A heart so big it swallows everything up.

a matter of principle

beginner’s mind

keeping yourself
open
to the process

Zazen: wholeheartedly sitting in the middle of your life with great clarity and practicality.

—Kosho Uchiyama

Prayer is a natural response to being alive in a natural world.

This is why all primitive cultures are religious.

Anne Lamott says there are basically three prayers: Help, Thanks, and Wow! (Petition, gratitude, adoration.) Each is a natural response to a situation: when in trouble, even if we don't admit it or blatantly ask for it, we wish for help; when we receive something that pleases us we always offer some sort of thanks, if only a smile of satisfaction; and when confronted by something that leaves us speechless and ripped open, we bleed energy, if only for a moment. If we were better able to let our energy out then each of these would be a prayer – an honest exchange of feeling (energy) with the world.

To use the mind to work on the mind.
How stupid can you get!

One of the most difficult (and indispensable) assets to be developed in this game is a mind that works for you rather than against.

Simplify the life
Free up some time
Quiet the mind
Pray to God


A sacrificial presence

Develop intent. Use the mind to focus and direct energy. Like a magnifying glass focusing the sun's rays into an intense scorching point. This requires practice.

Meditation is prayer without words.

When Niels Bohr was knighted by the King of Denmark in 1947, he put the Yin-Yang symbol in his coat of arms with the Latin motto  contraria sunt complementa  – opposites are complementary.

The spirit should be excited (tail out) but internally gathered (bum in).

(This is a principle: working everywhere at every level.)

We don't take time off when doing our life's work.

Go so deep into yourself, you speak for everyone.

—Galway Kinnell

MEDITATION

Sit with a vertical spine, relax & be patient.
Let gravity & levity do their gentle work.
Nothing worthwhile can be forced.

In dealing with others, take nothing personally. In dealing with the world, take everything personally.

—John Kells

A listening ever prepared to be changed by what it hears.

This book title says more about meditation than many a long treatise:

LINGERING
WITH THE
SCENT OF TIME

(In the East sessions are timed by burning a stick of incense)

Relax the mind and feel levity as fine champagne bubbles tickling up you.

Do not let possessions possess you.

Most have no interest in Truth. They believe what they want to believe to justify and preserve their way of life.

Relax the body and feel gravity as a soft rain trickling down you.

Polite society requires we hold ourselves in (restraint, self-control) so much so we don't realise we're doing it and take that state as our natural state. But this is the tension we need to let go if we want our Taiji to be anything more than polite posturing.

An ethics

first & foremost

of balance

The barrage of words in the head is a firewall we erect between us and experience.

Meditation: letting go of all accretion until we are simply pure consciousness