Discipline involves doing things you don't want to do in order to improve in some way. If you do it joyfully rather than begrudgingly then you'll discover it's not so bad after all.

Meditation opens up an ever expanding present

It's not so much that students don't listen, but that they're incapable of hearing. To hear what is being said one needs respect & humility.

Spirit resacralizes the world. This is why it is so important. Without spirit nothing is real.

coincidentia oppositorum

 

What strikes me about people I encounter on a so-called spiritual path is just how shallow is their understanding & commitment. Their spirituality reveals itself as a mere adjunct to a materialistic lifestyle.

All aflame

The bourgeois/capitalist model is inviable for the obvious reason that it is unsustainable.

Antediluvian if not prelapsarian

Prayer is the place of faith. 

Where trust & love meet honesty & humility.

Sacrament & Sacrifice
Gravity & Levity

Heft & Grace

What is Zen?
Simple, simple, so simple
Infinite gratitude toward all things past
Infinite service to all things present
Infinite responsibility to all things future

—Gotō Zuigan (後藤 瑞巌, 1879–1965), reported by Huston Smith

Maybe God is evolving too

Thinking you know is the worst form of ignorance.

The human spine, which I have seen referred to as the greatest engineering feat in nature, is a miraculous machine for transducing the down of gravity to the up of levity.

Gravity is the force of attraction between material bodies and levity is the force of attraction between spiritual bodies.

Wake up (to) dreaming

Never stop delving
Otherwise the spirit dies

Meditation: killing time

What lurks beneath the Ego?

Is this not the question (quest) that most piques your curiosity?

Unmake the self

Meditation: savouring the scent of time

Eyes hooded 

Neither closed nor open 

Unfocused 

Gaze directed inward

Humility is a relaxed state of not knowing.

Meditation reveals the need for God.

Consciousness is of the mind; awareness is of the spirit. This is why it is possible to conceive of a pre-conscious awareness.

The subject matter of any film you choose to make is doubly important because the process of filmmaking is such a relentless, tedious, and difficult experience that you have to be sure the theme is something that will sustain your interest. No matter how tough things get, or how discouraged you may feel, you have to be sure that morning after morning you’ll wake up to a subject that still fascinates you. It should preferably be a subject you don’t quite understand, even better if it’s based on a question you don’t know the answer to. Then the making of the film, which ultimately winds through several years, can provide an answer, which will be the film itself.

—Francis Ford Coppola, in his introduction to Mircea Eliade's Youth Without Youth of which he made a movie

In your quiet moments, admit the deep sadness in the soul, and let it show you where you need to go.

Dr Chi stayed in London with John Kells for nine months in 1975-6, teaching Taiji in the evenings. On one occasion, during a break in class, he was leafing through a copy of Iyengar's Light on Yoga that happened to be lying around. John asked him what he thought and he replied: Relaxed body, hard mind.

The thinking mind protects us from the spirit world.

I pray God to rid me of God.
—Meister Eckhart

A deep understanding of the second commandment: don't let the mind close around a concept.

Only through practice do we go deeper.

Never believe your own publicity.

What the scientist calls energy is very much of the material realm, best expressed by Einstein's  E=mc²  showing that matter is simply condensed energy. What we call energy is of the spiritual/ethereal realm and is really awareness. Energy becomes revealed as you wake up.

Meditation: lingering at becoming's bleeding edge

Thinking fills the mind
Meditating empties the mind

Meditation: release your grip on the world and look inside

Only when the mind lightens can the body be its true weight and sink.

To live well is to work well
To work well is to live well
—Thomas Aquinas

Practice is work done for the Love of God

Energy is the capacity to do work
Work is the expression of energy

Be suspicious. Develop pre-conscious awareness.

We dull our lives by the way we conceive them.
—James Hillman

This is why the Imagination is crucial & vital.

Let the Form tell you how it wants to be performed. This is respect.

The word psychology means literally 'science of the soul' (the Greek psyche ψυχή means soul, not mind). Most cultures admitting the notion of soul (especially ancient/primitive ones) describe soul as a pool or lake in the lower belly. Indeed the word soul comes from the Old English sāwol which originally meant 'from the sea'. So the instruction: Mind in Dantien doesn't mean put your thinking mind in the belly but rather Connect with your Soul.

The student must work sufficient to internalize the teaching – make it her own – or forever remain dependent. And remember: dependence → depression.

Swimming the stream of consciousness.

When we think with words then the mind stays in the head but when we think in images then the mind fills the whole body. And when we think deep deep images called archetypes then the mind fills the soul.

Most of what the teacher says you would find out for yourself if you did a tap of work. Then, and only then, has it power.

Surfing the wave of awareness.

EMPTY the mind 

and suddenly you 

realise you've never 

felt so FULL 

since you were 

a little kid

The only way the work gets done is if you don't give yourself a choice.

A patient mind refuses to force the issue because it knows that force never works.

Touch the truth and there's hell to pay. 

This is how we know it's the truth.

Built into the DNA of Western man is a resistance to Nature and the Natural Process (Dao).

The Imagination is simply the ability to put images to feelings, and feelings to images.

The past has not passed.

Be (in) the living present moment. Bring the totality of your awareness to the NOW. Only then do past & future dissolve. The Eternal is not ever-lasting life but ever-present life.

Moving, be like water.
Still, be like a mirror.
Respond like an echo.

—Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts, Tuttle, 2000

Spirit cracks safes.

The good student works harder than required.

Spirit, never convenient, always confounds convention.
The priapic monk breaching the sleeping convent.

The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.

—Anne Michaels

The good student works harder than expected.

Spirit is the source of miracles.

The enemy in this game is never the Other but our own petty mindedness – our refusal to open up and admit, let alone see, the bigger picture.

I like to define mindfulness as the energy that helps us to be here 100 percent.

—Thich Nhat Hanh

I like to define Spirit as the energy that redefines 100%.

When spirit rises you realise you're far more than you think.

the path is circuitous—
endlessly tramping circles

each pass a little deeper
than the one before

This age of distraction & excess.

Steal Softly Thru Snow

The major problem facing the individual today is how to slow down and reduce. Do less, think less, consume less.

It's the same problem facing the species: we desperately need to reduce, both our consumption & our numbers, otherwise it's curtains…

Taiji is about waking up the Spirit and getting back to a more natural state, and that state is always more wild & more crazy than the way we've become from living in society – conforming and consuming.

露見枝條
隱藏本根

Branches exposed
Roots hidden

—The Seal of the Unity of the Three, trans. Fabrizio Pregadio, Golden Elixir Press, 2011

Passion is falling in love afresh each time. This is the attitude we need to approach the work. After each practice session our love is confirmed & renewed.

God’s Spirit is life’s vibrating, vitalizing field of energy: we are in God, and God is in us.

—Jürgen Moltmann

Nowadays longevity is as much due to reduced intensity of living as it is to improved medicine.

Each time we are with the teacher he shows us a new aspect of energy – a new way of working, of becoming. It's our job to then go home, come to our own understanding through practice, and claim it as our own.

An Inner Silence bristling with Listening. This is how we connect to Life.

 
Life Force
Life Principle
Anima/Animus
Élan Vital
Spirit of Vitality
Vital Essence
Prana
Āyus
Qi

Each of us is like a computer. Our body is the hardware, the mind is the software, and the spirit is the electricity.

An Attention so alive with Spirit that it threatens to incite an Event.
(An Event is a freak occurrence.)

Taiji is a way into the Way.

A listening not only attending the inevitable but becoming sensitive to unpredictability.

Energy is the flow of Intent
Intent is mind directed by Spirit
Or, simply, Intent is Spirit

Every morning a dawning realization that yesterday's revelations were missing a layer of meaning and balance.

—Kim Kashkashian, in the liner notes to her recording of Bach's Cello Suites on viola, ECM 2553/54, 2018

The only sin is complacency.

ALL IS ENERGY AND EVERYTHING IS IN ITS RIGHTFUL PLACE

In Yoga they call this insight Bliss. In Taiji we simply call it Peace of Mind.

It is a product of Internal Work, especially Meditation.

Students believe it the end of the journey but really it is the beginning. The real journey never ends.

Relaxing the Body – relax, let the body be soft, the breath quiet; feel the connection of the body with the ground.

Quieting the Mind – the mind is quiet, eyes at the back of the head, the face soft, the back of the neck long and wide.

Intent – see the posture with your inner eye; imagine the pose.

Rooting – root the feet, activate the inner thighs, root the ball of the big toe.

Connecting – feel the connection from the rooting of the foot through the inner thighs to the belly, through the back and up to the top of the head. Bring the hands up from the feet or from the sitting bones. Keep the lower ribs connected to the hipbones; the back is neutral and quiet.

Breathing – watch the natural breath, inhale and bring the hands up, exhale and go into the pose.

Elongating & Expanding – the back is wide and long, the legs elongated.


—Orit Sen-Gupta, A Little Book of Yoga: The seven vital principles of practice, 2021

Connect and energy will manifest. If there is no energy it's because there's a block or break in connexion.

The function of the internal chatter is to keep the Real at bay.

Pull yourself together
Tighten up your act
Keep your wits about you

Ultima Thule

The next step is always the most difficult. If it's not then you're coasting. Success requires grace – a gift of spirit.

Any creative act is a mischief – goes against convention.

Verum   Pulchrum   Bonum

Attention is a matter of posture more than anything. The military knows this. A readiness to receive orders.

THE BIG SECRET
Do what you're doing wholeheartedly & joyfully.
Then the Spirit will take you where it needs to go.

A respect bordering on reverence.

pay attention
show interest
& you'll learn

The Art of Practice
…& it is an art…

Progress in Taiji is a series of going back-to-square-ones.

—John Kells

Next time round you'll do it that much better because your energy will have improved with all the daily practice you've been doing.

Real peace lies in finding the real war. 

The real war is the one mankind has been waging for centuries if not millennia against the natural world.

Meditation: quietly staring down the tunnel of death

You know sometimes when the light is low or hazy and you're not sure if you really saw something or just imagined it? That's the brink at which we would like to dwell.

'Think' & 'thank' are very similar words. (Same in German: denken/danken). Real (authentic) thinking simply expresses gratitude for being alive. In this sense thinking is a name for any creative (joyful) action.

The paradox of Ego is that on one hand it is identity & individuality (the "I") and on the other it represses energy & spirit to conform to whatever happens to be acceptable & fashionable. Ego, by definition, never really thinks.

Anthropologists tell us that the Ego developed as a response to the growing size & complexity of our societies. So if we want to break the domination of Ego we need to simplify simplify simplify. And this is why monastic life is just that – a life reduced to utter simplicity.

Meditation: an Openness toward the Mystery

Back in Blakeney (~2002), John, trying to figure out why someone who did so much work was making so little progress, said to me: What's holding you back is your inability to visualise.

Visualisation is not seeing in the mind something that isn't there but using the imagination to see something you have been told is there but that you cannot sense yet. You could have been told by the teacher or, more commonly, if you are working, by your own intuition.

Meditation: from Anxiety (Angst) to Composure (Gelassenheit)

In a word, what's it all about? 

Transformation.

The teacher, if they are qualified and if we allow it, will connect us to the source. Then, when we practice, it will not be out of choice but because we are called by that source. From avocation to vocation. We will only do the work if we find it impossible to ignore this call.

Strive to be at your best, even (especially) when you don't feel up for it.

Sink into the Earth, but more than that, sink into your Energy.

The most important thing in life is to go further than your talent will take you. This requires guidance & grace. And a ton of hard work.

Be generous with your energy but never foolish. 

It's a fine line.

Solitude doesn't really mean alone, it means unattached. And what we require is interior solitude – detached from opinion, point of view, information, knowledge, understanding.

Ego must become the object of critique, not its subject. This we call humility. It is a most difficult turn but without it there is no Internal work. And it's shocking how many teachers & therapists find it impossible.

My one talent is an ability to tolerate the intolerable. 

It has proved indispensable.

Resist the urge to pull yourself together. 

Let (the) self go.

The cosmos is breathing out: exhaling, expanding, relaxing, unwinding, entropizing. 

That's what time is – the expiration of the universe.

The Supreme Way is not difficult
If only you do not pick and choose

Awaken (to) the wow factor everywhere.

Energy is all subtlety & nuance – nebulous & numinous.

You know a student is serious when they treat everything – especially teacher & teaching – with utmost respect.

One of the first insights we need to come to on the Internal path is that everyone, literally everyone, has something to teach us.

Soy la que escribe y se escribe
I am the one who writes and who is being written

—Gloria Anzaldúa

Meditation: the less I do, the more that happens.

Prayer is not asking for something but tapping into something.

The meaning of life is to live, really live – become fully alive – wake up. This doesn't mean endlessly scurrying the plane of immanence in search of novelty (such would be decadence) but, through hard won inner silence, transcending & escaping that plane for depth – plumbing the abysses; ascending the peaks.

Artists, martial or otherwise, need great spirit. Maybe this is what distinguishes them from mere mortals.

If (when) you pray, pray for a release from rational presuppositions.

Death.—The certain prospect of death could sweeten every life with a precious and fragrant drop of levity—and now you strange apothecary souls have turned it into an ill-tasting drop of poison that makes the whole of life repulsive.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Intend: tend into

Meditation: squarely facing the unavoidable.

Ego hates discipline & impeccability.

Emergent: arising unexpectedly yet naturally out of the flux.

The aim of spiritual work is to waken the spirit and realise our divine aspect. We call this freedom. However freedom is difficult because it comes with uncertainty & responsibility. So there is a strong part of us that would rather remain in the prison of fear & conditioning. We call this fearful part of ourselves Ego. The only way to reliably fight the Ego is through disciplined work. We must get into the habit of dailyness: spending an allotted time each day devoted to eventual freedom. And this is the paradox of practice: we subject ourselves to heaviness (discipline) in the hope that will encourage spirit (the essence of lightness) to manifest.

O what a wonderful world!

Practice aims to awaken to this insight afresh each morning.

Without daily practice (dailyness) it's all just an indulgence.

In Yoga they say the breath is the bridge between mind & body. In Taiji, energy serves the same function. Energy flows. (Energy is the flow of intent.) When the body moves well, even though it operates as an articulated structure of levers, it seems to flow, like a slow old river meandering its way to the Sea.

long on erudition but short on nous

When smiling, the face softens & widens, and the corners of the mouth rise. In seated meditation, when the hands are together, the arms mirror this, cupping the dantian with a smile, and the crossed legs also, underpinning & upholding the whole body with a smile.

Maybe the way things are is the way things are meant to be. Change something and you're asking for trouble. (Unforeseen consequences.) 

Do your practice and your energy will slowly shift, and then things will change naturally.

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:

1. That Man has two real existing principles: Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body; & that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True:

1. Man has not Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.


—William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Slowly
Effortlessly
Evenly

Death has overtaken sex as the social taboo.

Taiji is moving meditation – a quiet mind in a slowly moving body. But really all meditation is such. Even when completely still, our being is flowing along the great river of time.

Gloria enim Dei vivens homo.

The glory of God is a human being fully alive.

—Saint Irenaeus

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.

an elegance as nimble as it is grave

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 that's 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.

—George Quasha

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.

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