A Tai Chi lesson, Swing and Kick. Very close to the end of the form, I think only one lesson left before I’m done with that form?

On Wednesday, I did 1h of Wu Ji and 40m of Kidney Hui Chun.

On Thursday, I went over all of my Tai Chi forms; I’m getting better at the Double Dao, my Yang 37 is still iffy towards the end. (And I did my Hunyuan 48 review in the evening, that one’s quite iffy too.) In terms of Nei Gong, I did the Qi Building Principles Zoom class; good stuff, but also I’ve seen a bunch of lessons about Calm Abiding recently, so not a ton that was new to me in there. Certainly made me want to keep Calm Abiding in my rotation at a high priority, at any rate.

On Friday I did 1h30m of Wu Ji, and 35m of breathing exercises. Still having a hard time getting back to 2 hours: another one of those where my form felt really good, I feel like I should be able to just go on forever, but then somewhere around 45 minutes or an hour in, my back gets a little iffy, and after an hour and a half I end up stopping. Not sure if there’s something wrong with my form or if I need to get my back stronger or if I’ve been stressing it as part of getting it stronger and it’s a temporary problem or if that’s just an excuse and I need to push through?

On Saturday, I did some Advanced Dantian Gong, and my standard Chen Tai Chi class. I did some of Chen Qingzhou’s version of Zhan Zhuang before that; I’m still not sure what that’s good for, I’ll probably keep it up through this month but stop after that. And my long Silk Reeling for this week was Spine Stretch; I thought that doing that for 40 minutes might be a bit much for my back so I did 10 minutes in each direction instead of 20 minutes, and actually it felt funny rather sooner than that. (Apparently that exercise is more strenuous than Spine Waves, I can do that for 20 minutes with no problems.) But it was fine, it didn’t end up overly inflaming my back or anything. Not much to report from that; one direction is good for feeling my vertebrae. (And I’m not surprised that I don’t have much to report: it’s honestly only barely a Silk Reeling exercise, I would say.)

Not much on Sunday: 20m of Wu Ji and 40m of sleepy Calm Abiding, no Tai Chi at all. Partly because I was sleepy, but also I think I might want to lower my expectations on Sunday? On Mondays through Fridays I’m putting in solid enough days that it kind of feels like regular work, and Saturday I’m very busy with a long dog walk and three hours (sometimes more) of Tai Chi and grocery shopping; so treating Sunday as a rest day at least to some extent feels like it’s pretty defensible? Don’t get me wrong, I want to do some Nei Gong and some Tai Chi normally, but also I want to have time to just play some video games in the afternoons. It also doesn’t help that, these days, I’m looking after Ulli during the first part of the morning while Liesl gives Velvet a longer walk, which means that I can’t sleep in late and I also can’t do Nei Gong during the walk.

Monday was Dantian day: 20m of Wu Ji (with my mind in my Dantian instead of in all of my body as I normally have it), 60m of Dantian Gong, 20m of Ji Ben 1, and 40m of Spleen Hui Chun. Glad I spent so much time on my Dantian: I’m happy enough with not having it by a primary area of focus right now but still, it’s important, so I should work in occasional Dantian days.

And today was Spine day: after doing 1h of decent Calm Abiding, I went through the Du Stretch video again, and I did 20m of Wu Ji and 20m of Spine Waves. So pretty good Nei Gong, but unfortunately almost no Tai Chi: I reviewed the WSSF3 video (and I’m glad I did, I picked up something useful with my hand positioning), but I didn’t do any forms. So I won’t do all of my Tai Chi forms this week, unless I do everything on Thursday. (And who knows, maybe that will happen! But I won’t count on it.) I don’t feel too horrible about that, because my sleep was bad on both Saturday night and Monday night, but still, not what I would have liked.

We’ll see how this week and the next go: my offspring is in town for both of those weeks, so I imagine there will days when I’m doing stuff with them and that eats into my Nei Gong / Tai Chi time.