Nei Gong Notes, March 4, 2025

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.)