journeys, healings, and transformations

Like consumer livestock, we are fattened with ever-new sameness.

For most people, the closest they get to physical relaxation and enlightened mind combined is when they're drunk. It takes a few drinks before they stop pretending.

The more you relax the more apparent the dantien should become. Like each body part is connected by an elastic thread to the dantien, and the dantien is a strong thick knot of all these threads bound together. A real centre of gravity.

where the deer are twitching

I've often lost myself, in order to find the burn that keeps everything awake.

In primitive (non-civilized) cultures, sleep was not only a time of rest and recuperation but a time for journeying in the spirit world.

The fundamental question of philosophy, from the Pre-Socratics to now, is not What does it all mean? but Why does civilization produce depressives?

In meditation, one relaxes and quietens in order to enter that space between wakefulness and sleep. One foot in the material world and one in the spirit world, so to speak. We must therefore be well rested enough not to fall asleep when we get there.

The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.

Come on, show a little backbone…

like a heavy cable being slowly paid and by its weight settling into gross coils

We have created a world, an environment, a society, so unnatural and unhealthy, that to be well-adjusted and successful within it requires us to be deeply unnatural and unhealthy ourselves. Those with any spiritual sensitivity just cannot tolerate such an environment. Their only recourse is either denial and depression or madness and terrorism, passive conformity or disruptive non-conformity.

Ego is a man-made artifact. About as far from natural as one could possibly get.

I am soft sift / In an hourglass ​

When quietly centred, the energetic body untangles, unravels, unfurls, and its tentacles reach out into space and time. This is the reality all spiritual and religious work endeavours, each in its own way, to explore.

Back, elbow, and liquid waist

The spirit only gains its truth when, in utter fragmentation, it finds itself.

Listen. With the spine, the nerves. Always much closer to reality than the eyes. Yogananda was right. When the posture is correct, when the mind is quietly ensconced in dantien, when the spirit is light and buoyant, then the spine resonates and sings with the Divine. It doesn't only collect and transmit messages, it harbours. This is why sacrum is sacred.

The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God's will, the less I value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; and as the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently, without asking too many questions. ​

today’s radical conformism

returning to the inner animal, which doesn’t consume or communicate

If you work hard at something it becomes interesting, and if you work really hard at something it becomes really interesting. It's amazing how many people go through life never understanding this.

Busy-ness is not the same as work. If anything they are antonymous.

Only the negativity of rupture and pain keeps the spirit alive.

A raging thunderstorm in the dead of night. A lull. Now a blackbird singing.

And never worry about being labelled a bad father. In fact, take it as a compliment.

Suffering is a gift— 
In it is hidden mercy.

We bring up the personal to let it go. The same with family. Everyone has a story – a trauma. The point is whether you're brave enough to let it improve/mature you, or whether you chose to forget and stay the same (get gradually worse). The only way to truly heal is to keep the wound open until its teaching has been totally internalized. Everything has a reason. It is not our place to know or even understand. But it is precisely our place to behave as though there were damn good reason. That is, to believe.

I shall show you the consummating death, which shall be a spur and a promise to the living.

Wonderful little book on taking (your) time – contemplation/meditation. Infinitely better than the proliferation of New Age/Buddhist tripe on the same.

Sit down into posture. But never look down.

Have you noticed how people that don't believe look really grey?

Once you're past the first flush, there's something inherently depressed and depressing about love.

Enlightened self-interest. We all need to snatch a portion of each day just for ourselves. It doesn't have to be long – ten minutes would be enough – but it must be sacred and it must be sacrosanct. A time when you close your eyes, sink into your centre or your root and remember why you're alive, in other words, remember God. Without that I would find it impossible to face the world with any degree of integrity.

Depression is attributable to a narcissistic accumulation of ego-libido.

Maybe Christmas is a time for giving, even when you've got fuck all.

Insights abound but breakthroughs are rare. An insight is like a light going on. For example, you go on a ten day Vipassana retreat and leave feeling cleansed and peaceful. This is an insight. You have had an experience and realise that such a state is very good and desirable. However, for this insight to lead to a breakthrough you will have to work really hard until you can attain that peaceful state on your own without the structure of the group or the inspiration of the teacher. The same can be said of the insights provided by therapy. They are just the beginning of a long and arduous journey which will, in all likelihood, never be embarked upon because the subject thinks that because they have had an insight they are already there.

As kids, my father was very abusive. He would beat my mother until she was so swollen and discoloured that I didn't recognize her, and he would beat us until we bled. Once, when we were all grown up, my eldest sister, always the pluckiest of the bunch, decided she couldn't bear the tension any longer, and drove round to have it out with him. She screamed and yelled, as only she can, and my father broke down, admitting his abuse and promising to mend his ways. After that, we all expected a miracle, but none came. He had had an insight but refused to work with it, and so no breakthrough came. In fact, if anything, it made matters worse. He just cut off from it all. It is now a no-go area.

[Glenn] Gould once described [Alberto] Guerrero's keyboard technique as not so much striking the keys as "pulling them down"

There comes a point when we need to stop searching for novelty – new impressions of the same – and start to burrow into what we already know until it becomes forever unknowable.

Insight in an emphatic sense is also transformative. It produces a new state of consciousness.

The softness of someone who knows that death is just around the corner.

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Why Taiji? Why devote your adult life to Taiji? This is a question I'm frequently posed. And, if I'm honest, I would have to say that it's because Taiji is the only thing I've found which I’m hopelessly useless at. Sums came easy, writing came easy, study and exams came very easy, but Taiji has always been impossibly difficult, and therefore, for me, perennially fascinating, demanding, engaging, challenging.

Destiny is what happens when you start to identify with the work that needs to be done rather than the pain you harbour or the respite you crave.

The Internet, by its very nature, is pornographic.

Spirit and the Other go hand in hand. They are not the same but stimulate/stipulate each other.

The teacher doesn’t dish out answers. She highlights problems and provides methods.

From one extreme to another.

The so-called Enlightenment has given us not a society of enlightened individuals but a world teeming with selfish consumers. That is proof enough, for me, that what drives so-called progress is profit for the very few.

we have given to the free market the status of a god

Last time I saw my son he was sporting a £10,000 Rolex. My daughter (his sister) said to him, "Why spend ten grand on a Rolex when you can get a Turkish fake on eBay for two hundred? No one would know!" His reply was priceless: "I would know."

the spirit, triumphant in the body’s fall

The arrogance of ignorance.

Feel but don’t indulge in feeling. In Taiji indulging means you've lost the ground – your root. In religion indulging means you've momentarily forgotten God. Find the time – the space – where these amount to the same thing.

A system that rejects the negativity of the Other develops self-destructive traits.

A dispassionate passion.

My son gave his cousin (my nephew) a real Louis Vuitton belt which retails at £320. The cousin was delighted but then terribly disappointed when none of his friends at school would believe that it wasn't fake. What does one have to do to be believed?

radically un-radical in refraining from any reduction to a principle

Weep if you need to weep. Feel the intensity, the realness.

Spent the day trying to decide if my teacher was a Catholic Taoist or a Taoist Catholic.

All atremble.

Go with the flow? Not really. If anything, go against the flow. Or, at any rate, find a deeper, contrary flow. Become salmon (of wisdom/peace/wholeness) – salamon (סלמון) – Solomon – Sulieman (سُـلـيـمـان) – shalom/salaam.

social-media shapes a subject who no longer minds

Can you sit, peacefully still, and say, in all honesty, "Yes. Here I am. This is I. Naked before God"? If so then you know how to meditate, and you are better than I.

To believe in God is to yearn for His existence and, furthermore, it is to act as if He did exist.

God loves the underdog.

Ward-Off makes a cave of the body within which you lurk, ever on guard. You are then the cave itself as well as inhabiting creature.

We're all lazy, especially those of us who work hard.

Arms issue from mid-spine rather than shoulders in the same way that the legs issue from sacrum rather than hips. Then there is no hunching of the shoulders and the heart can lift upward following its natural (undepressed) inclination.

One wing and a prayer.

beyond the shamelessly happy selfies and the unbearably banal small talk

My teacher once told me that the only time in his life he ever received unconditional love was from his pet spaniel as a kid. "And do you know what?" he said, with tears in his eyes, "At the time, I really despised him for it."

Ask a Tibetan monk where their mind is and they will place hand on heart.

The only criticism of my teacher that I would endorse is the one levelled by most of his loyal students who, through force of circumstance, have gone off to study elsewhere. That is, he taught advanced Taiji to students who were not yet qualified to receive it. The first stage of Taiji is sinking and relaxing to develop a root, which, whether you like it or not, means strengthening the legs, the core and the lower back. Traditionally in the Chinese martial arts, such strength is acquired through standing postures. It is difficult gruelling work, and anyone who says they enjoy it probably isn't doing it right. But without that root nothing comes from the Earth – nothing comes natural – and it all has to be fabricated each time you practice. Imagine the stress and stain – the drain of joy – in that.

Only the negativity of withdrawal brings forth the Other in its atopic otherness.

When otherness is stripped from the Other, one cannot love—one can only consume.

Good parents are not those who sacrifice their life (or destiny) for their children but those who present a consistent and loving example of life lived with spirit.

My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread; I'm selling yeast.

Information and imagination are opposing forces.

Spirit: the distillation of principle. Refining one's vocabulary.

Hardcore—with a light heart.

Freud takes us back to childhood where he said it all began. The Taoists, however, take us back to the womb, to before it all began, to a time before time, when we floated warm and weightless inside a living mother, breathed through a throbbing umbilicus, saw nothing yet heard everything, and were loved by a remote father whether we felt it or not.

A permanent state of transition is man's most noble condition.

Down the hatch.

create a project of life

What’s shocking about the twentieth century is not that so many were killed by wars and ideologies, but that so many were born in the first place. Over 10% of all the people who have ever lived were born in the last 100 years. A veritable plague of people.

Life : a fate worse than death?

The human project has been reduced to the rationalization of desire: finding good reason for self-interest, justifying vulgarity, revealing (thereby negating) the unconscious. Taoism suggests reversing this trend: hiding rather than exposing, loving rather than knowing, endarkenment rather than enlightenment.

disappointment is a chronic feature of modern life

Up the dosage.

No excuses left.

Be radical : develop a root.

Bounce back.

A smile broad enough to embrace the body. This is meditation, at least in posture: Cross-legged, Riding Horse, Ward-Off. The in-breath. The depressed diaphragm. The Inner Smile. The fundamental, tonic, root. Deep time. Soul.

A sense of privacy.

Smile. The middle relaxes downward, the corners rise upwards, the face broadens. The whole thing stretches into a cup, a receptacle, a container, a welcome, an invitation.

Go with the feeling, the intensity, and make an impression, a difference.

Solitude is good for the soul.

Relaxation harbours intensity. This is Taiji.

Work with the air's viscosity.

Danger creates something great.

Mindfulness is usually interpreted as 'keeping the mind on the job.' But this is not quite right. Most people's minds are so anxious and tense that they generally mess things up the moment that mind gets involved. Mindfulness is really the ability to rouse or generate a heart of compassion. This is what we should bring to bear.

Think of the hours and hours each day you practice being a wanker (be honest). Then why not put aside an hour or two to practice being a saint?

In Taiji we aim to generate all physical movement by turning the waist. Each movement starts in the dantien and ripples to the body part required to move. This passage of energy takes a little time so, when the body is relaxed and fluid, a lag develops between the action in the waist and the expression of that action in the arms and legs. We use this lag to create yielding holes and vortices that tug at the opponent's energy and tie them up in knots or rather entangle them in an elastic web.

Our dog is lying half-asleep under the quince bush. When he stirs I hear his fur against the grass.

If you don't love something, then don't do it. But sometimes things have to be done—we all have duties. So, the secret is to love what you do regardless of whether you want to do it or like to do it. This proposition requires us to rethink what is meant by love, the word and the action.

A healthy spine is a gentle S-shape, with alternate lumbar and thoracic curves. In Taiji we sink into the legs in order to become all spine – the bent legs become the lumbar curve – and the whole body, from foot to head becomes an S-shape. There is something about the S (half an 8 or an opened 8) that works as principle: on all levels at all scales in all dimensions. Reality a shimmer of voices.

If you had an inoperable terminal illness and were told that three hours a day of taiji for the rest of your life would guarantee a significant span then you'd do it, right? So what's the problem?

The first step (or is it the last?) is to leave home. Home in every sense.

Each person needs different limits to set him or her free. Finding yours is what practice is all about.

Have a heart.

Mindful practice. The trouble is that most people's minds are so shitty that they do better practice when that mind is elsewhere.

Getting your own way doesn't make you happy. This (along with practice makes perfect) is the most important lesson life teaches, when you let it. The lesson of softness.

Make a hole.

Good medicine is bitter to the taste.

Intelligence is no substitute for honesty. I've yet to meet an intelligent student who understands this, in other words one who is also honest.

The critical apparatus must be dismantled, and replaced by the love of God.

Reverse the process of profanation called Ego​.

At some point the work becomes largely psychological: delving into why we insist on getting it wrong.

Without Pushing Hands we never get any softer.

The complication of ego commences when we stand and begin to walk. This creates lumbar lordosis, disconnecting us from spirit, from Earth, and from (our) nature. To correct, simply allow the sacrum to hang plumb vertical and drop into soft legs. Easier said than done.

to hear the whisper of that wild voice that calls from well before your beginnings

The cut and dry has no place in liquid.

identity’s many perforations

A joyful pessimism.

Family is the death of destiny.

You don't need Kathmandu to see a view or Timbuktu to meet a stranger, you just need to close your eyes and go deeper than you've gone before.

When you're tired and you're run down and like you can't go on anymore – that's usually when you find yourself in the best moment…

The first step is to leave home.

Consider ego a parasite.

The symbolic force of softness.

When you forget the breath then time breaks and energy leaks.

Anxiety comes into the body when softness abandons it.

There is a world of difference between practising a piece of music and performing that piece of music. When practising you have in mind an ideal that you strive, in your own time, to realise, but when performing you give immediate expression to that ideal in real time. For the duration of the performance the ideal effectively vanishes and is replaced by spirit: the spirit of the composer, the spirit of the performer and the spirit of the event. Only a critic would be mean-spirited enough to refuse the numinous and make comparisons.

Experience the world softly, as if the senses were raw.

Everything for the glory of God. This the theme – the obsession – the madness. Body releases down, spirit releases up and you're piggy-in-the-middle: suspended, alone, flailing.

Given that we live in extremely conservative, topsy-turvy times, search for the unpopular and find something of value.

when internally exiled, then nothing seems to touch us

Mind continuous. The work boils down to this. We manage it in Taiji by embracing a set of principles that generate and govern correct (energetic) movement. As the practice develops and understanding deepens these principles seep into all our movements until hopefully we become a pure embodiment of connected continuity.

Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented.

A tool is an instrument for directing, shaping and focusing energy. My body is the tool God gave me.

Reverence is the nature of my love.

Social laws keep you superficial, spiritual rules take you deep.

It comes down to whether you're willing to bend the legs rather than straighten them. And be aware that bending a leg can either take you down or bring the foot up; feet gravitate towards dantien and dantien gravitates toward Earth.

Well, my mother always told me that anything in life worth having would take sacrifice, patience and a lot of work.

Rules and laws are for those too frightened to plumb their depths.

With age, art and life become one.

Let go of what you know; abandonment as principle.

Consider having two minds: a seeing mind and a listening mind. The seeing mind privileges the eyes – it has a visual attitude to the world – it sees things and it knows things – cognizes and recognizes – The Cogito. The listening mind privileges the ears but also the other senses than the visual: touch, smell, taste, the sense of movement. It perceives and conceives but not in/with pictures. More like unformed, unclear, uncertain feelings. What my teacher called 'whispers.' The seeing mind is what we call consciousness, and the listening mind, awareness. Yielding is then the turning aside of the seeing mind so the listening mind can come to the fore.

Evidence exhausts the truth.

Too much is the same as not enough.

We tend to think of the legs as two vertical columns supporting a lintel – the pelvis – from which the spine rises. Instead, think of the feet/shins/thighs/hips/sacrum as an arch, each element a voussoir with feet as springers, and sacrum (the only element not paired) as keystone at the apex. This is the sense in which thinking is good – bearing in mind better concepts in order to correct bad habits and improve awareness. In fact, thinking is never wrong of itself – what is wrong is the inability to turn it off when no longer appropriate: worry and anxiety.

I beg leave to sin against the rules.

Better too stupid to get it wrong than too clever for your own good.

In order to succeed, the dialogue needs an excluded third.

When studying meditation the eager student is admonished to simply sit: Don't think, just sit. And when studying therapy (psycho and somatic) the earnest student is told to simply listen: Don’t manipulate, just listen. This is a difficult lesson to learn. Simple awareness is healing of itself.

The spiritual life has nothing to do with accumulating, whether experience, wealth or power. It is all to do with continuity: treading a path, spinning a thread, climbing a ladder or stairway; keeping something fragile and ineffable going, come what may.

Suddenly a small fox appears. It comes to drink the turquoise water in the morning light. The animal heads for the opposite bank and disappears. From the eucalyptus trees comes a fragrance of crumpled leaves and tangerine. In the stealth of the wild animal, there is the glimmer of a gentleness never before captured.

Spirit flashes in the eyes but energy manifests when the eyes turn aside. The furtive glance.

Perceive that which cannot be seen with the eye.

Through the work, we celebrate the joy of service.

Base of spine burrows into Earth so upper spine can transmit messages to Heaven. We never understand these. Not even a glimmer. That's not our place. If we thought we understood then we’d only mess things up.

meanings that resist the ordering gaze of the ego

True listening hears in the other what they cannot or dare not hear themselves. You, in your listening, challenge and complete them.

Softness invites the other.

Circumvent expectation. This is yielding.

Daily practice, over time, develops symbolic power. You begin to stand for something.

kiss the earth

with your feet

A taste for plain simplicity.

Marry the moment. This is yielding. Making connexion.

The secret to losing weight is to feel what you gain by being always hungry: a reminder to be mindful.

a future and a past reconciled—a time undivided

What turns force into energy is softness—a willingness to change, especially the radical change we call failure.

Spine is a stake you drive into the heart of the Earth.

Softness resembles a child’s wish. That whispered promise: I will always be by your side.

If there is one trait common to all great interpreters, it is their capacity for intensification.

The deeper you go the more it becomes a question of authenticity. Not in the sense of 'Does it come from me?' but rather 'Does it come from the Dao?'

How do we welcome wonder?

Struggling to teach a particularly stubborn and cynical student about the gift economy the other day, when suddenly a bunch of local teenagers strolled past singing, in English, at the top of their lungs: "I don't care too much for money, cos money can't buy me love!"

the tyranny of self-consciousness

No society can understand itself without looking at its shadow side.

Sinking does not stop with bending the knees. Sinking is driving yourself down into the legs and into the ground. It is a ruthless act of humility, always rousing of spirit. My teacher's imperative: Become a pile-driver.

Problems, if you work with them, make you a better and stronger person. This is why the true believer thanks God for both the good and the bad.

There is a saying in Taiji: If there are problems in the upper body then look to the lower body. Specifically, sink your weight into the legs, and work from the root. Only then can the upper body properly relax and be light and natural—expressive of energy rather than ego. This advice applies not only to problems of posture but to all problems. ​

As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands; one to help yourself and another to help others.

Depression is a lack of feeling, a numbness to life – a lack of risk.

The first thing in Taiji is the root. Without it nothing works naturally – everything has to be fabricated.

Depressed? Then volunteer in a children's hospice. There's nothing so cathartic, and so uplifting of true spirit, than attending to someone who is dying well. And since children do most natural things better than adults it stands to reason that they die better too.

Problems arise when we feel the heart belongs to us. It doesn't, it belongs to Daddy.

For me the only things of interest are those linked to the heart.

Depression is just another name for chronic exhaustion. Tired to death with the falsity of modern life, with being a fraud, with living a lie.

Become a tree – a Faraway Tree in an Enchanted Forest – at least while you work. Then you’ll regularly access unimaginable worlds.

Depression is what happens when we no longer have natural enemies to keep us awake.

We all live in a world of 'make believe.' The religious are just honest about it.

Anyone who does not believe in miracles is not realistic.

The only book I've ever come across specifically on the subject of what we call 'Softness.' Also one of the most beautiful books I've encountered. Originally in French: Puissance de la douceur, by Anne Dufourmantelle. Click image for details.

Generosity, for us, is giving the benefit of the doubt.

We live in dumb insolence. Society demands it.

The attempt to escape from pain is what creates more pain.

The West recommends wishful thinking followed by willful action. The East recommends no-mind and non-action. I guess there has to be a happy medium.

I was born for it, I know for a fact.

The purpose of life is to learn to be simply happy. With no reference beyond what you are. This is enlightenment.

Love the work as your child, or mother, or both.

Maturity is indicated by an appreciation of vowels. Listening to the subtext. Reading between the lines.

without inner revolution forgiveness is merely wished for

Why do I continue? Because my spirit made a promise. In other words: it's a matter of honour.

The only real choice is between spirit and self. All other choices either boil down to this or are so trivial you may as well flip a coin.

Discipline and sacrifice. Without them it's all me, me, me.

It's not enough to have intuition. You must then have the courage to see it through.

When sparkling with spirit you're inspiring; when brimming with courage, encouraging; when in motion, emotional. But when bored you're boring, and when depressed, depressing.

Be other. Is this possible?

on the way to becoming-imperceptible

The most important thing to learn from the teacher is how to stand on your own two feet, or rather on one of those two feet.

Aim to overcome all anthropocentrism.

Not enough to have good instincts. You must then have the courage to act on them.

There is no limit to gentleness, rather a continual invitation to become infected by it – and that invitation can be broken in an instant.

The quantum leap comes when you finally love the work more than yourself. Fully prepared to be subsumed into energy.

Softness should never be an affectation. It comes over time as practice wears down your resistance to energy.

We're so accustomed to using the legs to push the ground away in order to move that it takes years to learn instead to use the legs as elastic pumps with which to bring energy up from the ground and into the upper body.

When standing – waiting, queueing, cooking, washing up – always bend the legs a little and feel gravity pulling down through you. Then you're practising.

Five thousand coats of lacquer were required in order to make a piece of furniture for the royal court in Beijing.

Turning is the abandonment of destination.

Softness is the secret lining, where the imaginary joins the real in a space that contains its own secret, making us feel an astonishment from which we can never entirely return.

Become pure movement – the challenge of Taiji which we manage by turning.

Softness expands the present.

Civilization is a set of rules that enable its members to coexist without ever having to expose their inner truth. In fact the fully civilized individual no longer even suspects he has a truth. He is pure simulacrum – a cultural artifact.

life as journey or becoming instead of narcissistic confirmation of self

Spirit loves a fight.

The majority, by its very nature, is fascist (oppressive), especially when tolerant and understanding.

Progress (maturity) cannot be rushed otherwise it will harbour hidden flaws destined to reveal themselves when it's all too late.

The beloved other is nothing more than a surrogate entity for the imaginary love object.

Eventually, after decades of practice, the realization dawns that you don't have the talent to get where you need to go. The progress that can be made in a lifetime is minuscule. However, this realization, instead of disheartening, fills you with joy because now the pressure is off and you can simply work for the love of it. Then, and only then, do you find the freedom to make your quantum leap.

If looking something 'in the face' means seeing its 'truth' or 'evidence' then there is never any direct face-to-face. Every face is a bedazzlement, terrible and marvelous.

As the work erodes the self one loses subjectivity, content to be just another object with an intensity no subject could match.

In order to see, I must be able to not see.

Work up the courage.

Live in the spiritual affirmative at the expense of the self-affirmative. This is the true meaning of Resurrection.

A life is ethical if it abandons the realm of the livable for the unlivable.

From my own experience, and from what I observed in my teacher, and from what he told me of his own teacher, spiritual progress, no matter how slight, always knocks you down.

Now that natural spirit has been banished, or worse still – tamed and milked, it's up to us to use the imagination to invest reality (external and internal) with a little strangeness.

If life is the dance of yin and yang then death is their conflation.

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

What turns something so tediously trivial (sitting on your bum doing nothing) into something so endlessly fascinating? Spirit.

Mind within or spirit without. It's impossible to attend to both.

Become a master of suspicion. Question everything. Especially your own diagnoses (thoughts).

elude the imperatives of comprehensibility