31 December 2014
Turning, forever turning. Away from what is known, understood, glimpsed; toward nothing in particular. Turning for its own sake; for the sake of the energy it evokes. Turning disrupts vectorial space: no longer uniform or three-dimensional, space becomes alive with ever-shifting centres of intensity. Turning is the one thing Taiji has that meditation doesn't. And this is their fundamental difference: meditation is about acquiring an awareness of unmediated presence whereas Taiji is all about losing one's self in a world of energy.
Meditation without mediation.
Reflect on the content of doubt.
Delete the word.
Place the intricate housing.
Haunt structure.
Give back to history and evolution.
Start again.
Stripped of innate character.
A circle is not sufficiently tortuous.
This eternal question of gravity.
Stopping the world as middle and end.
Expression embodies a difference.
Sensitive aggregates are themselves creative.
Mechanics pave the way.
Unleashing dangerous revolutionary flows.
Absorbed under close surveillance.
This insatiable desire for ambiguous positions.
The invention of new emotions.
Prefabricated models of meaning and commitment.
You will find lift while proliferating escape plans.
A mutant form of liberation.
Concerned neutrals can achieve a revolution.
The paradigm of resistance imprisoned.
Capture the pressing need.
The euphoria of creation is based on conformity.
How can a new identity be enforced?
Challenges.
A return to the tragic note.
It is unclear where this is going.
Who can help but hear a lament?
Strategic belief.
A connection colonized the body.
The intolerable clash of innocence.
An antidote to feeling.
A heterodox incendiary line.
Our shame in being human.
Interdisciplinary vitality.
Unruly practices.
Filtered and go wild.
Crazy textures giving a haptic affect.
Never believe that space will suffice.
A forced peace.
A smooth capture.
Traces of consciousness.
Energy is able to transform.
A higher algebra of spirit.
Inhabiting the body.
The idea.
Direction.
Irreducible to abstract forces.
To dream nonsense and understand.
Trimmed to basics.
Rupture the collective anus.
Delimit the ignorant.
Locate the blacksmith.
Reflect on the content of doubt.
Delete the word.
Place the intricate housing.
Haunt structure.
Give back to history and evolution.
Start again.
Stripped of innate character.
A circle is not sufficiently tortuous.
This eternal question of gravity.
Stopping the world as middle and end.
Expression embodies a difference.
Sensitive aggregates are themselves creative.
Mechanics pave the way.
Unleashing dangerous revolutionary flows.
Absorbed under close surveillance.
This insatiable desire for ambiguous positions.
The invention of new emotions.
Prefabricated models of meaning and commitment.
You will find lift while proliferating escape plans.
A mutant form of liberation.
Concerned neutrals can achieve a revolution.
The paradigm of resistance imprisoned.
Capture the pressing need.
The euphoria of creation is based on conformity.
How can a new identity be enforced?
Challenges.
A return to the tragic note.
It is unclear where this is going.
Who can help but hear a lament?
Strategic belief.
A connection colonized the body.
The intolerable clash of innocence.
An antidote to feeling.
A heterodox incendiary line.
Our shame in being human.
Interdisciplinary vitality.
Unruly practices.
Filtered and go wild.
Crazy textures giving a haptic affect.
Never believe that space will suffice.
A forced peace.
A smooth capture.
Traces of consciousness.
Energy is able to transform.
A higher algebra of spirit.
Inhabiting the body.
The idea.
Direction.
Irreducible to abstract forces.
To dream nonsense and understand.
Trimmed to basics.
Rupture the collective anus.
Delimit the ignorant.
Locate the blacksmith.
Meditating through the early hours. At one point the dogs started barking, set off by the arrival of wild boar. Strange creatures, they only come at night – huge black shadows that pass very close and make your hackles rise. And this is the thing about meditation: if you relax the mind quiet then the mysterious world of energy will open up and possess you. But use tension (force) and energy will always evade you.
30 December 2014
29 December 2014
28 December 2014
24 December 2014
22 December 2014
21 December 2014
Even with the best will in the world, the best ear to hear, the best heart, any and every communication is fraught with interpretive variability, and therefore endangered by the possibility and probability of misreading. This is what gives the cosmos, gives Nature, its infinite richness: mutability – the fact that life and existence are effectively a game of Chinese Whispers.
Listening with approval; never judgment. Like a good therapist – a psychoanalyst say – who struggles to remain as open as possible so that the patient's mind, feeling freer than usual, can stop thinking (worrying) and start to reveal itself. The analyst says as little as possible – remains out of sight even; just nods and prods every now and then.
20 December 2014
Thinking is a defence mechanism against the call of spirit. The ultimate act of avoidance: it creates so much internal noise that energy is effectively blotted out of consciousness. When we talk of listening in Taiji we don't really mean listening to words or thoughts, but listening to energy – attending the pain and suffering of the Other, their intention and intentions, and, through the ethical act of yielding, becoming appropriate to that energy. This becoming has nothing to do with thinking about what is heard and then deciding how to respond; such a process always takes me out of real time, out of their time, and disrupts the natural rhythm, the flow, of the relationship. It is more an unconscious, or at least unthinking, change of heart, brought about by a call to respond, a responsibility to rise above the morass of my own suffering and attend to theirs. Nothing is quite so healing as such an act of compassion.
19 December 2014
Ever have a feeling of terror and panic when, for example, you see something in the darkness that is momentarily unrecognisable? This is a true response to a world that hasn't yet been identified and named, a world effectively unsullied by language, but clearly rich with feeling. We don't realise it but our usual perceptions, as well as giving us information about the world, push that world away, to a safe distance, at least, giving us, we hope, sufficient time to process the information, and choose a course of action. Meditation is a space and time where/when we endeavour to remove mental formations from the mind. Not only thoughts but any mental acts designed to keep the world at bay – to protect us from the onslaught of reality. Such formations are always fear-based, hiding behind a facade of reason and propriety. To maintain a poised equilibrium whilst being bombarded from all sides by a world intent on getting in and waking us up: this is meditation. The Internal opens up when we have eradicated all interiority, all self, all selfishness; in particular all self-pity.
18 December 2014
16 December 2014
15 December 2014
13 December 2014
Ever mindful of the Earth's claim to my body. Each joint attached by a taut barely elastic thread of gravitational flux pulling ever downwards. This is how we face death, and this is how we eradicate ego – by allowing it no space in which to flourish. Ego thrives on my selfish and neurotic desire to be free of Earth, free of death.
The honour in living a life stripped, as much as is humanly possible, of all illusion if not delusion. This is the meaning of relaxed shoulders: constantly drawn down by broken (bent) elbows and wrists until gravity becomes embedded in my being. A veil unfurling, dropping to the ground, all around. A connexion to the grim reality of what Buddhists call suffering but which we call life. The life of a warrior.
12 December 2014
11 December 2014
A movement, a flow, a letting, so rich, that, for all intents and purposes, its dimensionality is infinite. And so, any attempt to represent it, to pin it down or define it, will, necessarily, clot and stanch it. Instead, go with the flow, and rightly see any attempts, from self or from beyond, to regulate it, as the work of the enemy of spirit and process, as an imposition of state. This is the function of meditation: to clear the mind, recognise the enemy, and find a way through.
10 December 2014
Every concept is accompanied by its equally valid opposite. Take the beautiful concept of destiny: the singularly significant life, a divine thread invested by the gods, the resonance of greatness echoing out from an evental assembling of power that a life can be when the destined focus their mind and spirit. This is always accompanied by the equally beautiful concept of multiplicity: a life lived as a series of almost arbitrary situations, void of singular power, by the absolute awareness of the sacredness of every possibility. Destiny is for the hero, strong of spirit and strong of ego, destined, above all, to suffer in the struggle to fill a life with power. Non-destiny is for the non-hero, void of ego and significance, yet full of a gentle spirit that invests each trivial action with poetic grace. The Greek tragic hero and the Zen master.
09 December 2014
08 December 2014
The idea of meditation is not simply that I train my mind to give up its neurotic chatter, but that I strive for such whilst the body is aligned and aligning energetically. Spiritual work – that which endeavours to free the spirit from the ego – requires a rigorous physical component – real hard work. This is not to say that the energetic has the same structures and follows the same rules as the material – nothing could be further from the truth. The two fundamental laws of the commonsense material world: that of cause and effect, and that of non-contradiction, simply do not apply to spirit because in the world of spirit time is otherwise. Time is not something that binds one inexorably to a plodding linear trudge, but a swirl of energy that can be dipped into, slipped through or past, played with, as long as one has the requisite softness, lightness and humour.
07 December 2014
05 December 2014
How am I in the world? How is my subjectivity constructed? These philosophical questions are maybe best considered in relation to my attitude to inevitable times of difficulty or wretchedness. Do I try to remove the misery (talk to friends, visit the therapist, get high, etc.) or do I sink into my wretchedness, intensify it, and allow it to open up new becomings that I could neither have anticipated nor imagined. The first approach is what in Taiji we call avoidance: constantly putting off difficulties to a later time. It is a slack and ultimately unhealthy attitude to time and destiny. The latter we call yielding: confronting a problem as it happens, albeit slant, and allowing that confrontation to rouse my spirit and transform me into a capable and inevitable victor. Yielding requires me to believe not only in my own capacities, and in the power of spirit, but in pure time, or, what in Taiji, we call destiny.
02 December 2014
When you sink in Taiji the knee releases forwards and out (away), and the hip releases back and in (toward the tailbone). This stretches the femur and tends it to horizontal. Both releases affect the heart: the releasing knee causes the heart to open and melt forward, and the releasing hip causes the heart to focus and centre itself.
01 December 2014
Listening, as we all know, is immensely difficult. On a simplistic and trivial level, that of receiving information and processing it, we do it all the time with various levels of success. This we call selfish listening because it is a listening by which the self survives and flourishes – a listening that is always comparing what is heard to what has already been assimilated. Taiji listening is largely just this: a listening sufficient to win the fight. True listening, on the other hand, listens from a place other than ego, a place of emptiness where the only thing in attendance is death. A listening with no interest in what is heard. Pure listening. Pure connexion.
30 November 2014
29 November 2014
28 November 2014
Spiritual work is all about breaking the spell of ego, of selfishness, of the cozy world. This always requires the falling under a different spell – that of a teacher and a teaching – for however long it takes. Eventually however that spell must also be broken so that you can enter the world as it is: a ground – a battle ground – of spirit.
The past decade, for me, has been informed, if not governed, by three quotes:
1. Every entity has feelings, including electrons (AN Whitehead)
2. In my past life I was a cloud, and I was very happy being a cloud (Thich Nhat Hanh)
3. I fell in love with Taiji (John Kells).
The first two stress my continuity with the rest of creation, in particular with a non-organic life independent of awareness and consciousness, and the third expresses just how all-consuming my passion and devotion to Taiji must become.
The first stage of Taiji is the development of a root. This is a protracted process of switching allegiance from unreliable modes of support such as family, State, culture, identity, ego, to the eminently reliable physical support of the Earth – the ground beneath one's feet and the all-embracing field of gravity. This work (and it is work – hard work) must become central to one's life otherwise it just won't happen. Without a daily practice regime that steadily becomes the focus and core of not only the day but a life, there may still be hope (attending weekly classes) but no progress beyond the superficial adoption of a Taiji veneer.
27 November 2014
25 November 2014
The external is known – captured – by naming. Giving and calling a name doesn't simply attach a label, though, it bestows an essence and permanence that then resists the energy from which the named emerge and immerge. Reality, or at least the world, the mind, is then a space littered with names, and, it would seem, by its very nature, language provides such spaces and little else. Our struggle is to clear the space of names and naming so that it can fill with flux and becoming. Poetry has always been a means of using language differently, stretching and twisting it, to transform the mind and evoke energy and spirit. When the poem is over the world is momentarily freed of my hardness, my discourse, and starts to hum. Taiji, of course, is also poetry, created from a language of movement and posture.
21 November 2014
20 November 2014
18 November 2014
Beware the Taiji slump. It is only the lower dantien that connects and roots into the Earth so that the upper dantien can reach for the Heavens, leaving the middle dantien (heart) free to interact with whomever I'm facing. This means that I need to get used to splitting my mind three-ways so that I can work all three connexions at the same time all the time.
17 November 2014
16 November 2014
Try to remember the feeling of a heart rent by grief or rejection – lost love. The unbearable openness, the known world crumbling. The good student feels this as truth, and that gives her the courage to not only bear it but, through decades of practice, to eventually transform it to bliss. The poor student feels simply pain which they endeavor to avoid at all costs. The mediocre student also feels it as pain, a pain they pull away from only to realise that it was simply the pain of being intensely alive. They must then not only live with regret but also with the knowledge that, in all likelihood, they will always lack the courage.
15 November 2014
14 November 2014
If therapy aims to heal the wounds, or at least plaster them over, then spiritual work opens them up and encourages them to bleed. Wounds, traumas, are not negatives to be vanquished for the sake of an integrated ego – conformity, but gateways to the soul of creativity. Ask any artist worth their salt.
13 November 2014
When the heart drops the belly rises, and when the belly sinks the heart lifts. This is the nature of relationship in Taiji – never locked, always equilibrating – elastic. A locked relationship is one ruled by anxiety. Equilibrium, founded on trust and relaxation, is always breathing, expanding and contracting, letting go only to return, differently.
Yielding is a joyful (affirmative) technique for transforming force into energy. It does this by playing with the equilibrium between active and reactive forces such that turning moments are introduced into the system. The play is creative – spontaneous and unconsidered – and is an attempt to restore equilibrium by creating new configurations. Ask any master of yielding what they do in the heat of the moment and the reply will always be: I have no idea.
12 November 2014
Practice through repetition can take two forms: the repetitions generate gradual improvement – the case of learning a skill, or the repetitions create a series of events – this would be more like repeating a performance (or repeating a well-known Form) where success is measured not by accuracy but by the life and spirit invested in or generated by the performance. For example Miles Davis performed If I Were A Bell thousands of times in the 50's and 60's, yet each recorded instance, of which there are numerous, is a singularly beautiful event: each comes alive on its own terms.
10 November 2014
Dedicated longtime students must, at some point (hopefully before it's too late), ask themselves if their devotion and loyalty is serving them or is it just a sign of dependence and fear of breaking a long corrupted relationship. It is really the teacher's responsibility to attend to such situations but they generally don't: a case of mistaking weakness for hope.
09 November 2014
I suspect the reason children generally possess such a light carefree physicality is that their heads haven't yet learnt to lock onto their environment in order to force it to conform to their expectations of it. They are largely free of ideas and ideals, but with wonderful imaginations. They live in a world of make-believe, which, in a sense, is the best form of faith.
In order to house the crazy multiplicity of becomings and contradictions that is reality in all its glory, without losing one's mind (without actually becoming schizophrenic), requires a life devoted not to thought or creativity or expression, but to the opposite of these: no-mind. Only once one has achieved a level of control over the ego can the heart-mind, empty then of self, fill with the cosmos.
"Cease activity and return to stillness
And that stillness will be ever more active."
08 November 2014
A good teacher is someone who shows you where you are failing. They are, and will always be, the least popular people on the planet. There is a Taiji adage: the best teachers have the fewest students. If a good teacher wants to earn a respectable living by teaching then he has to learn to constantly bite his tongue.
07 November 2014
The combination of relaxed movement and a quiet mind allows active affects to emerge from the energy, the unconscious, the depths. These feelings become pointers, embryo thoughts, inklings, that affect, correct, my life. It then truly becomes my life. And this is the responsibility, the destiny, of all of us – to use life to investigate life so that life can draw us to live a better life – one less conditioned and less conditional – one that realises a humanity and then rejects it as yet another snare, another distraction.
06 November 2014
Meditation teachers are very fond of imagery. One popular image used to promote the notion of stillness is that of cloudy water being allowed to settle so that it becomes clear and transparent – see-through (like most images, it privileges the sense of seeing over the other senses). If we take the image further we can see that the settled sediment becomes a thick sticky mud and there is always the possibility that our refined stillness will cause us to become entrapped in that sludge – stuck in the mud. Taiji turning stirs up the sediment, causing it to rise and swirl around us. As the turning becomes more vigorous turbulence sets in and the swirling (energy) takes on a life of its own. Now the image illustrates that creativity requires a shift from the passive extensive realm with its neurotic concern with what's out there, to an active intensive realm where visibility is reduced to zero but life springs spontaneously and unpredictably forth from our own power.
Turning, perhaps the most important principle in Taiji, is not just a technique but a philosophy and a way of life. Greeting the becoming present, fresh and open, without the advantage of an extrapolated past. Turning my back on the past, the has been, which doesn't mean ignoring it but storing that energy in the back and developing hindsight. Returning with the light expectation, the hope, of change.
05 November 2014
04 November 2014
Taiji is a Taoist art and as such its fundamental principle is that of balance. In particular the balance or equilibrium of yin and yang. Neither choosing one over the other nor allowing them to fuse into a deathly stillness but keeping them always distinct (clearly distinguish full and empty) and always moving (suddenly appear, suddenly disappear). The mind eventually becomes mature and understanding enough to hold both together, and then one's whole being resonates with the hum of their oscillation.
The sinking associated with relaxation isn't just a release to gravity, it is also a sinking into time – back into time. A revitalisation of one's energetic past – a pure past that was never quite present – aswim with all that was and all that could have been – a tense language fails. Such a time is total – nonlinear, non-sequential – containing future(s) as well as past(s); an energetic continuum where life and death have neither relevance nor dominion.
03 November 2014
Whenever the teacher says something that the student finds threatening, either to their ego or their world order, the first response is always fear, we can't help it. This fear expresses itself in incredulity and protest – this is natural. It's what happens next that is all important. The good student will go home, clear their mind, relax and dwell on what has been said until they at least feel, if not totally understand, the truth behind it. They then act upon it. The mediocre student will almost immediately appeal to rational argument in their defence – they will build a case for their own position and create all sorts of rational but incorrect reasons for the teacher having uttered what they did. They resist. The poor student resorts to ridicule, mockery and laughter – they are so terrified that they cannot countenance any part of what was said – they basically have no idea.
02 November 2014
The thing that no philosopher has fully appreciated, not since the Greeks, is that to think the unthinkable – namely difference – requires an athlete's body and a warrior's spirit. Something has to hold you together and stop you from being destroyed by the tornado unleashed by true freedom. So, instead of the physical world offering a multitude of possibilities and the calculating mind anxiously making choices, the quiet mind creates a virtual ground which the body navigates, without thinking, with the aid of spirit.
It doesn't matter how advanced I think I am, how much work I think I've done, if I can't listen and take correction whenever it's offered (which is all the time — every second) then I'm useless. Remember, the work reduces us to the obedience of God, or Spirit, or Whatever; it doesn't, or shouldn't, puff us up.
01 November 2014
Meditation and fighting represent two temporal extremes. Meditation slow and passive, the gap between stimulus and response so stretched that effectively there is no response – only quiet acceptance or disinterest. Fighting struggles for a sensitivity that is so quick and immediate that effectively there is no gap between stimulus and response. Two extreme solutions to the problem of clearing the mind sufficient for spirit to manifest.
"Art has this strange prophetic function: it is made in the present, from the materials at hand, but calls out to something else. This is its future orientation." And this is the nature of progress: never a linear trudge from past to future through a passing present, but a call from/to a possible future (the lyrical dream), which, when heeded, vitalizes the present and brings new meaning to the past.
I cannot fight ego because 'I' is ego. The only things I can usefully fight are those parts of me that the ego has installed as impediments to spirit, namely fear and laziness. When spirit is strong and pure (detached from subjectivity) it will eventually subdue the ego until it is little more than an embarrassment. Fighting fear and laziness is a lifelong campaign. And remember: the worst form of laziness is working hard at the wrong thing: working in the service of ego.
There is always something rather pathetic and inconsequential about domesticated animals. We naturally sense that by robbing them of their wildness and spirit, and making them dependent upon us, they have been reduced to mere shadows of what they would be in the wild – in their natural state and habitat. This must be how the powers that be, all the more insidious and dangerous for being largely invisible, feel when they look at us.
31 October 2014
30 October 2014
We don't realize this because we no longer remember a condition prior to it, but when the mind thinks or calculates it doubts the heart. This doubt casts a pall – a heaviness – over the heart, effectively ruling it out as a usefully functioning leader of action, requiring the mind to make decisions instead. This is disastrous because the mind, eminently capable of working things out in its own time – on its own – is hopeless at working in real time – its timing is always off because it neither listens like the heart nor transforms like the heart. The head uses time whereas the heart makes time.
29 October 2014
The mind is naturally lazy and resents both the body and physical work. So, the first stage of taiji: relaxation, pacification, passivization, should be appreciated for what it is: only the first stage. The second stage is very much the opposite: getting into movement and intensity – tension, but a passing tension: energy. For this the work rate needs to be upped, not necessarily the hours but certainly the intensity, the passion, the speed. The Form is no longer a slow, flat, drift through space and time, but a breathing, heaving body, working faster (or slower) than the mind can manage (control). Movement for its own sake – energetic and energized. This is the martial aspect of taiji – fighting the enemy – your own mind; a fight from which spirit naturally rises. The sheer joy of physical work.
28 October 2014
27 October 2014
The natural condition of the heart is light, open and joyful, with a generous receptivity (a natural and effortless yielding). The Other – otherness – is natural (and necessary) stimulation to a healthy heart. The head, on the other hand, is always perplexed by otherness because, by definition, it cannot know it. Approaching otherness (anything real) with the head (mind) will inevitably crush the heart and rob it of its natural condition. This is the fundamental problem for all of us, the solution of which can only ever be the command decision to switch from head to heart.
When a root has been established the Earth becomes a source of energy that thrusts up through the body, battling the thinking mind's attempts to control from on high by depressing both the posture and the heart. In time, this fountain of energy from the root washes the spine, eradicating the ego-mind's physical foundation – a point on the spine opposite the solar plexus – and forcing the spine to effectively lengthen to include the lumbar region – a source of deep silent confidence. So, the individual has a choice: either worry from the solar plexus and develop a blocked hardened (and therefore safe) heart, or relax from the sacrum with an open (and therefore often unbearably vulnerable) heart.
25 October 2014
24 October 2014
23 October 2014
The point is never a catch phrase or punch line, not a thought held onto or followed, but simply the projection onto the ground of the axis of revolution. Like a spinning top or gyroscope that appears to be still or traces a seemingly random, though very rich, line: the intensity of its rotation focuses, funnels, the mind to its point of contact, as mass is flung outwards.
21 October 2014
20 October 2014
The majority oppresses with force (force is oppression), with mass, advantage in numbers. The minority then has no recourse other than to yield – to slip between the planes of oppression and somehow turn the weight of the majority against itself. This is a natural state of affairs, and is why force favors the strong and spirit favors the weak. So, if you are interested in spirit better become weak, not in your self, but comparatively.
It is not, and has never been, a matter of knowing, or of awareness, or even of consciousness. The internal things we work with cannot be known, and the more we try to know them, which means set them within external frameworks of reference and representation, the more we ruin them. This is why, it is, and has always been, a matter of faith.
Only through an encounter with the Other, with otherness, with pure externality, can the Internal open up and be perceived. This is because my being is necessarily external – hard, enduring, structured – and, for the internal element it contains, and which contains it, to be released, this being, and the structures it is composed of, compose it, must be disturbed if not ruptured, temporarily, or not.
19 October 2014
18 October 2014
17 October 2014
Learning something new, especially something as strange as taijiquan, obviously requires an external reference or standard: the teacher's taiji and the teacher's spirit. Once the learning is complete though, the real work, that of erasing external referents, internalizing the taiji, and coming to your own energy and power – spirit – becomes imperative.
Rational thought, being necessarily linear and objective, cannot come to grips with process, with the in-between of things, because process is wonderfully ungraspable. Try and you'll ruin it. Process can either be stood separate from and observed, in which case I'll be left behind pretty quickly, or joined and enjoyed, in which case all objectivity and linearity need to be abandoned. What takes their place though, viz spirit, is well worth it.
The reason we fill our minds with ceaseless chatter and our lives with endless activity is because the void is terrifying and must, we believe, be filled at all costs. Taiji, being a moving meditation, suggests that instead we move mindfully from one leg to the other, from one single-weighted stance to another, always passing through double-weightedness, never settling into it, and simply be comforted and quietened by the movement, like a baby being rocked to sleep. When the body moves correctly – single-weightedly, that is: energetically – the mind cannot think about other things because it is fully involved and committed to the movement. Then the energy cleans and conditions my being, preparing it for the beckoning unknown – the days' encounters.
16 October 2014
15 October 2014
Tension in the hips, shoulders and jaw blocks internal movement, allowing us to privilege the external. This is effectively enslaving ourselves to a world we can only realise through the senses - the world science concerns itself with. The world of feeling, on the other hand, the world of the artist, requires the internal to be mobile and motile, always ready to move and be moved, not so that I can wallow in sentiment, but so that I am motivated to act prior to thought without being careless. This is heart.
14 October 2014
Sink and relax is a simple admonition to let gravity in, to feel its constant infolding, its endless operation, its process. The effect of this, as well as a deep strength that builds from the ground up, is a complete disaffection with fantasy. Fantasy is an indulgence that creates reality without the need for connexion, without the need for heart, and the major breakthrough for the student of spirit is the understanding, which must come from their own work, that everything perceived or thought is fantasy, and that the real resides in the heart. This breakthrough marks the opening of the heart, an initiation into a world of feeling, which requires years of preparation, detaching from the illusion of sensation and the selfishness of sensitivity, which most of us take for feeling. It is a breakthrough that many spiritual seekers neglect and miss in their greedy search for full consciousness. The upper dantien, the one in the head, cannot open without the heart. It's higher light is meaningless without the deep dark stirrings of heart and the rooted practicality of belly.
13 October 2014
Roundness is containment, and in taiji everything is contained and everything is container: body, mind, form, practice (time). Containment is neutralization, and hence yielding. So, practice contains and neutralizes laziness in a way that laziness cannot contain practice. By containing activity, spirit is reabsorbed into the core. This is discipline, which becomes power, without which there is no progress.
11 October 2014
The freedom we desire, more than anything, is freedom from anxiety. This is true for every human being. Most of us go about achieving such freedom by designing a life for ourselves that is relatively stress free, that is, we endeavor to avoid anxiety and it's occasion. This could be called the material approach to the problem of suffering. The spiritual approach, on the other hand, realizes that avoidance is inherently wrong: anything avoided now will catch up with me later, at a time when my mind and energy are less able to cope with it. But equally wrong is a passive attitude to anxiety: dealing with anxiety by not caring less, by detaching from occasion. Instead we need a transformative attitude: one which engages heartfully with the occasion, and believes, wholeheartedly, in the power of heart to melt through constrictions and disconnexions. This is supremely active – always forwards – and also extremely difficult to sustain. But, alas, this is the work, ever and forever at hand.
10 October 2014
The arms are loose ropes, hanging from sunk shoulders, thrown up and out by vigorous turning, a turning that gathers power into the root so that the empty leg can extend, reaching out for new territory, which is immediately and voraciously claimed. This is how we move through life: borrowing footholds and gathering power.
09 October 2014
08 October 2014
Neither resist (go against) nor assist (go for), but turn. This is yielding. The turning creates a vortex which draws the world's energy in (centripetal) as it throws my energy out (centrifugal). This exchange – this turn – means that both parties are transformed, and that a relationship has been created, established, deepened, without which it cannot be called yielding.
07 October 2014
06 October 2014
05 October 2014
The Internal is that which cannot be externalized, explicated, explained, isolated, represented... It accompanies everything: a whisper, a trace, a touch (of humour), and is intensely alive, quickly retreating into the shadows when approached coarsely, yet venturing out with a delightful grace when it has the space and inclination. We value softness and lightness, and do all in our power to develop them, because they encourage the Internal. It doesn't matter what you practise: taiji, yoga, meditation, painting, healing, unless the practice is inspired and enlivened by the Internal it doesn't amount to much.
04 October 2014
Ideally, Platonically, perfectly, I am all heart, a fount of loving energy, endlessly transforming the world around me. A sacred heart. Sin is any act that takes me away from this, any thought even. In fact thinking, especially reflective thought, is itself a sin because it diverts and contorts heart energy for its own selfish ends, it cannot help but, that's what thinking is – self-serving, a survival mechanism. So when I think, when I shift from heart to head, that beautiful heart energy that should be radiating out, instead twists and wraps around myself, drawing in to the head where it feeds the mind. We all break out of this pathological loop regularly, daily, whenever experience forces us to forget our own self-interest for a moment. But we then slip back into the mind, forget our heart's involvement, and mentally process the experience: organize it into a form that can be stored and profited from. We do this – compound our sin, make it respectable, admirable even – largely because we believe there is no choice, or because the alternative – remaining in and with the heart – is deemed impossible. Spiritual work is any practice that endeavors to get back to heart where we belong – a journey home for the proverbial prodigal son.
03 October 2014
My teacher was always adamant that practice is not primarily the place for working out technical problems, but simply an arena of and for work – the passing of time doing taiji. So my struggle is always to not evaluate in the process of working, otherwise I am never in the process but outside it, judging. The practice of taiji is an exercise in justice without judgment – in doing what needs to be done without having decided or known what needs to be done. Again, this paradox arises from judgment requiring the imperiousness of stillness and justice being a refusal to refuse flux and change.
When I stand still, the most stable stance – the one that best supports and maintains that stillness – is a double-weighted one. But when I move: walk, run, dance, etc. it is those instants of single-weightedness that generate and renew the movement. Always in motion, search out tension – the need to freeze in order to observe, use and profit by the world. The clash between you and world, between inside and outside, is not primarily perceptive or sensory but motile: the world moves you, and you move the world.
Interesting that, according to my dictionary, which admittedly isn't the best, the first recorded use of the word relax to mean "become less tense" dates from 1935 – nervous tension must be a modern phenomenon. And also interesting that implicit in the word relax is the belief that the relaxed state has been experienced before – it is a state the word requests you return to.
02 October 2014
Generally we seek stability in order to push certain forces – especially gravity – into the background, so that we can indulge in excess – live a life that exceeds subsistence – the absolutely necessary – and starts to contribute to culture, if only minimally. In taji, on the other hand, we seek a special kind of stability – central equilibrium – which foregrounds gravity as cleanser and creator – an in-system event-trigger – of all we are and all we can, could and should be.
The warrior's verity or certitude, the only thing he knows for sure, is that by embracing death, by entering the fray convinced that he is already dead, he increases his chances of both success and survival. The spirit is only truly free when it faces and embraces death. A final irony that works its way into every encounter.
As I practice taiji I endeavor to become so embroiled in its twists and turns that the Form is pushed into the background where it belongs, and spirit comes to the fore – into the fire. The temptation, of course, is to concentrate on formal and technical trivialities – the disease of the inveterately intermediate student. The function of practice is to go beyond technical problems, not to indulge them.
Things have value only if they take me out of myself. This value is, of course, invested by me in my impeccable engagement with reality. An engagement that insists upon reaching beyond the mind and into heart, beyond language and into true feeling, beyond ideas and ideals and into things in and for themselves.
The secret, if there is one, is simply confidence, the confidence to act. Without this I do not live in real time – I'm always too late – and there is no feedback, neither positive nor negative, and so no guidance to my progress, no wisdom in my life. As teachers we must be so careful not to say No to our students all the time. Not to batter them with our knowledge and expertise – our ego. Instead we must be constantly (re)inventing ways to stimulate and encourage their talent and spirit so that they develop the confidence to find out for themselves, the confidence to embark upon the proverbial voyage of discovery. This is the greatest gift to bestow.
01 October 2014
30 September 2014
29 September 2014
We observe the breathing because that endless alternation of in and out, tension and relaxation, models very well the workings of reality. And, as always, the parts of the series to pay special attention to are the changes: when in switches to out and relaxation rolls into tension. On one level these changes are external – consequences of endless movement in a finite system – return is inevitable. But on another level they are internal – the workings of spirit as precursor to all that is. This is the level that interests us.
28 September 2014
27 September 2014
26 September 2014
25 September 2014
It's not the past or future that are illusory but the present and presence. The illusion of irreversible time. The future doesn't really change the past but it does call to it, and the present only becomes real – a bridge – when I am responding to that call – allowing myself to be pulled across – drawn by connexions already humming rather than pushed reluctantly by a past already cold.
It's never one or the other – always both. The external only becomes boring when it is stripped of its internal. If I want to rise up and find the light then I also need to dig down into the damp darkness otherwise I have nothing to give – no energy – and can only observe the cold light of day. The name of the game is always connexion – touch – across which pours a world of feeling.
23 September 2014
Before forgiveness can be bestowed it must be begged for, otherwise whatever is given is tainted. This is the meaning of prayer: not just asking God for forgiveness, but remembering each occasion of sin (where sin is any action or thought that has impeded my own or somebody else's spiritual progress).
22 September 2014
Circles, circles, everywhere – set up by turning, always turning. Sinking in taiji is a sinking into circularity – falling, or rather being sucked, into a maelstrom, or rather two maelstroms, each rising up through the body from a foot like spinning funnels, channeling energy both down and up. Such energetic structures only reveal themselves when the Form is practised quickly. The Form is a celebration of movement, above all, turning, and if practised as such then the shapes the body takes as it turns are a consequence of that turning: of centrifugal and centripetal forces, and as soon as movement stops and those forces dissipate, then the body collapses. This is our path to lightness.
21 September 2014
Sitting on a park bench, awaiting the next appointment, surrounded by large fig trees. The one closest to me is magnificent, and as I let my eyes follow its trunk upwards into the branches and billowing crown, I also feel, but differently, its roots extending under me. That tree, seemingly twenty feet away, contains me.
Internally each of us is as a ball of yarn with many loose threads dangling. Each of these threads represents a possible becoming – a journey that beckons our embarkation. But also each thread is a vestige of the past – a fragment of our ancestry, genetic or energetic, put in place possibly millions of years ago. So, when we take up the challenge of our destiny and follow one of these threads, instead of swallowing hook, line and sinker, the external demands of society and species, then we are travelling both forward and back at the same time – breaking through the constraints of presence into a true future by remembering a true past.
Eschew the external, especially its claim to represent reality. The external is the detrita of process, in the same way that the artist creates art, the poet writes poems, yet the finished work reveals little of its making, quickly becoming a representative of some dubious artistic identity, a commodity to be bartered or rubbish to be binned.