Tuesday lesson was a Nei Gong one, Qi Emission 1. Which is something that I have no interest in trying (and I would be quite surprised if I could get it to work); fortunately, with the IAA rework, I didn’t have to wait a week for the next lesson to unlock, so on Thursday evening I watched Enquiry 1.

Wednesday: I watched the video of Rick’s February 21 Zoom class, and I did 10m of Balancing Upper and Lower.

Thursday: 15m Balancing Upper and Lower; 30m Wu Ji; 30m Dragon 2; 10m Wood Wu Xing. As mentioned above, I watched the Enquiry 1 lesson in the evening. And I also noticed an unusual feeling of heat in my armpits while I was sitting in preparation for that; maybe a side effect of the Balancing Upper and Lower? Or maybe a side effect of the weirdly warm torso stuff that I mentioned in last week’s post.

Friday: 40m Dantian Gong. My Nei Gong time has lessened noticeably recently, and in particular I haven’t been doing Dantian Gong at all frequently; I should get back to that. (But also it would be good if I more often had enough energy that I wanted to practice more; hopefully moving out of Winter and into Spring will help…)

Saturday: My regular Chen Tai Chi class.

Sunday: 1.5h push hands. One thing that came out of that is that the person I learn the most from there (Jason) was talking again about your legs as the source of energy, your waist / Dantian as something that decides how to use the energy and how to direct it, and your arms / hands as something that senses your opponent and where stuff comes out. And he says that I’m too stiff; when I try it his way with his help, it does feel better / more effective. But also I’m working on connecting things up inside, and when I do that, energy goes into my torso and arms in ways that make things feel more full but also less flexible. So I’m genuinely not entirely sure what to do here – how much is me doing things wrong, how much is a difference in styles between how Jason does things and how Lotus Nei Gong does things?

Monday: Du Stretch; 30m Full Moon.

Tuesday: I reviewed Step Back to Ride the Tiger, and did the 37 form and the Chen pole weapon forms. For Nei Gnog, I did 20m Dragon 1, a bit of Balancing Upper and Lower, and 20m of Enquiry 1. And I read an article on Zhan Zhuang, which is I think relevant to what I was thinking about on Sunday; note the bit about the lower body being full / naturally pulled down and the upper body floating. So at first I thought it was saying the same thing as Jason, but thinking about it a bit more, I’m not sure: the upper body floating isn’t clearly related to the upper body being more flexible / directing traffic more. But at any rate both agree that the lower body should be quite full, and I’ve known for a while that I’ve got too much tension in my legs in a way that interferes with that, so for now I should focus on that, I think. In the afternoon, I walked quite a bit, going to and from lunch and a doctor’s appointment, so I practiced trying to soak into my legs a bit more and relax / fill them up; hopefully that helped? And I paid attention to how that was affecting my torso and arms (and my shoulders, too, I was actually feeling stuff there a decent amount); if I relaxed in the right way they did feel more light, but maybe more in a way that was like the Zhan Zhuang article than the discussion from Sunday?

Anyways, interesting week, stuff to work on.