a matter of principle

beginner’s mind: keeping yourself open to the process

Zazen: wholeheartedly sitting in the middle of your life with great clarity and practicality.

—Kosho Uchiyama

Prayer is a natural response to being alive in a natural world.

This is why all primitive cultures are religious.

Anne Lamott says there are basically three prayers: Help, Thanks and Wow! Each is a natural response to a situation: when in trouble, even if we don't admit it or blatantly ask for it, we wish for help; when we receive something that pleases us we always offer some sort of thanks, if only a smile of satisfaction; and when confronted by something that leaves us speechless and ripped open, we bleed energy, if only for a moment. If we were better able to let our energy out then each of these would be a prayer – an honest exchange of feeling (energy) with the world.

To use the mind to work on the mind.
How stupid can you get!

One of the most difficult (and indispensable) assets to be developed in this game is a mind that works for you rather than against.

Simplify the life
Free up some time
Quiet the mind
Pray to God


A sacrificial presence

Develop intent. Use the mind to focus and direct energy. Like a magnifying glass focusing the sun's rays into an intense scorching point. This requires practice.

Meditation is prayer without words.

When Niels Bohr was knighted by the King of Denmark in 1947, he put the Yin-Yang symbol in his coat of arms with the Latin motto  contraria sunt complementa  – opposites are complementary.

The spirit should be excited (tail out) but internally gathered (bum in).

(This is a principle: working everywhere at every level.)

We don't take time off when doing our life's work.

Go so deep into yourself, you speak for everyone.

—Galway Kinnell

MEDITATION

Sit with a vertical spine, relax & be patient.
Let gravity & levity do their gentle work.
Nothing worthwhile can be forced.

In dealing with others, take nothing personally. In dealing with the world, take everything personally.

—John Kells

A listening ever prepared to be changed by what it hears.

This book title says more about meditation than many a long treatise:

LINGERING
WITH THE
SCENT OF TIME

(In the East sessions are timed by burning a stick of incense)

Relax the mind and feel levity as fine champagne bubbles tickling up you.

Do not let possessions possess you.

Most have no interest in Truth. They believe what they want to believe to justify and preserve their way of life.

Relax the body and feel gravity as a soft rain trickling down you.

Polite society requires we hold ourselves in (restraint, self-control) so much so we don't realise we're doing it and take that state as our natural state. But this is the tension we need to let go if we want our Taiji to be anything more than polite posturing.

An ethics

first & foremost

of balance

The barrage of words in the head is a firewall we erect between us and experience.

Meditation: letting go of all accretion until we are simply pure consciousness

A mature & developed heart is brimming with love & gratitude.

Live gently, frugally & compassionately.

The word frugal (not given to excess, temperate, sober, simple) comes from Latin frux meaning fruit. The sense of living within one's means and within the planet's means. And this is my major beef with the bourgeoisie – we consume far far more than our fair share.

Relax and you will find God, or, maybe, more accurately, God will find you.

Learn to stretch time

Learn to slip time

Meditation: coming back to base

Each stage we hope is the last – just another foothill

When the mind lightens and stops thinking the heart breathes a sigh of relief.

GRAVITY IS OF THE MATERIAL WORLD
LEVITY IS OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD
ENERGY BRIDGES THE TWO

The most commonplace truth, when it floods the whole soul, is like a revelation.

—Simone Weil

An education is not what they tell you but what you find out for yourself.

The more gentle the forces
the stronger the energy

The agitated mind is a reflexion (reflex/reflection) of the anguished heart. When the heart is at peace then there is no mind as such just a vast ocean of awareness that the heart is part of. This is the kind of insight that only comes through meditation.

rising
steam
like
light

↑LEVITY↑

☯︎

↓GRAVITY↓

soft
like
ice
melting

Soften, relax, quieten the mind and the heart will rejoice and slowly begin to bloom.

I can only teach poets.

—John Kells

By poets he didn't mean people who write poetry, necessarily, but those who live poetically – live through & for the magic of the creative spirit.

The artist stands back from the finished work and exclaims: That's not me!

drawn together
torn asunder

Any art work, far more than being a technical work of representation, is a work of magic.

Energy is just awareness stretched out...

The martial arts warn against too much meditation, not just because it slows you down, but because when you're not moving it's too easy to neglect spirit.

I'm really lucky to have come to meditation through Taiji. The Taiji revealed to me that spirit is, if not everything then certainly the most important thing – the one thing I could never neglect.

Energy in the sense of a brightening of the spirit.

Give the student just enough information to spark the Imagination. Too much and it hardens into knowledge.

Please, I beg you, don't let Taiji become another one of your bourgeois pursuits.  Show it some respect!

When we rouse the spirit and dive into heightened awareness, the world becomes a very different place.

Everyone wants to be special, and some people are, but never the way they think they are.

—John Kells

STARLIGHT

All night, this soft rain from the distant past.
No wonder I sometimes waken as a child.

—Ted Kooser

Look how readily we become slaves to our technology – addicts.  And I still think that despite smartphones and AI our greatest (and therefore most insidious) technological achievement is Language.

Work with, from, to and for Spirit – put the Art back into Martial Art.

The good student loves the teaching

The poor student resists the teaching

The mediocre student blows hot & cold

We use language to construct the dualistic world prior to any attempt to communicate with it.

Master the mind or be mastered by it.

—Zen proverb

Students find it difficult to grasp that energy and spirit have a wonderful way of hiding from those unable to appreciate them. This is what Herakleitos meant by Nature loves to hide (φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ).

panta rhei  πάντα ῥεῖ  everything flows

(become a rheologist)

Judge the authenticity of what you teach by how assiduously the good students practice and by how bitterly the poor students mock.

breathe on the embers / of unchanging change

What a beautiful way of saying: Practise!

Truth is never what you think it is, it is precisely what you cannot think.  It unavoidably seeps into consciousness when you stop thinking.

The body relaxes & sinks but the blithesome spirit soars in song.

Practise the Form technically until you know it by heart, then put technicalities aside and practise for feeling, energy, spirit. A veritable celebration of the life force within.

Release the sacroiliacs

(that's a difficult one)

The intense torsion in the waist – its ability to turn both ways at once.

The philosopher of the future is the explorer of ancient worlds, of peaks and caves, who creates only inasmuch as he recalls something that has been essentially forgotten.

—Gilles Deleuze

To move forward we must heal the past – remember the pain and smile with compassion.

Softness is Yin

Lightness is Yang

There is a slow melting quality to Softness and a quick fiery quality to Lightness. Elastic contains a balance of both qualities – yields when tensed and returns when relaxed. The straight wants to bend and the bent wants to straighten. And the turn always wants to return.

If you can't break out of your prison, why not redecorate?

Eventually, the work becomes all consuming – you lose self and become the work – and then the real you, which has spent a lifetime being upstaged by the self, will shine forth.

Anything can be learned but not everything can be taught.

When we sit in stillness with a beautiful vertical spine extending up to the sky and down into the Earth then the mind will naturally slow down & relax and we begin to see things as they really are and start to work with them rather than against them.

When you're in so much pain it's impossible to see the Other.

The Daoist Fourfold is Heaven, Earth, Man and Dao. Heaven & Earth represent the cosmic dimensions, Man represents humanity and its role in the universe, and Dao is the underlying principle uniting them all.

God, in the form of life itself, never tires of begging us to wake up.