damo says anything about the neck specifically.)

Crappy sleep on Friday night; that almost always happens after acupuncture appointments, which certainly doesn’t make me want to do it! Though also we had pho, so maybe I had too much food / too much beef and that interfered with my sleep. At any rate, it didn’t feel like it was caused by allergies, so I did some liver Wu Xing on Saturday afternoon, in hopes that that would help. And I did go to my Chen Tai Chi class but I showed up late, so I didn’t do my normal pre-class standing or a long silk reeling exercise. Also we were washing the sheets that day and I took the time to vacuum the pillow and the mattress, I feel like that really might have helped? Pretty good sleep on Saturday night and quite good sleep on Sunday night, I feel like I might have slept through the whole night on Sunday if one of my dogs hadn’t vomited a bit at 5:50am, but even with that that’s close to seven hours of sleep, which is way past the regular sleep apnea middle-of-night wakeup times.

On Sunday I did a long arm stretch: I figured I’d try to go past 35 minutes but I approached it with the attitude that there was a good chance that I’d make it an hour. Which I wasn’t at all sure of for the first half hour, it actually was feeling rougher than last time I did a long arm stretch, but I made it to 35 minutes and wasn’t tapped out so I kept going. And then I made it to 45 minutes and was still okay, and pretty soon after that my brain flipped from “not sure how much longer I can make it” to “I am definitely lasting the whole hour”, and sure enough I did. And it wasn’t that bad, honestly. So yay at succeeding on that, though of course I’ll want to repeat that more times to help normalize the stretch in my arms / help continue open things up. And I’m still not really holding them open the right way, I’m not getting as much Qi inflation as I’d like, so I’ll want to immerse my mind more. (And I’ll try out the technique I saw in one workshop involving changing the location of where my mind rests.) And I did practice my long Chen weapons on Sunday, as well as going through the Xinjia first form; my teacher will be going over my form in a couple of weeks, I think I want to show him the Xinjia form again, so I should practice that several times this week.

Because I’d been thinking I should stretch out my neck and back more I did some Coiling Snake today, even though I’m supposed to avoid Dao Yins in the winter. (After all, I live in California, it’s not like it gets all that cold here! Though it has rained some this week; not today, though.) I didn’t get as much stretch as I’d like, and my lower back ached in a way that made me think I’m probably bending it too much; so I should probably work on that some more to get back into proper form. (Though maybe I should wait until we’re more into Spring.)

This week’s lesson was San Dan Tian 1. Which I’d vaguely expected to be the snowman exercise, given the name, but it wasn’t that at all; seemed like maybe a Hunyuan thing, though Damo didn’t explicitly say that in the video. At any rate, interesting enough; as with anything that involves stuff in my head, I’m a little worried that it might make it hard for me to sleep; and in fact my sleep was crappy on Tuesday night, but I actually don’t think it was this exercise, I think it was sleep apnea being unusually bad.

Still, Wednesday was okay; I didn’t do as much Nei Gong as I normally do on Wednesdays, but I did a 40 minute San Dan Tian 1 session and a 40 minute Earth Hui Chun at least. And I didn’t do as much Tai Chi as would have been ideal but I did finish going through all of my Chen weapon forms. And on Thursday I was a little iffy during the day, and because of timing of some things that were going on, I didn’t do my normal Nei Gong practice during the day, but when I did it at night I decided to do arm stretching, and I lasted 35 minutes, which is 15 minutes past my previous; that was a pleasant surprise! And also the stretch itself is starting to feel pleasant in some ways: in the past the stretch had been unpleasant but in a way that doesn’t get worse and worse (unlike the muscular tension from my shoulders), but now I kind of think that, the next time I do this on a day when I’ve had good sleep, there are good odds that I’ll be able to make an hour.

Unfortunately, the “on a day when I’ve had good sleep” is a significant limitation: on Friday I think the effects of the bad sleep on Tuesday night and the less-than-ideal sleep Wednesday and Thursday nights caught up with me. I finished going through my empty hand Tai Chi forms in the morning, but by the afternoon it was pretty clear that I’d gotten a cold. (So maybe that was what was going on on Tuesday night; though I suspect the causation went in the other away.)

Unfortunate timing, it meant that I missed my regular Chen Tai Chi class on Saturday and my once a month class on Sunday, and a couple of personal things that I would ideally have done this weekend. But the flip side: just a cold, nothing horrible. But then the flip flip side: I feel like, for the last couple of months, my breathing overnight has gotten worse; maybe it’ll get better once it warms up and the furnace stops pushing dust through the air, but that’s a while off and also I could be wrong about that?

Fortunately, I saw my allergist this weekend; no immediate solutions there (and actually some possibilities mentioned that I could imagine finding scary, though I’m not reacting that way), but we’ve got some deeper diagnosis planned that hopefully will give us some ideas. And paying attention to exactly how my body is reacting where, I’m starting to suspect that my pillow currently has a heavier load of dust mites than I can handle. (We do dust mite treatments in bed but they’re not perfect.)

So if that’s the case, it’s tractable: when we wash sheets this weekend, I’ll vacuum off the pillows and mattress thoroughly, and if that doesn’t help, then next time I’ll replace the pillow entirely. (I got a spare one the last time my pillow was causing problems.) And, talking it over with my wife, we were thinking that the timing matched Ulli’s arrival pretty well; I hadn’t been worrying about that so much because he’s a poodle and I’m not allergic to them, and also we’d been washing his main bed toys with the sheets, but in the past our small poodles have been sleeping more at the foot of the bed than the head, and also it’s not too surprising for other toys to end up in bed. And it’s been a while since we’ve given him a bath (and he’s never had a haircut), so who knows what’s on his hair now.

If Ulli does turn out to the issue, then we’ve got a plan: we gave him a bath tonight, we were already thinking we’d give him a haircut over the next few days, we can be more disciplined about toys, and also now he’s housebroken enough at night that we can start nudging him to spend most of the night at the foot of the bed. So the optimistic scenario is that, doing all of that plus cleaning / replacing the pillow will get things to a much better shape. And that scenario sounds plausible to me, I think it matches all of the evidence? (And also: things actually were going genuinely well not too far back in 2024, for a while it wasn’t a surprise if I slept through the night completely. So that really is possible.) If not, I’ll see what my allergist suggests next.

Anyways, no new lesson tonight, given that I’m still on the mend and that I haven’t had enough time to practice stuff from the most recent Taiji and Nei Gong classes. But I’m planning to start ramping my Nei Gong practice back up tomorrow and go into work like normal (instead of working from home) on Thursday. And I have at least been watching more Nei Gong videos than normal: I’m all caught up with the 2025 videos that Damo’s been posting and with his latest podcast episode.

This week’s lesson was the Peng Ji Lu An lesson in the Taiji course. Which was really interesting: conceptually, the idea that these are qualities rather than techniques, and the way that it talked about how the Peng expansion should arise as a response to sinking. And I’ve done it a few times this week; it’s pretty strong, there’s something going on in there, I’m definitely going to want to keep that up. I feel like I feel the Peng part most strongly, but there’s something there in all of them?

On Wednesday, I decided that I wasn’t up for a long Wu Ji, so I decided to do an arm stretch, and actually it lasted 20 minutes; I don’t think I’ve ever lasted longer than 15 minutes before? So that was neat; honestly, I probably could have gone longer if I’d really been wanting to push myself and/or had felt more energetic, so it’s even better than it sounds. So I’ve set a goal to do that for 1 hour; not sure exactly what my path there will be, maybe I’ll hit a plateau at some point but for all I know the next time I try it my arms will just tune in properly to expansion and I’ll be able to hold it for an hour quickly. I’m still going to try to prioritize long Wu Ji over this for a bit (though I gave myself permission to not do a long Wu Ji session this past week), but I think I should be able to work in both.

I watched the Calm Abiding talk from the 2025 talks on Friday; a good one, maintained my feeling that it’s important for me to keep on working on that.

Not a particularly big Nei Gong session on Friday, closer to a normal day than my Wednesdays / Fridays usually are. A decent amount of Tai Chi, at least; I didn’t quite manage to go through all my Chen forms by Friday, but I did all but two, and I did the last two on Sunday. And I did 20 minutes of WSSF 1 and 20 minutes of the new Peng Ji Lu An back to back; that was a good combo, I was surprised how powerful the latter felt, but honestly it probably felt similarly powerful when I did it alone on Monday, so I don’t know if doing them together made a difference?

And on Sunday I did a long Calm Abiding session; I made sure to take a nap first, because I’d gotten the feeling that recently the sessions hadn’t gone well because I was too tired. I mean, they definitely didn’t, because I couldn’t really stay awake! But I think the tiredness messed up the absorption at the start, too. And that was a good call, because I managed to absorb well right at the beginning, and it was a very good session, maybe my second best Calm Abiding session ever? I didn’t get quite as much strong expansion as I sometimes do, but I got some of that, and I felt better absorbed / tuned into the right areas of my body than normal.

I got back to the long Silk Reeling exercise experiments on Saturday. This week’s one was Hand Shaking and Stretching; I was honestly dubious about that one, because it doesn’t really feel like it’s too related to the silk, especially the hand shaking part. I really didn’t expect the hand shaking part to turn out as badly as it did, though: in that part, you’re quickly rotating your hand (like you’re screwing / unscrewing a lightbulb except that you’re doing it super quickly), and like 30 seconds in, my hands basically forgot how to rotate. So that was a weird experience! Not harmful, at least. The hand stretching wasn’t bizarre like that, but I also didn’t get much out of doing it for a long time; maybe there was a little bit of unusual shoulder opening when I did the version of the stretch where my palm folds in towards my forearm, but not much.

I’ll try to get back to long Silk Reeling this week. And I’m thinking that, on Wednesdays and Fridays, I should switch to defaulting to my Nei Gong after lunch (and a potential nap). (At least on days when I don’t have a doctor’s appointment or something in the afternoon; on those days, I’ll probably do it in the morning because Nei Gong is a higher priority than Tai Chi.) So I’ll try doing Tai Chi in the mornings and Nei Gong in the afternoons, hopefully that will work better; I don’t think Tai Chi is affected as strongly by being tired, and for all I know moving around will give me more energy.

(And actually my sleep has been better the last few days, much less feeling of sleep apnea; not sure if it was a different nose strip variant or some antibiotics that I’ve bene taking or doing a better job of airing out my bedroom, but hopefully it will stick. Still room for further improvement, but it’s going in the right direction. Nice that Ulli has sometimes not even needed to go out at all in the middle of the night, too.)