The search for an equilibrium is essential for the artist, to be as aware of inner space as he is of outer space.

—Mark Tobey

Content is a glimpse.

—Willem de Kooning

Unless you let gravity flow through you it will be a pall dragging you down.

When you make spiritual progress, the body, which always lags behind, often injures. Its way of saying: "Wait for me!" Just be patient and resist fearing you've done something wrong. Eventually, the chances are, one such injury will be the death of you. So be it. This is why those on a spiritual path don't make old old bones.

Refuse to be an accomplice.

—Simone Weil

an inner discipline ↔ a search for truth

Clearly distinguish body, mind & spirit. Gravity pulls the body down. Levity lifts the spirit(s). Selfless attention expands the mind until mind is simply the space you operate within – the boundless field of consciousness. Thoughts & feelings are fleeting tightenings of mind within mind. They come & they go. When they linger too long you have obsession, indulgence, worry & narcissism.

To think about God is to the human soul what breathing is to the human body.

—Jacob Needleman

Practice stale & tedious?

Try reversing your circuits.

Often a change is as good as a rest.

Never stew in your own juices
(Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours)

When you move into a front-foot posture, imagine the master's hand on your sacrum, gently easing it forward & down. Then feel the thymus (upper sternum) reaching up & out.

All fear reduces to fear of death
All love aspires to love of God

A heavy heart will tip the body forward and then the bum will stick out (the cardinal sin of Taiji). A head full of worries (thoughts unrelated to the immediate situation) will do the same.

stones

water

mud

hands

days

symmetry

gravity

wellbeing
independence
opportunism
freedom
dreaming
happenstance

Once, feeling frustrated with my own stupidity – my inability to grasp the ungraspable – I asked my teacher what it was that he was really teaching, because it obviously wasn't Taiji. He said: I'm teaching weak men to survive strong women. He never could resist a dig…

Shaking is your long-lost home.

—Lawrence Shainberg

Energy tends to be a blanket term for anything that can't be understood or shouldn't be understood or will be ruined by any attempt to be understood.

B R E A T H I N G
Pull yourself together
Let yourself go
Repeat

The dantian is a door to the deep unconscious.

Solitude & silence are necessary before it will open.

Then it's like gazing into a restless volcano.

Fascism arises when opinion is taken as truth.

a shiver of silence up the spine

Transformation is a wounding;
a shedding of what went before it.

—Autumn Richardson

Language keeps us safe in the known world. If you have a desire to venture into the unknown then you will need inner silence.

Don't fall victim to your own nobility – develop a ruthless streak. Liang called it enlightened self-interest.

Happy the way things are

silence & insight

God breaks the heart again & again & again until it stays open.

—Hazrat Inayat Khan

When you find your true home you realise you've been living in exile.

The struggle with internal work is to stop struggling

The greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul.

—Josef Pieper

The imagination is a wellspring of images that bubble up from the unconscious when the surface language-drenched mind stops.

Yielding brings energy in from outside
& attack sends energy out from inside

both
quiet
&
intense

Softness dissolves boundaries

In cogitation the thought or attention flits aimlessly about the subject. In meditation it circles round it, that is, it views it systematically, from all sides, gaining perspective. In contemplation it radiates from a centre, that is, as light from the sun it reaches out in an infinite number of ways to things that are related to or dependent on it.

—Ezra Pound, 1909, recalling in his own words ideas from Richard of St. Victor

When I really see the Other
then I see the world
through their
eyes

Yin & Yang are one vital force – the primordial aura.

—Wang Yangming

Forgiveness frees me from the past whilst grace allows me into the future.

The present moment is where forgiveness & grace become one.