One of my favorite conceptual tools from studying the Neijia arts is the idea of the Three Treasures. Since the last six months of training have brought about such a myriad of changes across multiple spectrums of my perception I thought it could be a helpful way to organize what I have recorded about my training.
Jing-Body
On the level of my physicality it of course began with my new best friend: the backstop. While seemingly straightforward enough to activate, it initially produced such a cascade of sensations regarding the misalignment of my upper body with my lower that I found myself barely able to hold it for a minute or two before finding myself needing to start all over again.
The first three months took me through the first 5 or 6 steps of the standing meditation; these sessions were primarily focused on bending and then standing for five minute increments before working on other material from the videos or directly given by sifu. Once I learned the back-bear and universal post I became more aware of my diaphragm, and at this point I could feel stillness creeping in as my head, neck and shoulders settled and thoughts distanced themselves from wherever I was becoming located in my body.
About a month ago now I learned the 100 Meridians stretch which has given me such a distinct sensation of aligning the diaphragm with the perineum that the effect of smiling down to the foot became something that could accompany me throughout a training session instead of being something that would nearly take a whole training session to produce as a sensation.
Subsequently, the process of activating the back-stop to melting the heart of the foot has gone from feeling like just a mental checklist, to feeling like a series or ‘chain’ of segments of ‘song’ or releases as one step presents new tensions that are then released by the next procedure. Which makes me wonder if part of the goal of this process is to make the steps of standing ‘one thing’? Are we trying to condense these links into a single chain of song? Is then the foot-couple and the sensation of the ‘melting of the heart of the foot’ the ‘same thing’?
Two other positive things directly relating to my physical experience of this training program that sifu said would be worth mentioning have to do with its healing capacities. I have suffered from migraines from an impacted wisdom tooth even since it’s been extracted for a couple of years now; since adding the Bitter Pill neigong to my regimen of care for when a migraine comes on has reduced their duration from several hours to an hour at most and they are becoming less frequent. Also I have dealt with arthritic symptoms from an autoimmune disorder since I was about 12, in fact it was seeking alternative options to care for this issue that led me to internal arts about 7 years ago now. Many of the jiben gong that sifu has shared have helped tremendously to recover and improve dexterity, and my music (which is my profession) has benefited considerably from this. I am continually amazed how deep this neigong reaches into the body to make corrections as it finds further arthritic congestion that I was previously unaware of until it is being corrected. A couple weeks ago while practicing bending to wake up my body as I entered a phase of standing I suddenly experienced some acute pain in my left knee, I hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary and the quality of the pain was somehow different than I was familiar with, it felt old somehow. I decided to proceed with the standing as it didn’t feel injured in the usual sense and it seemed standing could facilitate further correction, and sure enough within the hour the pain was completely gone, without any soreness even. It brought to mind something sifu told me during my initial interview which has stuck with me since beginning this process: ‘if it can be fixed, it will be fixed if you can stick with the method.’