A Simple Life

I remember Charles once telling me that a ch’i kung teacher he had in New York recommended that every so often the student should live an empty day – an entire day indoors alone with no gadgets (telephone, TV, music), just you, your energy, your work and your maker. I need one of these at least once a fortnight. It’s during these days that the stresses of other peoples’ egos, which have been clinging to me like a scab, making it difficult to connect to my own essence, slowly begin to slip away. The weight of the mundane, that earthly freight, so often smothers the delicate dance and balance of the finer aspects of energy and essence, bringing a general air of disheartenment and heaviness which we counter by desperately spending energy and time crassly and unproductively, gradually depleting our vitality and building a hardening shell around our true nature. Modern living is a bombardment of nonsense and clutter, all designed to appease and satisfy the superficial and desperate demands of the disconnected. The product of this is a society of people so over-stimulated that they are content to exist within their shells: scurrying egos constantly withdrawing their energy in order to accommodate others and protect their own sensitivities, happy in the knowledge that the next entertainment is waiting for them just around the corner. No yielding. Tai Chi and Heartwork don’t make you strong enough to cope with all this, they make you strong enough to reject it. Life needs to be simple.

        You think there should be
        More, but this
        This is all there is.

(Poem by Joseph Massey)