Shelling and Sticking, My chi runs away from home! Options

I had been trying my hand at Psionics for a few years now, and I have had some success with telepathy and Remote Presencing and a few other skills; even still, I have two big problems that prevent me from practicing psi manipulation:

My chi usually refuses to leave the surface of my hand, and it doesn't stay contained within shells.

I have done all sorts of visualizations from shelling it with baseball skins to glass spheres, but it always flows directly through... without my mind slipping up and picturing it doing such.

Often, I can't get it into a *solid* shape, and it just sticks to the surface of my hands. It seems that I have immense trouble moving it, but once it is moving it goes wherever it wants.

I have read pretty much every article from psipog.net by the way, just to clarify that I'm not trying to read up on this problem. I just want to know if others experience this, and if so, if they would be willing to provide some useful tips.

Actually, I was thinking something similar - imagine yourself with a ball of ki in your centre, and then a sort of haze of ki around that and extending beyond your body are ribbons (although I think of them as tendrils - except that they're not always attached to anything, so ribbons is probably more accurate) of ki which sort of swirl and orbit in strange patterns around that core ball.