Nei Gong Notes, October 21, 2025
This week’s Lesson was a Tai Chi one, on The Foot Pump. Which I’d heard about before so I was looking forward to it, but unfortunately my first take during the lesson was that I’m having a really hard time putting it into practice. I think I’ve actually regressed in terms of releasing Jin from my feet; I was never great at it, but recently I’ve been spending time on Taiji Standing and that’s been taking away from my time on the Wu Song Shen Fa exercises, and I think that’s probably hurt. So it would be good to find more WSSF time, but it’s not entirely clear to me where to find it…
On Wednesday through Friday, I was at a seminar that Chen Bing was giving. And it was amazing, honestly potentially transformative. He was really focusing on Song during the whole workshop: constantly doing Song exercises between sections of the form, and even stopping bits of the form to Song in the middle.
It was a different version of Song than I’m used to: I think of Song as a vehicle for expansion, and of course the IAA talks about Bones Up Flesh Down in both the Nei Gong and Tai Chi coures. Whereas Chen Bing was perfectly happy to have us relax by, say, letting our head and torso sink forward; pretty different from Bones Up Flesh Down, but also we weren’t exactly collapsing either: we were opening up our joints, just in a way that had us bending more. And there was also advice about how to pay attention to our body to increase the Song.
So my body felt really different even by the second day. And also I don’t think that I’ve ever had such strong punches in the form, I really was clearing out tension that was getting in the way of that. We’ll see if I can keep that feeling up; I hope so.
No Nei Gong those days (and I skipped my Thursday Hunyuan 48 review too), I figured five hours a day on Tai Chi was enough, and maybe not the best idea to mix and match either.
On Saturday, I had to drop my wife off at the airport in the morning, so I skipped my Chen Tai Chi class. I did do some Nei Gong: 40m of a combination of Wu Ji and Ji Ben 1/4, and 40 minutes of Dantian Gong. My Ming Men was heating up more than normal during Wu Ji, and there was stuff going on in my torso while I was walking downtown for dinner.
On Sunday I did Chen pole weapons and the Double Dao; I think my Double Dao is solid enough that I can dial back to doing it once a week. And I did a quite slow version of the Lao Jia first form taking about 20 minutes to do it and trying to focus on relaxing, along with a more normal second form; my back was tingling in a good way. For Nei Gong I did 20m of the first Dragon, and 55m of seated work. When trying out Scholar Breathing, nothing happened at all, that kind of surprised me, my body felt relaxed and open? I had a pretty good Calm Abiding at the end of that, at least.
On Monday I went through the Du Stretch video, did 45m of Wu Ji, and 40m DTG. And then I got both the COVID and flu vaccinations; I am definitely feeling that today, so no Nei Gong or Tai Chi today. Actually not a bad idea to not do a new lesson: because of the workshop I didn’t work on the most recent Nei Gong or Tai Chi lessons at all this week, so having an extra week to spend on those will help.
Also on Monday I decided to try doing a Yi Jing reading for the first time. The question I asked was related to my breathing, and I got fire over water, the final hexagram in the sequence, with no changing lines; kind of an intense reading? It does feel consistent with my idea that I should spend time just paying attention to my breath, trying to get out of my body’s way, so I’ll keep on doing that. (And it’s also consistent with the idea that a CPAP isn’t the right approach, which I also believe.) Not that I actually believe in the Yi Jing, but still, if it reinforces my hypotheses, I can work with that.