I work on the surface
but am aware that the spirit is often hidden within
like a shadow in the darkness.

Love is an ancient way to break the wall down.
To be loving is to be in contact with our inner spirit.
—Roger Ackling

Someone asked me recently the difference between energy & spirit, and on reflexion all I could say was – not a lot. When I look back on the times my teacher commented on how good my energy was, it was always times my spirit was up.

Energy is spirit sustained.

Spirit requires freedom: instinctive spontaneity.
Energy requires a mind focused enough to intend.

Rituals performed in private
can change the world.

—Andrei Tarkovsky

When the spirit makes progress, don't be surprised if you get sick. The gods of Taiji are jealous, is how the Chinese put it. It's just the body struggling to keep up.

Οὐ δυνήσῃ προσεύξασθαι καθαρῶς, πράγμασι συμπλεκόμενος ὑλικοῖς, καὶ φροντίσι συνεχέσι δονούμενος· προσευχὴ γάρ ἐστιν ἀπόθεσις νοημάτων.


You cannot practice pure prayer while entangled in material things and agitated by continuous concerns, for prayer is the laying aside of mental representations.

—Evagrius Ponticus (Εὐάγριος ὁ Ποντικός)

Spirit changes everything. When it rouses & rises you are effectively plunged into heightened awareness and the world vibrates & throbs with energy.

Love, in its essence, is spiritual fire.
—Emanuël Swedenborg

I shut my eyes in order to see.
—Paul Gauguin

We live in a culture that demands the spending of money at every turn. Try living instead with frugality & thrift – much healthier for the soul.

Imagine the master's hand on your mingmen, gently but insistently driving down & forward through the Form. This is the tradition flowing through you.

When, through the work, you begin to acquire an internal life, you realise that the mind's monkey chatter is purely designed to lock you out of energy and into Ego.

The main impediment to spiritual progress (after lack of practice) is getting stuck in a rut or on a plateau. This implies that the spirit is no longer the prime mover in your work, and is why something like Taiji is so useful – it really activates & engages the spirit if you do it well sunk.

The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.

—Søren Kierkegaard

The real enemy is always within

We cannot afford the luxury of doubts in this game. There are so many external forces in play luring us from the path, we simply can't allow internal ones too.

just passing
through

Unfortunately, we tend to believe what we've been programmed to believe. Breaking free of this conditioning is the work.

to relax the shoulders
first relax the hips

If we want our connexion with the Earth to become a root, we must be prepared to both sink our energy into it and allow its energy up into us. When we get this right, the one release allows both.

MEDITATION
sit & quietly
smoulder

A mind
that has no appetite
for itself

THE SILENCE


Though the air is full of singing
my head is loud
with the labor of words.

Though the season is rich
with fruit, my tongue
hungers for the sweet of speech.

Though the beech is golden
I cannot stand beside it
mute, but must say

“It is golden,” while the leaves
stir and fall with a sound
that is not a name.

It is in the silence
that my hope is, and my aim.
A song whose lines

I cannot make or sing
sounds men’s silence
like a root. Let me say

and not mourn: the world
lives in the death of speech
and sings there.



—Wendell Berry

Spirit is an ebullience always ready to bubble over.

Without levity, love becomes depressive. Love must always be enlivened & lightened by play. Das göttliche Liebe-Spiel.

What I mean by depressive is the rejection of spirit.

(And for me spirit, levity, heart, God (or at least Christ/Buddha) – even awareness – are largely synonymous.)

Practice resurrection.
—Wendell Berry

To me it seems obvious that if there's a physical force pulling us down to Earth (gravity) then there must be a spiritual force drawing us up to the Heavens (levity).

What prevents us from feeling levity is the general disheartenment that comes from worry & anxiety. And it's strange that the more our rational & technological advancement takes away the need to worry, the more we worry. We are addicts.

The good student knows she has no choice.

When people ask me why I get up in the middle of the night to meditate for two hours, I feel like saying: "Because I have no choice." But I don't because they wouldn't understand. To them everything is a matter of choice.

If you are so consumed by worry (fear) that you cannot even appreciate the beauty of levity as an idea let alone feel it as a presence, then start meditating – it's your only hope.

Dantian makes its nest amongst the twitching fibres of psoas.

If your Taiji isn't taking you on an amazing journey then you're doing it wrong. (Failing to put spirit above form.)

To say that theology comes down to theopoetics is to say it deals in imaginative figurations originating in the depths of our sensuous, affective, and preconscious life, that its engagement with the world takes place in the preconceptual, prethematic base of our existence, in the dark and ambiguous ground from which we all spring.

—John D Caputo

We creatures have been created to create. Not simply propagating the species but using spirit to make it new.

A tense response
effectively erects
a barrier

When you feel the practice getting stale & flat, always come back to yielding. And remember, true yielding is from & to the heart – it is the heart breaking open to welcome in the Other.

You will find poetry nowhere unless
you bring some of it with you.
—Joseph Joubert

Poetry precedes prose
Always