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!"

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