Nei Gong Notes, April 29, 2025
A Nei Gong lesson week, on the Magpie Bridge. Weird lesson, and unfortunately I’m one of the one out of three people who are affected by this. It honestly makes me a little nervous – I’m worried about getting my teeth out of alignment, and also I’ve got problems with my nasal cavities, I don’t want shoving them around in a way that makes that worse? Though the flip side is that, to the extent that my teeth are currently out of alignment, a tiny bit more width on top would actually help; and for all I know, widening the roof of my mouth would create more room in the relevant nasal cavities? I’m really not sure, but for now I am giving it a try; I honestly don’t know if I’ll maintain the habit long enough to see any effects.
On Wednesday, I went through the Spine Spa Zoom class; seemed useful, I’ll probably return to it. And I did about 50 minutes of sleepy Calm Abiding.
On Thursday I planned to do 1h arm stretch instead of 1h of Wu Ji, so I did 20m of Wu Ji and then started the arm stretch. Unfortunately, I had a plumber showing up that day and they were available rather earlier than predicted, so I stopped the stretch after 20 minutes; I did return to it later in the day and did another 40 minutes, but I didn’t get in the whole hour in one stretch. And I also rewatched most of the breathwork exercise videos again; my notes were pretty accurate, fortunately, but that also reminded me that I should work in Dry Sighing at random times during the day, not just Yin Yang Breathing. As to Tai Chi, I got my Double Dao more solid, went through the Xinjia first form a couple of times, and went over the Hunyuan 48; I should probably start that again from the beginning next Thursday, picking up bits that aren’t solid.
Friday was mostly a travel day to a Nei Gong workshop, but I did get in 1h of Calm Abiding and some Wood Wu Xing. (And the various small exercises, of course; pretty sure I did the Magpie Bridge multiple times, and both Dry Sighing and Yin Yang breathing?) And Saturday and Sunday were the workshop; rather more unplanned than normal because our location reservation got lost somehow, but we dealt with things, and I hopefully learned a lot.
On Monday, I spent 20m working on Spinal Waves and did 20m of Ji Ben 4. (And of course some Wu Ji at the start, end, and in between.) And an hour of Calm Abiding. Ji Ben 4 was interesting; we spent some time on that on the workshop, and it was feeling more spherical to me on Monday and also my outside Lao Gong on my inside hand was a little tingly.
Today I did half of my Tai Chi forms and WSSF 3. Something weird going on with my hands in WSSF 3 (I think I mentioned that last week); I was going to ask on the Discord, but I just peeked at the video and I see a few ways in which it looks different, so I should just go through the video again, I think. I didn’t hit my Nei Gong quota today, though, only half an hour of Wu Ji and half an hour of Anchoring the Breath. (Though it’s not quite so bad if I throw in the 20 minutes of stretching that I did at the start, the 15 minutes of Dry Sighing, and maybe 5 minutes of Magpie Bridge stuff that I did elsewhere during the day.) I won’t feel too bad about it, though: I was feeling a little off when I woke up (sleepy, and my back was unusually achy, not sure if that was from sleeping posture or from the spine work yesterday?), and I had an allergy shot today, so taking it easy is reasonable enough.