No more offspring visiting, so I’ve been back to a normal schedule this week. And it’s been going well; actually, I feel like my body has been getting better even before this week? My spine is feeling both a little more flexible and a little more solid in ways that make me think that Qi is moving through it; also, how it feels when I sink into my Kua is changing (especially during Tai Chi), I feel like there’s an extra step at the end which has my pelvis sink further in ways that adds an extra stretch and extra stability. Which in turn creates a new goal, which is to get to that extra stretch more quickly, I think that will make a difference in my stability.

Anyways, on to the stuff from this week: last Tuesday’s lesson was a Nei Gong one, Scholar Breathing Revisited. Which started off with an assumption that you’ve been doing Scholar Breathing a lot; I hadn’t, and I’d actually forgotten exactly what it was, so I spent a decent amount of time rewatching some earlier videos. It turns out that it’s something that I was considering working on after last summer’s workshop but had decided I wanted to spend my time in other areas; having it come up again makes me wonder if I should reconsider that. I’d already been thinking I should spend more time on building Qi in my Dantian specifically, and this feels like it will dovetail well with that; so maybe instead of doing a 1h Calm Abiding three days a week, I should switch one of them to Scholar Breathing? Or, actually, to a combination of the two – I need to go through my notes from last summer, but my memory is that, on several days, we did a sequence where we started with Calm Abiding to build up Qi and then transitioned into Scholar Breathing (which in turn may or may not have transitioned into Martial Breathing, of course). So I’ll look through those notes and give that a try.

As to the other days:

On Wednesday I did 1h30m Wu Ji and I reviewed the year 2 Alchemical Breathing lesson. (Which turned out to be a different thing from Scholar Breathing, I couldn’t quite remember which year 2 videos were relevant. And I won’t say that that one is irrelevant, using Alchemical Breathing as prep for Scholar Breathing is maybe not a bad idea?)

On Thursday I did 10m Stringing the Arms, and I did all my Tai Chi weapons forms and almost all the empty hand forms. I went through the Sinew Work Principles Zoom class again, glad I did, I should do it every so often. (I think it was probably even more intense this time than when I first went through it?) I did my regular Thursday evening review of parts of the Hunyuan 48 for, and I rewatched a foundations video on the Dantian. Which, among other things, convinced me that I need to work on my Dantian more: building up Qi in general across my body is good, but I just don’t have nearly enough Qi in my Dantian specifically to get some of the behaviors that I’m working towards.

On Friday I did 1h Wu Ji (with my mind mostly in my Dantian), 20m Ji Ben 1, and I reviewed the year 2 scholar/martial breathing video; that last one was useful.

On Saturday I did 40m Scholar breathing (well, 20 minutes of prep stuff plus 20 minutes of Scholar breathing). Before my Chen Tai Chi class I did 20m of Qingzhou’s Zhan Zhuang (still not really getting anything out of it, I’ll declare an end to that experiment at the end of the month), and during Silk Reeling I did both long Horizontal Circles (during which the stretch / connection moved down to my legs in an interesting way about halfway through the time I spent on that) and long Body Stretch (in the going up direction, things gathered in an interesting way, though going down was less interesting). And I did some Dragon Dao Yins after that.

On Sunday I did 45m Calm Abiding with my mind in Dantian (went pretty well); and 30m Wu Ji combined with Ji Ben 4. I like how my body feels as it’s making a ball shape while doing that. And I did 10m of Stringing the Arms and went through half of my Tai Chi forms.

On Monday I did 90m Wu Ji, 40m Water Hui Chun.

And today I went through the Spine Spa video a second time; maybe I’ll try to do that once every month or so? And I reviewed the old and new Scholar Breathing lessons. And I finished going through the Tai Chi weapon forms for the week, though I still have empty-hand ones to do.

This week’s lesson was the Taiji one on Stringing the Arms. As you’ll see below, I’ve done very little Tai Chi this week, so I haven’t actually practiced this one, but I honestly suspect I’m probably already in okay shape with this quality? Could be wrong, though, certainly I should give it a try.

Anyways, an unusual week, mostly because my kid is in town so I’ve been doing extra activities on a bunch of days, but also I was on the edge of getting sick on Wednesday and Thursday so I took it easy those days. Anyways:

Wednesday: Feeling on the edge of getting sick, so I didn’t do anything.

Thursday: Spent the day at the Monterey Bay Aquarium (and I still wasn’t feeling 100%). I did the Hunyuan 48 review in the evening, at least.

Friday: 45m Wu Ji; was going to take it easy and only do 30m but I liked the internal stretch. And 30m Anchoring the Breath.

Saturday: The belt channel exercise and a short advanced Dantian Gong session..

Sunday: 20m Ji Ben 5, a bit of Wu Ji, 45m okayish Calm Abiding.

Monday: 1h Wu Ji, 30m Anchoring the Breath.

Tuesday: 1h Calm Abiding, 20m Wu Ji, rewatched the Pushing the Tides video, 10m Wood Wu Xing (plus some Wu Ji before / after).

The other thing I’ve noticed is that I’m getting more distracted than normal during the longer sessions, and also that it’s been a while since I’ve felt the mental Song really kick in during Calm Abiding. I was hoping it would kick in today because I got a decent nap before then, but it didn’t – the session wasn’t bad but it wasn’t unusually good, either. Maybe those are both related (and also maybe they’re related to the fact that it’s taken a little while longer to fall asleep than normal recently); at any rate, that’s why I threw in the Wood Wu Xing today, because it might fix some of that?

A Nei Gong lesson week: the Belt Channel, another one of the Hunyuan exercises. A lot of these are somewhat familiar to me from my Tai Chi teacher, but they way he teaches them has some details that are different in how you move and, I think, has a different purpose; I wonder if it’s something like the Wu Song Shen Fa where you teach the same basic movement for multiple different purposes?

On Wednesday, I had a 2h Wu Ji session, yay; I was maybe standing a bit high (though I wouldn’t have thought that if not for the mirror), but still, a good session.

On Thursday I had a 1h15m good Calm Abiding session; I should get back to tuning into the Qi during that, though, I keep on forgetting that. 1h Spinal Dao Yin; when doing the Water Wu Xing part of it, stuff was going up my back in a much wider channel than I’m used to (and hence getting blocked less), maybe that’s a sign that my spine work is having an effect? I did all my Tai Chi weapons, so at least I got somewhat caught up from the days when I skipped that. And I did my Hunyuan 48 review in the evening; I’m starting over from the beginning (well, near the beginning, I feel like I’m okay on the first 20% or so), and I did pick up some bits that I’d missed, so that was a good choice.

On Friday, I did 45m Wu Ji and 30m Anchoring the Breath. Which sounds bad, but the day was unusual because of some people visiting, so I’m fine with only getting that amount done.

On Saturday: 20m Advanced DTG, some Dragons, and my regular Tai Chi class. Again, not a ton, but I’m okay with that, I was sleepier than normal.

On Sunday I had my monthly special Tai Chi class, and I also went through the Belt Channel exercise and the full moon exercise.

On Monday I again went through the Belt Channel exercise and the full moon exercise, and I had a 1h30m Wu Ji session. That last one was surprisingly interesting, a pretty strong internal stretch.

And today I reviewed Tai Yi standing from the Taiji course; glad I did, I guess I should add that into the rotation? (Though also I need to get back to my regular Tuesday / Thursday Tai Chi sessions, and maybe add in a third 20m isolated exercise section into them…) And I did half of my weapons and some forms. For Nei Gong, I did the Roni Warm Up video from the Sweden 2022 set (I’d been rewatching the videos so I figured I might as well go through that as well); not my favorite warmup, I’m not so into strength stuff, but even that was presented in an interesting way, and I liked the bit from the end that was the Swimming Dragon hand movement. And I did Ji Ben 4 and the Kidney Hui Chun; should have been a Calm Abiding day, but I messed up my napping so I knew I would just fall asleep if I tried that.

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.