sifu dunn,
i don't expect you to remember, but in the past we have emailed as we tried to get the postal system to work -- your dvds didn't make it to me. / but then they did. / i am the one who had a head/neck injury and was unable to move (generally) for five months: no reading, watching tv, computering, walking, laughing, coughing etc. without immense head pain. even lying down hurt. naturally, running was no longer in the cards for me -- nor was farming, which i was doing at the time -- so i turned to your qigong series. i wasn't quite able to do it then either, as it hurt deeply to breathe deeply. but time has been passing and things have been getting better -- it will be two years this september, and i hope to be running (even if just once a week) again by then. for the last year, and especially the last six months, i have been able to practice (qigong) more carefully: about 4 days a week, an hour+ at a time. and now i have some questions -- and having read through all of these posts, hopefully i am not being redundant.
wind through treetops (80 50 30): may one perform a succession of these, or is it a single posture? and if one may do several in a row, does one do the three deep beaths to close out the pose, then do three deep breaths and the breath control sequence again to do it the second, etc. time?
monk serves wine (volume 2): i really really love the warm-ups, and the 90-80-50-20 posture, but find that to do the warmups and all three poses takes at least 1h15m, by which time i (at this stage of my work) have lost the focus to do the actual MSW (non-warmup) postures as well/slowly as i would like. is it possible to forgo the warm-ups and focus on the three main exercises? i ask this because you have lately mentioned the benefits of three MSW exercises ... // i would not completely forgo the MSW warmups, as i find them beneficial, ... i have been sprinkling them in at other times, or letting them stand-alone. // or i could just suck it up.
bending the bows: a question of speed, time, and repetition. at the moment i have been doing one cycle in about 70-75 breaths (looking at the numbers, it's about 10 breaths/minute). is there something 'magical' (by which i mean 'functional' in a way that shouldn't be necessary to explain, but should just be accepted, explored, and at some point understood) ... magical about doing a certain number of repetitions. say, 5, 7, or 9? i have been doing at least 7 (about 50 minutes), and then continuing without counting, or just stopping, based on how i feel. i have really enjoyed it like this, and have found that i like not worrying about an exact number of repetitions to perform; that this frees me to just go somewhat slowly. but if the number matters, then it matters.
on food: you have mentioned that solid food in some way negates the continuation of this qigong work. could you elaborate on this? / i usually do my qigong after work or in the morning, both of which are before a meal. am i in some way wasting my time by doing this? in the long run, would it be substantially more useful to practice at a time which isn't followed by a meal?
i apologize for the length of this. though i have your email, i thought a post/response here would be to the benefit of all.
take care,
