Heart and head

Don't you think it strange that some people you can meet only fleetingly and yet you feel so connected to them; and what's more strange, that connexion can deepen and grow without any further contact with that person? It is so important to feel the connexion and acknowledge it and allow it to grow – not resist its growth with ignorance or selfishness. It will probably grow without your being aware of it anyway, but awareness will always assist your movement towards inner peace. Peace comes with knowledge and awareness. Conflict arises from ignorance and the confusion brought about by only partial knowledge. Best to either know everything or know nothing. Partial knowledge means that there is also ignorance, and the problem with partial knowledge is that it offers a security that makes the insecurity of partial ignorance (knowing that you don't know) difficult to chose. We have a natural affinity to security and a natural aversion to insecurity. This situation poses a real and very deep problem to the student of Tai Chi. It is why so many students stop progressing, especially the ones who start teaching, despite the hours of practice they continue to devote to the art. What it boils down to is that the knowledge you house must be in your energy and your connectivity, and the temptation to bring that knowledge into the rational mind and make patterns, techniques and treatises about it, must be resisted. It is when the knowledge comes into your mind and you start to think you know because you can communicate about it, that you stop knowing where it really matters – in the heart. Those of us well-educated are far happier with mindful knowledge than heartful knowledge because it offers a way to outshine those around us. And yet the mind cannot connect, not usefully anyway, it is too slow and too separate – it connects to compete and not to join – it has no spiritual dimension. For all but the extremely advanced the heart and mind are almost mutually exclusive. Bringing them together is, in a sense, the task at hand. This task is only possible if you have the courage to chose the awareness that comes from knowing nothing – if you have the courage to stop knowing with the head and start connecting with the heart. The heart must become dominant – almost a bully – if our Tai Chi is going to be anything more than pat, flat Forms and lip service to connexion (which is what most partner work is).