This week’s lesson was labeled as part 2 of Drawing Down Heaven, but it turned out to be a seated exercise focusing on a mudra from that Dao Yin, where you have your hands together in a sort of prayer position, stretching your middle finger up. Which turned out to be a rather interesting exercise: it really does feel different inside your body with that finger stretched rather than relaxed (it’s supposed to help you feel your Central Channel), especially when I had my hands up in front of my forehead. By the end of the exercise, I’d feel a fairly persistent sensation in the back of the middle of my head and a tickling in my Bai Hui.

Good week of practice in general. Did the regular stuff over lunch, and every afternoon (or maybe almost every afternoon) I did a little bit extra at the end of the day, some back stretches or a Dao Yin or something. Not much to say about the Saturday class this week, other than that I’m sticking to my plan of pausing those for a while, while I build up my strength and/or get my sleep a little more under control.

And, speaking of building up strength, I was thinking I’d do 35 minutes of Wu Ji on Sunday (and try 40 next week), but it was going well, so I ended up going for 40 minutes. Felt pretty good, too, like my bones were kind of setting itself into a frame-like structure with the help of my tendons or something, as opposed to having my muscles do all the work; hopefully that’s a sign of progress and I’ll be able to get that feeling more often? Not sure that I was sinking quite as much as I do during the Saturday classes, but it still felt like I was doing a decent job with that, too.

And I didn’t do a huge amount of Tai Chi but I did some on both Saturday and Sunday (as well as Silk Reeling twice during the week), enough to make me feel like I’m holding steady enough with that. Still not sure what was going on with the back annoyance fro the start of the week, but that’s gotten better again.

Sleep was much better this past week, after some dust mite tackling, yay, so I got in decent practice last week after all. Though I was feeling off on Saturday, so I didn’t do much Tai Chi this weekend; better now, fortunately, though my back is letting me know that maybe I should have spent more time exercising over the weekend.

This week’s lesson in Damo’s course was on Drawing Down Heaven, a Dao Yin designed to work on your central channel. Interesting how, when bringing my arms together, I could feel my body sort of narrow up inside, and also the feeling of a line down the middle as I moved my hands down? There’s a second lesson on that next, curious what that’s going to be about.

There was a Sunday Tai Chi class this weekend. I’ve been trying recently to memorize the list of moves in the second form, and coming to the end, there were a few where I couldn’t quite line up the names with the actions, so I asked about that. (I was more or less doing the right things, just not dividing them up so finely into names.)

I did a 35 minute Wu Ji session on Sunday, and it wasn’t too bad; I suspect I’m not sinking / relaxing quite as much when doing it on my own as I do in the Saturday classes, though? But I feel like I’m sinking a decent amount, and I think spreading my lower back might be helping with my positioning, I don’t think I’m quite as asymmetric as I had been before. Anyways, something to keep gradually pushing at.

This week’s lesson from Damo’s course was on the Golden Orb Dao Yin; we’d seen a seated version of it very early on (maybe in the first month of the course, even), but this time we were seeing it standing, and of course with half a year of practice under our belt. I’d seen it briefly in a Saturday class, but it was good to see the lesson on it, too; I don’t know that I’ll do it frequently, but I enjoyed doing it this week, and it seems like a reasonable thing to keep in the mix every few days.

One thing that Damo warned about is to not do Dao Yins when you’re tired; fortunately, last week, my sleep was better than it had been in a while, so I got in several good practice sessions. Unfortunately, it’s been lousy yesterday and today; I have a hypothesis why (boo dust mites), so hopefully I’ll be able to fix it, we’ll see.

Some of the good practice sessions were two 30-minute Wu Ji sessions, one during the Saturday class and one the next day. And one thing I noticed earlier in the week was that I probably wasn’t turning in my feet quite enough, and when I turned them in more, that caused my lower back / Ming Men to spread horizontally. And relaxing into that seemed like an interesting thing to do, so I’ve been working on that; I feel like it’s been helping my sinking and relaxing a noticeable amount, so hopefully sticking with that will help.

Also, when I’ve been walking around the neighborhood this week, my back has been feeling interesting; sometimes just a pleasant tingling, and one day my upper back felt actively warm. So hopefully that’s a sign that something good is happening, that things are opening up.

So, I want to keep this up, and also experiment with longer Wu Ji sessions; hopefully I’ll be able to get enough sleep that I can do 30 minute or longer sessions a couple of times a week, and extend the duration? I don’t have enough time to do that every day, given my work schedule and that I also want to do Dantian Gong a couple of times a week, go through the whole Ji Ben Qi Gong (which I’m now doing in two groups of four instead of four groups of two), and some other miscellaneous stuff (maybe Thickening the Qi, maybe Wu Xing Qi Gong) as well.

In terms of Tai Chi, we’re now at a serious enough COVID level that I don’t feel comfortable going to classes any more. I practiced the first form a few times on Saturday, though, but I forgot to do weapons / Xin Jia / second form practice on Sunday; oops. And I’ve been maintaining a habit recently of going through the full Silk Reeling set twice a week during work meetings; that’s definitely felt good too.

We did have an October Minecraft session, but attendance was small and we didn’t do much building, so I didn’t put up much for it; here’s a combined post for October and November.

First, a few October pictures:

I was thinking I’d do something with the room behind the dock. But I stared at it for a while, and I just couldn’t convince myself that I’d like it more after cleaning it up or expanding it or something. So I wandered around for a bit, but I ended up with a grand total of one picture of that:

A view from above of the colored stairs near the mountain.

Ariel did a bit of work in their castle, adding some stuff to a couple of rooms:

A fire pit with some boxes of supplies.

A room with a row of furnaces at the back and assorted other equipment.

Some armor at the end of this section.

But, in general, not a lot; and I can’t remember if Dan wasn’t there at all or if he was talking but had to do something else instead of building?

I didn’t do any more building in November, but I took a more normal set of pictures. First, some pictures traveling back from Ariel’s castle to the mountain:

Some colored abstractions that Dan had built years ago.

I have no memory of where these boxes on / next to this island came from.

The joys of glitches. (I think this one is from a change in the terrain generation algorithm.)

Some spots of light in the dark while flying over the train tracks towards the mountain.

A cave visible through a gash in the base in the mountain.

A tree growing in a corner of a mountain.

A view out from the mountain at dusk.

Then I was feeling nostalgic so I wandered around the city where we were building during the first several years:

Inside the golden temple.

Looking through a window into the library in that complex I dug out of a mountain next to the city.

The stables in the top level of that mountain complex.

Fortunately, the horses still have plenty of hay to eat.

Inappropriate Cows.

Ariel just put in some stained glass windows.

Stained glass windows on the castle.

Dan built a bunch of squiggles, though:

I think this cube with a plane cutting through it is new, but I’m not 100% sure?

A brown squiggle.

Some purple squiggles.

A better view of the lower purple squiggles, plus some less squiggly art.

Pretty sure that the yellow and green art are new.

Some grey shapes.

Muddy green this time.

Some smaller, brighter shapes above the water.

A view of the red thing in the context of the shoreline; I like how it echoes the grassy bit in the water, which I assume came from the terrain algorithm instead of from Dan?

Then Dan decided to start blowing things up instead of making abstract shapes.

Some explosion remnants further down in the pit.

I think we’re starting to run out of energy for Minecraft. And, looking through my records, our first session on this server was December 9, 2010. So we’ve been doing this for a decade, which is something worth celebrating; we’ll do one more session in December, but I think we’ll take an indefinite pause after that.

This week’s lesson from Damo was about opening the Lao Gong further; some interesting exercises around moving your hands in various configurations with Lao Gong stretched open. Which sometimes led to interesting feelings: sometimes feeling like there were magnetic pushes of my hands acting on each other, sometimes like something was moving inside? So I’ll probably keep doing this one every few days for a while.

My notes on the sequence, since it’s long: rest, stretch and squeeze (for a longer period than the next one), circles, stretch and squeeze. Put fingers in a cage shape and stay there breathing into fingertips, do circles, then stretch fingertips towards each other without actually moving them, then separate and squeeze one finger at a time (including thumb), then do all five, then flatten your hand again and rest while breathing into the palm. Go up and down the arms, returning to neutral between the two arms and after the second arm. Then ditto but also moving in and out as you go up and down. Have one hand flat and the other facing it with fingers together straight towards the flat palm, go in and out; repeat on other side, then rest in neutral position. Do the circles on more time, then widen and squeeze your hands, much wider than the first time. Rest in neutral. Touch your fingers lightly and listen to where they touch. Rest your hands on the knees.

This Saturday’s Nei Gong class was kind of frustrating; Joyce and Rick had us standing in Wu Ji for an indefinite period of time. I gave up after 30 minutes, and I’m glad I did; if they’d stopped after 35 or maybe even 40 minutes I might have felt like I should have pushed it further, but they just kept going, and also I’m not into uncertainty as a teaching technique. I’m actually thinking that I’ll pause those classes after December (I might even pause them now if I hadn’t already paid for December): it’s useful having them point out more subtle points of postures and to critique me directly, but the direct critique feels a lot less useful to me over Zoom than in in-person classes I’ve taken with them, and in general the classes seem a lot more focused on pushing through physical endurance than I want. I actually think I could use a push on that, but I like Damo’s more mixed approach, and I also like the sequencing of topics that Damo’s class provides. (Whereas Joyce and Rick have to deal with people at radically different stages in their journey.) And also I’m still dealing with sleep / fatigue issues that are noticeably interfering with things; it would be one thing to try to push my endurance if I were regularly sleeping well, but it’s another thing to push on that when I’m tired far too much of the time.

Still doing the Tai Chi in the park, though we’ll see if a lockdown gets called soon. One note from that class this week: In the Xinjia first form, when flipping your right forearm over before the first punch, don’t immediately bring your left arm up to your temple: your left arm covers your right arm and you step forward with your left foot. Then, after that, you unfold and move up your right arm, and move your left arm to your right temple to block, shifting your weight to your left foot. And then you do the small jump and punch. So, basically, I was missing a step and conflating two left arm positions.

Not much to report other than that; practice went fine given the sleep issues, I’m managing some Tai Chi and Silk Reeling as well, though not as much Tai Chi as would be ideal.

This week’s lesson from Damo was on Pushing Your Tides, an arm stretching exercise. The main goal of the exercise is to realign your shoulder positioning; and maybe to open up your arm channels? It’s one of the few exercises in the course where Damo explicitly says you don’t have to do it for very long, once you’ve done it for a couple of weeks, your shoulders will be in the right place. And I’m not sure I’ll even stick with it that long: I’ve been working for years to realign my shoulders, and I feel like that’s been pretty successful? And certainly from doing Tai Chi, something is coming to my hands pretty frequently, which makes me think the channels are at least somewhat open.

No Saturday Nei Gong class this week; we did have a Tai Chi class, despite having gone up two tiers in our COVID rating. The class still seems to be legal, if I’m reading the county’s website correctly? Not sure what I think, I might pause attending for a while after Thanksgiving…

Sleep-wise, last week was iffy, but this week started off well, at least. And I feel like I’m doing a better job of sinking and relaxing during Wu Ji: doing a better job of relaxing my diaphragm, and different parts of my legs / kua.

One thing I forgot to mention last week: just as you’re supposed to work on noticing when you fall asleep, you’re also supposed to notice when you wake up. Still no real progress on the former, but I actually was, I think, completely successful on the latter once: I thought “I just woke up” right when I woke up and could actually trace the feelings in my mind back to right before I woke up, so I did really feel like I was aware of the transition itself.

Anyways, sleep-wise, this week hasn’t been good. (Though last night was just fine, at least.) Still don’t really know what’s going on there; I think it’s allergy side effects, but I’m not completely sure. So I didn’t get quite as much practice done this week, but still, I did something every day.

On which note, I guess I might as well write down my regular practice routine. 20 minutes of seated meditation in the morning; these days I’m doing the Calm-Abiding exercise. Which is super interesting: not currently getting the blissed-out state that I sometimes got with it, but it feels good, and my Dantian is buzzing, with some of the latter continuing (mildly, admittedly) into the rest of the day. So I’m really liking that, and feeling that it’s useful; on days when I have more time I’m spending more than 20 minutes on it.

Then, over lunch, I do standing work. Some stretching, some Wu Ji, something else. I go through the Ji Ben Qi Gong over the course of the week, two at a time; I try to do Thickening the Qi once, and I try to do Dantian Gong once (split over two days). And sometimes I do the Wu Xing.

If I’m tired, the stretching is short, I do 15 or even 10 minutes of Wu Ji plus some Ji Ben; 25 minutes or so in total. If I had a good night’s sleep, I do the Dantian Gong, because it’s the most work; unfortunately, this last week, I only managed to do half the Dantian Gong, because I just wasn’t up for it other days. Which is too bad, that exercise really is useful, if I were more awake I’d try to go through it twice a week instead of once (and twice for Thickening the Qi too), but that’s not where I’m at right now.

And, if work gets done reasonably early, then I’ll spend 15 minutes or so doing some back stuff.

Also, recently I’ve been getting more disciplined about going through Silk Reeling during work meetings, doing that twice a week; that feels good, I really think it’s helping. And it helps me pay attention in meetings, too, it’s great for meetings where I don’t have to talk but I do want to listen, because it means I can’t switch over to Slack or pull out my iPad or whatever.

Anyways, enough about the general practice routine, back to this week. Sleepy, but I kept going, and seated meditation and Silk Reeling were actively good. This week’s lesson in Damo’s course was around gratitude; I didn’t find as much time to practice that as I should have, probably because it doesn’t fit quite so neatly into either seated meditation or into standing work. So I guess I should do that a little more this week? Though temperamentally I’m not feeling super drawn to it. (Maybe that’s a sign I need to practice it more…)

In the Saturday Nei Gong class, in the Wu Ji at the start, I ended up feeling significantly more pressurized on the soles of my feet than I normally did. So I was relaxing better, or something, I should try to build on that? I’m trying to bring that back to my Wu Ji practice in general, in particular working on relaxing my diaphragm, relaxing my kua, and relaxing my pelvis; I feel like I’m getting better but am still feeling things out, and I haven’t yet repeated that pressurized feeling. It might be starting to help with my leaning, though.

As to Tai Chi, we started the Lao Jia Dao this week. And I did get in a decent practice on Sunday. Not so much the Lao Jia first form, but practicing the stuff that’s newer that I need to solidify: the Lao Jia second form, the Xin Jia first form, and the Jian. Though Santa Clara County’s COVID restrictions have gone up again, so I don’t know if we’ll be able to keep on doing Tai Chi in the group in the park, we’ll see…

Somewhat better sleep this week than in some recent weeks, though still not great. I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night as much, and in general I didn’t feel allergic, but I often woke up 30 minutes or so before the alarm, which kind of had me on the edge of having enough sleep.

Still, some days were fine, so I got in a decent Nei Gong practice on those days, and I got in some practice on the other days; made it through all the core stuff I wanted to do over the week.

This week’s lesson was on waking up, complementing the one on going to sleep a few weeks back. Partly about paying attention to exactly when you wake up, mostly about your behavior after that, which was a mixture of sensible sounding advice and weird sounding advice that’s easy enough to follow so I might as well do it anyways. So I did most of it; the main thing that I’m not doing is getting out of bed as soon as I wake up (because I think Widget and Liesl would be a bit taken aback by that), but I’m trying to sit up in bed instead of lying down, in hopes that my body and mind will see that as enough of a transition? Oh, and there’s also the advice to either not use an alarm or to change the alarm sound to something less jarring; haven’t done that, but the good side of waking up early is that the sound of the alarm wasn’t relevant most days…

I skipped the Saturday Nei Gong class because I had the Sunday Tai Chi class this week. And in the Saturday Tai Chi class it was my turn to get instruction; notes from that are that in the opening, after hands come down, I should spiral more when going left. And I have more work to do when relaxing at end of Dantian Change. In Flash the Back, the emphasis isn’t on the blocking, it’s about having the other arm vanish. When flashing your hands in the flip right that, have the energy go to the tips of the fingers, don’t have the hands curled. When punching, make sure my wrist is straight in the punching hand, and in the other hand, have the fingers straight and a little more energy in the elbow. And, in the reverse version of the Oblique Posture, don’t have my right arm behind my center.

We’re done with the Jian form, switching to the Dao next; I’ll definitely want to make suer to practice the Jian regularly to solidify it more. (But, unlike the first time I went through the Jian, I should be able to remember it this time if I practice.)

And a note from Sunday: in the second form, after Taming the Tiger, when you stomp down with your right hand also going down, your feet are next to each other. Then step forward with your left foot while turning your right hand palm up, before doing the brow strike.

This week’s class was another mental exercise, separating the Shen and Qi: you’re supposed to visualize a yellow triangle while keeping your Qi sunk. I can’t say I was super successful at visualizing the triangle, but at least on good days I did feel some amount of separation?

Nothing in particular to report about the Saturday Nei Gong course, though at least I felt up for doing the whole thing, which hasn’t always been the case recently. And on Saturday afternoon I led the start of Tai Chi, we’ll see what advice Tony has for my form next Saturday. He talked some about Song, which was pretty interesting: saying that, when you relax in postures with your arms out, your arms should actually end up further out because the muscles aren’t tightening them up. Which fits in with what I’d been feeling recently in my arms while doing Wu Ji? And we finished the Jian form, I think I’m getting the end down, so hopefully the whole form will stick.

In terms of practice, I’m still more tired than I’d like, and I don’t think the change of allergy medicines is having the desired effect. But I kept things up, and ended up doing a decent amount of practice, I think. And I’m working on relaxing my legs in a similar way to how I’ve been relaxing my arms; I’d actually been doing that a few months back, but I’d gotten out of the habit, so I’m starting to pick it up again. And it feels good, which is nice, and hopefully it’s doing something useful to the tendons on the inside of my thighs.

Still sleepier than I’d like; maybe that’s getting better, maybe not?

I listened to the Calm Abiding video again; I’m supposed to spend 70% of my attention calmly paying attention to my Dantian, 20% to the rest of my body, and 10% to what my mind is doing. Not entirely sure how much I’m supposed to be pleasantly zoned out, but there was this bit about relaxing while paying attention.

Anyways, I’ve been trying to do that, and today was super interesting; I did get back to the pleasantly zoned out state, at which point all of a sudden my attention was shifting to my body as a whole. (And, to the extent that there was a center to my attention, it was quite a bit higher.) So the difficulty wasn’t in getting 20% of my attention on my body, it was in restricting my attention so that only 20% was there and keeping 70% on my Dantian. (And who knows what’s going on with the last 10%.)

I should probably ask about that, though I’ll wait until I’ve gotten a little more experience with it. It does feel plausible that what I’m doing is consistent with generating qi, at least, which is the goal of the exercise.

This week’s video was on preparing for sleep; you’re supposed to try to pay attention to exactly when you switch from being awake to being asleep. Which is hard, Damo said it took him several months. And, if you do it wrong, you run the risk of having your mind racing a bit, which is counterproductive; that did indeed happen to me, and honestly really isn’t what I need right now. Still, I’ll keep on poking at it…

Also, standing in Wu Ji is continuing to be interestingly different. I’m kind of feeling like my upper body is being held up by its tendons now; I relax the tops of my shoulders, my arms go out, my hands go up a bit, and muscles don’t feel particularly active in any of this, it feels a lot more sinewy. And it actively feels like there’s energy flowing through all of that, too, which is nice. If I could get to that situation with my lower body, I’d really be happy, but it’s definitely progress, and even a bit of a state change. And, honestly, somewhat surprising given that I haven’t been practicing for as long the last couple of weeks because I’ve been tired, but I’ll take it. (Not as much of the buzzy Dantian feeling as I’d had a week or two ago, though.)

No class with the local Nei Gong folks this week; Tai Chi on Saturday, we’re almost done with the Jian, I’m somewhat optimistic that I’ll be able to retain that? It’s been useful reviewing the last few moves that we’d done before COVID, I’d been a bit iffy on those even back then.

And I did practice Jian at home on Sunday, hopefully I can keep that up. I should practice a bit more during the week, though, and probably do one round of Silk Reeling during the week – Saturday is good but not quite enough on its own. And my back has actually been aching a bit, in ways where I think Silk Reeling could help; I need to get back to the back exercises, too. (Might be a consequence of me not exercising quite enough, might be a consequence of how I’ve been turning off use of musculature in my torso?)