Nei Gong Notes, January 20, 2026
This week’s lesson was a Nei Gong one on Extending the Qi. Not one that I’m planning to spend much time on; I suppose I should go through it it one or two more times, but the other ones in the Subtle Body series are much more important for me now, I think.
Wednesday: 1h Wu Ji, for the first time in a while, yay. I was thinking I might do a bit longer, but I started to feel bad in a way that made me think I might be overstressing my body, so I stopped then. Good that I did, too – I was also planning to do 1h of seated work, but I decided it was wise to cut that off after half an hour of DTG, given how I was feeling. (And I wasn’t 100% the next couple of days, but good enough that I didn’t really mess anything up.) Still, it’s good to be building up my Wu Ji again; also, around 40 minutes into that, something interesting happened, with (faint) pulses coming out of my abdomen. And, observing them, it seemed like the pulse was actually going in for a bit before bouncing out – I think this might be an early form of the swallowing feeling that people say happens in your Dantian?
Thursday: 20m Pillar Pushing; 20m of the guard variant of Hook Punch. And I went through the Chen sword forms, the 37 form, and the Lao Jia first and second forms. In the afternoon, I did 1h Spinal Dao Yin and 25m Kidney Hui Chun. In the evening, I did my Hunyuan 48 review, and I watched the Dao De Jing verses 1/3 video from the 2025 talks, interesting pointers as to how to do an esoteric reading, though I don’t think I’ll be able to generalize that to other versus.
Friday: 20m Wu Ji and 25m Dragon 2; I’d been wanting to get back to the Dragons to open up my back more, so I’ll try to fit them in regularly now that I’m not as drained as I was for a while. (And of course the upcoming Foundations weekend is more motivation, too.) And 60m of Dantian Gong / thickening.
Saturday: My regular Chen class, with a particularly good Hunyuan 48 section. (We started going through the Hunyuan 48 a week or two ago, I’m looking forward to going through it now that I know the basic shape of the form pretty well.) And I spent 20m going through all four Dragons.
Sunday: A couple of hours of push hands; the main thing I got out of that was that, to try to control my partner, I first need to understand when I’m at my the edges of my comfort zone (my “box”), so I can learn what that edge feels like. And I did 35m of Subtle Mindset and Posture.
Monday: 20m Wu Ji; 30m Dragon 1; and a 1h MCO attempt. It didn’t succeed, but it made it most of the way up my back, not bad given that it was my first try in a while. At first I was worried that it was going to be too far forward, but it eventually shifted to the middle of my spine instead of the front (and it felt like it was going up a cylinder, I’m not used to that), so that was good.
Tuesday: I reviewed the Straight Line Section lesson of the 37 form. I did 20m each of Pillar Pushing and Wu Song Shen Fa 1, and went through the Chen pole weapons. And then I did the 37 form, the Xin Jia first form, and the start of the Hunyuan 48, going very slowly through all of them and paying attention to when I’m within my box of comfort; really rarely, it turns out! But if I stopped and adjusted I could get back under control, so that’s good. And then I did a short walk, also paying attention to how it felt; I’m using my right Kua much less than my left Kua. (Which surprised me, if I’d been asked I would have guessed the other way!) And I sat in a church for a bit. And in the afternoon, I went through the new Kua Work Basics videos; that turned out to be surprisingly relevant to all of this, it was certainly relevant to my feeling when I was walking but also to my comfort level more broadly.