Do not try to do extraordinary things but do ordinary things with intensity.

—Emily Carr

Dr Chi recommended daily practice sessions of three Short Forms: the first to warm-up, the second slow & meticulous, and a lively third for spirit.

hale & hearty

(hale & whole are basically the same word)

Stop activity, return to stillness,
And that stillness is even more active.

Each session starts with gravity and ends in levity.

Listening is not just hearing what the other has to say, although that's a start.  Listening is actively enveloping the other in a compassionate non-judgmental energy that seduces them to open up to you.

Meditation: the falling away of mind & body

In patience, in slowness, there is hope.

—Paul Kingsnorth

The student pays the teacher with money but pays the teaching with practice & loyalty.

Not the severe concentration of work but the easy concentration of play.  Learn to concentrate without effort.

sūsokukan  数息観  counting-the-breaths

L I F E  F E E D S  O N  L I F E

(Injustice is inevitable but try to keep it to a minimum)

Lend an ear
Extend an ear
Be all ears
Play it by ear

The essence of Taiji is in the partner work.  Private practice merely prepares you for this encounter with the Other.

We are constantly saying NO to the reality that's opening up all around us, and remaining locked in our own festering interiority. To escape we just need to start saying YES.

The sleep of the ancients was polyphasic – a first sleep early in the night, and a second sleep in the early morning are separated by a period of nocturnal activity. There are two nights: a night for sleeping, and a night for keeping watch, and two days: a day for working and a day for slumbering.

—Matthew Nini

Meditation: relaxing out of thinking and into breathing – out of the world of objects & things and into the world of flows & potentialities.

A few months after beginning to teach here a neighbour joined my class.  She immediately made a good connexion with both the Taiji and with me so I suggested she accompany me to one of Nitsan's classes.  She liked the class very much and at the end asked Nitsan if she could attend regularly.  He said of course so she took the details of times.  Nitsan then asked if she wasn't going to enquire as to the price.  She replied: "No, I want to study with you and I will pay whatever you ask."  Nitsan smiled and said: "May I give you a hug?"

Most don't live in the world, they live in their head. The device we use to get out of our head and into the world is LISTENING.

Live the life of a saint in-the-making.

To achieve mastery in Taiji one must work like a Trojan – hours each day – strengthening legs & waist, relaxing body & mind – repeating the Form until it becomes second nature. Mastery just means that your strength, relaxation and mental probity have softened you enough to enter the world of energy or mind-at-large. Now great care must be taken to put quality over quantity.

In Taiji the key word is always natural. The Daoist imperative.

the only time
I get lonely

is when I'm
in bad company

Loneliness has its own networks of cure. Its closest ally, even by-product, is meditation.

—Sumana Roy

For the average person, getting an advantage is what life is all about.

to connect to
& feel energy

we need only
do two things

relax the body
relax the mind

it's really as
simple as that

bristling with the tension of readiness

Meditation: feeling what naturally sinks and feeling what naturally rises

I remember once discussing Descartes' Cogito with my teacher.  We agreed it needed to be replaced.  I suggested Ezra Pound's Amo ergo sum which apparently graced his personal letterhead.  John said that Sentio ergo sum would be better.  I feel therefore I am.

It's all in the feeling – in the heart.  Feel the world rather than observe it.  Empathy – togetherness in feeling.  Feel the world then feel the world feeling you.

When I find myself getting irritated by a student's inability to relax, I remember my own teacher's infinite patience with my tension.

One ambition of poetry, certainly, is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the silence that preceded the poem. 

—Mark Doty

Find an alcove, sit quietly, and angels will join you there.

Imagine tramping through a forest on a fine day, enjoying the air and exercise. Suddenly, inspired by the trees, you stop and simply stand. Gradually the signs of life your coarse trespass has scattered would start to reappear. Birds singing, birds sighted, rodents rustling in the undergrowth, squirrels and maybe a marten in the trees. This is meditation. You stop and simply pay attention, and slowly realise there's far more present than you could ever have imagined.

Meditation investigates the subtle levels of reality that only become revealed when the mind quietens.

Work isometrically: against imagined resistance.

Uniting in a common enemy is not the same as uniting in love.

Slow down

Pay attention

Do good work

Love your neighbours

Love your place

Settle for less

Enjoy it more

—Paul Kingsnorth

Gestures of giving

If you wish to get into energy then you must first learn to concentrate an aspect of mind we call intent.

Traditionally, Palestinian men start the day with a tiny cup of very strong coffee (usually flavoured with cardamom) and a small glass of local olive oil. Both are bitter and, if imbibed mindfully, create a descending wave of astringency settling in the lower belly.  A natural abode for the quiet mind.

KEEP TO A YIELDING MIND

Our equivalent to St Paul's Pray unceasingly.  

No mention of attack.

How well do you function out of your milieu?

Always upping the ante.

When asked by the BBC to offer advice to young composers, Thea Musgrave replied, Don't do it, unless you have to. And if you do, enjoy every minute of it.

Ignorance is the most insidious form of resistance.

Do it with passion or not at all.

Like wading through warm honey.

Great mantra

STOP COMPLAINING!

If, for any reason, you feel subpar, never let on. Always behave & interact as though you're at your best. Life's too short…

Infinity is a loop that springs open to reveal an endless spiral.

—Eugenia Cheng

My father decided to replace the old washing machine he bought in the '80s. He went to the store and told the assistant what he wanted: a new machine to replace the old one. The assistant asked if the old one was still working. My father told him it was working fine – just old. The assistant told him to keep on with it: "In those days they made things to last. Nowadays they're made to last about five years."

Death should be the great letting-go. The final chance for the spirit to fly free. This is why it is so important for warriors to die in battle, where the spirit's raging for release.

Relax not into a dozy slackness but a taut responsiveness.

Egos interact at the level of bumper cars.

The change we need to make is no mere tweek. It is a fundamental seismic shift. For most this is not only impossible but ill-advised. As my teacher used to say: Most students are not ready to begin. The best we can hope to achieve is thorough preparation.

bene qui latuit bene vixit

Cultivate a fearless heart.

(The enemy is always fear  – one of the first things my teacher said to me.)

Make or break.

(Eventually we break – just hope it's later rather than sooner.)

A friend suggested I try out his AI app so I asked it to explain Deleuze & Guattari's concept of 'desire'. This is what it told me:

Deleuze & Guattari have a unique take on desire. They see it not as a lack, as traditional psychoanalysis might, but as a positive, productive force. They view desire as something that creates & connects, constantly generating new realities & possibilities, rather than just filling a void. It’s a fascinating concept!

I always suspected it was their word for 'spirit'. Now I know.

We must become past masters at borrowing energy if we expect to progress.

Pregnant with silence

analogue = potency

digital = exhaustion

It's obvious if you think about it.

For the scientist truth is objectivity.
For the artist truth is subjectivity.

I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul. 

—Jean Cocteau

frugality & friendship

Quiet mind is empty of words & thoughts but brimming with feeling & sensitivity.   A completely different way of being in the world.

We use words to make sense of consciousness: turn chaos into cosmos.

Things are so artificial nowadays that the mainstream is more likely to lead into a cesspool than the ocean.

One doesn't wait for a revolution. One becomes it.

—Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point, 2012

Beware Buddhist drowsiness

MEDITATION

Mind sinks down to dantian
Spirit floats above the head

There is a foreign land within

資訊不等於知識
知識不等於智力
智力不等於智慧

Information is not knowledge
Knowledge is not intelligence
Intelligence is not wisdom

I am a little world made cunningly
Of Elements, and an Angelike spright

—John Donne

A passion for work

Estrangement from the mainstream

Practise like crazy : tap the Primal Well

Deep down inside what do we really desire? Death. The death of self or Ego certainly because that's the part of us that keeps us separate and ultimately unhappy, but also physical death because it's only then that the Ego truly is gone and the Spirit free.

When one keeps quiet, the situation becomes clear.

—Albert Camus

When I first came to Israel I tried psychotherapy. A few weeks in, my therapist (whom I admired) asked me to write a list of the five things that were most important to me. 

"Like what?"

"Like happiness, money, family..."

So I sat for quite a while thinking & compiling. 

When I had finished I handed her the list. 

"Now this is very interesting," she said, "Number one is Softness and number two is Intimacy, and here you are in a country where you are not going to find either..."

Once, wallowing in the doldrums, I asked my teacher why, despite all my work, I was making such little progress. He replied: Because you're resisting the teaching with all your might.

touching & moving

When someone you know passes mildly away, after a good, long life, it is no time for mourning. Just sit quietly, close your eyes, and remember their spirit. Its lightness & sparkle, humour & mischief, and you'll feel that spirit now soaring free.

Not a state, of affairs or otherwise, but an ongoing process. 

Not an object, discrete or otherwise, but a bundle of connexions.

So let us melt and make no noise…

No matter what the age declares of itself, no matter how absent of spiritual truth and tendency you operate, there is beneath the loquacious level that your rationalism inhabits a deeper level to your nature where intuitions and occult convolutions gather and where, even deeper, a darkness emanates the material of creation. It’s poetry that narrates and demonstrates that dark energy, an unconsuming fire in which our imaginations come most intensely to life.

—Peter O'Leary, Thick & Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age, 2017

It's not what you do with your body that makes it qigong but what you do with your mind.

The most important thing in life is to go beyond where your talent takes you. This requires grace.

Depression is an excess of gravity / lack of levity.

Madness is an excess of levity / lack of gravity.

Turning allows us to give and take simultaneously. This is yielding.

Distraction & depression – the chief conditions of our time. (They are related.)

Let the Taiji carry you away. Otherwise you're going through the motions.

The teacher provides a Form.

We provide the content.

Softness is natural – of nature and of our nature – our natural mind. Ego, being an unnatural man-made construct, is never really soft, though it is good at pretending (lying).

If you so wish you can become aflame.

—Abba Joseph of Panephysis

Look softly – eyes unfocus and swivel inward.

G O D  I S  L O V E

L O V E  I S  G I V I N G

(great mantras)

The letting go of certainties.

Just stay in awareness. 

—Sheng Yen

Draw the world into the belly, and issue your energy from the belly. 

(Belly as place of rumination & digestion but also of silent knowledge, intuition, wisdom.)

There is a saying in Taiji: It never gets any easier. This is because when you practice daily, with faith, sincerity & courage, that practice naturally homes in on your weak points, and these are always difficult to face.

Each time we meditate we are presented with a clear choice: head or heart, hard or soft, tense or relaxed, fear or love.

Ego is where we hide from God.

The mind is usually centred, grounded, rooted in a sense of self – a separateness from the world – from which it inevitably regards and judges that world. This centre (Ego) appears firm, stable and real but only because the mind is constantly reinforcing it with its endless chatter. During meditation we allow the mind to quieten & soften, and then Ego can be seen for what it is – a man-made construct with no analogue in Nature.

Ego is our pact with Satan.

The easiest way to steal someone's energy is to coax them to your rhythm, to your time.

My favorite tool is my own hand, an extension of my body. It is a tool shaped by time and experience, refined through years of practice.

—Kwak Kyung-Tae

Like a tiger on the prowl, carefully picking its way through the undergrowth, ready to pounce at any moment.

The most important relationship we have in life is the one with God. This regulates all the others.

What attracted me to Taiji was its revolutionary aspect – it promised (threatened) change and freedom. Revolution – upturn – overthrow of the ultimate tyrant – Ego.

God's face is what we see when we awaken from the solipsism of self.

When we talk of freedom it is always freedom from self, never freedom of self.

It's not what you see but the intensity of the seeing.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked; it has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

—Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms, 1919

on-the-spur-of-the-moment

The best experiences are those we can't talk about.

The cure for pain is in the pain.

—Rumi

A body always ready to push beyond its limits.

A mind always ready to think the unthinkable.

A spirit always ready to make a mad dash for freedom.

Pay attention. The price of admission in this wonderful adventure called life.

The bourgeoisie feel entitled to anything & everything, but especially shortcuts.

The only way to change is through discipline. In other words: practice.

We are at our very best the moment—for whatever reason—the heart leaps free.

A lust for life—pure—without the trappings.

Most spend life endlessly renovating their prison cell when they could be breaking free.

κένωσις (kénōsis): self-emptying

I am on permanent vacation. This surprising state of affairs is the life that I have been called to, and it has lasted almost six decades. My good fortune is known as a vocation. Monastic life is essentially a vacating, an emptying out, not unlike vacating an apartment and living without furniture, or even without an apartment. Monastics (men and women) vacate the world and go where people of the world do not want to go and remain. To live in solitude, to be specific, is one of the most difficult things for a person to endure. “Man’s unhappiness,” as Pascal said, “springs from one thing alone, his incapacity to stay quietly in one room.” In more ways than one, that is precisely what I have been doing for a long time—except, rather than inside a room, I prefer to be outside. The generous ceiling of the sky for me is more congenial to solitude, precisely because there I find company with the visible world around me.

But this outward solitude is not enough. Vacating means a personal emptying out of clutter within the mind and heart, certainly a clearing of the nonessential and even some essential furniture to make room for God. A normal home has spouses and maybe children. Life in a monastic community can never be quite the equivalent of a family, although there may be plenty of people around. Radically, there must be an interior journey into a wilderness to be alone, free of the world and at rest in God. Living in cenobitic community might seem to upgrade this desert to the status of a private resort, with all conveniences provided, like laundry and cooking. Perhaps that sounds too good to be true. Well, it is. You will shortly find this is not the case. Everyone here has to put in a hand and do his own part. Work is one of the forms of this emptiness, this vacation. It enhances prayer and keeps it from going static and stale. Likewise, prayer is a form of work – “the work of God,” as St. Benedict called it. It requires intention, attention, and persistence.

—Paul Quenon, In Praise of the Useless Life: A Monk's Memoir, 2018

YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE

BUT IF YOU GET IT RIGHT

ONCE IS ENOUGH

(Graffiti)

If you must think then always outside the box.

The mind is a terrible master but a wonderful servant.

The miracle of turning is that it allows us to retreat and advance at the same time. This is yielding.

After weeks of watching the roof leak I fixed it tonight by moving a single board.

—Gary Snyder

The miracle of a work of art is that it contains far far more than what the artist put into it.

It's a rare student that really wants to change.

Meditation: sit with a vertical spine and let gravity do the work for you

Spiritual work endeavours to experience what we already know.

Buddha means awakened one. The practice of Buddhism leads us towards our essential Buddha-nature — an awakened (enlightened) state. Fundamental to this practice is compassion: a willingness to embrace and suffer with the other. This is all heart.

Dismantle the egoic operating system.

I don't ask for the sights in front of me to change, only the depth of my seeing.

—Mary Oliver

Taijiquan is built on softness, yielding and spirit. We fall in love with each until they are all we are and all there is.

Zheng Manqing's famous Taiji hand. Relaxed, soft & accommodating (yielding), with space between each finger. Try to get the feet the same. Toes all separate and somewhat independent of each other.

We don't get sad anymore, we get depressed.

In more than thirty years of research, I’ve discovered a very important truth about human psychology: certainty is a cruel mindset. It hardens our minds against possibility and closes them to the world we actually live in.

—Ellen J Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility, Penguin, 2009

attentive without being obtrusive

The psychology of possibility

roots & transformations

When I die I suspect the first question I'll be asked is not how good have I been but have I actually lived.

attention, care & concern

I have had two Taiji teachers: firstly John Kells (1984-2006) and secondly Nitsan Michaeli (2007-2010). Their approaches are miles apart. John's work (and life) was all spirit whereas Nitsan works almost exclusively on the root. But they have three crucial things in common: both love Taiji, both stress that Taiji is all about connexion, and both consider Enlightenment a hoax.

The authentic life: all attention (head), gut-feelings (belly), and spirit (heart).

Eight years ago, at John's funeral, I had a little word with each family member (all of whom I knew well). His younger sister Valerie had a few years before married a Muslim and had converted to Islam. They had since divorced so I assumed that her Islam, like her previous Catholicism, would have lapsed, but there she was, clearly dressed as a Muslim woman. I said to her, I thought she would have given all that up. "Steven, it's not something you grow out of, it's something you grow more and more into!" Ah, just like Taiji, I thought.

Poetry is a pheasant disappearing in the brush.

—Wallace Stevens

Meditation: time out of the language centre

Hail-fellow-well-met

from the archaic salutation

"Hail, fellow! Well met!"

get by on less

A life buoyed by attentiveness.

A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world.

—Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 1972

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 1892

Keep to a 

yielding mind: 

ready for all 

possibilities—

The work proceeds from the conviction that we are in the world all wrong – selfishly.

This is what
we do—

use up
resources

wipe out
indigenous populations

destroy
ecosystems

all in the name
of progress.

the enduring transcendentalist tradition

He didn’t so much teach as exemplify, which is the way it should be, since even the wisest lesson soon sounds like drivel.

—Douglas Crase, writing about James Schuyler

They could not see
the river for the bank
yet still kept talking
about the bridge.

—Jennifer Moxley

Flirting with madness

repetitive & ever-changing

SPIRIT: conflate God, Life, Love, Nature

Loosen the mind, but don't lose it.

Life on a shoestring

In order to bring inspiration to people I must not be concerned with applause by the audience. I must stand erect, tall, and straight. I must be of a clear head and pure heart (no stimulants).

—Sonny Rollins, The Notebooks

we enter time’s fullness not by clinging to it but by cutting ourselves loose from it

Rid your life of journalese. The antidote is poetry.

I have always felt that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist. But what does this equivalence between empiricism and pluralism mean? It derives from the two characteristics by which Whitehead defined empiricism: the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained; and the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness).

—Gilles Deleuze in Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet: Dialogues II, Columbia University Press, 2007

Gravity & levity : stillness & spirit

Practice: time spent engaging the principles of Taiji

prais-
ing

this
mo-
ment

with
all

of
his
heart

gave
him
heart


—Robert Lax

time speeds up in the presence of levity
(time flies when you're having fun)

It's not what you do that counts but the passion – the enthusiasm – with which you do it.

time slows down in the presence of gravity
(a watched kettle never boils)

linked through social media yet disconnected from real people

OBSERVE SHABBAT

rest & worship

(gravity & levity)

Kindness creates connexion.

Soul is not essence, self or identity, but the sum total of all our connexions.

Practice is an act of kindness. Kind to your soul and kind to your world.

Progress in Taiji (and there must be progress otherwise you're not travelling a path, you're just standing still) is a slow (think decades) process of getting closer to the ground. Sinking, sinking, sinking, which requires stronger legs, more flexible hips, more open groin. When I encounter old students who have kept up their daily practice but without a teacher to spur them on (fire their spirit), this is what they lack: their Taiji is all upper body with no root.

shining eyes (levity) & a quiet mind (gravity)

quiet
is always
quiet
rejoined


(Thomas A Clark)

All spiritual work, internal work, real work, boils down to one thing: trying to quieten the mind.

When you meditate and watch the noisy mind, what's it actually talking about? It's usually grumbling: going through a litany of complaints and resentments in order to reinforce its sense of self-righteousness. This is what Nietzsche called slave mentality. The slave silently grumbles at the master – he's full of resentments. The master, in contrast, has a quiet mind because he doesn't need to grumble – everything is under his control.

Hegel had a master/slave story. The master decides he shouldn't have to do menial jobs anymore so he buys himself a slave to do them for him. Because the master is not working he is getting weaker as time goes by, and because the slave is working, he's getting stronger as time goes by. So there comes a point when the slave overthrows the master. Now Nietzsche's big insight is: okay this happens, the slave may overthrow the master, but he will still have slave mentality, he will still have the noisy mind.

And this is what we are basically. We are masters of our lives in the sense that we have enough income not to have to worry about starving and other unpleasant things – we appear happy & content – but we still have the noisy mind. And you can see that to break this is different than just having more money to make life more comfortable. That sort of excess doesn't help at all.

The difference really between the slave mind and the master mind is that the slave is looking at the world and desiring. It's the whole market economy – capitalism is the slave mind in action. The master wants for nothing, so he can be himself, looking out and commanding his world. The slave is always looking at a world that is beyond it, moaning to itself because it can't have it. The slave thrives on envy. That's what we need to do something about.

Become a peacemaker. Always see both sides.

輕 則 靈
靈 則 動
動 則 變

Lightness leads to agility
Agility leads to movement
Movement leads to change

It's been obvious for a long time now that we can't go on like this…

God breathes through us so completely...so gently we hardly feel it...yet, it is our everything.

—John Coltrane

動 中 求 靜
靜 中 求 動

Seek stillness in movement
Seek movement in stillness

There are many paths. What they all have in common is practice.

To some degree we are all crippled by fear, conditioning and culture. Endeavour to step aside from each. This is the work.

Nature is solar powered. Burning fossil fuel is our big mistake. Reintroducing all that carbon, which had been conveniently locked underground, back into the atmosphere was bound to cause global warming. We only have ourselves to blame.

move with restful cadence

Imagine how you'd feel if you ventured into this church. The mind would likely be stunned into reverential silence, and the heart lifted to the vaults above. Awestruck.

When we meditate with erect posture then we become our own church or temple.

On a wing and a prayer

ATTENTION

Sacrum and manubrium align allowing sacrum to sink and manubrium to rise

Seek knowledge — increase daily
Seek Dao — decrease daily

Meditation: the practice of emptying

Go out & play!

Without forgiveness there is no healing and the past keeps repeating itself.

Missing the odd meal is good for you.

The two aspects of yielding: extending a presence behind the other, and opening a space within for the other to come into.

Meditation: savouring time rather than passing the time.

slowly but surely

I've had over ten thousand students in my time and is all I ever wanted is for them to get their bums in.

—John Robert Kells

Virginia Woolf expressed the purpose of her journal on 20 April 1919: I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through.

A good therapist listens so well the patient reveals things forgotten or repressed. Active listening: not just hearing what's offered but encouraging divulgence.

VIGIL  the act of keeping awake at times when sleep is customary; a period of wakefulness; an event or a period of time when a person or group stays in a place and quietly waits, prays, etc, especially at night

Spirit is all around all the time so if we are unaware of it it is because we are clotted with self.

xin zhai  心齋  mind fasting

This age of shameless conformity.

volatile & mercurial

Don't let trauma define you. Neither your own nor your clan's. And Ego is a trauma – it's how you conceive and therefore construct yourself when spirit / connexion has withered.

THE CALL

I was suddenly
required to be
like my soul

Throughout Chinese history, there have always been people who preferred to spend their lives in the mountains, getting by on less, sleeping under thatch, wearing old clothes, working the higher slopes, not talking much, writing even less—maybe a few poems, a recipe or two. Out of touch with the times but not with the seasons, they cultivated roots of the spirit, trading flatland dust for mountain mist. Distant and insignificant, they were the most respected men and women in the world’s oldest society.

—Bill Porter (Red Pine), Road to Heaven, Counterpoint Press, 1993

Spirit as first principle – arkhe ἀρχή – apeiron ἄπειρον – chaos χάος – substrate – dark energy.

Wisdom is like water. It resides in the lower meditation field, the belly. The head is for thinking; the heart for willing and desiring. The belly is the place for wisdom and contemplation. We ‘return’ to Dao’s gestating presence from this inner womb of intuitive awareness.

—Master Zhuang (quoted in Michael Saso: The Teachings of Daoist Master Zhuang, Oracle Bones Press, 2012)

ancient & living

Ultimately, awareness / consciousness / spirit are the same.

deus sive natura

Every artwork worth its salt is created with spirit and can only be understood with spirit.

Fascism is a refusal to admit critique.

P a t h f i n d e r

Pain is a challenge to be in the world differently.

To free the spirit you must first unburden the heart-mind.

In a nutshell, the work allows you to transition from control – the way many of us seek to organize our lives, to trust – the foundation for creating a fluid relationship with time.

—Paul Loomans, I've Got Time, Watkins Publishing, 2024

Listening, as ethics and ecology

The slowness of a hunting animal on the prowl.

G r o u n d b r e a k i n g

Trying to find a better way of being in the world. More awake/aware; more graceful/gracious; more responsive/responsible.

This life of glimmers

The teacher's words are meant to inspire practice, not replace it.

There is a saying in the martial arts: Timing is everything. And timing (the ability to thrive in real time) is always a matter for spirit. Spirit doesn't just find the right moment, spirit makes the moment.

We all have a world view and we believe anything that reinforces that view and we deny or disregard anything that contradicts it. We create the world before we encounter it.

The only real religion is animism. All those that have come since (except maybe Daoism, which isn't really a religion) are far more to do with social control than truth.

Confucianist in public but Daoist in private.

Brief habits — I love brief habits and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things and states, down to the bottom of their sweetness and bitternesses. My nature is designed entirely for brief habits, even in the needs of my physical health and altogether as far as I can see at all— from the lowest to the highest. I always believe that here is something that will give me lasting satisfaction—brief habits, too, have this faith of passion, this faith in eternity—and that I am to be envied for having found and recognized it; and now it nourishes me at noon and in the evening and spreads a deep contentment all around itself and deep into me so that I desire nothing else, without having any need for comparisons, contempt, or hatred. But one day its time is up; the good thing parts from me, not as something that has come to nauseate me but peacefully and sated with me as I am with it—as if we had reason to be grateful to each other as we shook hands to say farewell. Even then something new is waiting at the door, along with my faith—this indestructible fool and sage!—that this new discovery will be just right, and that this will be the last time. That is what happens to me with dishes, ideas, human beings, cities, poems, music, doctrines, ways of arranging the day, and life styles.

Enduring habits I hate. I feel as if a tyrant had come near me and as if the air I breathe had thickened when events take such a turn that it appears that they will inevitably give rise to enduring habits; for example, owing to an official position, constant association with the same people, a permanent domicile, or unique good health. Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits. Most intolerable, to be sure, and the terrible par excellence would be for me a life entirely devoid of habits, a life that would demand perpetual improvisation. That would be my exile and my Siberia.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 295

Spirit is a scalpel that nicks open a vein, allowing energy to flow.

Civilization is the enemy of spirit and so the enemy of soul and so the enemy of man.

Performing Taiji, you are not an object moving, you are the movement, the energy.

We are habits, nothing but habits—the habit of saying ‘I’

—Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism & Subjectivity, 1953

GOOD HABIT : very much a provisional institution and ultimately an oxymoron

All the problems facing the world today, from global warming to mass extinction to the new rise of tyrants, can be traced back to one cause: overpopulation.

We willingly sell our souls for toys & protection.

Spinal hygiene

Given we are good students (practise daily), our only choice is whether to fail miserably or joyfully.

(Beckett said it better. So did Castaneda.)

Most of us live on autopilot.

Practise daily, without endgaining.
There is no end.

Only when lost for words do we find out who we really are.

Man, you might say, is nature dreaming...

—Robinson Jeffers

This era of cultural decline and ecological degradation.

Ego is a parasite living in the psyche and feeding on thoughts, words, worry. Through meditation we slowly starve it. But it never dies – just leaves you enough psychic energy (awareness) to perceive energy, spirit and (eventually) Dao.

Thought does not exist where love is. 

—Jiddu Krishnamurti

Get involved but don't interfere

The difference between the poor student and the good student is courage.

Listen with rapt attention

Back in the early eighties when I started Taiji, the BTCCA (British T'ai Chi Ch'uan Association) held a seven hour Intensive on the first Saturday of every month. Toward the end of each of these sessions, Grand Master John Robert Kells, who always led the proceedings, gave an inspiring talk (effectively a dharma talk). These would always start the same way: "The most important word in Taiji is RESPECT," and then would go off on a wonderfully inventive tangent. I always tell my students that the most important word in Taiji is LISTENING. Respect & listening are really the same thing.

Choiceless awareness

Find out for yourself.
This is why we practise.

Everyday consume something fermented: kefir, sauerkraut, kombucha, yogurt, miso…

MEDITATION

Imagine you're at home, seated comfortably in your favourite armchair, watching television. The lights are low and the programme is entertaining. Suddenly, for whatever reason, the TV dies and you're left in the dark. You pull yourself forward to the edge of the seat, readying to arise and check the electricity. As you sit, perched on the edge, your eyes start to grow accustomed to the dark and you notice the gentle luminescence of the room. It's as though the surrounding objects slowly start to come alive, revealing a very different reality: more subtle, more mysterious, more natural.

Empty your mind
Empty your life

The more mind empties, the more spacious it becomes.

Only tolerate company you admire: those that elevate, edify and leave you cleaner.

We are so much more than what we think we are.

Spirit fires up – ignites – and you become a firebrand lighting up the way.

Listening for possibilities we haven't anticipated.

Spirit is the agent of becoming. Without spirit the past repeats itself and the real future never properly opens up.

Dantian: a place that, precisely because it is so empty and inhospitable, offers the possibility of dwelling.

Spirit: a willingness to dance / play

Rather than verb tenses inscribing our metaphysics of linear time into consciousness, classical Chinese verbs are unconjugated, simply registering emergence, occurrence appearing of itself in a kind of boundless present. And classical Chinese has minimal grammar, so pictographic ideograms seem to be each emerging from a generative emptiness.

—David Hinton

Love is a burgeoning heart.

Poetry is language invested with spirit

Thinking (mind) is a morass of prejudice.

An important element of a short poem is the white space that surrounds/contains it.

Spirit is the unbearable lightness of being.

Science's obsession with the material & measurable.

Monotheism is simply the deification of male Ego.

Acting creatively rather than reacting habitually.

The abuser always forgets but, for the life of them, the abused cannot.

Advice:

• Follow your nose
• Do as you're told

Until we move towards a broader view of self which incorporates spirit – an Atmavidya – psychology will remain simply the study of our psychological surfaces.

—Elliot Cohen

Aware: Middle English waren "to be mindful, be on guard," going back to Old English warian "to be wary, guard, protect," going back to Germanic warōjan- (whence Old Saxon waron "to attend to, protect," Old High German biwarōn, Old Norse vara "to warn," varask "to be on one's guard")

Awake: Old English wæccan to watch, Latin vegēre to enliven; Norwegian dialect vok, Old Norse vǫk hole in ice

I distinguish three fundamental sets of Taiji principles:

• Principles of Station: sink & relax; upright spine;
• Principles of Motion: single-weightedness; turning the waist;
• Principle of Continuity: keeping the mind on the job, also called Mind Continuous or the Principle of Flow.

Mind Continuous is the space in which the first two sets of principles (the physical principles) operate. It allows them to work together and regulate each other, each creating, preserving, and negating the others.

Attack from the heart
Yield into the belly

The Spirit of Hope
Is this not a tautology?

Practice expresses faith, generates love.

As dantian contracts into the here & now, mind expands into the ever-increasing void. Condensation & evaporation.

Soft mind connects
Hard mind controls

The main function of the rational mind is not to think but to blot out energy.

Birth was the death of him.      (Beckett)

Taiji mind: awake, attentive, alert. Neither desire nor need to know. Knowledge unnecessary clutter.

Keep the mind on the job. If I manage that, and keep repeating the exercise, I will be taken, via central equilibrium, into heightened awareness, into spirit. If my mind wanders at all, I won't; I will be simply wasting time.

As dantian contracts into the here & now – the local – the mind expands into the ever-increasing void. Condensation & evaporation.

RESPECT: the proverbial second glance

LISTENING: our first act of compassion

The problem with human beings is that very early on we learnt how to cheat.

Is all we're trying to do in this game is wake up. So simple, so natural, so easy. So why don't we? Because we don't really want to.

Humanity's deeper needs: meaning, community, transcendence.

Space peppered with spirit.

Truth is infinite and of the Void.
Knowledge is finite and of the World.

a fart fraught with meaning      (Beckett)

When the teacher gives an instruction you cannot understand, a part of you hasn't woken up yet.

Paradox is the rule, not the exception.

Mind in dantian. When it wanders off just bring it back.

Ever feel suspicious there's a bigger picture we're not quite getting?

From a certain point on, there is no more turning back. This point must be reached.

—Franz Kafka

Von einem gewissen Punkt an gibt es keine Rückkehr mehr. Dieser Punkt ist zu erreichen.

Humble literally means of the ground, earth, soil, dirt, dust

Bene qui latuit bene vixit

Peeling away the scabs of conditioning, worry & ambition, to reveal the truth – a gentle naked spark of awareness.

Ward off: turn aside something threatening; deflect; ward off a blow, trying to ward off a cold      (Merriam-Webster)

I am an archaeologist of morning

What spoils people is thinking (they have a choice)

We don't experience reality, we experience a world.
A world is what we turn reality into with our minds.

a dazed inarticulacy

The ground is our felt-sense of support and stability that lies beneath the body, and therefore our deepest ground is underground. There are different levels to this sense of being grounded. On one level—the most obvious one—we feel rooted in and connected to the earth. Our bodies are earth-bodies, and we are able to feel this earthy connection. Another level, less frequented, is archetypal.

—John Prendergast

A shift from economy to ecology.
From economics to ecologics.

Burn your bridges otherwise as soon as the going gets tough you'll run home to mummy.

Before we work on 

ARTIFICIAL

INTELLIGENCE

why don't we do

something about

NATURAL

STUPIDITY?

(T-shirt slogan in TLV)

from a transcendent superstructure to an immanent infrastructure

An artist is someone who, for the life of them, cannot conform.

Measure progress in decades.

gratefully & gracefully

That she had so completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her. One should never be cured of one's passion.

—Marguerite Duras

Don't waste time with people you don't admire. Life's too short.

The closer we get to the truth, the more difficult it is to face. Only purity can behold truth. Patiently await a moment of grace.

Last week my daughter had an English exam at school. She told me that many of the students had their phones on their laps, typing questions into an AI app, and then copying out the answers. I asked if there was no invigilator present. "Yes there was, but he was on his phone the whole time and didn't notice what people were doing."

Listen quietly in primed readiness. For as long as it takes. This is intelligence.

Internal work is all about changing the mind.

Meditation: Sein und Zeit

Invite spirit in and you'll go crazy. Keep it out and you'll get depressed. It's your choice. In fact it's the only choice.

An artist, in the act of creation, becomes a conduit for spirit. 

The same for us as we perform the Taiji Form.

I call it heightened awareness – the intense listening that draws spirit into the mix.

behold beingness, that most sacred of treasures

—Don Domanski

GRAVITY
I sink into Earth
Earth rises into me
LEVITY
I rise to Heaven
Heaven sinks into me
GRAVITY
I sink into Earth
Earth rises into me

MEDITATION 

Heedfulness

Vigilance

Diligence

Watchfulness

Awareness

Earnestness

LISTENING

The Internal is a milieu where money is irrelevant.
The only way to get ahead is through practice.

And wonder is a twine of wands lodged
to spine of nothing I know at least to hold.

—Clark Coolidge

We need energy to feel energy
we need spirit to engage spirit.

Deep is the new four-letter word.

I remember once discussing with teacher whether either of us would have started the work if we had known at the beginning how difficult it was going to be. We both said No, but then realised that it wasn't a matter of choice; it was destiny. We didn't choose the work, the work chose us.

Life's too short to dabble.

One continues on a long walk not by effort of will but through fidelity.

—Thomas A Clark

Tell it like it is. No one really listens anyway.

Deep down we are all infantile.

If you want to get half an hour of good quality practice in then you need at least an hour of free time.

It's been obvious for a long time that we can't go on like this…

Meditation: waiting for the murk to clear and the spirit to sparkle

If you truly listen, you will be amazed. You will realise that the space you inhabit is transcendental (of spirit) and that your mind, being (of) that space, is also transcendental.

We only become free when we let go. This is why relaxation is crucial.

The rational mind is not a creative tool (that would be the Imagination). Is all it can do is give a trivial reason for something that really has no reason. Like saying that the reason behind your existence is that your mother and father once copulated.

the disturbing
reality of

rampant
consumerism

political
corruption

moral
degradation

eating
away

at the
nation’s soul

FOUR CONDITIONS OF HAPPINESS

Life in the open air
Love for another being
Freedom from ambition
Creation

—Albert Camus

Before we can begin to even contemplate living at peace with each other we must first stop waging war on the natural world.

Alive in such a way that the world is always new.

Reduce the External as much as possible so that the Internal can expand into the vacated space. This is the Void. Empty of things but full of spirit. What Deleuze aptly called the Transcendental Field.

Give & take 

Give attention 

Take care

Letting go of everything: fear, anxiety, control, knowledge, expertise, opinions, values, judgements …

The modern mind grips things so tightly, with its anxious need to control, it reduces & strangles them. The enlightened mind is the opposite. Ever letting go, it shrinks to nothing, allowing the world to expand into fullness.

What fuels the noisy mind is the critical eye

Daily practice sheds anxiety, generates good energy, and gathers peace of mind. We are then better prepared to engage the world and give to the world.

soft eyes
invite

the world
rather

than push
it away

Imagine walking down the street minding your own business. You notice someone ahead looking lost. As you approach they politely ask directions. You graciously oblige. They thank you, exchange a few pleasantries, and head off with a new confidence. You continue on your way with a fuller heart. This is what life is all about: creating good feeling.

Anxiety, which is really just a need to know, inhibits the outflowing of your energy.

An empty depth

The Void

If you wish to experience levity, simply sit and watch the sunrise. You will realise that the sun rises not only over the hills, it also rises up through you.

The deeper the Form takes you, the longer you'll need to recover. 

Think of it as slow digestion or rumination.

Whenever I type    meditation    my spell-checker corrects to   medication

a modern episteme marked by disenchantment

soft  =  of energy

Reject the spiritual paucity of modern life.

An inner life rich enough to resist the need to conform.

Good people are givers.
Bad people are takers.

Avoid the latter.

Love does not make you weak because it is the source of all strength, but it makes you see the nothingness of the illusory strength on which you depended before you knew it.

—Léon Bloy

each foot a
stethoscope

auscultating

subterrene
grumbling

If the work you have decided to devote your life to is not making you a better person then you have either made the wrong choice or are working in the wrong way.

Fetishes of the Floating World