whoa.

I went to kung fu tonight. The weather was cool, and there was a nice breeze. The air was clean enough that I was able to breathe fully for the first time this summer.

After the warm up stances, we did some "dynamic breathing". While doing so, I managed to feel my "chi"; that's supposedly what one feels when one gets that tingling sensation in one's palms.

Whether or not there is actually any mystical force moving through me when I do those exercises, they are effective. Every time I get far enough into them to feel my chi, for the rest of the night, I'm super charged. My mind knows that I'm very tired, but my body feels like I've just had a 20 hour nap. I won't be able to sleep for a while tonight. I feel more aware of my surroundings, like I'm gliding on a perfectly still pool of water, and everything that moves around me disturbs the water.

When I'm too old to handle the hard external arts I train in now, I want to study something soft and internal, like tai chi or aikido. I gather that serious practitioners of internal arts feel like this all the time.

Spooky, no?

On a geeky note, I've finally installed a proper LJ client for linux. It makes me happy.