Faith is connexion to a source of energy. In taiji it starts (and ends) with root.

Men believe they are free precisely because they are conscious of their volitions and desires; yet concerning the causes that have determined them to desire and will they have not the faintest idea.

Faith liberates energy, and lends power to life. Without it one relies on knowledge and experience, which are a type of faith but far too literal to yield much power. Faith allows you to desolidify without losing your being.

dedication must be handled with a light touch

We forgive once we give up attachment to our wounds.

seeing the world as an open flux of possibilities

calm & stable

Mind in dantien : gut feelings take precedence over heart and head. Gut is pure sympathy – resonance – immanence. A blocked or sluggish gut is one full of shit, actual or metaphorical. Constipation – the refusal of feelings to emerge. Mind in dantien means listen to your gut – heed the belly – don't repress. As I write this, 4.30 in the morning, little Uri next door wakes sobbing from a bad dream.

mischief & vitality

to suspend the condition of having form, so that a new possibility can emerge

without sacrifice the spirit cannot be free

the soul is not perfectly beatified until she casts herself into the desolate Deity where neither act nor form exists and there, merged in the void, loses herself: as self she perishes, and has no more to do with things than she had when she was not ... now, dead to self, she is alive in God

The labour of gratitude accomplishes the transformation that a gift promises.

Root is my physicality bound with that of the Earth – a relationship enabled by gravity. What weakens the root, and eventually eradicates it altogether, is the mind's conviction that it doesn't need the Earth, the mind's assumption of immortality. My physical body is perishable – this is my only certainty, my mortality – and the weight of death – immanent or impending – is what makes my root strong, because gravity just isn't enough on its own. The root isn't only a physical earthing, it is a sobering of the mind, a control of the spirit.

Instantaneous decision is a mark of emotional and moral life.

All energy starts with the gift of touch and the desire for touch – full and empty. When these exist together then there can be exchange and reciprocity – movement. The kiss, the handshake, the embrace; massage, healing.

the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking

If you have a fearless and noble, yet reflective, heart then the work is not difficult. If you don't (and believe me we don't) then the work is well-nigh impossible, yet all the more necessary. It is a path well-trodden, and thousands have made the same mistakes we are making, and have had the same insights we are having. There is nothing unique in our struggle or our journey – we are just one amongst countless who may or may not make it. Once we have the humility to face and accept this fact then our path will be truer; we will no longer be diverted by either the need to express (tell someone about it) or the need to understand (tell ourselves about it).

whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept ... the gift must always move

selflessness, not self-expression, lies at the root of all creative acts

Duality, as motor or machine, is a line travelling in both directions. In one we have differentiation – each splitting into two – the explosion of reality into its infinitely dense texture. In the other we have integration – each seeking, proposing, its opposite and then embracing in a figure of eight – unity consuming reality. Our method is relaxation, which in taiji is never a sinking into a low-energy steady state, but rather a means of travelling in both directions at once. In this sense relaxation is simply a physical energetic acceptance of the unthinkableness of reality; and our means of production.

The key to the art is softness.

This site of Paul Brennan's is quite a resource.

the ultimate and last end of this chase is the capture of a fugitive and wild prey, through which the hunter becomes the hunted

Anything, other than love, in the mind, and the spine locks up. So love is simply the soft energy that naturally fills a relaxed space.

"Yesterday, a friend of Eitan slept over. He bumped his head. Eitan proceeded to place his hands gently on his head and said, "I am healing you." He kept his hands there for a few moments, moving them slightly every now and then. I was amazed because he has not really seen anything of the sort. I asked him who taught him this. He said, "No one." His friend said, "His heart taught him." Eitan said, "My head and my heart." It was a beautiful moment." 

a new vision of the mutual intercalation of material and spiritual forces

One of the first things the taiji student must learn to do is distinguish between a movement produced by force (muscular effort) and a movement precipitated by release and relaxation. There is a world of difference.

until the maker becomes unmade

We strive for knowledge and understanding only to acquire the wisdom to let go of the need to know and understand. Then we are ignorant, but it is a learned ignorance that belies a deeper wisdom, the wisdom of acceptance rather than understanding.

to liberate sexuality not only from reproduction but also from genitality

When a wild horse is tamed and effectively domesticated it is referred to as being broken: it's spirit has been broken rendering it slave to its owner. In a sense we are no different, our spirits have been broken by the need to conform to arbitrary models of respectability, hence the prevailing depression in/of our civilized society. We desperately need to heal our broken spirits, and reclaim our long lost ferality, not with antidepressants but by intelligently searching out oppression (always the cause of depression) and fighting it. Real passion always leads to confrontation and conflict because it reveals limitations and constraints that, in a state of passion, are intolerable. This is something fighters and athletes, those who use spirit to battle physical limitations, understand well, and which is why taiji, our chosen discipline, is primarily a physical and fighting art.

being is not essentially substance, but unfolding power and dynamic process

Before I can connect heart to heart I must allow the Earth to reach up through my heels and hips and into my chest and head to take away my anxiety. Only when my heart has been so cleansed is it ready to accept the Other. This is a mother's compassion – to comfort with the simplest of messages: "Child, you are not alone."

We are made of all these depths and distances, of these intensive souls which develop and are re-enveloped.

Sink & Relax is more divine imperative than principle. My response – Bum In – allows me to stand up to God – to glory in him. The other principles, which spring naturally from the structure of my human body, allow me to engage on the horizontal plane with similarly embedded entities.

hazardous & heretical

the presentation of the unconscious, not the representation of consciousness

experimental & hazardous

Turning, rather than evasion, is a way of entering and penetrating reality, in much the same way that a corkscrew penetrates the cork by turning.

Taiji is an embrace, an embrace of seemingly irreconcilable opposites, and through the embrace it creates working relationships. The organ of embrace is the heart – an eminent container – empty of itself, yet able to accept any guests.

As the decades slowly pass, one becomes taiji, and it is only with that becoming that one truly understands – stands under, fully immersed. Taiji is simply the Supreme Ultimate – the Yin/Yang symbol. The circle represents containment, unity, the body, the Form, the only thing I ever know. This body embraces duality – the yin and the yang – and that embrace contains and accepts duality – the double nature of Nature. Equilibrium.

it is only under certain intense conditions that the real is conceivable

well, I'm a mother & my softness can't be held in

the infinite vanity of everything

A concept is an image that works.

Mother Earth. The Earth is my mother, yet it works, always, both ways. If the Earth is my mother then I am child of the Earth, and in the same way that the behaviour, state, thoughts, health of my own children affect me, so I affect the Earth. This is the sense of my deep responsibility to that beneath my feet, but also to my species, my tribe, my family, my destiny; they all bear me, in all senses of the word.

To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities. What is to come? I know not.

the irresistible desire to be myself

Hardness is a stone in the mind.

to feel intensely in the heart what it is to be non-human, even if it's just becoming a plant, becoming animal, becoming molecular, becoming mountain, becoming rock

Whoever teaches you taiji gives you a great gift, which, if you treat it well, will prove your best friend and ally, always available to settle, regulate and stimulate your energy. Who dare ask for more?

Anything this side of the point of failure is merely keeping up appearances – conning oneself.

allow the line of hills to come between you
and resolve your contradictions

The poet is someone who has nothing to say except what language lets. And ‘let’ is an old, odd word in English, that means both permit (let the children play) and prohibit (let and hindrance). Language lets, poets listen, and that listening is their main responsibility, when coupled with what language lets them, makes them say, keeps them from saying. Maybe the deepest responsibility of the poet is the simplest: Keep talking.

An inferior intelligence delights in categorising, whereas a superior intelligence delights in its inability and refusal to categorise. In other words a superior intelligence is acutely aware of its own limitations and ultimately it's incapacity to truly understand reality.

When I truly see this neurotic need to commentate as the fear and avoidance of beckoning depth then I will end this folly and simply meditate.

Resist sedation, especially that of consumerism.

We are all prisoners. Prisoners of habit, conditioning, ego. The human spirit cannot tolerate this, so, despite the fact that society, family, and even the individual adorns the prison with enough creature comforts to make it appealing, spirit will always struggle to break free. The so called free society we live in robs us of revolutionary impulse, hence the deep conservatism of today's youth, and we forget not only how to fight but why we must fight. To break free of our prison we must find its walls and burrow through. Such an endeavour is distressing but exciting. Ultimately, if we do the work, life itself is prison, and death makes perfect sense.

Spirit is the desire to be free.

Make allies of the wrathful deities.

The relaxed individual is simply a tube into which, through which and out of which energy flows. In taiji we work first on channeling energy down through the body and into the Earth. Once this flow is established naturally, that is, joyfully, an upward flow of quite a different quality and order appears, a carrier or conveyor of simple goodness, absolutely untainted by self.

Listening. This word, perhaps more than any other, sums up the essence of taiji. (Yielding, our close contender, is simply the art of acting upon what is heard.) It should be clear, having said this, why honesty is so important. What we listen to, namely energy, is so subtle, so delicate, so open to suggestion, that anything in our mind and heart will change it and possibly corrupt it. If the mind has already decided what it wants to hear then the listening process is largely ruined. So our touch and our presence must be so light and soft as to be elusive. Yet, paradoxically, our listening must bristle with the desire to hear – our listening doesn't just hear, it sucks what is heard into existence – otherwise yielding is always too late. Taiji takes so long to learn because listening is only true when the heart is ready to yield – to change – to fight, and to possibly die.

Most of us, especially the educated, use the mind not to engage reality but to suppress life's intensity. It's what makes the average middle-class adult so shitless and predictable. They spend all their energy keeping their artificial world in place, with none left over for their soul.

I cannot change the past, nor count on – account for – the future. My only chance is now, and any truce, no matter how uneasy, is only for now: this point, this time. This is single-weightedness – a deep commitment to the spirit of togetherness.

Anxiety constitutes a struggle to discriminate – to make sense. It necessitates a pinching of the root – a clenching in the groin.

Double weightedness springs from the conviction that two can, for all intents and purposes, be pacified into one. It amounts to ignorance and laziness, and results in loss of spirit – grossness.

Taiji is a method for attending to leakage. Whilst my energy is leaking, either through bad posture, bad diet, excessive sex, anxiety, etc, I will not be able to respond honestly and immediately to stimuli – I will be irresponsible – I will break promises. All martial artists strive to reach a permanent state of mind where their responses are unthinking and pure – so quick they seem to precede whatever prompted them. And all who achieve it will admit that it is only possible by pledging life to the pursuit of truth. A trothplight.

I think the significance of the work is in its effort not in its intentions. And that effort is a state of mind, an activity, an interaction with the world.

We cultivate the quiet mind not to better attend the things of this world, but to enter an alternative world – the world of energy. Unlike the objective world, the world of energy admits no spectators, only full participants. The qualification is a fearless spirit.

Modern civilized man has built himself an existence overseen by the principles of health, safety and security, designed to avoid a confrontation with death at all costs. Our work aims to awaken the joy and delight that manifests when these principles crumble and are replaced by energy and spirit.