Nei Gong Notes, March 25, 2025
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.)