Look how readily we become slaves to our technology – addicts.  And I still think that despite smartphones and AI our greatest (and therefore most insidious) technological achievement is Language.

The good student loves the teaching, the poor student resists the teaching, and the mediocre student blows hot & cold.

We use language to construct the dualistic world prior to any attempt to communicate with it.

Master the mind or be mastered by it.

—Zen proverb

Students find it difficult to grasp that energy and spirit have a wonderful way of hiding from those unable to appreciate them. This is what Herakleitos meant by Nature loves to hide (φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ).

panta rhei  πάντα ῥεῖ  everything flows

(become a rheologist)

I can't do the work for you, and if I could I wouldn't.

—John Kells

Judge the authenticity of what you teach by how assiduously the good students practice and by how bitterly the poor students mock.

breathe on the embers / of unchanging change

What a beautiful way of saying: Practise!

Truth is never what you think it is, it is precisely what you cannot think.  It unavoidably seeps into consciousness when you stop thinking.

The body relaxes & sinks but the blithesome spirit soars in song.

Practise the Form technically until you know it by heart, then put technicalities aside and practise for feeling, energy, spirit. A celebration of the life force within.

Release the sacroiliacs

(that's a difficult one)

The intense torsion in the waist – its ability to turn both ways at once.

The philosopher of the future is the explorer of ancient worlds, of peaks and caves, who creates only inasmuch as he recalls something that has been essentially forgotten.

—Gilles Deleuze

To move forward we must heal the past – remember the pain and smile with compassion.

Softness is Yin

Lightness is Yang

There is a slow melting quality to Softness and a quick fiery quality to Lightness. Elastic contains a balance of both qualities – yields when tensed and returns when relaxed. The straight wants to bend and the bent wants to straighten. And the turn always wants to return.

If you can't break out of your prison, why not redecorate?

Eventually, the work becomes all consuming – you lose self and become the work – and then the real you, which has spent a lifetime being upstaged by the self, will shine forth.

Anything can be learned but not everything can be taught.

When we sit in stillness with a beautiful vertical spine extending up to the sky and down into the Earth then the mind will naturally slow down & relax and we begin to see things as they really are and start to work with them rather than against them.

When you're in so much pain it's impossible to see the Other.

The Daoist Fourfold is Heaven, Earth, Man and Dao. Heaven & Earth represent the cosmic dimensions, Man represents humanity and its role in the universe, and Dao is the underlying principle uniting them all.

God, in the form of life itself, never tires of begging us to wake up.

The trouble with therapy is that those that really need it wouldn't countenance it and those that don't need it but instead need to do some work of their own end up indulging it.

A Yielding that is not melting away from the Other but melting into them.

The more you talk and think, the farther away you get.

Once, after enduring my sharp intellect, my teacher remarked: Clear head; confused heart.  The point being, I now realise, that if the heart were clear then such an intelligence would not be on display. The basic shift we all need to make is from head to heart – a heart big enough and brave enough to open up, reach out and embrace not only the Other, but the whole situation, and ultimately the bigger picture.

You know when you're not sure if you've really felt something or just imagined it?  This is where we'd like to dwell – between feeling and imagination – closer to reality than factuality.