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.