Avoidance

Avoidance is the enemy in life and the task at hand is to develop the honesty to search it out wherever it may be. It can take many forms, the most obvious being turning aside from problems that need facing, but really any self-projection is a form of avoidance – it avoids what's there by changing it into something more familiar and palatable – an extension of some aspect of self. It is a difficult problem because simply by being alive you are creating your own reality, or rather the reality that unfolds before you is as much due to you as it is anything else. Avoidance arises if you close off – if you block out what's trying to come in. Avoidance is generally a means to maintaining a status quo (balance) – a comfort zone – a cozy, well-known state. Not avoiding is all about allowing yourself to be taken away from the known and into the unknown. This requires you to have the training or wisdom, inside or at hand, to recognize and instantly go with selective forces of change – the ones that will lead you into what has been called a path with heart. This is always a matter for your energy rather than your thinking mind (always a long time after the event), which is why the first stage in Tai Chi and especially Heartwork is to develop a feeling for and a belief in energy as the prime positive ingredient in life, especially a life that is going somewhere. If we decide to try to live a life with less avoidance then we will be spending significant periods in states of not-knowing, not rationally anyway. The only way to adequately prepare for such times is to make sure your energy is up to the task, not just the energy that will enable you to get the task done but the more subtle energies that suss out the terrain before you physically or mentally venture into it – the energies of connexion. The best way to develop these energies is to practice connexion and practice responding to connexion, hence Heartwork.