Good week. On my days off last week, I was a little sleepy, so I didn’t have super long practices, but at least they happened. And when I did the Spleen Hui Chun on Saturday, it felt much stronger than normal, my Solar Plexus felt really active. No idea exactly what was going on there or whether it will recur, but I figure that’s got to be a good sign.

And this week I’ve got work on Wednesday, so I mostly took Monday off, and I did some Nei Gong practice there; I put in a couple of hours, and it felt pretty solid. So this week is getting off to a good start.

In terms of Tai Chi, I didn’t practice much at home, but at least I went through the Guan Dao, so my memory is refreshed there. I still need to really get the last little bit down, but I’m very close, and I’ve got a couple of weeks before the next class. And we did an extra push hands practice on Sunday morning, that was fun.

I was leading Silk Reeling at the Saturday class this week, and I asked the people who showed up early if they were potentially interested in the course that I’d mentioned. They weren’t completely sold on it, but were willing to give it a shot, so we agreed that I’d start it next week. And when I announced the date and syllabus to the group, other people seemed potentially interested. So hopefully a few people will show up? I don’t expect a lot, but somewhere in the range of 3-5 people seems plausible, I think. And I spent some time yesterday writing up notes for the first class, I think I’ve got a decent plan? It’ll be different from the way my teacher teaches stuff: I’ll talk a bit about muscles / tendons / huang, and how the huang expands when you Song, we’ll see if that gets anybody’s interest. (Though I’ll do less theoretical stuff too.)

Not much to report this week: we were visiting my wife’s father, so I didn’t do my regular Nei Gong / Tai Chi practice routine, and no classes. I did make sure to do some amount of Nei Gong every day, but it was more along the lines of the amount I do during a workday rather than a day off; I did almost no Tai Chi.

One thing I’ve been noticing recently during my Wu Ji is that my shoulder is getting tugged down a lot. I was assuming that I was actively pushing down my hands and arms, but when I was paying attention to it today, I don’t think I particularly am? Maybe I’m just deluding myself, but maybe I’m managing to relax enough that the weight of my arms (and my shoulder blades as well, perhaps?) are pulling down to an extent that feels significant. Not sure, I’ll have to observe it more.

I’m going to talk to my Tai Chi teacher about me teaching an intermediate Silk Reeling course; if he agrees, I’ll see if there’s any interest in that.

Mixed week: it started not great but ended up quite good. I’d been getting over a cold, and Tuesday morning had been pretty good, so I figured I’d get back to Nei Gong practice on Wednesday. Which, honestly, I should have known was a mistake: I didn’t feel as good on Wednesday morning as I had on Tuesday morning. But I decided to do some Nei Gong anyways, not my full Wednesday routine but still a noticeable amount, and that was probably a mistake? Certainly I was feeling worse the rest of the day on Wednesday and on Thursday; it’s possible I would have been feeling just as bad without the Nei Gong practice, but I don’t think it helped.

Which was unfortunate because Rick was running a Nei Gong workshop starting on Friday. I actually was feeling noticeable better on Friday, but I didn’t want to repeat the mistake from Wednesday, so I stayed at home and didn’t practice that day. Though I did have an interesting time when I went for a walk and felt my lower back spreading and curving forward around the sides a bit; that had been happening to me some recently, it was nice to see it happening then even though I’d been sick recently. So at least there was something good still going on inside my body.

I was continuing to feel better on Saturday, so I went to the workshop; I figured I’d bail halfway through if I started to feel worse, but I felt good enough to stay the whole time. Apparently the theme of this workshop was placing your attention an inch outside of the skin of your body, and doing the Wu Dao Yins while in this state, to help shape your tissues. Which is related to the arm stretching exercise that Rick had been teaching in previous workshops, where you stretch your arm by putting your awareness above your arm (after first putting it inside); I’d been having good results with that, so I was happy to build on it.

I don’t know that I had super spectacular results doing that with Dao Yins during the workshop; even Pushing the Tides was going sort of mediocre for me? But it was very interesting doing Wu Ji that way: it really helped my body spread out more inside. (Including my shoulders, interestingly enough.) Also, one thing he said was, when you create space during Wu Ji, you should sink through the space that you’re creating; so, in particular, my arms were sinking pretty heavily as my shoulders opened.

Also, we did the three snowball exercise that he’d showed us in the previous workshop, and I learned a few more details. You should feel it through your body as your hands are moving in all three snowballs; e.g. in the middle snowball, you should feel it going through the space between your ribs. Also, the middle one goes to the height of your collarbone, not to the height of your middle Dantian. And stay sunk in your Kua the whole time, don’t come up in the middle / high ones.

Definitely glad I went to the workshop; I’ll play around with doing the Dao Yins that way, and I’m finding it very natural to expand during Wu Ji, so I’ll keep that up as well.

I didn’t go to the Nei Gong workshop on Sunday because my Tai Chi teacher was holding a Push Hands workshop, and given that I’d been asking for him to do more Push Hands for a year, I wanted to make sure to go to that. And, fortunately, the Nei Gong didn’t make the cold come back or anything, so I was feeling fine doing push hands. I mean, mostly fine: it was two and a half hours in each of the morning and the afternoon, and I was feeling a bit beat by the last half hour or so! But that’s a lot of push hands, so that’s understandable.

In the morning, we started by continuing the two hands fixed step drill we’d been doing, and then moving on to the moving step. I spent most of the morning (maybe all of the morning) working with people who were new to push hands (and who had less Tai Chi experience than I have); that was a pretty good experience for me, it got me being more analytical which solidified my knowledge of what was going on at each step. And it also got me thinking about what kind of energy to give people, how and where to push them, which was a useful learning experience as well. And then, towards the end of that, I got to work with somebody else who was at about my level who wasn’t my normal practice partner; that was useful, too.

Then, in the afternoon, we did the Dai Peng Dai Lu exercise; I’d seen that before and could mostly do it, but I definitely felt a lot more solid after learning it again. And I also was trying to go down lower than I had been; I feel like I’m better at going low than I used to be? Then we did the five step and the three step exercises; those were new to me. In the afternoon, I was mostly / entirely working with my regular practice partner; useful to make sure that we can do them together, hopefully we’ll still remember them on Saturdays.

Not this Saturday, though, because I’m on vacation visiting relatives; we’ll see how much Nei Gong and Tai Chi I do this week, but presumably it’ll be noticeably less than normal. Hopefully I’ll be able to do at least a bit of Nei Gong every day?

Pretty solid week. On Wednesday, I did more Nei Gong than I have in months (outside of workshops): 10 minutes of stretching, 1 hour of Spinal Dao Yin, 40 minutes of Kidney Hui Chun, 25 minutes of Full Moon practice, and 35 minutes of Advanced Dantian Gong. A sign that I’m making progress on recovering energy; still not particularly close to where I’d like to be, but progress is good. And progress on Nei Gong is good, totally aside from my energy levels.

I had some neck strain Wednesday night; it reminded me of when, last year, I had arm problems that were related to neck issues. And both times I think it happened when my Nei Gong was going well. So my tentative theory is that Qi going up into my neck (which was certainly happening on Monday during my Anchoring the Breath) strains some of my tissues up there, in a way that gets them inflamed; at any rate, I’m taking some ibuprofen to try to keep that under control. Hopefully with that I’ll manage to stretch out the spaces between my neck vertebrae without having any particularly bad side effects; we’ll see.

One thing I forgot to mention about that session last week: I think I finally understand (or at least am starting to understand what Soft means while breathing). Because, while I was doing that, it felt like boundaries were getting less strict, between breathing in and breathing out and in terms of where the breath was ending up in my body. And that last feeling in particular did seem like it could plausibly be described as softness.

Not a lot to report about Nei Gong for the rest of the week. Though I was experimenting with my arm positioning some during Wu Ji and I realized that, when I let my arms expand, I could feel my elbows sinking, so it was nice to be making progress in that way too.

In terms of Tai Chi, I did a solid job of practicing during the week: I still didn’t quite do every form I know (this time I skipped the spear form), but I did all but one, and I did try to get caught up with the class on the Guan Dao.

In the Saturday class, I remembered my teacher telling me to sink into my back Kua more during the Push Hands seminar, so I tried doing that during Silk Reeling; sure enough, I really can sink into my Kua more than I have been. So I need to keep on working on that; I worked on that during the first form as well, but I have to work on it more during push hands, more during Nei Gong. (With luck, this will help some of my body’s asymmetry, I think my left Kua is relevant there.)

My teacher, when watching my Jian form, also gave me a pointer on the Support a Thousand Pounds move: he showed me the energy moving to the tip of the Jian there. Which is actually related to something I’d been wondering about when rewatching Damo’s intro Jian video last week, since Damo had talked about energy going up and down the Jian; I was surprised to see my teacher demonstrate it in that move, though, since the Jian is going a fair amount to the side instead of straight out! Definitely something to work on; I don’t really understand what my teacher was actually doing, but now that I know it’s possible, I can experiment with things. (And probably my teacher wouldn’t have shown me that if he didn’t think there was a chance that I’d be able to get it.)

And then on Sunday we had the monthly Tai Chi class. Sure enough, I actually was caught up with the Guan Dao form; and I think I’d picked up things decently well from the videos? (Either that, or I was missing the same subtle points in class that I was missing from the videos.) And we went a bit further; honestly, basically we went to the end, though I think we’ll go through the form for one more month. I’ll definitely have to keep up my review, because on some of the new moves, I could do them right after watching somebody but they went out of my head pretty soon after that. But I’m pretty optimistic that I’ll have the form down decently solidly. Also, when doing the Lao Jia Second Form in class, I felt like I was getting better at that; my Sweeping the Hall Leg is no longer completely pathetic, and I think I finally know the right sequence of moves in the bit at the end where you’re doing a bunch of punches and fakeouts in a row while advancing.

Unfortunately, my sleep wasn’t great on Friday night, and I was feeling a little off on Saturday, and on Sunday I was pretty sure I was coming down with a cold; it was a pretty mild one (otherwise I would have had to skip the Sunday class), but it was definitely present. So I didn’t do much Nei Gong on Sunday and none yesterday and today. I was feeling almost better most of today (though I’m definitely not feeling 100% this evening), so I think I’ll do some Nei Gong tomorrow; not as much as I do on a normal Wednesday, probably, let alone the amount I did last week, but maybe the amount that I do on a normal workday. And actually my body today has felt like it’s sinking on the inside, so that’s also a good side, I would seem to be making progress.

And this weekend I’ve got a Nei Gong workshop with Rick on Friday and Saturday, I’m definitely looking forward for that. Unfortunately I won’t be able to go on Sunday, because the Push Hands workshop is all day on Sunday, but I’m looking forward to that too!

The week started off kind of meh but ended up pretty good. I got in okay practice on Wednesday and Friday, but there wasn’t any day where I felt like that was a really good practice. A few months ago (or maybe the end of last year), I had these times where I had unexpected amounts of energy in my Dantian and spine, and while in some ways I feel better now, I also am not feeling like that at all frequently. So, while I feel like I’m doing better in some ways (both with my health and my Nei Gong), maybe I’m overestimating that progress. (Though, the previous couple of weeks, my TCM doctor was happy with how things were going, though he did say things had slightly backslid this week.)

It might be a side effect of not doing the Hui Chuns so constantly? And I do want to spend most of my time doing other stuff, but still, maybe doing one Kidney and one Spleen isn’t enough? I’ll try mixing in a second Kidney one and see how that helps.

Another hypothesis is that I should work on my form. I feel like I’m not relaxing my spine and neck as much as I had been when things were going well; easier to do when my Qi is going well, but still. I should expand more, to get more Spleen Qi, while working on hanging flesh. And I should make more space in my back, move my ribcage a bit back, and tweak the curvature of my lower spine to get my Ming Men full.

Anyways, that was Nei Gong last Wednesday through Friday. I did do a decent job of staying with my Tai Chi practice; I didn’t do the Xinjia first form but I did go through all the other forms I know, and I made it a bit further in the Guan Dao. And the Saturday Tai Chi class was fine.

And then there was a push hands workshop on Sunday. Lots of people there, which was great to see, I hope that gets both my teacher and my fellow students interested in keeping it up. It was good to practice with people other than my regular push hands partner; mostly the people were new to push hands, but that’s fine. I got reminded of a couple of single hand exercises that I learned last summer but haven’t done much since then, I should get back to practicing that one. I was working on relaxing and maintaining Peng, which seems like a good direction to go in (and which is also consistent with some of the form stuff I was mentioning on the Nei Gong side). And my teacher pointed out some situations where I wasn’t sinking enough into my back Kua, I should learn from that. (And I should also finally get around to taking a video of my Lao Jia first form, to help catch stuff like that.)

Also, a couple of weeks ago I watched a video where Damo was mentioning using Ma Bu as a diagnostic and as a foundational Gong Fu practice. So I watched a video he made on that; he actually showed the basic Ma Bu plus three follow-on moving exercises. I’m glad I watched it both because of the extra exercises and because of how he showed doing the form: wider than I’d been doing it, with a useful way to figure out the correct width and height.

When showing the first of the moving exercises, he said that you should make sure you can do the static version for 5 minutes first. Which, it turned out, I could without any particular problem, so that was good news. But I also figured there’s stuff in the static version for me to work on, so I’m going to do that regularly for a week or two before adding in the moving stuff; I did it several days in a row, though I forgot it yesterday and today, maybe I should add in a daily reminder for that.

And then yesterday’s Nei Gong practice was surprising. I sat down to do Anchoring the Breath; it seemed like it was going pretty well, my breath in particular was feeling surprisingly relaxed, so I made sure to work on that as well as the anchoring. And then, about halfway through, my spine just started to unfold and stretch up: basically, getting that expanded feeling that I was lamenting at the start of the post.

And it was also interesting that it wasn’t in the last part of the exercise, where my attention is completely down at the Dantian: it was where I was observing my breath in my torso somewhere. So I think what triggered it was me getting my breathing right: observing it and letting it develop without controlling it. I’ll definitely add that to the list of foundational stuff that I’m working on; and I should work on that when I’m standing, too, I feel too tense when I’m doing that. (Which is another reason to work on my Ma Bu, it’ll help with building a strong, relaxed standing foundation.)

So that was a really good sign. Would have been nice if today I’d been able to build further on that, but still, a good day. And, ultimately, a good week: progress on both the Tai Chi and Nei Gong sides, and I’ve also got a nice, tractable list of foundational changes to work on.

Pretty solid week. In terms of Nei Gong, there’s a workshop with Rick coming up in a few weeks, so I figured I’d get back to stretching my arms by moving my attention in and out of my arms instead of by using physical force; surprisingly strong, I’ll keep that up. And I did a Line of Ming practice that might be starting to have an effect beyond just feeling where the line is, it felt like my back was moving in a bit when I did that. So nothing super spectacular or anything, but it felt like quiet progress.

Also in terms of progress, I’m doing a better job of feeling when my body is asymmetric from side to side. Which is progress, but it’s kind of annoying progress, because it’s basically always the case (it’s my body’s default resting position these days) and because I don’t really know what to do about it. For now, I’m just trying to be at least somewhat correctly positioned while in Wu Ji and hoping that the Spinal Dao Yin loosens up my spine and adjacent muscles in a way that helps with the situation. (Which I’m somewhat optimistic about, because when I was doing that solidly a few months back, I had a week or two when my spine felt loose and it seemed like other things were hanging better from it.)

As to Tai Chi, I made progress on the Guan Dao; I’m back to caught up with where I had been, and I’ve started learning the next section. So I’m pretty optimistic that I’ll be caught up with the class by the April Sunday class. And I also had a decent practice of a few of the other forms; my goal has been to go through every form I know every week and to focus extra on the new forms, but, with all the rain this winter (and with me not always feeling good), it’s been ages since I’ve done that. And I didn’t do that this past week, either, but I’m coming closer than I had been, maybe I’ll even manage it this week? Depends on the rain and on how I feel…

And on Saturday I gave a speech to try to convince more people to sign up for the push hands course; hopefully it had an effect. And we did some push hands at the end of the class, with a decently wide range of people participating, good to see that.

Quite a good week. On Wednesday in particular I had a very good Nei Gong session: I did my normal Spinal Dao Yin and Kidney Hui Chun for Wednesdays, but then, later in the day, I felt like practicing more, so I did a longish Advanced Dantian Gong session. And it felt like it was useful: I relaxed my abdomen in a way that seemed to help stuff get in there more. So I feel like I’m getting more out of that than I was when I was trying it last summer; I’m still not at the Qi swallowing stage of that exercise, but this felt like a step in the right direction.

And also, over the course of the week, I’ve reminded myself of how the various MCO preparation activities went. The previous week, I’d gone through the Bellows Breathing / Huiyin plucking video, and this week, besides practicing Advanced Dantian Gong, I went through the Line of Ming, Mixing Kan and Li, and Lesser Orbit videos, and took notes. I think that’s a good set of practices to remind myself of; and, for now, I think I should be focusing on Advanced Dantian Gong, Bellows Breathing, and Line of Ming. (As well as Anchoring the Breath and the Kidney and Spleen Hui Chuns.) And once I feel like those are in a good place, I’ll add in Mixing Kan and Li and the Lesser Orbit, and then a couple of longer sequences from the Maryland retreat.

And my Tai Chi was okay this week. We had Sunday Tai Chi this weekend, and so I wanted to work on my Guan Dao; and I did get back to where I was before going on vacation. So I still wasn’t caught up to where the class was, but I was only a month behind; hopefully I’d be able to follow along well enough on Sunday and then get completely caught up before the April class.

But it turned out to be raining on Sunday, so we didn’t do Guan Dao at all! So I have less catching up to do than I expected, I should be completely caught up in a couple of weeks, I hope. Instead, we did some push hands; nice to get some pointers from Tony, but also it was nice to do push hands with somebody other than my normal partner. (Not that I don’t like doing push hands with him, he and I are actually well matched, just that variety has its virtues too.) And in particular, with one of the other people I was pushing hands with, I started to feel like something was moving around in interesting ways; I should try to capture that feeling more often.

Though, having said that, I’ve been watching a few videos of Damo or Adam Mizner doing push hands, and either those videos are fakes or they’re doing something that is fundamentally different from what my teacher is teaching. Not necessarily fundamentally different from what he can do – one of my fellow students was saying on Sunday that, when my teacher does An, he feels incredibly heavy, which seems consistent with the videos of Damo doing An? But I don’t really see how to get there from what I’ve seen my teacher teach. Though maybe that’s just that, so far, he’s been teaching push hands at a basic level because we’re starting out, so maybe I just have to stick with it more.

But it is getting me to think again that I should get back to Damo’s Tai Chi course and follow it along seriously, because I think he has things to say about Jin and how to develop it that I would really like to learn. Having said that, I’m also not convinced that I have the energy / motivation in practice to stick with that: I’m already not reviewing the Tai Chi forms that I know or am learning frequently enough, and so I’m hesitant to add in another commitment on top of that. (Because I don’t think I’d learn Tai Chi from Damo’s videos without really committing to it; just watching the videos and trying out the exercises a few times won’t be enough.) So, for now, I’m not picking those videos up yet, I think the real issue is that I need to make more time for various kinds of Internal Arts practice. But once I’ve made more time (and maybe once I’ve gotten to where I can activate the Microcosmic Orbit outside of a workshop) then that is something I’m considering doing.

So: good week. The one bump in the road is that I had a colonoscopy on Monday; the prep during most of the week wasn’t bad, I just had to avoid a couple of kinds of food, but on Sunday and Monday morning and afternoon I was on a liquid diet, and Sunday afternoon and Monday morning I had to take something to empty out my system. So, while I was fine during Sunday Tai Chi, it was also good that it was Sunday morning rather than Sunday afternoon; and it didn’t feel wise to practice on Monday. But the procedure itself was totally fine, and I had a good dinner on Monday evening, and I felt back to normal today. So I’m not worried about that going forward, I should be fine the rest of the week.

I’m finally back to my normal practice: I stayed inactive through Wednesday, but I restarted practice on Thursday. And sometimes in the past when I’ve been actually sick, I’ve had to spend a few days ramping up, but I didn’t have to do that this time: I had a normal workday practice on Thursday and on Friday I had a 40 minute Wu Ji plus arm stretching Dao Yin session followed by a 40 minute Hui Chun, and it went fine. And decent practice over the weekend, too.

The arm stretching Dao Yin was kind of interesting: I was in a part where my arms were stretching diagonally down, and then at some point I felt like something was releasing out, like I was pulling and some lines were pulling over my shoulders. Though I also realized that I was leaning forward more and more as I did that, so I’m not 100% sure how much something was actually stretching internally and how much the movement was external.

Also, my sleep stuff is getting better. Over the trip, I was feeling like sleep was correlated with food; so, since I’ve gotten home, I’ve been putting less food on my plate at dinner. And it has been definitely helping: I’ve switched from normally waking up twice in the middle of the night to normally waking up once in the middle of the night, with me sleeping for about 6 hours, then waking up briefly and going back to sleep. So that change is great. (And it’s not like I feel hungry or anything: I’m full when I stop eating, I’m just not eating past that point. Heck, for all I know I could eat even a little less?)

And that made me wonder whether my overall energy problems were also sleep-linked. While I was wondering that, I had a random conversation with a coworker who mentioned that a friend of his had felt like he had a lot more energy after going off of gluten, and that’s not the first time I’ve heard that sort of thing. So I decided to experiment with going off of gluten for a few weeks to see if that has any effect; I’ve started that experiment this past Sunday, we’ll see how it goes.

If that does fix things, I will have mixed feelings, because I really do like having a bit of baguette for breakfast in the morning once or twice a week, and because we cook a lot of pasta; hopefully gluten-free pasta tastes okay? And it turns out that soy sauce generally has gluten in it, which isn’t great for eating Chinese or Japanese food. Still, there will be a ton of things I can eat without gluten, so if it does give me a lot more energy, then that would be a good tradeoff.

Similar to last week: I was feeling iffy enough on my trip that I didn’t want to do Nei Gong. And, in fact, I got a bit of a cold on Friday; nothing horrible, but still.

Anyways, I’m home now, sleeping better, and pretty much over the cold. I’ve been trying to make sure I wasn’t eating too much, and I slept soundly last night, I think I only woke up once; especially good since the time zone change was only a few days earlier.

I’m still not completely sure I’m out of the woods, so I think I’ll hold off on Nei Gong tomorrow and Thursday, but if I feel good on Friday then I’ll get back to it then. And maybe I’ll do some Tai Chi tomorrow? I’ll also be curious to see what my TCM doctor says on Friday, since it will have been four weeks since my last appointment.

Very little to say this week. I’ve been on vacation, and my sleep just hasn’t been consistently good enough for me to want to get back into practice: sometimes I’ll have a good day and think I’m in good form, but then the next day my sleep will be crappy and I’ll be afraid that I’m going to get sick again if I push myself. I think the sleep problems are related to the quantity of food that I’m eating, which is probably higher than normal given that one of the benefits of this vacation is being around good restaurants; fortunately, the better restaurants actually have quite modest portions, so it’s not as bad as it could be, but still.

Anyways, the one thing that I have been doing along these lines is I’ve been trying squatting with my feet on the ground. I saw some videos on that a while back that made me think that it might be worth trying: something that people in many parts of the world do in complete comfort, whereas Americans have trouble with it. (I can squat fine on the balls of my feet, but the mechanics of that feel different, like they’re putting / transmitting weight in unhealthy ways.)

When I’d tried it before, I had a hard time keeping it going for more than a few minutes; I wanted to relax more but never felt like I could. But I decided to give it a try during this trip while waiting for Liesl as we were going through a museum; and, after a bit of experimenting, I actually did manage to relax more and feel decently comfortable squatting that way? I don’t know that I could do it for an hour or anything like that, but it definitely felt like progress compared to how it had been for me before.

And it also felt like probably useful body mechanics from a Nei Gong point of view. When I relaxed enough, my pelvis was definitely sinking, enough to put a quite strong stretch on my lower back: I could feel stuff popping in there as it got dragged down. It took my a little bit of fiddling to get my weight in a position that felt stable, and I suspect that, as I relax more, that positioning will change, but the positioning that I ended up with was also activating my Yongquan a noticeable amount.

I’m also pretty sure that it will help me better understand the default positioning of my back and lower body, and ways in which my habits in that regard are not so healthy. In particular, my left foot was turned noticeably further out than my right foot; I’m not treating this like Wu Ji or anything, I expect my feet to be turned out, but I would also want them to be turned out symmetrically, and that definitely wasn’t happening. So I’ll want to understand and work with that; maybe if I can get them turned more symmetrically then the weighting of my pelvis will help get stuff aligned to a better positioning?

One thing that did surprise me what what it felt like when I stood up: I was usually noticeably light-headed after doing that, much more so than I am when sitting on the ground or squatting on my toes. Not sure what the deal is there, and whether it’s transient or not; I’m not worrying about it or anything, it didn’t take that long to recover, but it was a surprise.