possessed of a tensile—and at times precarious—balance
Happiness is not
a state or
a condition
but a skill

and like all
skills you get
better at it
with practice.
sentio ergo sum
I'm often happy God knows but never more than at this instant

—Samuel Beckett
The student who fails to establish a daily practice will eventually turn against the teacher. The onslaught will be too much for them. And if they don't then it's because, all along, they haven't been listening.
It always amazes me how many seemingly intelligent people feel they have a moral obligation to worry.
Having an opinion isn't the same as thinking for yourself. Real free thinkers dare not voice opinions for fear of ostracisation.
Head-mind thinks / worries
Heart-mind feels / imagines


Prayer is the lifting of heart and mind to God in the absence of thoughts. Meditation ditto.

Like an olive tree.
Heart  us  invisibly  thyme  time
round  rose  bud  fire  downland
bird  tread  quagmire  dry  gill-over-the-ground
stem-square  leaves-cordate  earth  race  horsethyme
breath  neighbors  a  mace  nays
sorrow  of  harness  pulses  pent
thus  fruit  pod  split  four
one-fourth  ripens  unwithering  gaping

—Louis Zukofsky, first stanza of 80 Flowers, 1978
Every interaction with the teacher contains a lesson to be learned so try to remember them all.
Truth is not something I can tell you because it cannot be explained. (Poets miraculously put it into words.) But if I were to work with you, one to one, then I guarantee we would touch it together and you may even feel it. It is like a small bud in the heart aching to bloom. Thymos, as well as Greek for 'life' is a tiny bud of thyme.
The ethologists tell us empathy defines our humanity. Our ability to feel the suffering of the Other.
We value the Other, not because they are the same as us (in anything), but because they are different from us (in everything). Difference is always more interesting than sameness. And more Real.
Sometimes I sense my zabuton a raft adrift a great river approaching its estuary.
Modern technology is repressive naturally.
There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which individual freedom can develop.

—Herbert Marcuse
Alexander Technique practitioners insist on calling their sessions lessons rather than treatments, and themselves teachers rather than therapists. Lesson implies receiving material to be studied and practised – homework.
Attention: literally, stretch towards.
Many are called but few are chosen. Most are not ready to begin, lacking the subterranean seriousness that only hard work can bring. This is why the first stage is always developing a root – acquiring gravity. Groundwork.
I go to the place
of flowing water

sit

and watch
the clouds rise


—Yamada Koun Zenshin
And water flowing / clouds rising are just different phases of the same substance.

wherever we sit
water (energy/time)
is flowing

whenever we sit
clouds (spirit/levity)
are rising
Like any athletic or artistic pursuit, Taiji is concerned with letting our energy out: clear, pure & strong.
Without a quiet mind we cannot listen.
善行無轍迹 

A good traveller leaves no trace. 

—Daodejing: 27.01

(Literally: Good deeds leave no trace.)
Internal work is built not on information but on secrets. Secrets that elude revelation. As you attempt to expose one, it morphs into something else.
Poetry is feeling put into words.
One of the most common questions I am asked is: What is the difference between Taiji and Qigong?

That's easy. Taiji is a martial art so its principal energy is Spirit, whereas Qigong is a class of energy exercises, and its principal energy is Qi. 

The next question is always: What's the difference between Spirit and Qi? 

Spirit is the vital animating spark that brings things alive or wakes things up, whereas Qi is a pervasive energy prevalent in Nature, especially in Living Nature. 

Life requires both but Spirit precedes Qi. 

When walking in Nature, experiencing its beauty and vibrancy then you are feeling Qi. If you are suddenly startled by a noise in the undergrowth and your hackles rise and your senses sharpen then you are experiencing Spirit.
Equilibria delicately poised.
Yield pronates
Attack supinates
Imagination is the ability to see things that are not there. Without it we only see what (we think) is there.
The vices most difficult to correct are the ones we see as virtues. Perhaps the worst of these is self-righteousness.
Look up to remember
Look down to think

And Taiji is all about remembering.
hermit   ἐρημίτης   desert-dweller
anchorite   ἀναχωρέω   in retreat
The good student is not the one regularly attending class or the one doing lots of practice or the one hanging on every word from the teacher's mouth but the one who is learning. John once said to me: You do realise that you only started to learn anything from me after Max (my son) was born? And I remember it well. Even though the added commitment meant I couldn't practice all hours as before, the birth of Max woke me up and charged me up and suddenly I was able to really hear what John was saying and then put it into practice. Learning, like everything else, is a matter of spirit.
The vice of sloth (ἀκηδία) is not necessarily laziness but a resistance to necessary work. It's most common manifestation is frenetic busyness (distraction).
Laugh at any master who does not first laugh at himself. 

—Zen saying
The body will only relax and the mind will only quieten when the heart is full of love. The best and probably only way to work on this is through some sort of prayer of adoration.
The older we get, the deeper and more total the work, until that's all there is.
Anyone on an Internal path craves real companionship. In a sense this is what this journal is all about.
When, at 16, it was time to chose A-levels to study at school, I was decidedly undecided. Expected & pressured to do three sciences and try for Oxbridge, I realised that my first love was poetry and my greatest talent was art. So I compromised and chose Physics, Maths and English Lit. And I must admit that the depth of thought I put into Shakespeare far surpassed anything at University, including the PhD.
The infant develops an Ego when it finds itself subject to forces preventing it from letting its energy out – forces that its spirit cannot effectively resist.
The only valid reason to miss practice is if someone you care for needs that time & energy more than you. The imperative here is: Be honest!
I always tell my students that the most important word in Taiji is LISTENING. 
But of course they don't hear.
Knowing the truth doesn't really help.
It must still be uncovered/discovered afresh each time.
It is the nature of Dao to remain a mystery. We cannot know it or understand it. Is all we can do is relax & soften and become a part of it.
Mobilising energy requires spirit.
Mobilising force requires ego (a sense of separation).
A necessary sense that during practice we are doing God's work.
the narcissism of reason
The conspiracy of life : the breathing together of the myriad creatures.
Grundtvig's Church, Copenhagen, Denmark
Realisation of Emptiness engenders Compassion.

—Milarepa 

Or, put another way: 

When mind empties, the heart fills.

The corollary is perhaps more useful: 

We cannot hope to quieten the mind if the heart is not full of love.
just sitting 只管打坐 shikantaza
If I quote liberally, it is not to show off book learning, which at my stage of life can only invite ridicule, but rather to bathe in this kinship of strangers.

—Yi-Fu Tuan
  ART 
 EAR 
HEAR 
HEART 
HEARTH 
 EARTH 
 EAR 
  ART
We are only as good as our practice.
Rather than the opinions in your head defining you, let it be the love in your heart. Meditation is simply time spent dwelling on this. Time well spent.
Torrential rain, even though the weather app says no chance of precipitation. Wonderful that nature still springs surprises.
Deep rooted tension – tension that we don't realise is there because it's been there so long – is due to living a lie.
I will always support the indigenous, the aboriginal, the autochthon over the colonisers, largely because there is more chance they love & respect the land – know how to live sustainably – in balance.
Befriend spirit.
Instead of having an opinion on everything, try having no opinions at all, no preferences, no likes or dislikes, neither for nor against, just an overarching openness. This is empty mind.

GOLDFINCHES

into a settled
order of things
into an understanding
a gust
of goldfinches


they flock to larches
to waste and stubble
to feed on seeds
of thistles and teasels
the hearts of sunflowers


nest of roots and bents
flight a dancing a twinkling
song of tinkling variations
wings gilded
a rose hip for a head


after the storm
thorns stripped bare
ragwort in rags
the day in tatters
until brushed by a wing


—Thomas A Clark
The antidote to depression is not happiness but inspiration.
Spirit is not just important, it's a matter of life and death.
We are far far bigger than we think and we only occupy a tiny portion of that.
I once overheard a rising student ask John how much daily practice he would have to do to be considered a serious student. "Two hours minimum," was John's reply. And there were at the time quite a few of us doing this. Those were the days.
Meditation: shining the light of the mind upon the still pond of the mind.
My favourite quotation is still Nietzsche:
An even cheerfulness is the reward for a long, brave, diligent, subterranean seriousness for which, admittedly, not everyone is suited.
But I realise now that this cheerfulness is not a reward but a requirement. Without it the work will surely send you mad.
A sense of service. Not for my own good but for the common good, the commonwealth.
When students would complain about where they were living, or pine for their origins, their roots, John would often quote the Daodejing:

In dwelling, think it a good place to be.

Love where you are, where you find yourself. Love the place, love the earth, the ground, the people, despite their faults, otherwise rooting will be impossible.

Ultimately everything is a matter of heart.
Inner power   安以德   put at ease by virtue
The trouble is we don't live who we are, we live who we think we are. Ego always puts us at least one step removed from reality.

In my best moments I think "Life has passed me by" and I am content.

—Agnes Martin
A stone in the belly (dāntián) dense dark cool

A jewel in the heart (thymus) light radiant warm
Democracy cherishes & protects its minorities.
Fascism loathes & persecutes it's minorities.

Unfortunately it's a fine line.
Body sunk & relaxed
Mind clear & calm
Spirit light & free
Only attempt to teach those clearly receptive to teaching.
A mind of dead ashes.
qingjing 清靜

clear (qing 清) & calm (jing 靜)
The death wish is the natural desire of body & spirit to go their separate ways when the time is right.
Developing a disciplined sitting practice is a matter of commitment and patience. For many practitioners, it is not easy, even for those who have been sitting for a while. Sitting every day must become a priority in our daily lives rather than just one more thing we have to do.

—Narayan Liebenson Grady in Joan Duncan Oliver (ed), Commit to Sit, 2009
So anxious to stay alive at all cost, we have forgotten how to die.
Negative Capability: the power to say NO.
The trouble with knowledge is that it quickly becomes set in stone. In the world of energy & spirit nothing is for certain and all knowledge is provisional and open to change or reversal.
Rooting: dipping into what Charles Olson called the subterranean lake by means of what Nietzsche called a subterranean seriousness.
In all Internal work, modesty & humility are necessary virtues, and the best way to work on them is to serve others with joy.
Free of desire we enter the Internal
Full of desires we remain External

常無欲  以觀其妙
常有欲  以觀其徼

—Daodejing, chapter 1

which Google translates as

Always have no desire to observe its beauty
Always have desire to observe its pleasure
Early in his training John asked Liang about Qigong. Liang explained what it was – energy work – and advised John to get a Tibetan teacher because the Tibetans have the best Qi. So John found himself two Tibetans residing in London: Geshe Damchö Yonten (1930-2017) and Chime Rinpoche (1941-) with whom he studied both Qigong and Tibetan Buddhism. After a couple of years he began to have doubts about the work and asked Geshe "Is Qi internal?" to which Geshe replied "No, of course not." He then went on to explain that Qi is no more internal than muscular strength.
If silence is golden, then Zen may be called an alchemy that transforms all things into gold by purifying them in the fire of the negation of all words and letters, names and concepts, logical methods and theoretical systems.

—Keiji Nishitani, Religion & Nothingness, 1982
The beginner student works on the body: relaxing, strengthening, coördinating.

The intermediate student works on the mind: calming, quietening, clarifying.

The advanced student works on spirit: wakening, exciting, concentrating.
In Taiji we engage & work with the two natural forces of gravity & levity. Gravity pulls the body down onto (and eventually into) the Earth. Levity lifts the spirit up to (and eventually into) the firmament – the expanse of an ever-expanding universe. The natural function of the mind is to equilibrate these two forces rather than think to itself. When I think to myself then gravity overpowers levity and I need to right the balance by waking up & letting my spirit soar. All of our problems, as individuals & as social members, stem from the incorrect use of the mind, from idle thought.
The work is simply waking up & paying attention to the things we usually take for granted and pass over. 

Wake up
Cheer up
Lighten up 
Open up
The more advanced we become the more it's about the use of the spirit rather than body or mind.
God created man to look after creation. We are rightfully stewards. It is not our place to use and abuse.
If the spirit doesn't soar then we're sulking.
The teacher uses words not so much to impart or explain to an ignorant mind but to whip up the spirit.
Our method of meditation ought to be simple and passive, so as not to hinder the wonders that can only arise naturally. Less is more in all things, including meditation. 

—Stephen Eskildsen, Daoism, Meditation, and the Wonders of Serenity, 2015
Practice: rituals performed in private.
Ego is not simply the self, it is the very irreproachability of self. The sovereignty of self. A sovereign who firmly believes in the Divine Right of Kings.
Given the choice, always go for simple. It appeals to the heart.
Most in the wealthy West fail to appreciate that freedom of choice (affordable commodities) requires others (out of sight, out of mind) to live in poverty & slavery.
Softness is a willingness to change.
Ruthless
Cunning
Patient
Sweet

Castaneda's Four Moods of Stalking.
Faith 
Respect 
Perseverance 
Patience 
Humility 

Chen Weiming's Five Virtues of the Good Student.

Let’s look at it practically: you pour cream into black coffee and look at it. What do you see? Passively: Enough, not enough, or too much cream. A little more awake to the moment: Wow, what a swirl! Very engaged in seeing: Look, a dragon! That’s a range of intensity and concentration in viewing what’s at hand. A matter of degree that verges on a difference of kind.


Awakeness/awareness is an intensity. So intense it becomes creative.
Sink into Earth. And remember gravity isn't enough, we must drive down, like pile drivers.

Theory without practice is obviously worse than useless – the student thinks they know but their body and energy are clueless. Practice without theory is almost as bad – progress will be very slow if at all – hit & miss. Theory in our game is a way of focusing the mind whilst practising.

The real work starts when we finally break away from our conditioning. And that includes class, caste and race.

You can't always get what you want.

Until life teaches us this we remain the spoilt brat.
Internal work is all about transformation (change), but never the way we expect, and certainly never the way we want.

A bourgeois pursuit is one that poses no threat to the ego.

Religion has always been humanity's way of controlling an ego threatening to run rampant. Without religion everything stems from self and returns to self.
We desperately hold on to our tension thinking it our strength. But it's not; it's our prison. And like many long-term prisoners, nothing terrifies us more than the threat of freedom.

Roger Ackling was a British artist who used a magnifying glass to carefully burn lines into small pieces of driftwood he found on his local beach in East Anglia. Each piece, although usually only pocket-size, would take hours of patient and attentive concentration to complete. For me this is a perfect image of meditation: carefully focusing the light of the mind on a point and allowing time to drag that point into a line. Lines burnt in light.
Energy is endless incipience.
Practice is our way of praying for a miracle. And if we practice with faith & sincerity then a miracle will surely happen.
Heidegger famously said: Language is the house of Being. But he didn't mean language as it is usually used: to describe, communicate, self-promote, but language as a device to evoke spirit and thereby change hearts & minds.
God-the-Father 
everywhere present 
yet never there…
Softness & heart belong together. A dearth of one means the death of the other.
RESPECT : Acknowledging difference without rejecting or appropriating it.
We consider dying before our time a great misfortune but dying after our time is just as bad. Timing is everything.
The work is simply a matter of replacing bad habits with good ones. It is immensely difficult because we are addicted to those bad habits. And as every addict discovers, breaking the addiction requires total concentration (mindfulness) and is always painful.
faith   fidelity   fealty 
truth   trust   troth
To feel energy we must first let it in, and to do that we must stop thinking.
Divorced from Nature we are also divorced from our own nature because it is fundamental to our own nature to be one with Nature.
in a state of grace
with a sense of wonder

I've yet to find a better way to describe the quality of mind needed to invite reality in rather than push it away.

Thinking can never understand the world. Is all it can hope to do is formalise it and thereby keep it at bay.
Beware a teacher who tells you what you want to hear. They are not really teaching you anything. A good teacher always challenges and upsets.

The second time John visited T.T.Liang in Boston in 1972, Liang picked him up at the airport.
"How's the Taiji going?" he asked.
"Oh it's terrible! I'm sure I'm going backwards."
To which Liang smiled and replied:
"Ah, sign of progress!"

Progress in Taiji is always a softening – a falling away of all you thought you knew – and as such is difficult and often painful.
Spiritual work is negative. It subtracts both excess activity (noise, distraction, anxiety) and the repressive forces blocking the right activity, what I call the Imagination.

All our treasured words: dao, energy, spirit, softness, listening, yielding, awareness, heart, etc, are in a sense interchangeable.

In meditation we seek peace & composure, not to bliss out, but to lend the steadiness to burn through to the abyss beneath; what in Zen they call the Great Doubt, unsettling all certainties.


I showed one of the qigong teachers here this photo of Laozi I took last time I was in China 5 years ago. She asked if I had read the Daodejing:
"Yes, many times."
"For us Dao is Qi," she said, "Dao and Qi are the same."
This all requires time! Often an entire lifetime, a time that must remain in harmony with the rhythm of life in general, that of the universe and that of other living beings, which the candidate to the spiritual must respect, and even try to aid if such is their wish. 

—Luce Irigaray, Between East & West, 2003
spirit (shen 神) 
energy (qi 氣) 
essence (jing 精)
In China for 11 days.
Old