Pretty normal class on Saturday; though I’ve been trying to get into the habit recently of doing a second repetition of the form even when Tony isn’t there to tell us to do that. Two or three weeks back, maybe five other people did it with me; and this week, basically everybody did that with me; I’m sure that it helped that I was standing in the back row, which is the right place to lead when we turn around for the repetition. It’ll be interesting if that stays as a whole-class habit, we’ll see.

In the spear form, my full marshal felt a little messy, so I should work on that. But the good news is that the Xin Jia form is feeling much more natural than it was two or three weeks ago, I feel like I’m making real progress there? Not that I’m great at that form or anything, it’s just that it used to feel very unnatural, but now it’s much less of an active struggle.

After the regular class, we had a special push-hands class. I was curious how that would feel, since I feel like my Tai Chi has improved significantly since the last time I did much push hands. And, honestly, the single-hand push hands didn’t feel too good; but the two-handed form felt pretty different, in a good way. Partly because I felt like I was moving from my legs more than my torso, and partly because I got a little bit of the feeling of energy moving around in my body in ways similar to what I’m feeling these days in the form.

On Sunday I did my normal practice; I worked on the spear a bit more than normal, and I think I should be able to do better at the full marshal. Better in a couple of ways: keeping the spear movement in a plane more of the time, and also sometimes sliding my hands apart instead of always having them right next to each other.

I’m also continuing to read that Nei Gong book; there’s lots of stuff there, too much to absorb right now. (I was thinking I should reread it in six months; the author will actually be giving a course in the Bay Area in six months, though, so now I’m wondering whether I should do that?) There’s some fairly specific hard-to-believe claims about how bodies respond to these exercises, which at least would potentially have the advantage of making some of the harder-to-accept claims more potentially testable by somebody who is willing to put in the effort.

Which I’m not currently, but for now I think I should focus on doing abdominal breathing (and doing that by relaxing my muscles instead of forcing it), and also by guiding my awareness around the regular and lesser microcosmic orbits. (Which I can actually do kind of absentmindedly while riding the train!) Those orbits seem to be something pretty basic that Qi Gong books agree on, and that focus on awareness seems to me to dovetail well with my paying attention to my Dantian when doing the form and with my doing Dantian Rotations, so it’ll probably be interesting no matter what. (And certainly improving my breathing is a good idea.)

Speaking of Dantian Rotations, I’ve kept up that habit, as well as the habit of doing slow squats. (And I just bought the app Streaks to help with that.) With the rotations, I’m trying to put more into awareness and less into physical movements, and also to have the rotations that are on the plane of my chest feel like they’re farther back in my body instead of on the surface on my stomach.

All of this stuff (paying attention to my Dantian in the form and keeping up momentum, doing Dantian Rotations, and being more aware of the inside of my body in general) seems to be paying off. For example, I was realizing during class tonight that, at the end of Grab and Tuck Robe / the start of Six Sealing Four Closing, I think there’s an entire little Dantian rotation that’s completely hidden, where the momentum brings it around one more time when you have your right arm out, leading into you bringing you left arm over to meet it. And I’m actively trying to figure out how I want things to move during the Dantian Change: when am I trying to let everything calm down inside, and when am I going with the momentum?

This might actually be related to why I’m feeling more comfortable with Xin Jia: that form has a lot more circles in it. So maybe I’m now getting better at relating those external circles with internal circles that are hidden in the Lao Jia form?

Last week, I’d been wondering about my right arm when moving forward in the first Pound with the Pestle: I thought I was moving it too far back, jamming my energy. So I asked about that in Saturday, and I was indeed correct: I should have my arm more in front of my torso rather than to the right when extending it there.

We had the once-a-month Pao Chui course on Sunday; the application review from the first floor was interesting, talking about Thrust with the Right / Left foot. The details of the foot movements at the start of those moves really matter, if you trap closely it makes a real difference.

I started reading A Comprehensive Guide to Daoist Nei Gong, and it’s super interesting so far. (The author has a more introductory book, and I’d been thinking I should have ordered that instead, but now I’m happy with my choice.) One thing that caught my eye is the discussion on p. 39 of uses of the term “Qi”. Sometimes it just means the quality of an action: a completely straightforward usage. Then there’s Qi of the channels, which he describes as “extension of consciousness through the body”; that’s the part that, I think, we hear about most in the west, with the most mysticism involved; I still have a hard time really believing in, say, there being a particular point (Xia Bai / Lu 4) on your body that “helps a person to start the emotional recovery process that needs to begin after grieving has ended”. And the third version is Qi of standing / martial arts, “the reaction to sinking and changing the body” – that seems directly associated to some of the stuff I’m seeing in my Tai Chi classes.

I really appreciate seeing all three of these described (even the bits that I have a hard time believing in), and also how concretely the author ties that to various both physical structures and sensations as well as how well he presents the analytical framework. I’m dubious about the details of, say, specific points on the body or ties to organs, but I’m a little more on the fence when it comes to channels in general: seems weird, but I can also relate it a little to physical sensations? And then there’s the analysis of muscles / sinews / tendons / “huang”: I’m willing to believe that Western medicine pays more attention to muscles than it should, and it seems not completely ludicrous that there’s some sort of connective tissue that Western medicine actively undervalues? (Huang might be the same as fascia, the author isn’t sure.)

I just finished a chapter on Wu Ji meditation; some potentially useful ideas there on how to experiment with body positioning and relaxing. (Including the question of to what extent I should tuck my tailbone, something that my teacher recommends in that context and that Gokhale actively recommends against!) Another interesting thing is a reminder that the Dantian is a specific location and that it’s inside your body rather than on the surface: I think I’m doing a combination of being a bit vague about it and thinking of it as being closer to the skin, I should change my attention a bit more during the form.

It’s a big book, it’ll be a while before I finish it. (And I might need to interrupt my reading because of a library book being due.) The other thing that’s been going on is that I seem to be reasonably successful in establishing two new habits: I’ve done 50 Dantian Rotations every day this week, instead of the 20 that I’d been doing, and I’ve finally doing the squatting exercise reliably before I go to bed. Starting with only 3 repetitions, which is pathetic, but I’m already up to 4, so at least the trajectory is good.

On Saturday, I asked about the leg movement in the transition from Jade Girl to Grab and Tuck Robe. The answer turned out to be that, if your jump is short enough that you have good control, then you can land with a narrower and higher stance, and then should move your leg afterwards, while if you jump farther, then you’ll have to land lower and wider.

I also noticed that my teacher seemed to be turning his hip during Dantian Change during the Xin Jia form; he said that I should focus on turning my Dantian and I shouldn’t turn my knees. So I think that, in practice, that means that I should move more of my body to the right, and turning my hip is okay. And, watching that on Tuesday, it seems like the same thing applies in Lao Jia, too, I’d just been not paying attention and thinking that you should only turn your waist.

I was thinking more about doing Dantian rotations; going from 20 to 50 seemed like a big jump, but if I switch from 20 to 25 on my morning commute and then repeat that in my afternoon commute, then I’ll actually reach 50 pretty easily. So I started doing 50 at home over the weekend and have kept it up on the first two weekdays of this week, and actually things already feel different? So I’ll try to keep that up, I’m very curious how that will develop.

Also in terms of exercises, I’d been thinking I should do that squatting exercise before going to bed, but hadn’t actually been doing it in practice. But I’ve finally started to establish that habit, I have a three- or four-day streak now; unfortunately, I’ve already lost some leg strength from skipping it, so I’m only managing to do three repetitions whereas before I was managing five. But the important thing is establishing the habit, I’m sure once I’ve done that I can build it up more and more.

A couple of other things I was thinking about in class tonight: in the first Pound the Pestle, right after you stand on your right leg, I was thinking about what my right hand / arm does as it moves first back then forward. And I think I was moving in a way that jammed my right shoulder a bit, so I should do some combination of either not moving my right arm as far back and/or waiting to turn my body forward until I’ve started moving my arm; not sure, I’ll have to experiment. Also, during Grab and Tuck Robe, I should probably think about Peng energy when moving my right hand across the top at the end?

On Saturday, one thing that came up when the class was going over bits of the first for was that, after the first punch, sink to your left kua; I don’t think I was doing that so much. And, jumping ahead to Tuesday, that also came up right at the start of Six Sealing Four Closing; so it’s clearly something I should think about. And the other move that came up that I wasn’t paying so close attention to the details was in the Diagonal Body-Stroke Fist: I wasn’t really brushing my knees so much in two parts of those moves, I should have my bottom hand be a little lower.

Also on Saturday I noticed a few places where I wasn’t extending my arms much, not in the way that I was supposed to in, say, Dantian Change. But then I thought about it, and realized that at least some of those were moves with Ji energy, and maybe the calculations are different there? So I asked about that on Tuesday, again in the context of Six Sealing Four Closing; and having the elbows significantly bent in the push at the end there is correct, and it is indeed because of Ji energy and having your back rounded. Trying it out, I think I understand the feel: when your back is rounded and so you can feel your shoulders hunched forward, it actually feels a little odd to also stretch out your upper arms.

On Sunday, the one notable thing was that, during one of the times doing the form, I felt energy go from my legs to my shoulder in the shoulder strike in Small Catching and Striking. It would be nice to be able to reliably get that feel, seems important… (It would also be good to get a similar feel in Covering-the-Hand Forearm Fist.)

The other thing that happened on Tuesday was that Tony went over Dantian Rotation. I thought I was doing a good job by doing it 20 times while waiting for the train (or, most days, after getting off the train), and I really do think that that has helped me; but Tony talked about doing it 50 or 100 times, and about really getting a feel for movements starting in your Dantian when you keep that up for six months or a year. Which hasn’t yet happened to me: the feeling that I’ve been getting from the exercise is sensations in other parts of my body when doing the rotations (e.g. horizontal movement across my shoulders or the back of my head at the top part of the first rotation); now that I type that out, it’s probably connected to the idea of movements starting in the Dantian, but I feel like there’s something more fundamental and actionable that is waiting for me. So either I should increase my repetition count or just be prepared to wait for a few years…

(And there’s also the question as to whether I’m doing the exercise correctly, or at least correctly enough; I’m honestly not sure about that, either…)

The first main event this week was actually a book I read: Internal Body Mechanics, by Ken Gullette. He talks about six key mechanics, the ground path, peng, whole-body movement, spiraling / silk-reeling energy, opening and closing the kua, and dantian rotation. There’s a lot to think about there, but the main one that struck me is the ground path: always maintaining a connection from the point of contact with your opponent to the ground. It’s not a phrase that my teacher uses, but it feels related to things he talks about (e.g. uprooting yourself, which it makes sense to me to think of in terms of losing the ground path). And related in a potentially actively useful way: if I can get the feel for what it means to have the ground path, then I can try to maintain that feel.

The other five concepts seem worth thinking about too, though: it seems like a good list? For example, the mention of the kua there reminds me that I have work to do there. I used to sink into my knee too much; more recently I’ve gotten better about that and am sinking into my thigh more. But I should actually probably frequently move that sinking further up my leg, into the crease at the hip.

Anyways, on Saturday, I tried to pay attention to maintaining the ground path while doing silk reeling exercises, and quickly realized that I was constantly uprooting myself: e.g. when doing shoulder rotation, I’d uproot myself on the upward part of the rotation. So I spent the entire time trying to maintain that connection; felt surprisingly low, seems worth working on.

Since I’d led the exercises the previous week, I got one-on-one instruction this week on the form. I got one small piece of advice, that I wasn’t turning my body enough at the start of Dantian Change; and one big piece of advice, that I should stop pausing between moves but instead try to maintain more of a continuous flow, and that I should have the flow led by my Dantian. I went through the form a couple more times, trying to follow that advice; again, quite different! So: two big things to work on.

Also on Saturday we reviewed the Full Marshal in the spear form; Tony showed us a place where we could skip a step compared to how he’d taught us before, but presented that as optional, I think I’m going to stick with the earlier version. (And there were a couple of other little things that I noticed I wasn’t doing right.) And then he showed us the next move in the form, with three chest-high thrusts followed by a shoulder-high thrust; I was doing something wrong with the shoulder-high thrust, though, tensing up too much or something.

And we got caught up back up in the Xinjia first form to where we had been a month or so ago, good that we should be able to make progress again soon. (But, honestly, it’s also been good to have a pause where I could solidify things a bit.)

On Sunday, I practiced as normal; the main thing I worked on was the spear form, the shoulder-high thrust felt better after that.

In today’s Tuesday class, I didn’t have quite the same feel while doing the silk-reeling exercise or while doing the form as I did on Saturday; so clearly those feelings are a little transient (and probably aided by concentrated practice), and I shouldn’t take them for granted: so I expect I’ll have to focus on the ground path and being led by my dantian for a while…

I led the Silk Reeling Exercises in the Saturday class this week. One of the senior students gave me a few pieces of advice afterwards: when I’m doing the Spiraling from Dantian to Wrist, I should lead with the pinky and end with the middle finger; when I’m doing the punching in the exercises, the punches should be chest height instead of waist height; and when I’m doing the Six Sealing Four Closing in the form, I shouldn’t lean forward at the start.

When doing the form, I feel like my Hand Maneuvers are getting a little better – I’m doing a better job of relaxing the off hand. I’m feeling a little off-balance in the Oblique Posture, when returning to my back foot: I think I need to work on that. And I was feeling a little uncertain about what I should do with my hands between the Protecting the Heart Fist and the Whirlwind Kick; not sure where that uncertainty came from, but hopefully I’ve got it mostly figured out again, but I should probably ask about that on Saturday?

For the spear part, we just reviewed what we’d done the previous week. (Which was a good thing: it’s important, and I hadn’t practiced because the Pao Chui course had taken up my normal practice time. Tony repeated some advice to practice new moves a hundred times; I should probably try that at some point!) And Xin Jia was also a repeat, we’re kind of stalled with that.

After the regular class I reviewed both Dao forms for a bit, and a couple of other students joined me; good to have company. There were a few things I wasn’t quite sure of, but hopefully we mostly figured it out…

Sunday was the last 8 Energies workshop. When doing 8 Energies reviews, I’ve been enjoying the feel of the Lei, feeling like something is stretching between my forearms; I think I need to work on Lu, it’s subtler than I’d been thinking of it as; and Kao definitely needs some work. I’d been doing the Kao in the drill as just moving my shoulder forward, with my arm already down, but I realized that Tony spirals his arm down to set up the shoulder strike, I need to work on that. And the handout translates Kao as torso instead of shoulder; I asked about that, the point there is that the force comes from the torso as well as the shoulder.

Most of the morning was spent on the moving steps version of the 8 Energies drill. Not sure if I’ll be able to remember that, but here are some notes to try to help:

• In general, moves are done with your hands in fists. And in the first four you slide your feet forward and backward; in the second four, you switch feet and step every time.
• Peng: both fists curve forward and up, but make sure you don’t get uprooted: it’s important to sink. Your back fist goes pretty far forward, you’re not just expanding with the front fist, and in fact the back fist can turn into an uppercut.
• Lu: both fists are in a horizontal orientation (in fists), with the front palm up the back palm down; pull back with them.
• Ji: switch feet with this one; punch forward, with both fists in a vertical orientation.
• An: pretty much what you’d expect, punch down just inside your back leg.
• Cai: no fists on this one, you’re grabbing pulling back like in the regular version of the exercise. But think of the foot switch at the end as part of the Cai.
• Lei: there’s a foot switch right at the start (coming very soon after the Cai switch, so it feels like two switches in a row). And then pull your fists apart while turning, but don’t think of it as a turn, rather as emphasizing the split: bend your front arm at the elbow, with the outer half of your arm vertical, while the left hand goes back. So you can think of it as using your back hand to pull on your opponent’s arm, extending it, while your left hand pushes on the part of the arm above the shoulder, locking their joint. It’s kind of like jump turn after third Pound Pestle in Xin Jia.
• Zhou: start with a block and strike, just like in Kao. Both elbows are going horizontally sideways, but the front elbow is the important one: unlike Lei, you’re not splitting. (And maybe the back arm isn’t even really hitting so much with the elbow at all?)
• Kao: it starts with the same block and strike as Zho does; it’s basically just like the regular 8 energies Kao.

And in the afternoon we did a push hands version of that; that was fun, but I don’t think I’ll try to write down notes, I don’t spend much time on push hands. (I should probably start doing more push hands at some point?) And then there was some other push hands thing after that, but I was feeling surprisingly wiped out, so I sat out during the last hour.

I skipped class today: Liesl wasn’t feeling good so I walked Widget after getting home, and I got home late because of train problems. And the combination of those two took enough time that I would have shown up quite late to class.

As to non-class practices, I skipped standing meditation last Thursday (I was at a conference over lunch) but I did it today; only 15 minutes, though. I haven’t been as good as I’d like about the leg strengthening exercise that Tony’s been talking about over the last month or so, but I’m still doing it some; hopefully I can turn that into a regular habit (before I go to bed, probably?), because I’m pretty sure it would be good for me.

On Saturday, we spent a lot of time on the spear: we learned the very beginning and the full marshal. I think I’m going to enjoy the spear – lots of spinning your hands around, but it ultimately seems to make sense? Quite different so far from other forms I’ve done…. Because we spent so much time on the spear, though, we unfortunately didn’t have time to do Xin Jia. And I did go through both dao forms during a break.

Sunday was the once-a-month Pao Chui (second form) class. Getting close to the end of that form; there are definitely parts that I’m rough on and parts that I don’t remember so well outside of class, but I made progress on one of the latter areas, I think. And then we did an application discussion on the first form, covering relaxing your arm to get out of an arm lock. Interesting to practice both sides of that one, I wish I’d had a little more time with it.

And then I relaxed a bit while other people did the guan dao (I was already learning enough new forms, so I skipped that one); and then we did Xin Jia practice. (So it wasn’t so bad skipping that on Saturday.) Again, there are a few spots where I don’t quite know the form, but I’m making progress…

Today was the first week of a new session on the Tuesday class, which is always more introductory than normal weeks; so a pretty quiet class. Though that meant that we were working on the moves right at the start, which meant that I got to practice the bit where I’m balancing on my right leg; I think I’m getting better at that because of the 8 energies course, because I’m doing a better job of treating it as a lu, somehow that helps me maintain my balance by drawing my body together. The other good thing that happened today was that I didn’t have much trouble doing standing meditation for 20 minutes over lunch; hopefully I’ll be able to maintain that.

In Saturday’s class this week I didn’t get the same feeling when doing the shoulder rotation that I had the previous Tuesday; ah well. Maybe the previous one was partly a side effect of having spent six hours doing Tai Chi a couple of days earlier; we’ll see what happens after the third 8 Energies course?

One thing that my teacher pointed out to me on Saturday was that I was bending my arm too much in The White Goose Displays the Wings; he’d also mentioned that to me earlier in Grab and Tuck in the Robe, I should work on extending my arm more. (I’m better at remembering it in Dantian Change.) The other thing I’m thinking about now is something he’s said about energy going down your unweighted foot in certain moves: he brought that up a few weeks back in Reverse with Spiraling Forearms, and he’s mentioned it before in Grab and Tuck in the Robe and in Dantian Change.) I’m not entirely sure what to feel for there, hopefully I’ll get better at sensing that? (I think I’ve felt something related to that a few times, though.)

We started the spear, specifically learning how to do a half marshal. I scrape the ground more than I’d like, and the middle of the three turns in the half marshal doesn’t feel particularly natural yet, but presumably that will come? And he also recommended an exercise for getting used to your weapon, namely jerking the spear up from the ground, having it slide through your hand, and trying to stop it with your hand right near the bottom of it (without changing the height of your hand, so your hand should basically be near your waist the whole time). That seems like a fun exercise; so far my failure mode is almost always that the spear doesn’t come high enough.

And we got back to Xin Jia this week. I still have significant gaps there, even in the portions I’ve allegedly learned (we’re only up to the first Feel out the Tall Horse): I’m getting something wrong in Teal Dragon Emerges from the Water, and there are some parts after Reverse with Scrolling Forearms that I’m significantly off on. Still, I’m doing better than I was a couple of months ago: Xin Jia still doesn’t feel natural to me, but I don’t feel as completely lost as I did…

Sunday practice is now getting kind of long: I’ve been doing the Lao Jia first form three times, as much of the Lao Jia second form and the Xin Jia first form as I can remember, and both the Lao Jia Dao and the Hunyuan Dao. And now I’m adding in the Eight Energies drill and starting to add in the spear; and I’m just learning three of those, so if I stick with all of that, it’ll just get longer! Still, it’s a manageable length, and all of those forms feel like stuff that will stick with me if I keep at it, so I think that’s the right choice; maybe I’ll start practicing the Dao forms on Saturdays, though, I imagine there might even be other students who would want to keep it going.

This Tuesday was the last day for the Silk Reeling special class; our teacher was answering questions about stuff. Nothing in particular to note, though there was one question another student asked that I was glad to hear: I was thinking this Saturday that the weight shifts in both directions of the four energies Silk Reeling exercise felt like the weight shift in the eight energies drill (which makes sense!), which in turn suggests that I should turn my waist a bit more than I had been while going back; but Tony said that we shouldn’t focus on that: in particular, on the second version of that drill, the focus should really be much more on how we spiral out of our shoulders.

I’ve been spending a lot of time practicing and thinking about Tai Chi over the last three years, and I thought that maybe I should start blogging about that. But I don’t think I want to start with big posts about individual topics: I’m going to just try to take notes about classes and practice every week. Which means that it’s a fit for this blog instead of my main blog; if the only reason why you’re subscribed to this blog is Minecraft pictures, there’s an RSS feed that only has the Minecraft stuff.

I imagine these notes won’t make much sense initially without context, because they’re coming into the middle of multiple ongoing trains of thought; hopefully that will improve later.

On Friday, I had the day off (I took the whole week off because of taking Miranda to college, but we flew back Thursday), so I stopped by Kung Fu Direct to pick up a spear, a staff, and a weapons case that can store both of my swords. The spear is long, in fact too long to fit in the trunk of the car; not sure what I’ll do about that going forward, maybe I’ll fold down the rear seat? We’ll start the spear in a Saturday or two; the staff is the next weapon for the monthly Sunday class, but that’s still a few months out, it was just convenient to pick it up while I was at the store.

Not much going on in the Saturday class this week: a little bit of a preview of the 8 Energies stuff, a review of the Hunyuan Dao form, and that was basically it. (We skipped Xin Jia this week.)

Sunday was the second of three courses in the special summer 8 Energies course. We did the last four energies this time: Cai (plucking), Lie (splitting), Zhou (elbow), and Kao (shoulder). I’d seen the 8 energies drill before but I’d had a hard time remembering how those last four fit together; this time, though, I think it will stick? We did isolated drills for each, which made it easier for me to remember the transitions: after Lie, you let your arms relax and drop and then swing forward, up, and back in a circle, while after Zhou you arc your front arm back in a block and then swing it up in a strike.

(Side note: I’m a lot better at relaxing my arms and letting them drop under gravity than I was before starting Tai Chi. Not so good at relaxing other parts of my body, though…)

I came in with one question, whether the hand movement in front of your dantian in Six Sealing Four Closing is a Ji (press) or a Lu (divert); I’d kind of thought it was the former, but it’s actually the latter, good thing I asked.

I’ve been trying to do Wu Ji (standing meditation) on Tuesdays and Thursdays over lunch, trying to build up from 15 minutes to 20 minutes. I skipped that last week while dropping Miranda off, though; maybe because of that or maybe because of random fluctuation, I only made it about 16 minutes today. Still, it was good to get back to that.

And then this evening was the Tuesday class, which is covering Silk Reeling this summer. There was one bit that was really surprising: I felt sensations flow around in my body in a way I’ve never really felt it flow before while doing the double-shoulder rotation. (One of the questions I have when studying Tai Chi is what are the physical sensations that are a plausible match for the concept of “qi”; so that was an interesting new data point for that question.) Maybe it’s a sign that I should do more Silk Reeling outside of class? And in terms of the lesson part, I got a useful tweak on the reverse part of the chest folding exercise, I should have my palms up instead of back when unfolding my chest, and I should spiral my hands significantly more when sticking them out.

And then I practiced the 8 Energies drill after class ended; I did basically remember how it worked, though my footwork felt a little unsure during the Lie / Zhou / Kao transition. So that’s something I’ll want to practice a little more and then pay extra attention to in the third class in a few weeks.

There’s also one new strength exercise that we learned a couple of weeks back and saw again this Sunday: very slowly lowering down into a squat, pausing, and very slowly raising, with arms raised and hands relaxed. After the first time I tried the drill, I was still feeling the effects the next day, which was a sign that it’s effective; so I’m thinking that maybe I should get in the habit of doing a few repetitions (5 working towards 10, for now?) every evening when I get home? Not sure if I’ll commit to that just yet, though, but I do feel like it would be useful in strengthening my legs and helping me relax my upper body.