31 May 2017
If you concentrate on qi you will be weak
If you concentrate on spirit you will be strong
This is a famous Taiji adage. My teacher pointed out once that when they say qi (ch'i) they actually mean anything that isn't spirit. So, if you use mind expanding drugs to open up consciousness, which a lot of students seem to do nowadays, be aware that this must go hand in hand with disciplined daily practice on and with spirit otherwise it'll end up weakening you. There's little point in having knowledge you don't have the means to either engage or internalise.
If you concentrate on spirit you will be strong
This is a famous Taiji adage. My teacher pointed out once that when they say qi (ch'i) they actually mean anything that isn't spirit. So, if you use mind expanding drugs to open up consciousness, which a lot of students seem to do nowadays, be aware that this must go hand in hand with disciplined daily practice on and with spirit otherwise it'll end up weakening you. There's little point in having knowledge you don't have the means to either engage or internalise.
30 May 2017
The feeling of perfect completeness that you feel/felt with the teaching/teacher is what motivates and fuels the continuing practice. Each session an opportunity to touch that perfection, to evoke the spirit of the teaching/teacher and keep it alive, without which you know you'd be a mere shadow living a shadow life. It's the very least you/we can do.
29 May 2017
Spirit plus consciousness is what Blake called the Imagination. It is what this work is working towards, though most of us probably don't see it as such. The ability to embody your beliefs, the courage to live your own life and vision, but not selfishly, not for self alone, but to further the Image of Man; to aspire and to inspire; inspire aspiration in others. To teach, basically.
Early in life we make a command decision to take on board a whole array of tensions that force our perceptions to conform to those of the herd we find ourselves amidst. Learning to belong to a family, a society. This is what is known as selling your soul to the devil. Spiritual work is then any attempt to locate and relax these tensions so that vision broadens and heightens, and we start to see what God intended.
The lengths we go to to wreck our spine, and our chances of salvation, just to construct a lair in the chest for the self. When the spine is erect and healthy there is no reflective ego as such, no place to go to mull things over, only communication – body with Earth (other bodies), spirit with God (other spirits).
28 May 2017
27 May 2017
26 May 2017
25 May 2017
The task for all of us is exactly the same: to break out of class and into humanity. So, whether you are middle class, working class, rich, poor, black, white, male, female, educated, uneducated, first world, third world, jew, arab, straight, gay, these categories must be left behind so that you can become simply the expression of your own magnificent spirit. Sounds easy but in actual fact it is without doubt the most difficult task you could possibly undertake.
Back in 1998 my teacher suddenly abandoned the British Tai Chi Chuan Association, the organisation he had founded in 1970 and which, at its height, in the mid eighties, was the largest and most vibrant Taiji centre in Europe. Admittedly it had been slowly declining ever since he and his family were evicted from the Upper Wimpole Street premises in 1993 due to neglect. In actual fact the decline had started years before then. For some time John Kells had been bored with the Yang style Taiji he was teaching because he felt it wasn't an adequate vehicle for either his Irish spirit or his Celtic vision (he was a true visionary if nothing else). He was playing around with little technical nicknacks he'd picked up here and there – the figure 8 exercise in Taiwan, Chen style push hands from Nitsan Michaeli, his own no-contact rebound – in the hope of injecting a bit of spirit into his complacent students, and maybe developing a new and fresh style of Taiji. And then suddenly he just stopped showing up – leaving it up to me to keep things ticking over. I asked him why and he just said, "I'm tired of being a crutch."
Pain is the work that needs to be done. The choice that faces us all is whether to buckle down to it or avoid it. Most, of course, chose avoidance. We engineer an anodyne life that backgrounds pain in the hope that pleasure will come forward. But, to the soul, such a life is clearly false because painkillers reduce our ability to feel anything – they dampen the spirit. Hence depression – an inability to grasp the bull by the horns because letting go, walking away and becoming busy with something else is always presented as such a tempting option.
24 May 2017
I met Rupert Sheldrake a few times back in the mid 80's. His wife Jill Purce was a friend of a friend. He was terribly Oxbridge (probably still is). On one occasion he asked me what I did.
"Taiji."
"That's all?"
"Yes."
"But Taiji's just something you do for ten minutes in the morning isn't it?"
Despite his sensitivity and his remarkable ability to think creatively, he couldn't step out of his class conditioning for the life of him.
"Taiji."
"That's all?"
"Yes."
"But Taiji's just something you do for ten minutes in the morning isn't it?"
Despite his sensitivity and his remarkable ability to think creatively, he couldn't step out of his class conditioning for the life of him.
22 May 2017
Meditation strives to use spirit to create time. This is its paradox. Even though sitting still, seemingly passive, your heightened awareness becomes pure activity in its intensity and presence – what Blake called Imagination – and this activity ignites the ever elusive present moment into presence. Such moments then endure as long as there is spirit to fuel them.
If you receive the grace of great teaching and yet refuse to give it due respect by taking it into regular practice, then it will, in all likelihood, end up doing more harm than good, if only because you'll have the external experience – so will think you know – and yet nothing has been internalised.
21 May 2017
20 May 2017
Whilst busy thinking, chattering, worrying, you cannot be aware of the flows and forces operating upon you, externally or internally. Every now and then one of these messages is strong enough to dredge you from your stupor and for a short time you marvel at the richness of reality, only to succumb yet again to the seduction of self absorption. This is the way – bouncing ever to and fro – until something in you breaks and you no longer expect the best of both worlds.
Consider a tall man – his relations with the world. To partake, his head bows forward, eyes look down, heart drops, groin pulls back: all of which have a terrible effect on spirit, and so, on life. A warrior, on the other hand, is short, relatively: small but central, centred, in the midst of giants and ogres. Head pulled back, eyes wide open, heart cast up, groin thrust forward: leading with purple glans through the cosmic vagina (Castaneda's phrase) of time, and ever into living presence.
19 May 2017
The trouble with learning to quieten the mind is that then the company of those with undue internal noise, which of course is the vast majority of humanity, becomes tiresome and tiring in the extreme. This is your burden – to bear the other's suffering with compassion and impeccability – to maintain peace of mind in the midst of their disturbance – to swallow them whole with a heart that cannot do otherwise.
18 May 2017
"There are not only two worlds, but three: the world of vision, the world of sight and the world of memory: the world we create, the world we live in and the world we run away to. The world of memory is an unreal world of reflection and abstract ideas; the world of sight is a potentially real world of subjects and objects; the world of vision is a world of creators and creatures."
I have a student here who also takes rowing lessons with the top rowing instructor in Israel. Apparently, one particularly grueling lesson, she exclaimed, "Good God, why am I doing this!" to which he replied, "To make your lungs and your heart strong. And when they are strong everything in your life changes."
One little secret I've discovered along the Way is the use of yerba mate tea to stimulate the correct sort of elastic tension in mind and body, a tension – intention – without which spirit can be neither gathered internally nor directed externally. Coffee doesn't have the elasticity, without which there is no fluidity to directed movement; no energy, only force.
17 May 2017
The master, above all else, offers a path with heart, a path into heart. To take the path requires a transmission of energy, and a mountain of work. Poignantly, there is no room for passengers, despite the depth of your affections. Gradually all ties to the world are severed, and it passes you by, rather than vice versa.
11 May 2017
10 May 2017
Reflective thought is only bad if it distances you from life, if it packages and discards – consumes – like the professional tourist ticking off destinations. Reflection can be creative – it can create an event of foresight – but then this must be worked with like a Trojan – or Spartan – before transformation is effected.
09 May 2017
Instead of going into therapy to talk about your problems, in the vain and vague hope that they'll quietly go away, work with them: grapple with them, wrestle them, fashion them into a machine, a weapon, with which to burrow through the veil of crass convention that envelops everything nowadays, and into the heart of reality.
08 May 2017
"If you ever manage to quieten your mind then the shit will really hit the fan."
John Kells
Something my teacher growled at me many years ago. And it's because there is absolute dissonance between reality as is, revealed only when the mind stops, and the world constructed by that mind, which is basically a fabric of social and personal neuroses.
John Kells
Something my teacher growled at me many years ago. And it's because there is absolute dissonance between reality as is, revealed only when the mind stops, and the world constructed by that mind, which is basically a fabric of social and personal neuroses.
06 May 2017
No matter
what it is
I’m doing
I’ve never yet
got over the
idea
I’m pretending
to do what
I am.
John Phillips
what it is
I’m doing
I’ve never yet
got over the
idea
I’m pretending
to do what
I am.
John Phillips
05 May 2017
04 May 2017
03 May 2017
The portal to the next moment is here, now, but in the realm of spirit. And for us – warriors, dancers – spirit is very real – nothing like the abstract spirit of the religious which is mere wishful thinking – "If I think it and believe it then maybe it'll be true" – a naive misplaced faith in mental formation. For us spirit is an intensity of presence that conjures sufficient magic to turn this here moment into the centre of a creative universe. When I rouse my spirit in the way my teacher taught me then all around teems and seethes with life. Dwell on past events or future possibility and you'll miss it. Due vigilance.