A Tai Chi lesson, Swing and Kick. Very close to the end of the form, I think only one lesson left before I’m done with that form?

On Wednesday, I did 1h of Wu Ji and 40m of Kidney Hui Chun.

On Thursday, I went over all of my Tai Chi forms; I’m getting better at the Double Dao, my Yang 37 is still iffy towards the end. (And I did my Hunyuan 48 review in the evening, that one’s quite iffy too.) In terms of Nei Gong, I did the Qi Building Principles Zoom class; good stuff, but also I’ve seen a bunch of lessons about Calm Abiding recently, so not a ton that was new to me in there. Certainly made me want to keep Calm Abiding in my rotation at a high priority, at any rate.

On Friday I did 1h30m of Wu Ji, and 35m of breathing exercises. Still having a hard time getting back to 2 hours: another one of those where my form felt really good, I feel like I should be able to just go on forever, but then somewhere around 45 minutes or an hour in, my back gets a little iffy, and after an hour and a half I end up stopping. Not sure if there’s something wrong with my form or if I need to get my back stronger or if I’ve been stressing it as part of getting it stronger and it’s a temporary problem or if that’s just an excuse and I need to push through?

On Saturday, I did some Advanced Dantian Gong, and my standard Chen Tai Chi class. I did some of Chen Qingzhou’s version of Zhan Zhuang before that; I’m still not sure what that’s good for, I’ll probably keep it up through this month but stop after that. And my long Silk Reeling for this week was Spine Stretch; I thought that doing that for 40 minutes might be a bit much for my back so I did 10 minutes in each direction instead of 20 minutes, and actually it felt funny rather sooner than that. (Apparently that exercise is more strenuous than Spine Waves, I can do that for 20 minutes with no problems.) But it was fine, it didn’t end up overly inflaming my back or anything. Not much to report from that; one direction is good for feeling my vertebrae. (And I’m not surprised that I don’t have much to report: it’s honestly only barely a Silk Reeling exercise, I would say.)

Not much on Sunday: 20m of Wu Ji and 40m of sleepy Calm Abiding, no Tai Chi at all. Partly because I was sleepy, but also I think I might want to lower my expectations on Sunday? On Mondays through Fridays I’m putting in solid enough days that it kind of feels like regular work, and Saturday I’m very busy with a long dog walk and three hours (sometimes more) of Tai Chi and grocery shopping; so treating Sunday as a rest day at least to some extent feels like it’s pretty defensible? Don’t get me wrong, I want to do some Nei Gong and some Tai Chi normally, but also I want to have time to just play some video games in the afternoons. It also doesn’t help that, these days, I’m looking after Ulli during the first part of the morning while Liesl gives Velvet a longer walk, which means that I can’t sleep in late and I also can’t do Nei Gong during the walk.

Monday was Dantian day: 20m of Wu Ji (with my mind in my Dantian instead of in all of my body as I normally have it), 60m of Dantian Gong, 20m of Ji Ben 1, and 40m of Spleen Hui Chun. Glad I spent so much time on my Dantian: I’m happy enough with not having it by a primary area of focus right now but still, it’s important, so I should work in occasional Dantian days.

And today was Spine day: after doing 1h of decent Calm Abiding, I went through the Du Stretch video again, and I did 20m of Wu Ji and 20m of Spine Waves. So pretty good Nei Gong, but unfortunately almost no Tai Chi: I reviewed the WSSF3 video (and I’m glad I did, I picked up something useful with my hand positioning), but I didn’t do any forms. So I won’t do all of my Tai Chi forms this week, unless I do everything on Thursday. (And who knows, maybe that will happen! But I won’t count on it.) I don’t feel too horrible about that, because my sleep was bad on both Saturday night and Monday night, but still, not what I would have liked.

We’ll see how this week and the next go: my offspring is in town for both of those weeks, so I imagine there will days when I’m doing stuff with them and that eats into my Nei Gong / Tai Chi time.

A Nei Gong lesson week, on the Magpie Bridge. Weird lesson, and unfortunately I’m one of the one out of three people who are affected by this. It honestly makes me a little nervous – I’m worried about getting my teeth out of alignment, and also I’ve got problems with my nasal cavities, I don’t want shoving them around in a way that makes that worse? Though the flip side is that, to the extent that my teeth are currently out of alignment, a tiny bit more width on top would actually help; and for all I know, widening the roof of my mouth would create more room in the relevant nasal cavities? I’m really not sure, but for now I am giving it a try; I honestly don’t know if I’ll maintain the habit long enough to see any effects.

On Wednesday, I went through the Spine Spa Zoom class; seemed useful, I’ll probably return to it. And I did about 50 minutes of sleepy Calm Abiding.

On Thursday I planned to do 1h arm stretch instead of 1h of Wu Ji, so I did 20m of Wu Ji and then started the arm stretch. Unfortunately, I had a plumber showing up that day and they were available rather earlier than predicted, so I stopped the stretch after 20 minutes; I did return to it later in the day and did another 40 minutes, but I didn’t get in the whole hour in one stretch. And I also rewatched most of the breathwork exercise videos again; my notes were pretty accurate, fortunately, but that also reminded me that I should work in Dry Sighing at random times during the day, not just Yin Yang Breathing. As to Tai Chi, I got my Double Dao more solid, went through the Xinjia first form a couple of times, and went over the Hunyuan 48; I should probably start that again from the beginning next Thursday, picking up bits that aren’t solid.

Friday was mostly a travel day to a Nei Gong workshop, but I did get in 1h of Calm Abiding and some Wood Wu Xing. (And the various small exercises, of course; pretty sure I did the Magpie Bridge multiple times, and both Dry Sighing and Yin Yang breathing?) And Saturday and Sunday were the workshop; rather more unplanned than normal because our location reservation got lost somehow, but we dealt with things, and I hopefully learned a lot.

On Monday, I spent 20m working on Spinal Waves and did 20m of Ji Ben 4. (And of course some Wu Ji at the start, end, and in between.) And an hour of Calm Abiding. Ji Ben 4 was interesting; we spent some time on that on the workshop, and it was feeling more spherical to me on Monday and also my outside Lao Gong on my inside hand was a little tingly.

Today I did half of my Tai Chi forms and WSSF 3. Something weird going on with my hands in WSSF 3 (I think I mentioned that last week); I was going to ask on the Discord, but I just peeked at the video and I see a few ways in which it looks different, so I should just go through the video again, I think. I didn’t hit my Nei Gong quota today, though, only half an hour of Wu Ji and half an hour of Anchoring the Breath. (Though it’s not quite so bad if I throw in the 20 minutes of stretching that I did at the start, the 15 minutes of Dry Sighing, and maybe 5 minutes of Magpie Bridge stuff that I did elsewhere during the day.) I won’t feel too bad about it, though: I was feeling a little off when I woke up (sleepy, and my back was unusually achy, not sure if that was from sleeping posture or from the spine work yesterday?), and I had an allergy shot today, so taking it easy is reasonable enough.

This week was a Tai Chi lesson week; Step Back to Ride the Tiger, a short one.

Now I’ve finished a full week of my no work schedule; a little unusual because my wife was out of town this week, but I don’t think that significantly affected the amount of Nei Gong and Tai Chi that I did. It’s gone well: I was hoping to spend significant amounts of time on Nei Gong, Tai Chi, and programming, and I’ve figured out a rhythm that’s allowed all of that to happen. And my goal was to spend at least two hours a day doing Nei Gong (except for Saturdays); that’s actually been surprisingly easy, I’ve probably gone beyond that more often than not?

One thing I wanted to do was set up a better stretching routine at the start. After trying a few videos, I decided I liked the Preparatory Stretching set from the Stretching Videos class in the IAA library. It’s about 20 minutes long, which is a little longer than I was hoping for, and I have tried paring it down a bit on some days when timing has been tight, but actually I really like the way my body feels after doing that, so I might just stick with it for the time being?

Anyways, here’s what I’ve been doing the various days; I didn’t write down the stretching details, you can assume that I did some form of that every day, and the above video most of the days:

Wednesday: I reviewed the multi-step Spine Waves sequence, and I did someSan Dan Tian 3, a bit of bellows breathing, and an hour of somewhat sleepy Calm Abiding. I’m starting to feel in Calm Abiding that I’m more tuned into the Qi part of my body than the standard physical part of my body, so that’s interesting. (I mean, I still think whatever I’m tuned into is physical, it’s just a different layer of my body than I’m used to tuning into.)

Thursday: 1h15m Wu Ji; it would have been nice to have gone longer. And some box breathing, and Anchoring the Breath. I’ve been trying to work in a bit of box breathing most days, including some times when I’m just sitting around and watching a movie or something. In my Tai Chi session, I did WSSF 3, the four energy drill, and the rest of my forms for that week. My Xin Jia feels good; in WSSF 3, I was noticing that my downward hand was generating an upward pull; I’m honestly not sure if that’s a good thing given the goal of that exercise, it might be effects from my Silk Reeling having an inappropriate affect on that particular exercise? I’ll play around with it some next time and probably ask on Discord.

Friday: long spine waves, San Dantian Gong 3, 1h Calm Abiding. That latter was super interesting; unfortunately interrupted twice by dogs, and also I had a hard stop, but there was lots of stuff going on inside. I wasn’t even actively Songing my mind all that much, but my body kept on physically Songing on its own and popping bits of energy out in various places; if I’d had more time / fewer interruptions it would have been my strongest Calm Abiding session, I’m fairly sure, and even so it was up there. Another random fact that’s potentially relevant: beside the dog walk, I ended up walking a little over three miles dropping off my car and picking it up again, maybe that affected things?

Saturday: mostly my standard Chen Tai Chi class, though I didn’t do standing or a long Silk Reeling at the beginning like normal, because I showed up late so my dogs weren’t alone as long. And my Saturday standard of Advanced Dantian Gong and some Dragon Dao Yins.

Sunday: 1h Wu Ji; I made it fine but 2h would have been quite tough – is it random chance, stance width, time of day, how much sleep I’d gotten? (Today’s nap was interrupted, and today I did the Wu Ji at around noon, FWIW.) San Dantian Gong 3 with 10 minute intervals; Anchoring the Breath, which I feel like hasn’t gone great the last couple of times I’ve done it. And I did half of my Tai Chi forms.

Monday: I went through another spine video (the physical/spine version of Ji Ben 4), did SDTG3, and 1h Calm Abiding. (Awake but not super strong; I forgot to tune into the Qi layer of my body, maybe that would have made a difference.)

Tuesday: I finished the rest of my Tai Chi forms, and did WSSF 1 and 2. My feet were noticeably more tingly than normal during the WSSF; not sure what that means, but hopefully something’s opening up in a useful way? And the form work is pointing out that I’m kind of on the edge of my three new forms (the Yang 37, the Hunyuan 48, and the Chen Double Dao); I should work on the details of those. Hopefully on weeks when I’m getting in three decent Tai Chi sessions, I’ll go through everything once in the first two and in the third one I can focus more on details; but still, finding time for the details of three is going to be a bit of a challenge. (Though I have been making special time for the Hunyuan 48 on Thursday evenings.) As to Nei Gong, I did 1h30m of Wu Ji; if we’re keeping track of variables, it was in the middle of the afternoon, after a not-great nap, honestly I was surprised it started out well. It did start out well, but also my back ached enough in the second hour that I decided not to push it to the full two hours. I think my back positioning was okay; maybe a wider stance would have helped, maybe I just need to build up more strength in my back / normalize that, maybe I’m wrong about my back positioning being okay? And I did a bit of box breathing and the Water Hui Chun.

Nei Gong lesson this week, San Dantian Gong 3. I actually haven’t practiced it outside of the lesson, I should do that. I was thinking that I might take today off from new lessons, because I hadn’t done a ton of practice of the latest Tai Chi lesson, but that lesson was really short so just doing it a little is okay? And hopefully with my new schedule I should be able to go through San Dantian Gong 3 enough times over the course of the week that I won’t feel like I’m too far behind…

On Wednesday, I did the Spinal Dao Yin, and a 1h15m Calm Abiding. Not as much Tai Chi as normal on a Wednesday, though, because of unusual work stuff. And on Friday, I finally did a 2h Wu Ji; I went in not expecting that at all, because it had been like pulling teeth even doing an hour of Wu Ji, but I was nice and rested, and my base felt really solid right from the beginning, so it was going really well; I definitely wasn’t stopping after an hour, and actually two hours was totally fine. Though because of that and a bit of work stuff, not much Tai Chi then either; I don’t think I did my weapons at all during the week?

On Saturday I got back to my long Silk Reeling exercises, with the Peng / Cai energy drill. And that turned out to be pretty interesting: during the Peng part, I could feel the Peng moving up my body as I sunk (I think maybe the four energy drill has been making that stronger), and during the Cai part, I could feel the rotating pull continuing down my arms after the initial quick change of direction.

It was a Sunday Tai Chi week; I definitely have some catching up to do with the Double Dao. And that ate into my Nei Gong time some, too (well, that plus I wanted to watch some of the Warriors/Clippers game; super exciting, as it turned out), so I didn’t do as long a Calm Abiding as I would have liked.

And now I’m retired, so longer Nei Gong every day except for Saturday (I mean, I won’t be dogmatic, exceptions will happen, but that’s the default), and I’ll do my (non-class) Tai Chi practice on Sunday / Tuesday / Thursday instead of Sunday / Wednesday / Friday. On Monday, I went through a Sinew Work Principles zoom class; theory that I’d heard before but the initial set of exercises made it more concrete, and then it taught the Golden Orb in a way that felt pretty different than I’d seen it before; I’d been thinking of the Dao Yins as exercises to stretch out and purge stagnant Qi, but I guess I should tihnk of them as ways to get good Qi into my huang / sinews / muscles.

And today I did an hour of Wu Ji; went great, I could have gone longer, but the timing for the day worked out better with only an hour. Also, I followed along with a stretching video at the start, looking for a better stretching routine; this one won’t be it, though. And I did two things after the Wu Ji, instead of just one: some Compressing the Pearl and some breathing exercises. First time in a while that I’d done the latter, but I still think they’re a good idea; I should probably throw in 5 minutes of Yin Yang breathing during random free moments in my day, if I’m serious about improving my breathing.

And solid Tai Chi practice today, too: I did my long weapons, 20 minutes each of WSSF1/2, and a decent amount of empty hand form practice.

A Taiji lesson this week, going a little farther in the form, adding in Up to Seven Stars. Unfortunately, on Tuesday night my sleep was really bad (maybe worrying about a doctor’s appointment, maybe worrying about quitting my job, I can’t remember); on Wednesday I was surprised that I wasn’t actually feeling too bad so I did an hour of arm stretch, but by the afternoon, I was clearly going downhill. So I took it easy the rest of the week; I did go to my Chen Tai Chi class on Saturday but I only did the minimum there (but we did finish the Hunyuan 48, so that’s neat). I got back to practice at the start of the week, hopefully this week will go better, though actually my sleep has been a little off all week, for reasons that aren’t clear to me.

And unfortunately the nose doctor wasn’t convinced that surgery would fix things, so he said I should make an appointment with a sleep doctor first, and get tested and see how a CPAP goes. Which I honestly can’t argue with: I’ve been putting it off for a while but I don’t have a good reason to do that, there’s a reasonable chance it could make a big difference.

I’ll be done with work after this week; I’ve been thinking about what to spend my expanded Nei Gong time on. I’m planning to keep Saturday as is, because I’m doing so much Chen Tai Chi then, so the only Nei Gong then will be Advanced Dantian Gong and the Dragon Dao Yins. But I’m hoping to do two hours a day, maybe a little more, on the other days. I’ll look for a somewhat longer stretching set (10-15 minutes, as opposed to the 5-10 minutes I do now on my longer days); my current idea other than that is that, on three days a week, I’ll do an hour (or more) of Calm Abiding and on the other three days, I’ll do an hour (or more, I’ll try to do two hours once a week) of Wu Ji. And in terms of foundational stuff, I want to work on my spine and I want to work on my breathing, so I’ll do each of those three days a week, maybe for half hour sessions. (Probably defaulting to breathing on the long Wu Ji days and spine work on the Calm Abiding days; I’ll certainly do some Wu Ji as part of the spine work, just not long enough to really count.) And then (assuming I don’t count the stretching time) that gives me another half hour a day; I’ll leave that unplanned, so I can use it for whatever is in the latest Nei Gong lesson I’ve gone through or stuff from the Foundations course (Ji Bens, for example) or whatever suits my fancy.

The main thing that that leaves out is the Hui Chuns, and I actually think that’s bad, I’d like to do Water once (or even twice) a week and Earth once a week. For now, I’ll leave that open as to how to fit that in: maybe I’ll have days when I feel like doing something extra, maybe it’ll take up two of the open slots, maybe I’ll replace one of the long Wu Ji sessions and one of the long Calm Abiding sessions?

I’ll ask Rick for advice at the workshop in a couple of weeks. There’s definitely other stuff that I want to work on, but I can’t work on everything. Part of me thinks I should do an hour of Wu Ji every day, but it’s not clear where to take the time for that from; maybe trade one of the hours of Calm Abiding for an hour of Wu Ji, maybe don’t work on both breathing and my spine? For that matter, maybe I should pick one of breathing and my spine and work on it every day until I’ve made significant progress there; who knows.

And of course who knows what my energy levels will let me do. I certainly haven’t been thrilled with the number of bad weeks I’ve had over the last month and a half; though at least when I get back to Nei Gong, my insides still feel decently active.

A Nei Gong lesson week, San Dantian Gong 2. I don’t have much to say about it, I still don’t really have much of a feeling for what I’m supposed to be getting out of that one. I’ll keep on doing it occasionally (and fortunately I think I was wrong about that messing with my sleep), but right now I feel like it’ll drop out of the rotation pretty soon.

On Wednesday I had pretty good Tai Chi practice: I finished my Chen forms, and I spent time on the Taiji Mingmen exercise, WSSF 1, and the four energies exercise. Nei Gong wasn’t so great: I fully intended to do 2 hours of Wu Ji but I only lasted an hour. I’m honestly not sure what was going on there, and how much was physical versus mental; certainly more was mental than I’d like. I’ll keep on plugging away at that, hopefully I’ll get back to 2 hours pretty soon, it was right within reach a month ago. And I did the Nei Gong Mingmen exercise for my seated exercise that day; a little iffy, I think both of those are evidence that I need to work on mental Song. So, more evidence that spending more time on Calm Abiding would be good; some notes on finding time for that below.

On Friday I worked on the other challenge that I’ve been setting myself, the 1 hour arm stretch; didn’t feel great at the start but then it stopped getting worse and kind of normalized, and ended up just fine. (And yeah, it’s a little weird that, at least this week, I actually found 1 hour of Wu Ji harder than 1 hour of holding my arms out to the side.)

My Chen Tai Chi teacher reviewed my Xinjia form on Saturday; the main takeaway there is that I should find even more spiraling connections in the form. Which makes me continue to think that that’s a good form for me to work on! And in my push hands practice, I tried doing it slower, to see if I could get more of the Peng-via-sinking feeling from the four energies exercise; some success, but I definitely have more to work on there.

Sunday’s practice was fine; went through half the Chen weapons and reviewed Xin Jia, and for Nei Gong I did San Dantian Gong with 10 minute intervals and a sleepy Calm Abiding.

I don’t normally mention the details of what I do for Nei Gong on M/W/F/Sat because my practice is shorter those days, but I will say: even though I only did 20 minutes of Wu Ji on Monday, it was surprisingly powerful. Not sure what was going on there but I’ll take it.

Also on Monday I gave notice at my job. So I’ll have more time to do Nei Gong and Tai Chi starting in a couple of weeks! And I really am planning to spend more time on Nei Gong, hopefully I’ll manage at least two hours a day every day other than Saturdays. I’m looking forward to have more time to spend on foundational stuff; I should spend some time making a list of what to focus on first (and I should ask Rick for advice at the workshop later this month), but certainly spending more time on Calm Abiding will be one of those things. Hopefully I’ll have some more time to spend on Tai Chi too, but I’m less sure of that, the amount of time on that might stay the same. I put up some more notes about my thinking about all that on my main blog.

Pretty good week. It was a Taiji lesson week, on the Mingmen; a useful little practice to try. On Wednesday, I did a solid amount of Tai Chi practice (finished the Chen weapons for the week, did some empty hand forms, 20 minutes each of Wu Song Shen Fa 3 and the 4 Energies drill, plus the new Mingmen exercise); I also tried doing an arm stretch solely from expansion by placing my mind inside my arms (or sometimes a bit outside), I only lasted 25 minutes, I probably need to build up more Qi for that to work, but I’m glad I did the experiment.

One other thing that Wednesday reminded me of is that my breathing really has slowed down when doing Nei Gong. I noticed it on Wednesday while doing Anchoring the Breath, but I’ve noticed it at other times over the last month and a half: e.g. I used to breathe pretty fast while doing Wu Ji but now my breathing there is much slower. So I guess the breath work that I did two or three months ago has helped; I should probably keep working on that (among other things, my breathing isn’t naturally as low as I would like), but still, progress is good.

On Friday’s Tai Chi session, I mostly did a bunch of Xinjia practice. And for Nei Gong I had a surprisingly crappy Coiling Snake; I need to figure out what’s going on there. But I had a good Calm Abiding session.

Currently my main theory for what’s going on there is that I just haven’t been working my back enough: a combination of being in bad shape sleep/breathing-wise over much of the winter and also maybe overrotating on avoiding Dao Yins? So I decided to start doing the Dragons once a week again; I did that on Saturday, it felt like it was a good thing to have done. (And fortunately it’s getting quite a bit warmer now, it was actually really gorgeous yesterday and today; though the Bay Area being what it is, we don’t ever get real winter weather, just somewhat chilly and pretty rainy at the worst.)

On Sunday I tried doing a long Wu Ji for the first time since the workshop; I only lasted an hour and 20 minutes, partly because my back wasn’t feeling great and partly because my mind was scattered. Not worrying particularly about it, it’s just another piece of evidence that I should work on my back and I should get back to my longer Wu Ji. And I did like how the insides of my torso felt in the rest of the day, so that’s good. Another possible contributing factor is that I tried doing it with a slightly narrower stance than normal; that might interfere with stretching out my back. So I think next time I’ll go back to a wider stance and see if that helps.

I also did a pillow swap on Friday evening, and I think it’s helped – since then, my sleep has been back to the previously normal range of “not ideal, but not dreadful”, which is a big improvement. Which always happened sometimes, but now it’s been four days in a row, so I’m cautiously optimistic? And it’s been nice having the insides of my body feel more alive: e.g. I had a really good Spleen Hui Chun this morning. Also I had a CAT scan of parts of my head a week or so ago and I talked to my allergist about it on Friday, and it seemed like pretty convincing evidence of where my breathing is restricted. So that’s good news: a more concrete diagnosis combined with a recommendation to an airway specialist / surgeon whom she trusts. We’ll see how that goes, but maybe we’ll actually get a real fix for the breathing aspect of my sleep problems? (Which isn’t the only thing that has caused me sleep issues over the years, but I think I’ve got the other aspects under control; and, in turn, sleep problems aren’t the only thing that have caused me energy issues over the years, but I think there’s a reasonable chance that I’ve got the other aspects of that under control, and if I don’t, getting sleep and breathing under control will make those other aspects easier to deal with.)

I was feeling mostly over my cold by Wednesday (and my sleep was better Tuesday night than it had been), so I restarted my Nei Gong then; nothing strenuous, a bit of Wu Ji and some Kidney Hui Chun. And I rewatched a couple of the Sweden videos, the one on the Spine and Pathogens and the one on Dao Yin Mechanisms; both good and timely, I should watch the Spine one a second time I think and I should look to see what other lectures are in there.

I slept decently well on Wednesday night too, and I could really feel it on Thursday, my body was noticeably more active inside. So I guess you really do build Qi while you sleep! So I did a little more practice than I normally do on days when I work: some full moon practice, some San Dan Tian Gong, and the Taiji Peng Lu Ji An exercises. (And some Hunyuan 48 review, as I usually do on Thursday evenings.)

Not as good sleep on Thursday night; I do wonder if the San Dan Tian Gong makes my sleep worse, it didn’t feel like allergies were worse than normal. So on Friday I did the Spinal Dao Yin set (I do those once every four weeks) but I cut it down a bit, and the full moon seated practice. And I had an acupuncture appointment, but I didn’t make a followup appointment: I feel like I’ve gotten what I’m going to get out of that, it seems pretty clear that my main issue right now is sleep problems caused by allergies, and I don’t think he helps a lot with that. Having said that, he pointed at one disk in my neck that’s relevant to that, so I should probably get back to spending a bit more time on neck exercises? (I should pay attention to that when I rewatch the Spine and Pathogens video, to see if Damo says anything about the neck specifically.)

Crappy sleep on Friday night; that almost always happens after acupuncture appointments, which certainly doesn’t make me want to do it! Though also we had pho, so maybe I had too much food / too much beef and that interfered with my sleep. At any rate, it didn’t feel like it was caused by allergies, so I did some liver Wu Xing on Saturday afternoon, in hopes that that would help. And I did go to my Chen Tai Chi class but I showed up late, so I didn’t do my normal pre-class standing or a long silk reeling exercise. Also we were washing the sheets that day and I took the time to vacuum the pillow and the mattress, I feel like that really might have helped? Pretty good sleep on Saturday night and quite good sleep on Sunday night, I feel like I might have slept through the whole night on Sunday if one of my dogs hadn’t vomited a bit at 5:50am, but even with that that’s close to seven hours of sleep, which is way past the regular sleep apnea middle-of-night wakeup times.

On Sunday I did a long arm stretch: I figured I’d try to go past 35 minutes but I approached it with the attitude that there was a good chance that I’d make it an hour. Which I wasn’t at all sure of for the first half hour, it actually was feeling rougher than last time I did a long arm stretch, but I made it to 35 minutes and wasn’t tapped out so I kept going. And then I made it to 45 minutes and was still okay, and pretty soon after that my brain flipped from “not sure how much longer I can make it” to “I am definitely lasting the whole hour”, and sure enough I did. And it wasn’t that bad, honestly. So yay at succeeding on that, though of course I’ll want to repeat that more times to help normalize the stretch in my arms / help continue open things up. And I’m still not really holding them open the right way, I’m not getting as much Qi inflation as I’d like, so I’ll want to immerse my mind more. (And I’ll try out the technique I saw in one workshop involving changing the location of where my mind rests.) And I did practice my long Chen weapons on Sunday, as well as going through the Xinjia first form; my teacher will be going over my form in a couple of weeks, I think I want to show him the Xinjia form again, so I should practice that several times this week.

Because I’d been thinking I should stretch out my neck and back more I did some Coiling Snake today, even though I’m supposed to avoid Dao Yins in the winter. (After all, I live in California, it’s not like it gets all that cold here! Though it has rained some this week; not today, though.) I didn’t get as much stretch as I’d like, and my lower back ached in a way that made me think I’m probably bending it too much; so I should probably work on that some more to get back into proper form. (Though maybe I should wait until we’re more into Spring.)

This week’s lesson was San Dan Tian 1. Which I’d vaguely expected to be the snowman exercise, given the name, but it wasn’t that at all; seemed like maybe a Hunyuan thing, though Damo didn’t explicitly say that in the video. At any rate, interesting enough; as with anything that involves stuff in my head, I’m a little worried that it might make it hard for me to sleep; and in fact my sleep was crappy on Tuesday night, but I actually don’t think it was this exercise, I think it was sleep apnea being unusually bad.

Still, Wednesday was okay; I didn’t do as much Nei Gong as I normally do on Wednesdays, but I did a 40 minute San Dan Tian 1 session and a 40 minute Earth Hui Chun at least. And I didn’t do as much Tai Chi as would have been ideal but I did finish going through all of my Chen weapon forms. And on Thursday I was a little iffy during the day, and because of timing of some things that were going on, I didn’t do my normal Nei Gong practice during the day, but when I did it at night I decided to do arm stretching, and I lasted 35 minutes, which is 15 minutes past my previous; that was a pleasant surprise! And also the stretch itself is starting to feel pleasant in some ways: in the past the stretch had been unpleasant but in a way that doesn’t get worse and worse (unlike the muscular tension from my shoulders), but now I kind of think that, the next time I do this on a day when I’ve had good sleep, there are good odds that I’ll be able to make an hour.

Unfortunately, the “on a day when I’ve had good sleep” is a significant limitation: on Friday I think the effects of the bad sleep on Tuesday night and the less-than-ideal sleep Wednesday and Thursday nights caught up with me. I finished going through my empty hand Tai Chi forms in the morning, but by the afternoon it was pretty clear that I’d gotten a cold. (So maybe that was what was going on on Tuesday night; though I suspect the causation went in the other away.)

Unfortunate timing, it meant that I missed my regular Chen Tai Chi class on Saturday and my once a month class on Sunday, and a couple of personal things that I would ideally have done this weekend. But the flip side: just a cold, nothing horrible. But then the flip flip side: I feel like, for the last couple of months, my breathing overnight has gotten worse; maybe it’ll get better once it warms up and the furnace stops pushing dust through the air, but that’s a while off and also I could be wrong about that?

Fortunately, I saw my allergist this weekend; no immediate solutions there (and actually some possibilities mentioned that I could imagine finding scary, though I’m not reacting that way), but we’ve got some deeper diagnosis planned that hopefully will give us some ideas. And paying attention to exactly how my body is reacting where, I’m starting to suspect that my pillow currently has a heavier load of dust mites than I can handle. (We do dust mite treatments in bed but they’re not perfect.)

So if that’s the case, it’s tractable: when we wash sheets this weekend, I’ll vacuum off the pillows and mattress thoroughly, and if that doesn’t help, then next time I’ll replace the pillow entirely. (I got a spare one the last time my pillow was causing problems.) And, talking it over with my wife, we were thinking that the timing matched Ulli’s arrival pretty well; I hadn’t been worrying about that so much because he’s a poodle and I’m not allergic to them, and also we’d been washing his main bed toys with the sheets, but in the past our small poodles have been sleeping more at the foot of the bed than the head, and also it’s not too surprising for other toys to end up in bed. And it’s been a while since we’ve given him a bath (and he’s never had a haircut), so who knows what’s on his hair now.

If Ulli does turn out to the issue, then we’ve got a plan: we gave him a bath tonight, we were already thinking we’d give him a haircut over the next few days, we can be more disciplined about toys, and also now he’s housebroken enough at night that we can start nudging him to spend most of the night at the foot of the bed. So the optimistic scenario is that, doing all of that plus cleaning / replacing the pillow will get things to a much better shape. And that scenario sounds plausible to me, I think it matches all of the evidence? (And also: things actually were going genuinely well not too far back in 2024, for a while it wasn’t a surprise if I slept through the night completely. So that really is possible.) If not, I’ll see what my allergist suggests next.

Anyways, no new lesson tonight, given that I’m still on the mend and that I haven’t had enough time to practice stuff from the most recent Taiji and Nei Gong classes. But I’m planning to start ramping my Nei Gong practice back up tomorrow and go into work like normal (instead of working from home) on Thursday. And I have at least been watching more Nei Gong videos than normal: I’m all caught up with the 2025 videos that Damo’s been posting and with his latest podcast episode.

This week’s lesson was the Peng Ji Lu An lesson in the Taiji course. Which was really interesting: conceptually, the idea that these are qualities rather than techniques, and the way that it talked about how the Peng expansion should arise as a response to sinking. And I’ve done it a few times this week; it’s pretty strong, there’s something going on in there, I’m definitely going to want to keep that up. I feel like I feel the Peng part most strongly, but there’s something there in all of them?

On Wednesday, I decided that I wasn’t up for a long Wu Ji, so I decided to do an arm stretch, and actually it lasted 20 minutes; I don’t think I’ve ever lasted longer than 15 minutes before? So that was neat; honestly, I probably could have gone longer if I’d really been wanting to push myself and/or had felt more energetic, so it’s even better than it sounds. So I’ve set a goal to do that for 1 hour; not sure exactly what my path there will be, maybe I’ll hit a plateau at some point but for all I know the next time I try it my arms will just tune in properly to expansion and I’ll be able to hold it for an hour quickly. I’m still going to try to prioritize long Wu Ji over this for a bit (though I gave myself permission to not do a long Wu Ji session this past week), but I think I should be able to work in both.

I watched the Calm Abiding talk from the 2025 talks on Friday; a good one, maintained my feeling that it’s important for me to keep on working on that.

Not a particularly big Nei Gong session on Friday, closer to a normal day than my Wednesdays / Fridays usually are. A decent amount of Tai Chi, at least; I didn’t quite manage to go through all my Chen forms by Friday, but I did all but two, and I did the last two on Sunday. And I did 20 minutes of WSSF 1 and 20 minutes of the new Peng Ji Lu An back to back; that was a good combo, I was surprised how powerful the latter felt, but honestly it probably felt similarly powerful when I did it alone on Monday, so I don’t know if doing them together made a difference?

And on Sunday I did a long Calm Abiding session; I made sure to take a nap first, because I’d gotten the feeling that recently the sessions hadn’t gone well because I was too tired. I mean, they definitely didn’t, because I couldn’t really stay awake! But I think the tiredness messed up the absorption at the start, too. And that was a good call, because I managed to absorb well right at the beginning, and it was a very good session, maybe my second best Calm Abiding session ever? I didn’t get quite as much strong expansion as I sometimes do, but I got some of that, and I felt better absorbed / tuned into the right areas of my body than normal.

I got back to the long Silk Reeling exercise experiments on Saturday. This week’s one was Hand Shaking and Stretching; I was honestly dubious about that one, because it doesn’t really feel like it’s too related to the silk, especially the hand shaking part. I really didn’t expect the hand shaking part to turn out as badly as it did, though: in that part, you’re quickly rotating your hand (like you’re screwing / unscrewing a lightbulb except that you’re doing it super quickly), and like 30 seconds in, my hands basically forgot how to rotate. So that was a weird experience! Not harmful, at least. The hand stretching wasn’t bizarre like that, but I also didn’t get much out of doing it for a long time; maybe there was a little bit of unusual shoulder opening when I did the version of the stretch where my palm folds in towards my forearm, but not much.

I’ll try to get back to long Silk Reeling this week. And I’m thinking that, on Wednesdays and Fridays, I should switch to defaulting to my Nei Gong after lunch (and a potential nap). (At least on days when I don’t have a doctor’s appointment or something in the afternoon; on those days, I’ll probably do it in the morning because Nei Gong is a higher priority than Tai Chi.) So I’ll try doing Tai Chi in the mornings and Nei Gong in the afternoons, hopefully that will work better; I don’t think Tai Chi is affected as strongly by being tired, and for all I know moving around will give me more energy.

(And actually my sleep has been better the last few days, much less feeling of sleep apnea; not sure if it was a different nose strip variant or some antibiotics that I’ve bene taking or doing a better job of airing out my bedroom, but hopefully it will stick. Still room for further improvement, but it’s going in the right direction. Nice that Ulli has sometimes not even needed to go out at all in the middle of the night, too.)