A Nei Gong lesson week, San Dantian Gong 2. I don’t have much to say about it, I still don’t really have much of a feeling for what I’m supposed to be getting out of that one. I’ll keep on doing it occasionally (and fortunately I think I was wrong about that messing with my sleep), but right now I feel like it’ll drop out of the rotation pretty soon.

On Wednesday I had pretty good Tai Chi practice: I finished my Chen forms, and I spent time on the Taiji Mingmen exercise, WSSF 1, and the four energies exercise. Nei Gong wasn’t so great: I fully intended to do 2 hours of Wu Ji but I only lasted an hour. I’m honestly not sure what was going on there, and how much was physical versus mental; certainly more was mental than I’d like. I’ll keep on plugging away at that, hopefully I’ll get back to 2 hours pretty soon, it was right within reach a month ago. And I did the Nei Gong Mingmen exercise for my seated exercise that day; a little iffy, I think both of those are evidence that I need to work on mental Song. So, more evidence that spending more time on Calm Abiding would be good; some notes on finding time for that below.

On Friday I worked on the other challenge that I’ve been setting myself, the 1 hour arm stretch; didn’t feel great at the start but then it stopped getting worse and kind of normalized, and ended up just fine. (And yeah, it’s a little weird that, at least this week, I actually found 1 hour of Wu Ji harder than 1 hour of holding my arms out to the side.)

My Chen Tai Chi teacher reviewed my Xinjia form on Saturday; the main takeaway there is that I should find even more spiraling connections in the form. Which makes me continue to think that that’s a good form for me to work on! And in my push hands practice, I tried doing it slower, to see if I could get more of the Peng-via-sinking feeling from the four energies exercise; some success, but I definitely have more to work on there.

Sunday’s practice was fine; went through half the Chen weapons and reviewed Xin Jia, and for Nei Gong I did San Dantian Gong with 10 minute intervals and a sleepy Calm Abiding.

I don’t normally mention the details of what I do for Nei Gong on M/W/F/Sat because my practice is shorter those days, but I will say: even though I only did 20 minutes of Wu Ji on Monday, it was surprisingly powerful. Not sure what was going on there but I’ll take it.

Also on Monday I gave notice at my job. So I’ll have more time to do Nei Gong and Tai Chi starting in a couple of weeks! And I really am planning to spend more time on Nei Gong, hopefully I’ll manage at least two hours a day every day other than Saturdays. I’m looking forward to have more time to spend on foundational stuff; I should spend some time making a list of what to focus on first (and I should ask Rick for advice at the workshop later this month), but certainly spending more time on Calm Abiding will be one of those things. Hopefully I’ll have some more time to spend on Tai Chi too, but I’m less sure of that, the amount of time on that might stay the same. I put up some more notes about my thinking about all that on my main blog.