I repeated the previous lesson from Damo’s course, on Alchemical Breathing, this week. And I’m glad I did: there were a couple of bits about reverse abdominal breathing that it was good to get clarification on, and the extra week of practice was useful. I won’t say that I’m doing it perfectly now, but it feels better, and yesterday I felt an unusual amount of connection between my Huiyin and Dantian while doing it.

So-so week practice week. Pretty good practice on Wednesday, iffy practice the rest of the week. Still trying to figure out what’s going on with sleep stuff; I did review the Shui Gong 2 video, since I felt like I’d been making progress there, and that was kind of interesting. The vibration that you’re supposed to feel is faster than the one I noticed, but also more localized, and he did talk about feeling shaking down your spine, so I might have been feeling the latter? And Shui Gong 2 is target at having you sleep more restfully, so if I can get it to work, it would be really useful; I feel like what’s going on right now is mostly mental rather than physical?

But the flip side is that, if you focus too much while doing it, then you bring Qi to your head, and that can make it harder to sleep more restfully. So it’s possible that, the way I’ve been doing it, Shui Gong 2 is actually counterproductive? At any rate, I’m going to experiment with seeing if I sleep any differently on nights when I do Shui Gong 2 versus nights when I don’t, and also I’ll try to dial back my attention when I am doing it.

In Tai Chi, I got enough people to agree to do Push Hands that my teacher was willing to restart that on Saturday. So that’s good; and I definitely have a lot to learn there…

Not a lot to talk about this week. Though actually this week’s lesson in Damo’s course was kind of surprising; it was another seated exercise involving pulling up your Huiyin, which sounds straightforward enough? But then he also talked about not letting stuff escape through the top of your Dantian, and I realized that I was in fact not closing that off. So I think that I’m going to watch that lesson again tonight instead of moving on to a new lesson; he said that this one was harder to get in place in your body than you’d expect, and I think that is proving to be the case.

Not great Nei Gong practice. The sleep stuff has taken yet another turn; I think that now with some bedding changes I’m actually not feeling too allergic overnight? So I can breathe okay, and I haven’t woken up startled for a while. But I’m still not reliably sleeping solidly. Not sure what’s going on there; maybe it’s my brain being funny, maybe it’s Widget spending more time in the bed than he had been, maybe there’s something else physical going on. For now I’m just letting it be; but at any rate I was doing minimal amounts of practice a lot this week.

Though there was one interesting thing related to going to bed – after sporadically trying the Shui Gong 2 exercise once every week or two for a year or so, I started to feel something going down my spine. My memory was that he talked about shaking going down your spine, whereas what I felt was fairly slow waves, so I’m not completely sure that what I was experiencing was what that lesson talked about. I guess it’s time for me to watch that lesson again.

Tony went over my form this Saturday; a bit of a let down, I kept on having Xin Jia leak into my form. We talked a bit about other stuff for me to do, though; he said he was willing to do Push Hands if I could get some people to commit to that. So I’ll give that a try.

I hadn’t been working much on my Silk Reeling notes; not sure how much is being past the initial flush of ideas and how much is that Damo’s generating a new set of videos from his current retreat that are keeping me busy on Thursdays. Having said that, I did realize that I wasn’t making as much progress as I’d like, and I put in some time on that on Saturday. So that’s okay; my goal isn’t to put in huge amounts of focused effort, I just want to chip away at it.

No new Nei Gong lesson this week, because I’d had an interrupted week the previous week and figured I could use the extra time with the current exercise. (Advanced Dantian Gong.) I didn’t get quite as much extra exercise as I would have liked: I was on call, and that interrupted my Wednesday Nei Gong session, so while I did have a good session with the seated Wu Xing exercises that day, I didn’t manage to continue with an Advanced Dantian Gong. But I did spend an hour on it on Friday, and of course I had more shorter sessions.

So, pretty solid week practice wise; nothing stellar, but it was fine. One thing that I noticed when practicing was doing the regular Dantian Gong: at the end, I feel kind of reluctant about doing the Wu Ji at the end, and it’s because I feel that it’s going to make me sink my torso in a way that feels different / tired. And that in turn probably means that I’m holding my torso wrong during Dantian Gong, that I’m not relaxing enough, because I don’t think the feeling in my torso should change significantly in that particular way.

I’d also put off the next lesson in Damo’s Tai Chi course for another week, because it felt like a useful one and I hadn’t really spent much time with it. I spent a bit of time with it this week; but, honestly, my conclusion is that I need everything to go right for me to spend even a vaguely acceptable amount of time on that course, and I basically never actually dive into it. I’m glad I’ve spent the time that I have with that course, but a big part of what I’ve learned is an understanding how the Tai Chi system he teaches is different from Chen Tai Chi (significantly more/different emphasis on Song, significantly less emphasis on the Dantian); so if I really want to learn Damo’s system, it’s not just going to be learning a few forms, it’s going to be putting in significant effort like learning a different martial art. And I don’t want to spend that kind of time on it now; if I were to spend more time on something on my days off, I’d rather spend it playing piano. Or, if I’m going to do something Tai Chi related, maybe find a way to spend time on push hands.

Not much to report on my regular Tai Chi: continuing to chip away, the Guan Dao and the Hunyuan 48 both continue to be a bit hard to learn in real time, but I think I’m keeping up with them pretty well by reviewing videos. I’d hoped to have my teacher look at my form last Saturday, but he was busy; hopefully that will happen this Saturday.

This week’s Nei Gong lesson was on a new form of Dantian Gong; this one, instead of being focused on building up the Dantian as a container, was focused on adding more Qi to your Dantian. Which, interestingly, meant that you don’t want to stretch you Lao Gong as much during this exercise: you need to stretch it a bit to build the connection between your hands and Dantian, but if you stretch them too much, apparently that makes the boundary of your Dantian hard to pass through.

Anyways, interesting exercise: when learning it, I was pretty surprised how quickly / strongly my hands locked into my Dantian, given how far apart they were, and in general it got my Dantian feeling kind of buzzy? warm? Not sure how to describe it, but unusual at any rate. I won’t necessarily chalk that all up to this exercise, since I was feeling some of that after the previous exercise, but this one is definitely helping.

I was hoping to do it more, because it sounded like something you could do for a while. Unfortunately, my practice routine wasn’t great this week; I was working M-W this week and taking Th-F off, but unfortunately I felt mildly sick on Thursday, so I didn’t get serious Nei Gong practice in either day. (I think either a cold or just side effects from being tired; I took a COVID test on Friday and it was negative.) That also meant that I didn’t spend more time practicing stuff from Damo’s Tai Chi course this week, which I’d been hoping to do. So I’m not going to do new lessons in either course this week, to give them more time.

Saturday Tai Chi was good; I led Silk Reeling, which surprised me a bit, I thought it hadn’t been that long since my last turn? I’d been thinking I should ask Tony for advice on what to work on next, though, so it’s good timing. And we had Sunday Tai Chi this week as well. It continues to be the case that both the Hunyuan 48 and the Lao Jia Guan Dao are being surprisingly hard for me to pick up on the fly, but I’ve got good videos of both, so I’m managing to keep up with them both. And I do enjoy both forms; they make sense once I’ve learned them, they just take a surprisingly long time to learn.

This week’s lesson in Damo’s course was continuing the Qi Mobilization series, this time doing the sixth Ji Ben (Diagonal Flying). Pretty interesting one: he was pointing out how that one reinforces your central channel, and indeed if I focus on that during the rest position in the exercise (e.g. stretching my middle fingers), I feel a bit of a stretch in the middle of a body and a tingling at the top of my head. And then when I do the forceful version of the exercise (as with all the Qi Mobilization exercises, there are three versions), I get this interesting feeling like there’s a sheet stretching out. And then, in the final version, it’s nice feeling my arms mostly stretch out on their own.

In terms of general practice, another very good week. I got in three hours on both Wednesday and Friday; and on Wednesday, I did the full Dantian Gong set in a single session. So that’s more than an hour of standing; I need to keep on working on long standing sessions, but that’s an accomplishment. Nothing else that was particularly notable individually, but it’s good to feel like chipping away is helping. And in general I’m feeling like my Dantian is ambiently buzzing a bit more, so hopefully that’s a sign that I’m building things up too. (I did also keep on going with the previous sitting exercise, doing it most days, maybe even every day.)

A new lesson in Damo’s Tai Chi course; it covered Wu Song Shan Fa 3, another way to get at that system’s take on Song. And it felt maybe a little more effective than some of the other ones, I could feel stuff moving across my chest? I am starting to feel like it would be good for me to put in more time into those classes; e.g. I feel like I haven’t been doing Taiyi standing enough, and then actually I realized I’d forgotten the details of that exercise. Not entirely sure where to fit that in; at the very least, I should put in a more serious practice on Sundays, probably going through a couple of different exercises.

My regular Tai Chi is going okay; I feel like my Xin Jia has stopped improving and is in danger of degrading, though, so I should put in a little more effort to shore that up. And I should also find a good Xin Jia video to help with that, the ones that I’ve been using so far are a little hard to learn from…

Quite a good week. As I mentioned last time, I decided not to do a new lesson this week, so I was just continuing with the exercise from last week. And I was definitely feeling better for most of the week; I had a solid three+ hour practice on Wednesday, and while Friday was only a two hour practice, that’s still an okay amount. I decided to try a long Wu Ji but only made it for, if I’m remembering correctly, 45 minutes; I feel like I should work on that, because I bet that there will be some long sessions in the retreat in June?

And then on Saturday something interesting happened: I didn’t have time to do the new seated exercise before Tai Chi, so I did it at the end of the afternoon. And I honestly wasn’t expecting it to go well, because I was pretty tired; but, unexpectedly, I felt two strong sensations on the outside of my abdomen, one in the back on my Ming Men, one in the front on my Qi Hai.

Which rings a bell: I haven’t gone back to listen to it, but my memory is that, in the Microcosmic Orbit preparation video series, there’s an exercise that involves connecting those two points, and in fact it’s the next exercise after the one that involves connecting the Huiyin up to the Dantian. Given that the current exercise is about the Huiyin and Dantian, I’m expecting one connecting the Qi Hai and Ming Men to show up soon, but I wasn’t expecting to start feeling something there now without doing an exercise that directly dealt with those points? But the feeling really was unmistakeable.

No idea why it was so strong that time; it was significantly weaker on Sunday (I’m not sure I would have noticed the Qi Hai part on Sunday if I hadn’t been listening for it), and either not present or barely present on Monday and Tuesday. Still, it was pretty cool.

I also had a good practice over lunch yesterday. I was feeling tired, so I decided to just do 20 minutes of Wu Ji, but they ended up being a very solid 20 minutes. Basically, my whole body felt like it was hanging together in a sort of tensegrity way, I felt a pretty clear line down the inside of my thigh, and I felt really heavy in my feet. Also, in general over the weekend I felt like my back was loose; in general it seems like my back is hanging nicely, with my pelvis providing a tug down and also with a tug down around my neck. So I really do think that I’m making progress towards building up a Nei Gong body?

And Tai Chi also went well this week. In particular, on Sunday I had an unusual amount of energy for doing Tai Chi, so I threw in a practice of Damo’s stuff, and it went pretty well; I did 15 minutes of that form of Wu Ji and was sinking a ton there (with very heavy feet), and then I did the new exercise. Which I’m still learning, and in general I think it will be quite a while before I’m good at using Song to generate significant energy, but I’ll keep on chipping away?

My sleep has been pretty crappy the last couple of days, but I had an appointment my allergist on Wednesday and she gave me a couple of suggestions, one of which I’m pretty optimistic about. So I’ll give that a try this weekend, hopefully it will make a difference.

And I’ve managed to get started on content that I’m planning for my new Silk Reeling website. And I’ve been fitting it into random evenings, which is good: being able to do it in bits and pieces increases the chance that I’ll actually get it done. It certainly helps that individual pages there are quite a bit smaller than my posts on my regular blog, that makes it a lot easier to write it a bit at a time.

This week started out as my best practice week in a while. I liked the lesson in the Nei Gong class: continuing the seated bellows breathing / huiyin lesson from a few weeks earlier, with a change in the mudras; I’d been continuing the earlier lesson some of the time anyways, so I’m glad to have a way to level it up slightly.

And then on Wednesday morning I had a quite solid practice, over three hours; first time I’ve done that in weeks, and it felt good.

But then on Wednesday afternoon I got a shingles vaccination, and it unfortunately turns out that that messes you up in a similar way that the COVID vaccination does. So on Thursday and Friday I did minimal seated work and no standing work or Tai Chi; ditto for the Nei Gong on Saturday, though I went to most of the Saturday Tai Chi class.

But on Sunday I felt pretty normal; I didn’t do quite as long a practice as my regular Sunday morning practice, because I figured I should ease back into things, but I did at least do a solid 20 minutes of Wu Ji and the new seated lesson. And then things were normal after that; I had a good 45 minute Dantian Gong session over lunch today.

I’m not going to do a new Nei Gong lesson this week, though, and I also won’t do a new lesson in Damo’s Tai Chi course: I don’t want to rush stuff, and I definitely don’t feel like I’m ahead of the expected progress in the Nei Gong course.

In terms of my Tai Chi practice, I’m finding both the Guan Dao form and the Hunyuan 48 to be surprisingly hard to learn just in class. Fortunately, I’ve got videos of my teacher doing both of them, so if I go over the video enough time, I can learn them. I think the Hunyuan 48 video is only the beginning of that form, but it’s enough for now, and it turns out that my teacher has a DVD of that form, so I’ll be able to get the whole thing by the time that we reach that stage.

The other thing that’s going on is that I’ve decided that I spend enough time thinking about how to do the Silk Reeling Exercises well that I really should write something about that down. So I’ve started writing some notes that I’m planning to turn into a standalone website. We’ll see whether I really manage to find time for that, and how it turns out; I don’t actually want to explain the exercises, I want to assume that people already know the basics of those exercises, and that probably limits the audience to people who are students of my teacher and who like to read about that sort of thing, which isn’t a lot of people? But I do want to get this out of my head, so I think it’s worth doing anyways…

Better practice this week than the last couple: my Wednesday / Friday Nei Gong sessions weren’t quite as long as I’d like, but they weren’t bad, and on Monday and Tuesday I had solid practice over lunch at work. So hopefully I’m on an upswing from the recent dip.

This week’s lesson in the Nei Gong class was on settling the shoulders. Which is something I’ve been thinking about recently, and feel like I’m doing pretty well at; there was one new idea in the lesson, but in general, much less new in that lesson than normal. In fact, for the first time maybe since I’ve started the course, I actually didn’t do the new exercise every day during the first week after the lesson: there was a full moon, so I wanted to work in that practice, and I didn’t always have time to do a second meditation practice.

At first, the full moon practice felt basically identical to how it felt when I’d done it a week or two before the full moon: same stretch inside the body. But then I kind of relaxed and it actually felt milder? Not sure if that different feeling meant that it was more effective or less effective or just different, and I’m also not sure if it was related to the full moon or just a coincidence. Anyways, I’ve rescheduled my reminder for next month.

In Damo’s Tai Chi course, we did Wu Song Shen Fa 2 – another exercise on using Song to generate movement. I haven’t practiced it much, hopefully I’ll be able to work it in a few times this week.

We had the Sunday class in my regular Tai Chi course this week; we started the Guan Dao. So now I’m learning two completely new forms (that plus the Hunyuan 48), and getting the spear form back into my memory; hopefully that won’t be too much? I can report that the Guan Dao is heavy; and that when reviewing even the small bit of it and the Hunyuan 48 that I’ve seen so far, I basically immediately forgot what I just learned. Fortunately, I have good movies of both of those (though the Hunyuan 48 video is only the beginning, I think), and I think after watching those videos enough, I’ve more or less gotten those bits into my memory? We’ll see.

I also noticed that my legs ached a bit on Monday; not sure if that was caused by the Guan Dao, but it might be. And my body felt different on Monday in a different way. When walking, I felt a little like my feet were sticking well to the ground, and movements through my hips / butt / kua were more present? And also my torso felt like it was sinking more. If I’m optimistic, it might be a sign that I’m finally starting to get to the stage of flesh separating from bone that Damo talks about? I will continue to monitor it.

Damo’s having a 9 day Nei Gong retreat in June, and I did manage to get signed up for that; I’m really looking forward to it. It’s in Maryland, so I’ll have to fly across the country, but maybe being isolated will make it more effective as a retreat? Anyways, not much I can do about that: he’s not coming to the Bay Area this year, I’m just glad to go to an event of his at all.

It gives me motivation to get stuff in order so I’m prepared well to benefit from the retreat. So I’ll have to think of ways in which I want to go on a diet, mentally and physically. Speaking of which, I happened to listen to an interesting interview on the Ezra Klein show, talking to Johann Hari; among other things, they talked about just having more time to have your mind wander. Which made me think that I should do that more, especially while walking; means I should wean myself off of FlipFlop Solitaire, though…

Not a lot to say about Nei Gong this week. The lesson was titled “Full Moon Practice”, and I assumed it would be something that I didn’t care about, but actually I liked it: it was about a seated practice for opening up the Chong Mai, and it felt pretty interesting even when practicing it this week when the moon isn’t full. Damo says that it’s more effective right around the full moon, and that you feel some of that effect even doing it at home during the day (but you get more when doing it outside at night in view of the moon); honestly, I’m dubious about that sort of linkage, but I’ll be glad enough to have an excuse to do this practice a couple of times a month, so I’ll probably follow that recommendation anyways.

Other than that, I probably did the least amount of Nei Gong practice this past week that I have over the last couple of months; partly because of a dentist appointment last Wednesday, but also I’ve just been more tired than I would like. Though I have sometimes been doing a second seated practice even on non Wednesdays/Fridays, because the practice from the previous week seemed important and it only takes 15 minutes.

Tai Chi went well, though. I’m continuing to feel my Dantian as being more present, and feeling connections from it to other parts of my body, so I think I’m finally starting to understand this whole Silk Reeling concept. And I think I’ve figured out some things as well. In the step forward in Jing Gang that I’ve been thinking about over the last month or so, I think my perception of a symptom last week was right but the fix wasn’t, and my fix from a few weeks back also wasn’t right: it’s not so much that I should close my left Kua, but instead I should open up my right Kua. That way, I get in the correct position before stepping, and I feel a lot more stable. And in Oblique Posture, I think that, when coming up while opening my arms, I should pivot my body from lower down than I had been, closer to the pelvis instead of the middle of the back. That way, my tailbone naturally goes under the body, instead of requiring me to tuck it after the fact.

We’ve started the Hunyuan 48 form; unsurprisingly, the beginning is just like the beginning of the Hunyuan Dao form. I’m glad we’re doing that, it’s an interesting experience, much more flowy. And I’m also enjoying the spear, it feels fun in a way that’s different from the other weapons forms that I’ve learned.

Interesting week. In the Nei Gong course, we covered an exercise connecting your Huiyin to your Dantian; seemed similar conceptually to one of the earlier bits of his sequence of Microcosmic Orbit lectures, so we do seem to be getting closer to that. (I kind of doubt I’m really prepared for it, but who knows.) One thing that surprised me about this lesson was that Damo was pretty explicit about only doing it for 15 minutes; not used to that kind of recommendation.

Also, the previous week I finished reading Anatomy Trains; I honestly mostly skimmed it after about the first third or so, but I’m glad I read it. Not sure if it’s coincidence or if the book has had an effect on my perception of my body, but I’m noticing stretching caused by relaxation in a bunch of places in my body now; that certainly seems to be a good thing?

Not great Nei Gong practice this week in general: I continue to be more tired than normal, I’m not sure why, so I didn’t put in as much time as normal. Because of the new seated exercise, I also didn’t do the concentration exercise every day; more disappointingly, I had a hard time keeping it going when I did do it, probably because of the tiredness? Not sure if I’ll keep up that exercise or not; I was thinking that I’d do it for a couple of months, but now I’m wondering if it would be better for me to go back to one exercise from the first year about choosing which mental seeds to water, because that certainly seems relevant. Though, thinking about it a bit more, the issue right now is I think mostly just that I’m tired, which would have an effect no matter which one of those I do, so I should probably work on that and try to spend time on the Concentration exercise when I have good days.

(And I think I’ll continue to work in this week’s new exercise fairly frequently from now on, too.)

In Damo’s Tai Chi course, we continued with the four energies drill, this time having our body movements coming from relaxing to generate release. Which is a pretty interesting way of doing things, and one that doesn’t seem familiar from my regular Tai Chi course? Which, in turn, raised the question of whether I should work it into my regular Tai Chi as well or if I should treat that as a Yang thing that isn’t applicable to Chen. In particular, I think Chen is more focused on everything coming from your Dantian.

Thinking about that a bit more, I got to wondering about Cover the Hand Punch in Chen: Tony sometimes talks about that going from your foot to your kua to your hand, which is potentially consistent with having it generated by release but isn’t so consistent with having it come from your Dantian. So I asked Tony about that; he said that, actually, that was just a beginner way of doing things, it really should originate from your Dantian, going down both your arm and foot. So that’s making me pretty sure that I should try to keep the Yang and Chen stuff separate, and that using release to initiate movements is on the Yang side of things.

The other thing I was noticing on Saturday was that my body felt different inside; maybe another side effect of reading Anatomy Trains? In particular, I really was noticing my Dantian, having it feel like a ball; that’s happened to me sometimes before, but it was more present and persistent this time. And there was also more of a feeling of direct connection between it and other parts of my body; maybe that’s the silk reeling stuff, reflecting fascial restructuring. Definitely something I want to keep on playing with.

Going through the spear, I’m realizing that the second circle on the right side of the Full Martial feels wrong. Playing around with that more on Sunday, I think I need to let go a bit and let the spear swing around more, I’m restricting my arms a bit. Something to work on.

And we’ve finished the Xin Jia first form now: I’m sure I’ve got details wrong but now I feel like I’ve at least learn all of it. Speaking of details, I feel like I’m skipping over a step (or combining two steps) right after the second Gao Tan Ma, so I need to figure that out.

And on Sunday I was going through the from while paying attention to the Dantian, and I noticed something feeling odd right at one of my regular trouble spots, when stepping forward in Jing Gang. Basically, it felt like my Dantian was kind of falling off the front? Experimenting, tucking my tailbone there seemed to help; honestly, seems like a slightly odd thing to do in that movement, but maybe it’s the right thing to do? Or maybe I can find a different way of moving that will make more sense. Something else to keep on playing with.