Whatever's worth saying just cannot be said, not adequately, unambiguously. Language is not a means of communication, it's a means of avoiding communication or, at best, a politely distanced stand-in for communication.

"What matters most is what sort of person you are becoming."

Yielding, and its concomitant quality of softness, is a way of life – our way of life. To draw out the element of unconditionality lurking in everything, an element that cannot be confronted, directly, but must be seduced by the same element in ourselves – by spirit. Then asked to dance.

The whole idea is to create a continuous thread through time. Inevitably such a thread will be composed of moments of various lengths and varying intensities. The difficulty is paying sufficient attention to ends and beginnings so that adjacent moments run together seamlessly.

"I retired from everything except work."

If it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger; even if it cripples you.

Meditation is an exercise that extends the attention span.

The task for all of us is exactly the same: to break out of class and into humanity. So, whether you are middle class, working class, rich, poor, black, white, male, female, educated, uneducated, first world, third world, jew, arab, straight, gay, these categories must be left behind so that you can become simply the expression of your own magnificent spirit. Sounds easy but in actual fact it is without doubt the most difficult task you could possibly undertake.

Back in 1998 my teacher suddenly abandoned the British Tai Chi Chuan Association, the organisation he had founded in 1970 and which, at its height, in the mid eighties, was the largest and most vibrant Taiji centre in Europe. Admittedly it had been slowly declining ever since he and his family were evicted from the Upper Wimpole Street premises in 1993 due to neglect. In actual fact the decline had started years before then. For some time John Kells had been bored with the Yang style Taiji he was teaching because he felt it wasn't an adequate vehicle for either his Irish spirit or his Celtic vision (he was a true visionary if nothing else). He was playing around with little technical nicknacks he'd picked up here and there – the figure 8 exercise in Taiwan, Chen style push hands from Nitsan Michaeli, his own no-contact rebound – in the hope of injecting a bit of spirit into his complacent students, and maybe developing a new and fresh style of Taiji. And then suddenly he just stopped showing up – leaving it up to me to keep things ticking over. I asked him why and he just said, "I'm tired of being a crutch."

It always seems a miracle, don't you think, to see such joyful carefree children with such depressed mediocre parents. The parents' pain seems to run off them like water off a ducks back. But just wait until those children are their parents age. They'll be carbon copies.

willing the event as such

Pain is the work that needs to be done. The choice that faces us all is whether to buckle down to it or avoid it. Most, of course, chose avoidance. We engineer an anodyne life that backgrounds pain in the hope that pleasure will come forward. But, to the soul, such a life is clearly false because painkillers reduce our ability to feel anything – they dampen the spirit. Hence depression – an inability to grasp the bull by the horns because letting go, walking away and becoming busy with something else is always presented as such a tempting option.

What motivates? Fundamentally, for me, a deep deep desire for justice. So deep, so fundamental, that the word hasn't formed yet. A wordless world. An egoless world. Paradise.

"As soon as we stop paying attention to a particular moment it falls into the past and no longer forms part of our present. Thus the distinction between past and present is fluid and dependent upon one's level of attention."

When solitude is disturbed, loneliness sneaks in.

Genteel poverty.