Hello,
I'm in Chicago and have been practicing qigong for a couple years on-and-off. Decades ago, I trained in Min Zin, a Burmese energy cultivation system, tho' I unfortunately remember very little of that.
Since, I've been practicing Zhineng/Chilel from a udemy course I found, books from Pang Ming and Luke Chan and Chan's youtube channel (I nearly completed a gong, but life got in the way and foiled my 100-day streak on two separate occasions). I experienced some interesting results, but ultimately, I wanted to find a style with less thinking* and was a little more dynamic. From there, I got turned on to TK Shih's Swimming Dragon, which I practiced daily for some months, but didn't find any great benefit.
Somewhere in there, I took a pleasantly in-depth online course in the Short Form Yang Tai Chi, but the teacher stopped teaching after we completed the "short half." I looked up other Tai Chi schools in the area, haven't yet found any that resonated with me, nor have I had any luck trying to learn from YouTube videos.
I picked up Steve Gray's (aka Starjumper) book Zhan Zhuang Power Secrets and began to practice with that. It was enjoyable, tho' I don't know that I made much progress until I looked up his Tien Shan videos - I've been practicing Level 1 over the past 3-4 months, gradually putting the pieces together and I think I've got it more or less correct now, and have been doing it basically daily for the past ~month.
I discovered this forum while searching for more info on Steve and his polarizing demeanor. It's been very helpful to read through the posts here, but I still have a bunch of beginner questions of my own to ask.
Thanks for having me,
* I don't know why, but counting reps on some of the movements began to drive me nuts.
