No more offspring visiting, so I’ve been back to a normal schedule this week. And it’s been going well; actually, I feel like my body has been getting better even before this week? My spine is feeling both a little more flexible and a little more solid in ways that make me think that Qi is moving through it; also, how it feels when I sink into my Kua is changing (especially during Tai Chi), I feel like there’s an extra step at the end which has my pelvis sink further in ways that adds an extra stretch and extra stability. Which in turn creates a new goal, which is to get to that extra stretch more quickly, I think that will make a difference in my stability.

Anyways, on to the stuff from this week: last Tuesday’s lesson was a Nei Gong one, Scholar Breathing Revisited. Which started off with an assumption that you’ve been doing Scholar Breathing a lot; I hadn’t, and I’d actually forgotten exactly what it was, so I spent a decent amount of time rewatching some earlier videos. It turns out that it’s something that I was considering working on after last summer’s workshop but had decided I wanted to spend my time in other areas; having it come up again makes me wonder if I should reconsider that. I’d already been thinking I should spend more time on building Qi in my Dantian specifically, and this feels like it will dovetail well with that; so maybe instead of doing a 1h Calm Abiding three days a week, I should switch one of them to Scholar Breathing? Or, actually, to a combination of the two – I need to go through my notes from last summer, but my memory is that, on several days, we did a sequence where we started with Calm Abiding to build up Qi and then transitioned into Scholar Breathing (which in turn may or may not have transitioned into Martial Breathing, of course). So I’ll look through those notes and give that a try.

As to the other days:

On Wednesday I did 1h30m Wu Ji and I reviewed the year 2 Alchemical Breathing lesson. (Which turned out to be a different thing from Scholar Breathing, I couldn’t quite remember which year 2 videos were relevant. And I won’t say that that one is irrelevant, using Alchemical Breathing as prep for Scholar Breathing is maybe not a bad idea?)

On Thursday I did 10m Stringing the Arms, and I did all my Tai Chi weapons forms and almost all the empty hand forms. I went through the Sinew Work Principles Zoom class again, glad I did, I should do it every so often. (I think it was probably even more intense this time than when I first went through it?) I did my regular Thursday evening review of parts of the Hunyuan 48 for, and I rewatched a foundations video on the Dantian. Which, among other things, convinced me that I need to work on my Dantian more: building up Qi in general across my body is good, but I just don’t have nearly enough Qi in my Dantian specifically to get some of the behaviors that I’m working towards.

On Friday I did 1h Wu Ji (with my mind mostly in my Dantian), 20m Ji Ben 1, and I reviewed the year 2 scholar/martial breathing video; that last one was useful.

On Saturday I did 40m Scholar breathing (well, 20 minutes of prep stuff plus 20 minutes of Scholar breathing). Before my Chen Tai Chi class I did 20m of Qingzhou’s Zhan Zhuang (still not really getting anything out of it, I’ll declare an end to that experiment at the end of the month), and during Silk Reeling I did both long Horizontal Circles (during which the stretch / connection moved down to my legs in an interesting way about halfway through the time I spent on that) and long Body Stretch (in the going up direction, things gathered in an interesting way, though going down was less interesting). And I did some Dragon Dao Yins after that.

On Sunday I did 45m Calm Abiding with my mind in Dantian (went pretty well); and 30m Wu Ji combined with Ji Ben 4. I like how my body feels as it’s making a ball shape while doing that. And I did 10m of Stringing the Arms and went through half of my Tai Chi forms.

On Monday I did 90m Wu Ji, 40m Water Hui Chun.

And today I went through the Spine Spa video a second time; maybe I’ll try to do that once every month or so? And I reviewed the old and new Scholar Breathing lessons. And I finished going through the Tai Chi weapon forms for the week, though I still have empty-hand ones to do.

This week’s lesson was the Taiji one on Stringing the Arms. As you’ll see below, I’ve done very little Tai Chi this week, so I haven’t actually practiced this one, but I honestly suspect I’m probably already in okay shape with this quality? Could be wrong, though, certainly I should give it a try.

Anyways, an unusual week, mostly because my kid is in town so I’ve been doing extra activities on a bunch of days, but also I was on the edge of getting sick on Wednesday and Thursday so I took it easy those days. Anyways:

Wednesday: Feeling on the edge of getting sick, so I didn’t do anything.

Thursday: Spent the day at the Monterey Bay Aquarium (and I still wasn’t feeling 100%). I did the Hunyuan 48 review in the evening, at least.

Friday: 45m Wu Ji; was going to take it easy and only do 30m but I liked the internal stretch. And 30m Anchoring the Breath.

Saturday: The belt channel exercise and a short advanced Dantian Gong session..

Sunday: 20m Ji Ben 5, a bit of Wu Ji, 45m okayish Calm Abiding.

Monday: 1h Wu Ji, 30m Anchoring the Breath.

Tuesday: 1h Calm Abiding, 20m Wu Ji, rewatched the Pushing the Tides video, 10m Wood Wu Xing (plus some Wu Ji before / after).

The other thing I’ve noticed is that I’m getting more distracted than normal during the longer sessions, and also that it’s been a while since I’ve felt the mental Song really kick in during Calm Abiding. I was hoping it would kick in today because I got a decent nap before then, but it didn’t – the session wasn’t bad but it wasn’t unusually good, either. Maybe those are both related (and also maybe they’re related to the fact that it’s taken a little while longer to fall asleep than normal recently); at any rate, that’s why I threw in the Wood Wu Xing today, because it might fix some of that?

A Nei Gong lesson week: the Belt Channel, another one of the Hunyuan exercises. A lot of these are somewhat familiar to me from my Tai Chi teacher, but they way he teaches them has some details that are different in how you move and, I think, has a different purpose; I wonder if it’s something like the Wu Song Shen Fa where you teach the same basic movement for multiple different purposes?

On Wednesday, I had a 2h Wu Ji session, yay; I was maybe standing a bit high (though I wouldn’t have thought that if not for the mirror), but still, a good session.

On Thursday I had a 1h15m good Calm Abiding session; I should get back to tuning into the Qi during that, though, I keep on forgetting that. 1h Spinal Dao Yin; when doing the Water Wu Xing part of it, stuff was going up my back in a much wider channel than I’m used to (and hence getting blocked less), maybe that’s a sign that my spine work is having an effect? I did all my Tai Chi weapons, so at least I got somewhat caught up from the days when I skipped that. And I did my Hunyuan 48 review in the evening; I’m starting over from the beginning (well, near the beginning, I feel like I’m okay on the first 20% or so), and I did pick up some bits that I’d missed, so that was a good choice.

On Friday, I did 45m Wu Ji and 30m Anchoring the Breath. Which sounds bad, but the day was unusual because of some people visiting, so I’m fine with only getting that amount done.

On Saturday: 20m Advanced DTG, some Dragons, and my regular Tai Chi class. Again, not a ton, but I’m okay with that, I was sleepier than normal.

On Sunday I had my monthly special Tai Chi class, and I also went through the Belt Channel exercise and the full moon exercise.

On Monday I again went through the Belt Channel exercise and the full moon exercise, and I had a 1h30m Wu Ji session. That last one was surprisingly interesting, a pretty strong internal stretch.

And today I reviewed Tai Yi standing from the Taiji course; glad I did, I guess I should add that into the rotation? (Though also I need to get back to my regular Tuesday / Thursday Tai Chi sessions, and maybe add in a third 20m isolated exercise section into them…) And I did half of my weapons and some forms. For Nei Gong, I did the Roni Warm Up video from the Sweden 2022 set (I’d been rewatching the videos so I figured I might as well go through that as well); not my favorite warmup, I’m not so into strength stuff, but even that was presented in an interesting way, and I liked the bit from the end that was the Swimming Dragon hand movement. And I did Ji Ben 4 and the Kidney Hui Chun; should have been a Calm Abiding day, but I messed up my napping so I knew I would just fall asleep if I tried that.

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.)