Put away your sadness, it is a mantle of work.

—Anne Carson

Dr Chi told my teacher that when Cheng Man-ch'ing pushed hands his feet were always making little adjustments. This means that he worked off the heels.

When the heels go down onto the ground you become rooted in the wrong way – you become glued to the spot, you become slow. And what's far worse is that you instantly reconstruct the self and start thinking to yourself. You have become a separate subject pitting yourself against a world of objects – you have become dualistic.

Warrior or worrier?

It's your choice...

The struggle nowadays is to prevent technology from devastating the soul.

Without the sacrum forward of its normal position we don't have gravity properly and without the crown of the head back from it's normal position we don't have levity properly. Bum in AND chin in.

Practice is simply returning to the principles. The first principle in Taiji is lightness in the headtop (head suspended), and the second principle is sink & relax (sacrum hanging plumb). Levity & gravity.

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

—John Kells

The thing we need to work on is always the thing we find most difficult to work on.

Rain
drops
fall
ing
on
a
wind
less
day
The perfect image of gravity

A mindset that tightens the belly: detached, nervy, unsentimental, on edge, ready to kill, ready to die. Basically the mind of a warrior.

Without ethical consciousness,
a painter is only a decorator.
—Robert Motherwell

Stay on your toes

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

—Julian Barnes

poets remain true to an unsaid

I never get lonely when alone. I get lonely when I'm with people who aren't with me.

I’m not really into religion. They’re all macrocosms of the ego. When man began to think he was a separate person with a separate soul, it created a violent situation.

—Harry Dean Stanton

sacrum is your plumb

MEDITATION
first settle down
then lighten up

silence : healing

Get a grip (on yourself)
This is mind in dantian

a ludic mind

a lucid mind

Truth
(by its very nature)
disturbs

Awareness is its own action.
—Harry Dean Stanton

My teacher, bless him, taught me that a worthy life is one devoted to (researching) spirit, and this is the one I have endeavoured to live. And as I get deeper in I realise that the three great mysteries of life – consciousness, spirit, love – are basically the same thing.

Conscious of the unconscious mind

If God (the tribal God) is collective spirit
then Satan (the devil) is collective ego

Strange isn't it that despite all the listening, some people just cannot hear. To hear we must get the self out of the way.

I work on the surface
but am aware that the spirit is often hidden within
like a shadow in the darkness.