Energy

Always struck after teaching just how important it is to have an excess of energy. Unless you are overflowing with the stuff your interactions will lack power and your living will lack meaning. When two people get together properly and begin to communicate, energy is offered up from each and pooled into the entity which is the togetherness. If enough energy is combined then that entity comes alive and takes each of you for an amazing ride. This is the way life is meant to be – the natural way – because that ride is itself a teaching – it'll show you things you need to see and experience in order to develop. It's like an aspect of grace – creating your own luck. Normal social interactions, especially here in England, lack any power – just small talk – all designed to pass social pleasantries from one insipid vessel to another, maintaining a polite distance which actually belies a complete lack of real interest, in fact a complete lack of real anything because to engage with reality requires energy – lots of it. No intensity, no danger – no life. Without enough energy to be truly generous you are not only denuded but also denatured – you cannot function naturally. You have to try to get used to seeing yourself not as a physical lump containing mind and feelings, but as energy – lots of it – bursting to express itself through work to change your world – yourself and those you interact with. Even if you feel tired and not particularly energetic try not to let the way you feel get you (your energy) down. The heart – the part of you that offers up your energy – must be light. The worst thing of all is a heavy heart. When the heart is truly light then energy leaps up and out of the upper sternum (just below the sternal notch), passing upwards into your face, flooding your nostrils and eyes with a honeyed scent and rose coloured hue, changing the way you see the world – you start to see energy and heart by virtue of the fact that such has flooded your senses. The tragedy of most lives is that people lack energy and vitality because they are using it all to keep the world just the way they are conditioned to believe it should be. The life we live is not our own. It is inherited. The teacher reveals the stultifying and enervating effects of living this inherited life and offers a new energizing approach, and still students refuse to listen. The Tai Chi class is not the place you go to learn new postures and techniques, to then go away and practice in the same way you do everything else – badly – but a place of transformation and growth. The energy created within the class by the willing and open hearted engagement of all participants, coordinated and led by the teacher, is sacred and needs to be treated as such. To go away and use it incorrectly is a sin. It is offering you a challenge – “Use me to become me.” This is probably the most difficult riddle you will ever have to wrestle with, and no amount of thinking will solve it. You must just practice with the same open hearted willing that you offered the class. You must allow your own work to seduce you the way the class always does. And you must develop strategies to enable you to give your best energy to your Tai Chi, the most sensible one being to make sure you get enough sleep and then practice immediately upon rising in the morning. Then you will start to dwell in the positive space where energy naturally accumulates and gathers.