Sit, be still, and listen, 
because you’re drunk 
and we’re at 
the edge of the roof.

Zoos, prisons, mental institutions, old people's homes are testament to our conviction that existence (quantity) is more important than life (quality), than spirit.

As every good therapist knows, real listening doesn't just get the patient to say what's on their mind, it encourages them to open and expose their heart.

Spirit, undiluted, is unbearable. Learn to thin/stretch it out with sobriety and probity. Learn endurance.

Donkey braying in the dead of night.

Spirit is quick: speed born of lightness. Depression is slow: ponderous and reluctant.

A clenched jaw is the mind's Achilles heel. Every time you notice it relax and take the tension into the dantien.

Sometimes I ask students how much practice they do. They answer – 3, 4, 5 hours a day.  And I say, Very good. What do you do for the other 12 hours?

The way we are living is unsustainable. It's as simple as that.

Don't waste time. Be interested and interesting.

Consider three different practices: running, meditation and singing. Running gives you stronger lungs and heart, as well as fitness and endurance. Meditation gives you inner calm and depth – the ability to see beyond surface appearances. Singing lends the voice a power, richness and resonance which makes people listen to you. The point being that such practices are not techniques to solve problems. Instead their regular practice turns you into a better instrument for problem solving.

Western dance begins with its feet firmly planted on the ground whereas Butoh begins with a dance wherein the dancer tries in vain to find his feet.

If, during meditation, you find the mind excessively noisy then close the eyes and let the head gently and imperceptibly sway from side to side, as though you are a little wild flower dancing in the breeze. In order to think, especially with words, the mind must freeze out such movements, so, by reintroducing them, you make it difficult for the mind to string words together. Language is still not natural to us – still requires tension and disconnection to use. Within seconds of starting to speak the words are generating themselves – the proverbial stream of consciousness or train of thought – and I have lost connexion with what I wanted to say, with the source and the spring.

Happiness is what you feel when the circulation between you and your world makes sense. In order to change and grow the student must be able to weather periods of unhappiness, where nothing makes sense. Something deep inside simply trusts the process.

there is no 'away' – waste always goes somewhere

Softness is energetic, hardness forceful.

Your heart is the light of this world. Don't cover it with your mind.

What is more valuable, one dear friend who dwells in your heart or a thousand Facebook friends who live on your phone? A dear friend loves you despite your self-importance not because of it.

It's all in the touch. Words lie – what else can they do? But touch tells the truth. Mostly.

Repetition is not repetition. The same action makes you feel something completely different by the end.

The body needs tension otherwise it would fall to pieces. But local tension blocks the flow of energy, so we suggest taking it as deep as possible, deep into the bones and dantien.

Don't bully the present moment with expectation.

Remember to smile.

Tension disconnects and pulls into itself. Relaxation opens out to make new connexions. These are the two basic forces in the Universe. Everything is a play of these.

Every morning I am a beginner.

Your fragility is also your strength.

True listening is open to hear the truth – to hear not only what is, what exists, but what is aching to come into existence. True listening is generous by giving encouragement and permission. This we call imagination.

To achieve some depth in your field requires a lot of sacrifices.

The most stupid mistake you can possibly make is to believe your own publicity, put store in self-image. The work, if it has any spiritual or internal content, deconstructs this image (all images) and leaves you naked, raw, fragile and vulnerable. Free of guarantee and security yet full of energy, of potentiality.

My favorite piece of music is the one we hear all the time if we are quiet.

Concentric temporalities.

You, are you really telling a story from your own root?

Potential energy is a farce of gravity.

Once you've got through the foothills, which takes a while, climbing the mountain of lightness is so reductive as to be virtual slow suicide, so you have to be really certain that's where you want to go. Although by that point you probably (and rightly) feel you have no choice. There's no way down.

Everything you do is music, and everywhere is the best seat.

...music heard so deeply 
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music 
While the music lasts.

The secret of life? Love God with all your heart. What does this actually mean? It's really very simple. Follow the heart's natural desire to look upward in worship. This should be the dominant fact of life, gravity being the dominant fact of existence. It doesn't mean that you're always gazing upward or thrusting your chest up and out, but it does mean that there is always a tendency – a desire – behind the quotidian, to lift, to lightness. A quiet moment should always bring you back to this feeling.

All that counts in life is intention.

After illness. Back to the old self. What a horrible prospect. What a waste.

Insistent rain all day. I love it.

It doesn't take long for a bad habit to become naturalised, and then where do I stand? My only hope is for some external input to convince me of the unnaturalness of something that feels to me so completely natural as to be part of me. This external input we call teaching. And you can see that progress without teaching is well-nigh impossible.

I can never leave my passion behind. If I take an interest in other things, this is only a pleasant diversion. For me music is all-consuming.

The present moment is not really a moment – only to those with short attention span – it is a flow – a current that happens to be current – that happens to be happening. Lose it and your passage through time is at best accidental – without power or significance. Catch it and every gesture, every breath is creative and energized.

Most of all we resist, tooth and nail, our own progress. This is the only reason it takes so long.

The trouble with possessions is they end up possessing you.

Practice has a logic which is not that of the logician.

Two jobs spring to mind that I can imagine myself doing:

When Tai was born she was a month premature with jaundice so was put in an incubator under UV light in a room with fifty or so other newborns. There was a nurse in attendance whose job it was to fix any baby that started to cry. That would be my dream job.

Here in Tel Aviv the garbage is collected twice a week. There is one worker for each garbage truck whose job it is to walk the route during the wee small hours, dragging refuse bins from their little cubby holes and onto the pavement for ease of collection later. I could get into that job too. Walking through the night. Immersing myself in the stench of reality. Utilising physical strength intermittently. What could be better?

The secret to keeping the mind on the job is energy: feeling energy, responding to energy, falling in love with energy, because as long as you are alive energy is present, and the more alive the more energy. To get into energy one needs to make the subtle but revolutionary switch from mind (always heavy) to heart (light at best) or, to start with at least, from the thinking analysing mind to the imaginative creative mind. Because energy is so gentle, so sensitive, that any harshness or coarseness from me, which is how ratiocination comes across, will interfere and inhibit. Imagine yourself as lumbering clumsy oaf, which is how you appear to the finer aspects of spirit, and see the work as a long slow process of refinement.

Every established order tends to produce the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.

There must be connexion – touch – but there must also be distance. Like looking at a painting: one gets in close to see the brushstrokes, the energy that went into the application of paint, then one stands back to take in the whole picture.

Tell a student something and you rob them of the chance of finding out for themselves and thereby becoming fully empowered by their discovery. This is why the good teacher seems to ignore the good student. He has them under his wing and that is sufficient for learning to happen naturally at its own pace.

Reduce consumption to a minimum. Live an ethical life. Harder than it sounds. Real mindfulness.

Imagine a budding concert pianist trying to find a new interpretation of a piece from the established repertoire. She tries lots of ideas none of which really work. Then one day, after practice, she just plays, plays for herself, plays herself, and there it is: true naked authenticity.

Love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange.

The possibility of touch. The impossibility of touch.

Not accumulation but change. This our anti-bourgeois principle. Embrace reduction, diminishment, destruction and death. (And by death I don't mean the spiritual death that comes with following the crowd but actual physical death.) Get (back) to a sense of essence. Especially now the endgame has commenced.

I learnt very early on that when I get what I want, when I get my own way, disappointment inevitably follows. But when things don't go according to plan or when I manage to suppress desire and accept what comes then I'm always taken somewhere I could never have imagined.

The work boils down to just one very simple instruction: keep your mind on the job – don't let it wander. If you manage this then everything else takes care of itself. If you don't manage this then you need a thousand and one tweeks just to give yourself a sense of progress.

strip sensuality of its pomp, and selfishness of its excuses, and contemplate actions and objects as they really are

Life is a play of body and spirit. Mind the subjective arena. Thinking is the mind's desire to control and direct the play of life, a job better achieved by Spirit, though without the requisite guarantees.

Turn, sink and lift one leg off the ground. Repeat. Keep repeating until you clearly feel what you gain by being single-weighted. This is spirit.

A long time ago we chose existence over life – security over Spirit.

Life is enough without the mind trying to complicate, sophisticate, explicate, elaborate, decorate.

The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist.

Mind, instead of thinking, should look for omens (manifestations of Spirit).

Truth is not something to know or feel but something to live and thereby love.

Gravity is quite an onslaught – persistent, insistent, inescapable. And unless the heart opens up, lightens up, fills with love and finds the lift from above, it'll end up grinding me into the ground. The Taoist approach to this problem is the most intelligent I have found. By taking as first principle the balance of opposites, gravity itself, or rather the Earth's inexorable presence coupled with the draw it exerts, recoils up through me and reminds me to connect to Heaven, if only I have the heart to hear.

Turn and sink into one leg. There you have it! The three components of yielding.

Love is the time and space where "I" give myself the right to be extraordinary.

Heart connects, mind disconnects. Mind may then try to reconnect but it never quite manages it. Creative endeavour without heart is precisely that: heartless.

Thought excludes the heart that moves it.

Admitting contradiction, as principle, generates humour, play and connexion – that special elastic connexion that ties me to time, to the present moment, and makes a joyful labour (or trudge – it's up to me) of life. Every moment real. No let up, no respite, no holidays.

planted in my own integrity

I am not innocent. Innocence is a science of the sublime. And I am only at the very beginning of the apprenticeship.

In dantien you go unnoticed. This is precisely why it is so unpopular.

Man's last great achievement was standing up erect. And it's something we still haven't mastered. Everything since: language, thinking, agriculture, civilization, medicine, sliced bread, has been a wrong turn.

Self hinders the magical unfolding of time.

Dantien is centre of detachment and ruthlessness. But it is also a happy centre, not because it provides pleasure or entertainment, but because it allows me to simply be, and it never gets any better than that.

Everything ends with flowers.

The business of Art is to live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to completely express that complete actual present.

Everything is looped. Everything returns. The very nature of the lemniscate.

Mind in dantien. What does this actually mean? It means that the mind takes its main point of reference to be a plexus of muscle fibres deep in the abdomen rather than any of the features of the space/place I find myself in. Any action/movement then comes from there and returns me to there. I constantly emanate from dantien and am thereby driven back into dantien. A centre of being. A centre of gravity. Difficult to catch this. It has to be or at least approach totality. It comes as silent (wordless) knowledge when you finally throw yourself into the river/fire.

By writing she means a vantage from which one feels inclined to commentate. Take it and you'll be noticed. Refuse it and you're all alone. It all depends upon how anonymous you're prepared to remain.

Letting be is as important as mastering.

If it can be done why do it?

Think illness and injury as washout of old strength. Stripdown. A chance for a new beginning, a new understanding, a new set of principles, a new configuration. A fresh start. You get sick when your energy needs to change. Your spirit conjures the illness. See it as sign of progress. And make sure you make the most of it.

the vatic, unwitting way of poets

Being a Taoist means I don't just admit contradiction, I revel in it. Everything I do and am conjures its opposite and I become a shimmering play of contra and contrast.

tantalizing ratios of presence and absence

Meditation is a giving over to what is not self possession.

Mind in dantien. What does this actually mean? It means I dredge myself out of culture, class and conditioning and embed myself instead in the core of my own body. My point of reference is now a ruthless reminder in my belly rather than an archive of memories or bank of knowledge accumulated over time.

Meditation needs no results. Meditation can have itself as an end, I meditate without words and on nothingness. What tangles my life is writing.

Imagine a fish swimming upstream. As it tires it reaches a point where its speed equals the speed of the stream and it appears, relative to an observer, to have ground to a halt. This is our stillness: we are still moving, still breathing, still groping our way through the stickiness of time, but, relative to a more elevated view, we are serenely still.

the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be

Meditation foregrounds what is usually in the background, out of mind: the medium we are embedded within, be that air or ether or space or energy or gravity or, simply, time. What Gertrude Stein beautifully called the Continuous Present.

Gratitude makes no distinctions. It precedes its occasion.

Only when you are lost can love find itself in you without losing its way.

Hope fuels process. Without it things either grind to a halt or lose their way.

washing your hands forces bacteria to adapt

Spiritual work wakes me to the simple things in life – the important things – the things that get overlooked or forgotten because they are there all the time. The air I breathe, the water that bathes and quenches, the heart that beats, the Earth that feeds and the spirit that animates (the God that loves).

The secret to receiving grace is gratitude.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Newton's Third Law of Motion. The fundamental, universal and only principle of Taoism. The value of unity is two. Yin and yang. Central Equilibrium: balance of opposites. Integrity is balance – harmony. Being and becoming. Station and motion. Identity and difference. Sameness and change. Equilibrium and disequilibrium. Parsed and integrated, at the same time, with the same impulse, the same spirit. Eodem spiritu.

Together in body, apart in head. Body, at core, taut and primed. Then mind explodes, or at least vaporizes.

There is a certain irony in feeling togetherness. Being together – being we – is not a feeling. It is surrendering to mutuality. Being useful. Not taking things too seriously. Knowing, deep down, that two may not necessarily be better than one, but it is more interesting, largely because it offers a unique opportunity to be drawn out of self.

The sky reaches out
to hold me.
East, west, north, south:
wide open.
But I am wrapped up 
in myself.

I use this poem as prayer or incantation, invocation. Right hand on or at dantien, left hand at heart, with an imaginary flame rising from the cupped palm. I replace the conditional but with an affirmative and. Then there is irony, humour, in my admission to retreat, though never defeat. As though God's love is something we, when deeply aware, need to protect ourselves from. It's too much, overwhelming; an onslaught. And we're only human after all.

Each ethical tweek, in time, with practice, allows you closer to true center. Homing in. Once there, or nearly there, you feel surprise, and maybe a little short-changed – nothing's there except what is. No secrets, no prizes, nothing special, just life: stark, unadorned, and supremely beautiful.

those who think there's no problem 
end up in hot water

Pull yourself together and make yourself useful.

Science can never directly talk about reality, only about data.

True being – presence – requires a detachment, a withdrawal, a coiling of your energy into core, heart – internal spring. Then you are present not as lump but as a source that constantly feeds vibrancy – energy – into being. This is why in Taiji we eschew local movement. If the hand moves, that movement is always generated elsewhere. Remote agency. Why did I do that? Who knows. Did I really do that? asks the artist. Who knows. Then you have become a finely tuned instrument for use by Spirit. You have gone beyond self and into destiny.

Humans are artificers; nonhumans are spontaneous.

Undistracted by memory. Practically an impossibility. That's what the mind seems to be – a host of memories. But be patient. Let them play on and out. The mind is the screen upon which these memories play, and will reveal itself when you grow up and stop expecting to be constantly entertained.

Danger keeps you on your toes.

when the heart tries to control 
what it feels that is called 
"forcing things"

When one meets an enlightened master or a great artist one gets a real sense that they live in a different world. A world of magic, of wondrous visions, strange creatures and uncanny possibilities. A world neither imaginary nor real but skirting these two realms. A world where anything imagined by the pure of heart becomes real.

Hedging your bets, reserving the right to change your mind whenever you feel like it, implies a life without the spirit of commitment, and so without power.

The inner fragility of a thing is why a thing can exist at all. Fragility is also why anything at all can happen. Existence is incompleteness. This fragility is activated in what is called destruction.

My teacher had a beautiful saying: Everybody wants to be special and some people are but never in the way they think they are. The implication being that we cannot even see ourselves let alone evaluate ourselves. And this is why we need the Other. They do see us, warts and all, and they must be trusted – believed. Partner work is crucial because only through the Other can I possibly get it right.

The curtain lifts and the dead enter
while the living exit. This is what the world is. 
A hand held out amidst noise and dust 
whose touch is a wide-eyed lifetime.

in matters of the heart 
the important thing is depth

Natural way best way. This phrase of Chi Chiang-tao's is one of our foundation principles. It means that it is not enough to simply do as teacher says – that's just a beginning and always incorrect (though, hopefully, moving on to bigger and better things). Instead we should relax and find the mind – the internal configuration – that allows the instruction to manifest naturally in the spirit.

Humans represent roughly 32 percent of vertebrate biomass. The other 65 percent is creatures we keep to eat. Vertebrate wildlife counts for less than 3 percent.

This is why the single most significant act you could possibly make to help the environment, other than suicide, is to become vegan.

Faith is of the heart, knowledge of the mind. They come and go from two very different places. Don't confuse them.

the mythical utopian image of face-to-face communication

In dwelling think it a good place to be.

An internal oral transmission takes you way beyond the text. Such a teaching is all about the destructive power of spirit, which the student must embrace unconditionally for it to break down all internal resistance. Then, maybe, something may rise from the ashes, for a moment, before death.

In dwelling live close to the Earth.

Whenever I meet people who claim to have received a spiritual teaching I'm genuinely shocked how much that teaching seems to do with rationalising a life of bourgeois ease and comfort and how little with real burning spirit and honest hard work.

it seemed to me flux was more important than framing

To dwell naturally and contentedly at dantien requires an inner smile so broad and deep it curves space-time into an enveloping shawl.

We marvel at our minds, our ability to think and reflect, to know ourselves. And yet the real marvel – the little bit of hope in the system – is that we do this so very badly. As thinking creatures we are a bit of a joke, yet as spirited, imaginative, sensitive creatures we really are a marvel.

Each of us is a body animated with spirit. The body rightly belongs to Earth, the spirit to God. When they come together we have a life, a dance, a delight, a miracle.

There is a story of an interviewer asking John Coltrane something about his amazing sound. Coltrane pointed out that he can't say anything about the sound himself, because, being the producer of that sound, he is the only person alive unable to truly experience it. And this is the thing about any creative act: the creator is too embroiled to make any useful judgements about what she creates. Is all she can do, usefully, is make. And this is the thing about life, life truly lived. It has little to do with pleasure, credit or profit received, and everything to do with what's given to and through the creative process.

the transcendental gap between data and things

Beauty is a nonviolent experience of near death, a warning that one is fragile, like everything else in the universe.

The legs are not simply machines to cart me from A to B. They are sensitive connectors designed to plug my nervous and energetic systems into the Earth. I am, primarily, a Gaian technology: a sensitive machine evolved to fulfil a destiny.

It all depends upon how finely, sensitively, perfectly, you catch the fleeting image, and – for a resonant moment – become pure spirit.

The empty void and the rush of infinity have been unmasked as parochial paradigms.

How to get one's energy – one's story – out as clean and authentic as possible. This is our problem. An artistic problem.

For the rational mind to ascend it needs a ladder, and then, when that one’s done, which it eventually will be, being finite and prone to rot, it’ll need another. For the heart to ascend it simply needs cleanliness – purity.

One of the things that modern society has damaged, along with ecosystems and species and the global climate, is thinking.

The only thing that has consistently interested me is where I could get to if I managed to give a little more.

The vastness of Nature is reflected in my puny but genuinely receptive spirit.

A mind, no matter how clever, is no substitute for a pure heart. The mind only has access to images, being only image itself. A pure heart sees reality because that, above all, is what it is – real.