I tried out the new Dao and Jian some more, and I am glad that I got them. (Though I’m not convinced yet that I like the handle wrap; but it’ll be fine if I decide I don’t like that, not a big deal either way.) They’re enough heavier that it will take me a little while to get used to them: the Hunyuan Dao set in particular has a bunch of moves where you use your wrist to spin the Dao in various ways, and I can’t yet do those at full speed; but even given that I feel like a heavier Dao is more honest. (And I still have two other Daos that are lighter by various degrees if I want to show off.)

I mentioned last time that my energy levels were uncomfortably low, so I did noticeably more Wu Ji over the last week than I had been, 30 minutes most day. And yeah, it’s probably bad that that’s noticeably more than I had been doing! It’s understandable on days when I work, at least if I’ve got another standing exercise that I’m working on; but on my days off, I think I haven’t been putting in enough time towards standing work, I should be able to put in 30 minutes of Wu Ji and 30 minutes of some other exercise just fine, and I should be putting in an hour of Wu Ji sometimes too. And hey, if I actually succeed in getting my energy levels up, maybe I’ll respond by doing more than two hours of Nei Gong a day; that’s what happened when my energy levels were high back at the start of the year.

I didn’t do quite as much Tai Chi last week as I’d hoped I would, but still a reasonable amount; I’m caught up on my weapons, and did almost everything else at least once. (I kind of ran out of energy at the end of my practice session on Friday, otherwise I would have done everything at least once; but I’m feeling like I shouldn’t push my body right now.) The one thing that I’m worried about is the Hunyuan 48: I really do want to learn that this time, and I already wasn’t solid at the very last bit I’d learned, and I’m missing two Saturdays because of the Nei Gong workshop. So I should try to spend some time in the evenings working on that; fortunately my teacher just posted a video of the bit I wasn’t solid on plus the next bit that he did this Saturday, so if I put that on loop then that will help a lot.

Anyways, I’m two days into the workshop now. I was a little worried at the start because I was coming down with a cold or something on Sunday, but fortunately it seemed to be very mild, and it cleared up Sunday night, so I think I’m okay. And the first two days have been very good indeed. Mostly so far because of the lectures: Damo’s planning to go into Alchemy, I think, but the first two lectures have been on foundational material that is very useful to me. Monday’s lecture was partly on what it means for your mind to be inside and partly on the Jing system; and in the latter bit, the bits about not believing your emotion, about strengthening willpower, and avoiding addictions all seemed directly relevant to me. Not that I have an addictive personality; I actually think I’m relatively good on all three of those fronts compared to many people! But also, I do spend time playing puzzle games on my phone that honestly isn’t well spent; fighting back against that sort of thing, and trying to strengthen my willpower in some other areas feels like it would be useful. And if doing that has some of the consequences on the rest of the Jing system that he describes, then that would be directly useful for me as well (strengthening my spine, nourishing my brain, increasing my physical energy level); and the alchemy consequences are interesting too.

And today’s lecture was about Calm Abiding: he was making a case that this is absolutely fundamental across a whole range of internal arts, because it enables both your mind and body to strip away a lot of bad habits and start reshaping themselves in healthy manners. The way he presented it is pretty different from the Year 1 IAA Nei Gong lesson on the topic; but, for a short version, you want to relax your body and mind (though with your body in a good structure to begin with), let gravity pull your mind down, and have your mind fill your entire body. (But with your center of consciousness more in your Dantian rather than looking down from above; that latter bit is something I’ve actually experienced before, with the help of one of the techniques from my Silk Reeling Principles course; I should get back to that technique again, to see if it helps me get to that location more easily, and, if so, if it links up to Calm Abiding or if I’m only reaching it via a technique that doesn’t help with the broader goal.)

So I should spend more time on that. I’m not sure when – right now I’m doing Hui Chun twice a week, Advanced Dantian Gong once a week, MCO prep three times a week, and that only leaves one day, which isn’t enough to really work on something new. So I either need to cut back on one of those or double up some days; both of those seem plausible, but I’ll have to think about it.

We’ve done much less standing work compared to other Lotus Nei Gong courses I’ve been to; in general the days have actually been a little shorter, but also we’re doing quite a bit more seated work. (So, basically, one third seated work, one third lecture, one third standing.) So we haven’t yet had a non-perfunctory Wu Ji session, for example; though today’s session had us spending an hour on a shoulder opening exercise, so it was strenuous enough! (Holding your arms out forward and then moving your shoulder blades in circles.) I was really surprised how it turned out: I was in a decent but manageable amount of pain 10 minutes in, and with that arm positioning I wasn’t able to get the kind of inflation via relaxing that I normally do to have my arms feel buoyant, so I was expecting it to get more and more painful over the course of the hour. And it would have been fine if it had, Damo even showed us a way to rest our arms without completely stopping the progress, but actually, the rest of the hour my arms didn’t feel any worse, so I made it through the hour just fine? I do wish I’d felt a stronger feeling of shoulder opening, though; there was some, but not as much as I’d expected, given the length of the exercise, I’m not sure what’s going on there.

Definitely looking forward to the rest of the workshop: it definitely seems like interesting information that I’m hoping I’ll be able to build on, and while I’m a little surprised that it hasn’t been more strenuous, that will probably change, and also I’ve been to enough workshops that I don’t know that I need to spend more time seeing the same exercises over and over again, I mostly need to do them more myself, so having a workshop that’s skewed more towards learning thing that are new to me but not too far out of reach seems like a good idea. And presumably the Foundations courses will give me more back-to-basics stuff, so I won’t be missing that side of things over the next couple of years.

I did the first lesson of Year 3 of the Nei Gong course last week, on Channel Opening 1. Seems potentially interesting – I don’t think I’ve quite gotten past the first stage that he talks about in the video, but I feel like I’m making progress, so hopefully that’ll happen pretty soon? Also I watched the fifth lesson from the 2023 Maryland lectures that were posted a couple of months back; went into more detail about what Shen Up, Qi Down meant, in a way that hopefully I can understand better. And yet another data point that I should spend more time working on attention.

My MCO work is regressing, unfortunately; I wasn’t up for doing it at all on Wednesday, and on Friday I was tired enough that I decided to switch to something else. And it’s been a few weeks since I’ve felt nice and tingly inside my Dantian; and I had an acupuncture appointment on Friday and my doctor said my Kidney Qi was slipping slightly. I think that I’ve been slacking on building Qi, I’ve been spending too much time moving stuff around or thickening or whatever instead. So, the last few days, I’ve been spending more time doing Wu Ji, I tentatively think that’s been helping? And I’ve asked for advice about seated exercises to build Qi, too.

We had Sunday Tai Chi this month; during Pao Chui, I realized that, even though there are lots of moves in that form that have you storing and releasing, I’m only doing that effectively in maybe half of them. Like, right at the start of where the form diverges from the first form, I do okay in the first two flashes of the arm, connecting them to my Dantian, but then there are a couple more right after that that I’m really just doing in my arm instead of having it reach my torso. So I’ll have to work on that.

I got a new, somewhat heavier Dao and Jian, from the Mushin Martial Culture store. Expensive enough that I was nervous about getting them, but I’m pretty sure I like them – heavy but not unmanageable so, and they’re balanced well. I haven’t tried them out much yet, but I’ll work on them some this week.

I think I’ll skip doing a new lesson this week: I’m going to the workshop in Houston next week, so I won’t have much time to practice. (Or maybe I’ll do one of the recently added Year 1 lessons.) And spending the week trying to build up Qi and working on Channel Opening seems like a pretty reasonable way to spend time. Also, I should spend more time on Tai Chi this week – heat and having to be inside the house because of house repairs have meant that I didn’t do as much Tai Chi practice the last couple of weeks, so I should spend time firming up my staff form, trying out the new weapons, and hopefully getting a little ahead on the Hunyuan 48 given that I’ll miss the next two Saturday classes.

I was planning to do some of the recently added Nei Gong Year 1 videos last week, but when I got done with other stuff, I only had half an hour, and they were all too long for that; so I did the next Tai Chi video instead, Taiji Standing 2. Pleasant enough, but also not something I’m likely to focus on too much in the short-to-medium term. But then I found time on Wednesday morning to do the Reverse Abdominal Breathing live class, and I even found a couple of hours on Friday morning to do the Wuji Standing live class. Nothing I didn’t basically know in either of them, so I’m fine with having done a couple of them in a week, but I was happy to have gone through them. Hopefully I can move on to the first lesson of Nei Gong year 3 today. (Though I still need to spend more time on Solar Qigong; it’ll probably be too hot outside tomorrow for me to want to do it then, but hopefully on Friday at least I can do it.)

The usual three hours of MCO-related stuff this week; nothing much special happened, I feel like my Dantian is more full than it was a month or two ago but still needs more juice. But hopefully if I keep on chipping away at it, it will build up more. Though I feel better in a different way: I slept through the night multiple times this week, I think I probably literally had my best week of sleep in the last decade or more? So that’s pretty cool; I don’t know what caused it, but hopefully it will keep up? I’m getting more of a sense as to the layers of tiredness that I have: I’m feeling less tired with the better sleep, but even on nights when I get quite good sleep, I’m still more tired than I’d like during the day. Not enough that I need to nap, and I can generally do Nei Gong fine as long as I’ve slept well, but there’s another layer that I have to work through, probably related to Kidney Qi still being low.

I taught the second class in my Silk Reeling Principles course; this time it was on Sink Into Your Kua. Got one more person in the course; still small but it’s good that people came back, and people seemed pretty actively involved. And I think I did a reasonable job of presenting things? Hopefully people got something out of it, we’ll see how they report back next month; and actually I was pleased with what people had to say about their experiences since the previous class, it might actually be helping?

Tai Chi week this week; I reviewed the next-to-last lesson from the First Road, and then on Friday I reviewed the last lesson, so I can get back to new lessons from that course now. I actually realized in the middle of the week that I forgot to hit the blue button on the Nei Gong course, so I could potentially do Tai Chi today; but given that there were new year 1 lessons released recently for the Nei Gong course, I think I’ll do one of those instead.

I wasn’t feeling 100% on Wednesday so I didn’t do my MCO prep exercise then; I did it on Friday and Sunday, though, and Monday was a holiday, so I took advantage of that to try kicking off the MCO again. I wasn’t super optimistic at the start of that (I felt fine but not any more energized than the previous week) but actually my Dantian got pretty tingly during the prep? Unusual feeling when I got to the bit while I was actively trying to kick it off: felt like there was a massive blob of stuff going up my back. It didn’t go up particularly far, though; not sure what was going on there, not going to spend much time thinking about it. My Dantian did feel nice and active this morning while doing the Kidney Hui Chun, though, which was nice; we’ll see how this week goes.

As to Chen Tai Chi, I went to a workshop on Saturday with Zhu Tiancai and Zhu Xiangqian. They’re from Chen village; their form was a little different from my teacher’s (Zhu Tiancai is from the same generation as my teacher’s teacher), but basically the same Lao Jia first form. Most of the class was talking about Silk Reeling; their take is interestingly different from what I’m used to, with sudden Fa Jin followed by relaxation in the middle of each movement. I’m not entirely sure what I think about that, but it feels worth poking at to understand the pros and cons; and my shoulders and elbows were aching a bit the next day or two, so it was opening things up. I don’t think I’ll make time to try that out any time soon, though, because I’ve got enough else going on; I do have a video of the set saved on my phone if I want to do so at some point, though.

Just Taiji review on Tuesday; I think only two sections to review and then I’ll be back to progressing on those lessons? I would say that I should try to review more sections midweek, but I’ve been spending that time on watching the Zhan Zhuang lessons; hopefully I’ll do the third of those this week. I’m definitely glad that I went through the Zhan Zhuang prep lessons: yesterday in particular I had a quite strong internal stretch while practicing that, and while I didn’t feel as strong an inflation today, I felt like maybe my mind was stabilizing a little more inside my body? Also I’ve been feeling random tingling (in a good way) in my back pretty often, and I’m continuing to feel bits of my back want to relax and expand at random points during the day.

I had an acupuncture appointment on Friday, and my energy levels have been a little better since then; not sure if it’s the treatment or getting restocked on my herbs or random chance or what.

I’m trying to get back into MCO work. I did a one-hour MCO prep set on Wednesday, then tried out the MCO on Friday. Didn’t make it very far, though; I clearly didn’t have much juice, which didn’t surprise me. But I did the prep exercise on Sunday, and then when I was doing the Kidney Hui Chun on Monday, it went really well, in a way that made me think that stuff is starting to build up. I’ll try to keep up that routine, doing the prep twice a week and trying to kick it off on a third day during the week, plus some other exercises that hopefully will help out some. We’ll see if anything happens that interferes with that; and hopefully I won’t come across any long seated Qigong exercises in the course for the next few weeks that I have to spend time on.

It was a Nei Gong lesson week; this time it was on Give It All Away. I’ll have to think about that one, figuring out what my approach should be; I don’t think I’m currently approaching Nei Gong in too instrumental a way, but I’m also not approaching it in the sort of attitude of devotion that that lesson recommends. And, honestly, I’m not good at that sort of attitude! Maybe I should listen to it again to see what options he recommends and see if I can find one that fits.

I also watched the Zhan Zhuang 2 video on Friday. Still doing preparation, this time about sinking your mind through your body; I was surprised how much my body was reconfiguring while doing that. Definitely seems good to work on, for Nei Gong purposes as well as Tai Chi. I did regular Zhan Zhuang on Saturday; I don’t know that I felt like my mind was doing a particularly good job of soaking through my body (maybe because of the arm position, maybe because it was raining pretty hard), but even so my body felt like it was supporting itself surprisingly well.

Also on Friday I had an interesting Wu Song Shen Fa 1 session: when the Jin reached my shoulders, my arms lifted on their own more strongly than I’m used to them doing.

In general, I feel like there’s interesting and productive stuff going on inside my body. I wish my energy levels were better, though, still room for improvement on that front.

On Sunday, I taught my first class in this iteration of my Silk Reeling Principles course. Only two students, which was less than I’d hoped; I knew some people had a conflict (so I’ve already scheduled a makeup session of it for this Saturday), but I’d thought a couple more people might show up? But the two people who showed up were super involved, so that was great, we ended up talking enough that the class went about half an hour over. Part of that was that I probably stuffed in a little too much material this time; also, I feel like I need more calibration about how hard people find it to pay attention to their body, and to what sort of attention I’m looking like: I think people are looking for big insights but I want people to start small, and initially with stuff that isn’t even surprising. So still a work in progress.

This week’s lesson was a Taiji review lesson; nothing much to report there.

I’d mentioned last week that I’d been feeling tired recently; and this past Wednesday my sleep had been interrupted, so I expected to feel like I’d need a nap at some point during the day. But actually it went fine: I was a little tired, but not actually that much given how my sleep had gone. I was trying to keep my spine open that day, and I think that helped. I had a good session of the Zhan Zhuang precursor exercise (about sinking flesh from bone), I’m definitely going to be keeping that up. Thursday started off very well, I had a good Spleen Hui Chun session and felt active and stretchy inside, so that was good too; a bit more yawning later in the day than I would have liked. And on Friday I went to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco; on the drive up I was doing a good job of sinking inside my torso, and I kept that state during the museum visit. Saturday I again had bad sleep and was pretty tired but I still managed to do all my usual practice and I felt like it turned out pretty well, e.g. a good Zhan Zhuang session (the regular version, not the precursor exercise), and I was feeling my and my partner’s bodies pretty well during push hands. Good sleep Saturday night, and then on Sunday I did an hour-long MCO prep exercise and that went well, I’m glad I did that. So in general I’m seeing a good number of positive signs; it would still be nice if my energy levels were better (I’ll try to ask Damo about that in June), but there are enough other signs of progress that I’m not particularly discouraged.

One thing I forgot to mention last week when talking about my trip: I was taking a bus from Cincinnati to northern Ohio, and there were a bunch of Amish (?) people on the bus. I didn’t see anybody in the seat in front of me at first, but then, an hour or so into the trip, I saw a little girl standing up in the seat and looking at me. And the reason why I’m mentioning that here is she had maybe the best neck / head positioning I’ve ever seen; I guess that’s what happens when you’re a kid who doesn’t spend your time hunched over looking at things and are also around adults who don’t spend their time hunched over looking at things? Something to strive for, at any rate: my neck (and upper spine) is in a lot better shape than it once was, but clearly I’ve got a lot of room for improvement.

Anyways, pretty quiet week: end of the trip, and now my wife is on a trip, so still a decent amount of disruption. No new lessons, I’m still reviewing the first chunk of the Yang 37 form. And my body is definitely letting me know that I didn’t move quite enough on my trip; nothing horrible, but I do need to get back into shape, and also be a little better about my sleep. I felt good this morning, though, so that’s a good sign.

Not much to report in general. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned that I’m giving a second iteration of my Silk Reeling Principles course, but I announced that to my local Tai Chi folks a week or so ago; this time I’m doing it once a month for five months, that will start in May. So I’ve been thinking about that, and I’m starting to get excited; hopefully it’ll be better this year? (I mean, it was okay last year, but there’s definitely room for improvement.) And I reread Ken Gullette’s Internal Body Mechanics book; there are some partner drills there that I think I would benefit from working on, and my push hands partner sounded open to that idea, so hopefully I’ll be able to spend time on that?

Bought my plane tickets for Damo’s June workshop in Houston; I’m looking forward to that. Though doing that made me realize how much it will cost for me to attend the Foundations courses; I still think that’s the right idea, but I’ll probably hold off on buying plane tickets until I’ve talked to Rick, just to make sure that he thinks the course would be a good idea for me.

Not much to report this week: I’ve been on vacation, so while I did my daily Nei Gong practice and a little bit of Tai Chi, but no more than the minimum, and no new lessons.

Nice seeing family, though, and the eclipse was pretty cool!

This week’s lesson was on Nervous System Refinement. I haven’t gone through it too many times; the surface of my arms feel a little more present, but I’m not yet sure what to make of that, I’m not feeling direct connections between that and environmental (or internal) aspects? We’ll see, I’ll keep at it.

On Wednesday I reviewed the Lotus Dao Yin lesson, and I’ve thrown that into the mix a few times. No big effect from that one either but it still feels like the right thing to do. I guess the other option would be to work on Song breathing, the one big effect I had with that was actually related to opening up my chest? But I’ll stick with the Lotus Dao Yin for a while.

I also tried kicking off the Microcosmic Orbit on Wednesday; stuff made it near the top of my spine but not actually up into my head. And the same thing happened on Sunday, too. Not sure if I just don’t have enough juice; if I need to get back to some of the pre-MCO practices; if I need to open up my neck some more (if I’m remembering correctly, the one day when I did do it successfully, I’d been doing Coiling Snake right before then, which does help with my neck); if I need to spend more time thickening in my Dantian before sending stuff up my spine; if I should switch to sitting on my knees before sending stuff up my spine to make it easier for Qi to get in there; or something else. Not worrying too much either way; I’ll keep on trying it out once or twice a week, and hopefully I’ll be able to rotate back to exercises that help me build a little bit more.

On Friday I did 20 minutes of Zhan Zhuang; it was interesting again, this time there was a pretty strong and continually expanding stretch along my arms. So I tried it on Saturday, this time for 30 minutes; less of a dramatic stretch, but still definitely felt worth doing, and actually I felt an expansion in my chest too, which is something that I’m trying for right now! I was surprised after that how much my legs ached; wasn’t awful or anything, but more than I would expect if I’d been doing Wu Ji for 30 minutes, not sure what the difference was there. (Maybe I was sitting lower for some reason, or maybe it had to do with how forces were being transmitted.) I think I’m going to try showing up to Tai Chi class 30 minutes early on Saturdays and doing it at the start of class.