Romantic delusion : someone else can make me happy.

The principle of hospitality.

Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.

Emma Goldman

Feel at home

dance meaning

A hospitable relaxation : extend a warm welcome to all.

Body : my own specifically and the physical world generally. Objects as vessels, vehicles and conduits for energy; and their interactions.

Spirit : that part of my vitality that engages reality : my readiness and willingness to fight or fuck.

Heart : raw and vulnerable – so open it hurts – in the face of the other. Boundaries melt and we fall in love and we make love : we create (glow/grow) together.

All love is originally love of touch.

Body, spirit, heart : connexion, expression, creation.

If you must search then search beneath belief.

Is all that's required is that I be still and listen to what's there. Then everything else follows – flows.

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.

Albert Einstein

Relaxation without love is incomplete – external.

Photo: Corinna

Love springs internal

Today the young singers do not develop a basic vocal technique. They don't know how to breathe and support and project the sound... It's so unrelaxed. There seems to be no repose, no feeling of ease, no feeling of continual line, of breathing and projecting the sound, and the excitement of singing and giving it to the public.

Joan Sutherland

Is all we can know is our own body – by being fully in it.
Is all we can express is our own spirit – by being fully of it.

As the Taoists say, Life starts at 50 : the age at which I finally become fully aware that centre is within my body and not embedded mysteriously in ideology, teaching, tribe, romance or energy, and that happiness is simply being in, and therefore operating from, my centre. Then, and only then, every action drives me deeper into my centre, and the possibility of being drawn from that centre – of unhappiness – becomes ever more remote. Happiness in this sense is not a feeling of comfort or pleasure or contentment but a feeling – a knowledge – a realisation – of full capability.

Don't cheat

Photo: Chris Laver

Opening/closing is the breathing of my being. It is the motor that not only propels me through life but also draws life to and through me. It requires a strong and stable foundation to function at all well. This foundation is the support of my delicately aligned skeleton as outcrop of Earth : that is, me connected to the ground. Any work I do (on opening/closing) will bring me back, if I am at all honest, to the inadequacy of my internal quiet – the loving support I offer the life that flows through me.

Enlightenment is, I guess, what's left once the indulgence of self has finally lifted.

To understand Nature I must become natural : a part of Nature.

Falling into God's loving hands

Relaxation is light; collapse is heavy.

Stand on your own two feet

Ego – and everything it spawns – is the only unnatural thing in the universe : it doesn't belong.

More than enough is too much

Depression is a consequence of forcing the world to my own design : not listening.

Truth is lived, not taught.

Herman Hesse

Energy is the consequence of connexion
Action is the consequence of disconnexion

Yielding is internalization

The risk is in the release

If you don’t think you have the blues, just keep living.

Buddy Guy

Heart and knees together : both release to take me forward.

Tao is without limitation; its depth is the source of whatever is.

Truth resonates.

This is all there is (to communication).

To find interest in a place outside man's attention.

Hamlet Hovsepian

A soft person embodies a multitude of possibility : not just malleable but generously suggesting.

FORGET SELF AND BECOME ONE WITH THE TAO

Just a reminder.

How do you take the risk?
Just don't think about it.

Spring is opening.
I can smell the different perfumes
Of the white weeds used in the dance.

Reaching the next level is a matter of ditching what I (think I) know : progress is not cumulative but revolutionary.

Connexion demands that I touch and leave interpretation aside. A task that requires me to be as vulnerable as I am present.

When I am fully present my body loses its corporeality and becomes energetic.

stuttering aorta
mortal song
unbidden and compact as the bud

Ray DiPalma

Don't trust the senses – we see what we want to see : our own reflection everywhere. If perception and hence conception cannot support (be trusted) then what can? Specifically : the connexion. Generally : the teaching.

Breakthrough comes with a weakening of resistance and a deepening of resolve. Both forms of softness.

The mind congratulates itself with extrapolation and satisfies itself with reduction.

Whether I learn what is to be learned is ultimately neither a matter of talent nor application but destiny : the confluence of life and work. Life's work.

The temperature of the mynde folowes the constitucion of the bodie.

The cost of freedom is everything.

The good student aspires to truth
The mediocre student is inspired by truth
The poor student derides the truth

Avoid trickery

When I take principle into my body not only the flesh and bone become imbued but the cells and even the molecules. This process of deep and intense internalization takes decades – a lifetime. It starts when the mind finally yields. Yielding mind.

A path fraught with pitfalls.

The poor student always thinks he knows best.

The good student is not only willing but destined to go all the way.

Ensure you teach to enlighten rather than to maintain the empire.

I can only know my own body. If I wish to know anything else I must bring it into my body.

It is difficult for a thoughtful intelligent person to appreciate that understanding in taichi has little to do with the mind. Understanding in taichi is embodiment : I understand a point of principle only once I embody it, a process that requires rigorous and lengthy training under a qualified master. The master may explain a little with words but only to assist the mind to come into accord with the body and stop getting in the way. The student who is unaware of embodiment will happily memorize his master's words and repeat them willy-nilly to his own students as though this amounted to transmission; it does not, it amounts to malpractice.

Photo: Abby Moore

The attack must be blind because there is nothing to attack.

Outrageous fortune : not to suffer but engage.

In other words, not a question of being or not being, but how to be AND not to be : how to be active & passive, aggressive & benign, giving & receiving, trusting & supporting, front-foot & back-foot, at the same time.

everything is antithetically arranged

Wilhelm Reich

The first requirement for good studentship is attendance.

Happy New Year

The Approach on the Body Level

Our body is a beautiful musical instrument, like a Stradivarius, but, it must be tuned. We are the tuner. To tune this instrument that is so sensitive, so secret, calls for a complete metamorphosis of oneself, and this can only happen when we are one with our instrument, with our body. We must be very sensitive to tune our bodies. We must find just the right tone for tuning, because the tone is not only vibration, it is more than vibration. 

One tone contains all the tones. One chord attunes all the other chords. We need to have a bipolar listening, listening inside, attuning to the inside and to the outside. We must listen to what happens inside, in our body, and to what also comes from the so-called outside. Strictly speaking, there is no outside and inside. 

This beautiful instrument has to be sensed. It is in sensing that we come to the right tuning. It calls for a very high art of listening. All our muscle structure should be maintained in tune in inaction and also in action. It is a bipolar listening. We must become able to listen. Hearing these fine vibrations comes first in meditation. There is a very important moment when you listen inside, when you listen to the listening itself. When you are aware in listening, there is no listener and nothing is listened to. There is only listening.

It is tremendous to discover oneself in listening. But first there is listening to an object, then comes listening to ourself. When listening is Silence, our musical instrument, our body, is completely penetrated by this objectless listening. Then there is something born that is beyond the human being. 

You are not body, senses and mind. Really live in the absence of what you are not and this reality will be the background of life. Live in the absence of yourself. In the absence of yourself there is presence. We should take every opportunity to listen to ourselves without directing, without changing, or looking for something new. When we listen to ourselves and sustain the listening, there’s transformation, there’s a kind of metamorphosis. 

This directionless listening is fixed neither in the forehead, nor in the heart, nor in the abdominal region. Listening is absolutely objectless. It is really a bird that flies everywhere. See when it lands. The moment you become aware that you fix it, in that awareness an emptiness will appear and this becomes openness. Don’t put the bird in a cage. Open all the doors. 

Be aware in the morning that before the body wakes up there’s another kind of waking up. Then you feel the body waking up in this already awakeness. See how the body appears to you in this moment. You will feel how the old conditioned body tries to come back, the old thoughts, feelings, habits and so on. Go to the tactile sensation. It may first appear in the hands. Evoke this tactility, and you will feel a letting go. Sense it. It is enough. 

Become aware of the shoulders and also of the forehead. You should let go completely in your bed. Put all the weight of your body, head, shoulders, shoulder blades, hands, and the legs, on the bed, on the ground, until all the parts are heavy. Have the impression that the energy comes from the earth and it comes to the human body and the body is inter-penetrated by this energy. It is something beautiful. You will become aware that your tensions are defences which are reactions. Let it become so tangible for you in the morning that you keep this knowing as the background throughout the day. It is a kind of inner touching. You feel much more alive. It is only possible to go beyond the contraction of your body by sensing your body, by being aware. 

When there comes this expansion of the body, you become free from the forehead, and you feel your self localized behind, in your old brain. Don’t strain to achieve it, it belongs to you, it makes you free from the body, it makes you free from space, from direction. I would say, you’re beyond space. 

You must become free from the meditator. This is a very deep saying. Make it your own. There is no meditator, there is only meditation. The mind can be still without trying to be still. It is only in your absence that there is stillness, presence. In the absence that you are not, there is presence. But it is not an objective presence, this presence. It is a double absence. And when you have it, don’t move away from it. At the slightest motion you go away from it. 

Abandon all residue in the forehead. Only then can knowledge become being the knowing. Knowledge takes place in the forehead, in front of you. Being knowledge is localized nowhere. But temporarily it is localized as if behind you. This feeling of going behind is very important because it takes you away from the factory of thoughts in the forehead. When you are localized behind you, at the base of the skull, you cannot think. Even the impulse to think dies down. No formulation can occur when you are localized behind. But eventually even this subtle localization dissolves and you find yourself nowhere, living in nowhere.