Principle

Text message received today from a student:

Just figured the best way to protect knees & ankles is to have a constant leg ward-off feeling which also wakes up inner legs and inner ferocity.

Energy tends to travel up the inside leg and down the outside. Ward-off is a posture that attracts and gathers energy into your core: arms into heart/throat, legs into groin/belly, and eyes into brain. What it actually does is send energy down the outside of the limbs from the back-brain, back-heart, sacrum, and then gather it up into the front of each centre. Embrace. Attack is usually what happens when this flow of energy is reversed. Inner ferocity is what you experience and develop when you naturally alternate yield (ward-off) and attack, i.e. when one naturally morphs into the other, or when your body contains both simultaneously, e.g. lower body ward-off whilst upper body attacks. The faster this alternation, or vibration, the more ferocious. What is difficult, and what requires maturity and humility, i.e. a refusal to be seduced by power - a refusal to adhere to anything other than good principle - is to allow this dual nature to develop as a consequence of that impeccability - relaxedly. Only then does it become natural to you - invade every aspect of your being, ready to invade in turn everything it touches - but also programmed in so that its expression, or rather its ability to connect and transform, is not at all a matter of energy. Nothings needs to be done. It is present and so it has already done its work. Work without energy. Dr Chi having successfully yielded before either he or his opponent have gotten up in the morning. This is what I find totally interesting and totally inspiring. How the way a person lives their life expresses in every aspect of that life. When I read poetry to JK his response is unusual. He has no interest in the work as such, only in the principles at the core of the life that produced such work. If these are firstly worth communicating and secondly well communicated then the poem is a success. There is always present the problem of communication. Is it ever possible to communicate successfully to those who don't, on some level, already know? If the principles at the core of the life and the work are 'true' (natural) are they any easier to get across? How muddy indeed are the stirrings and interferences that occur when one set of principles (the teacher's) meet another (the student's). In a way I suspect communication is always a matter of seduction and resonance. The supreme effort must come from the student - to make themselves a fit instrument first for tuning and then for use. The (im)possibility of teaching/learning.