The trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things which are worst for them.

We practice an internal art not to perfect discrete techniques but to change our energy. Or, as Castaneda puts it, to dust our link with spirit.

Every being cries out silently to be read differently.

Mind in dantien is a natural physical response to stress. Consider the most stressful situation imaginable: your walk to the gallows. The gripping in your belly would be so intense that in all likelihood you'd both vomit and shit yourself: indications that your body is centering itself and preparing the spirit for an unavoidable confrontation with death. The same happens when soldiers are readying themselves for battle, or when stage performers are awaiting their grand entrance. The prospect of spirited transformation is awful because spirit is your own internal other and, when it shows itself, you have no idea (thought) of what you'll become or of how (well) you'll perform; it is the absolute unknown. Nowadays, however, we have made for ourselves a completely artifical environment where spirit never needs to show itself with any life-saving or life-threatening intensity. So the modern response to stress is not a wise and spirited withdrawal of mind into dantien (where it can't get in the way and mess things up) but worry.

we need to abandon the arrogance of anthropocentrism

Mr Nice Guy doesn't get the job done.

The first responsibility of the teacher is to wrench the student out of their world and into his by confounding their expectations.

Giving as a consequence of being (centred) and of listening from that (centred) being.

Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.

Without first rousing the spirit of contention (fighting spirit) you'll never get to the correct spirit of attention. This is a secret.

We are all responsible for our own interpretations.

The silence of the sentry, the guard; the silence of vigil. Supremely ready, waiting, expectant. The silence of meditation should start and then naturally develop from this, though it generally doesn't.

Outside soft and relaxed. Inside all wound up.

No one is naturally bad at spirit because we are all, naturally, creatures of spirit. If we do the work to clear away the crap, our spirits shine. Despite this I know teachers who refuse spirit in their classes, their students and their practice because they feel they, themselves, don't have adequate talent for it: if spirit ever rises then their students outshine them. The reason for this, usually, is that they started teaching before being properly qualified, and ever since have been refusing correction.

to touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention

Spirit is fearless(ness).

Capitalism (Grand Ego: also known as civilization, the State, culture) has this uncanny ability to turn any enemy into not only a friend and ally, but a marketable commodity. The same with personal petty ego. Hence modern New Age spiritual pursuits which profess to fight ego but in actual fact serve it.

Spirit is life and death. Not life or death, life AND death.

The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

Deshimaru was asked by a student about heaven and hell. He replied, teasingly, that in heaven you sit with Buddha in eternal zazen, which for most would be hell. The price of admission (to anything worthwhile) is emptiness. Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness, to fill a void.

The trouble with looking at things is that we tend to see what we want to see. This is the glaring limitation of therapy.

Most don't want change, they want more, or less.

the vulnerable tenderness, the patience, of cinders

I am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.

Relax. Relax the body, relax the mind. The first imperative. But this is impossible if I don't relax the nerves as well, something that has become very difficult nowadays since, in our wisdom, we have polluted our living, working and recreational spaces with electrical circuitry and electronic gadgetry. Our environment positively fizzles with nervous (electrical) energy. And now, with the advent of WiFi, it is even worse; there are over twenty different signals entering my apartment – imagine how that affects the brain and the nervous system. So, before you meditate try turning off the electricity at the mains and feel the difference: quiet, clean, naturally relaxed – free of anxiety. Then next time you go to the desert or the forest or the sea recognize this feeling. Success in this game requires a subtle reprogramming – a shift in attention.

The only way to move forward and onward in through forgiveness.

Taiji teaches us to carry our root around with us.

Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.

If you have to think then think outside the box.

Most spiritual work nowadays lacks one vital ingredient: spirit. Or, to give it its full name, spirit of vitality – fighting spirit. We have all experienced it at some time, accompanied by adrenaline rush. Stage performers know all about it: it makes them vomit before the show. More accurately, it's the natural tightening in the belly – mind in dantien – the anchor to effective spirit, that makes them sick.

Why funeral flowers? Because their beauty and light help the soul on its way.

If you have total freedom, then you are in trouble. It's much better when you have some obligation, some discipline, some rules. When you have no rules, then you start to build your own rules.

Meditation, more than anything, takes you beyond words or, rather, before, words.

We find ourselves in the midst of a sudden mass extinction event, the speed of which the planet has never seen, all caused by human overpopulation and profligacy. But, don't worry, I'm sure that science will find a solution, and that bourgeois values will prevail.

When the great master immerses himself, day by day, in the weak sycophantic energy of needy students, he has little choice but to become corrupt and abusive. That's when he needs someone – a spouse, a dear friend, a teacher – to remind him that he's not a god, he's just a human being who happens to shine in one tiny area of human endeavour.

Not thinking doesn't mean sleep; it means thought that is fresh.

If the work, and by that I mean devoted personal practice, not going to class and nodding knowingly at your teacher's words, does not come natural – if you don't find yourself aching to dig in when you wake up in the morning – then the chances are that you are not karmically ready for the work. Such students, in the old days, would have been set to work in the monastery garden or kitchens, or, if Christian, would have been directed to spend a few years working at a hospice or almshouse. Nowadays however most students aren't even ready for that.

Silence is really hard to describe because it has this ability to change its shape and its form, and what's fascinating for me is that silence makes silence, you don't need to push, it can just come out naturally and beautifully.

For those of us driven and seemingly destined to work hard, the main problem, and it's a big deadly one, is to continually ensure that the work is not being used to avoid the real issue. This is why we all need a teacher.

The elastic tension we endeavour to develop – what in Taiji we call sticking energy – glues the small conscious mind to the ever elusive present but passing moment, enabling the big unconscious mind – what my teacher called the guardian – to come out of its lair and prowl. This big mind slips stealthily into your timeline – ancestors and destiny – working, fixing, clearing, setting things up in a way unimaginable. This is why faith is so important, and why the Buddhists stress meditation to work out karma.

What is easy does not lead to happiness.

Most of us refuse to face the fact that our own glamorous squeaky-clean designer lifestyle, though maybe not overexcessive compared to some, relies on lots of little brown people on the other side of the tracks doing our dirty work for us.

Spiritual freedom means free of ego not free to do what you want.

The shortest energy we call spirit. The longest we call soul. The work shortens the short and lengthens the long: makes spirit finer and soul deeper.

The authentic thing is always unconscious.

Mind in dantien is, basically, just a strong survival instinct – the ability to gather yourself into a centred effective whole and rise to unexpected occassion. This is the obvious meaning of suffering, real suffering, not the petty selfish anxiety Buddhists call suffering: it makes you strong, or dead, in a real way, that nothing else, no amount of training, can. Mind in dantien saves your life.

We are all petty little Neros, selfishly fiddling whilst the planet burns.

Freedom does not mean doing whatever you like.

When you practice zazen you enter your coffin.

'Good' is an accolade most bestow on anything that reinforces their ego.

The human species lost its way twelve thousand years ago. That is the level of accumulated junk we need to clear away.

If you must eat meat, at least butcher it yourself. Become acquainted (if not intimate) with the components of a body: flesh, bone, sinew, cartilage, viscera, and, in particular, the fascia. Then bring that tactile knowledge to the workings of your own body.

To look at an object is easy, to look at the subject is not so easy.

Spend a little time with a newborn and it's obvious that, lacking the apparatus for artifice, they are totally in and of the world of energy. It won't be long though before they abandon that for the world of things, and then the world of language, and then the world of deceit. What choice do they have? It's the only model they are ever presented with.

We are as domesticated as the animals we eat.

Stillness from poise and balance rather than inertia and enervation. Movement from spirit rather than momentum.

Mind tainted with originary sin always besmirches that which it perceives and conceives.

No fundamental understanding can come from reading alone. In fact, reading can delay one’s progress.

If it's true, it needn't be said. In fact, if it's true, it can't be said. This is because language, or more specifically the thought that goes into stringing words together, is heavy-handed and necessarily interferes with the thing being said, the feeling.

The origin of sin is always the mind thinking it knows best and then interfering with natural order, for whatever reason.

Bad tension prevents a thing from finding its true place, its natural place.

That light joyful spirit, so visible in children at play, aches to inhabit our being and our doing. So, if it is not there, and I don't see it in most adults, then something in the mind is blocking it out. In the old days this block would, quite rightly, have been called an evil spirit.

Push the sky with your head and the ground with your knees.

For the correct spirit to show itself there must be a strong possibility of failure. Spirit saves the day when mind and body threaten to fail you.

Don't get stiff, don't get old. Stay young at heart. The secret to this is energy – internal movement – every part of body and mind able to play with its neighbour.

Bored with habit? Then take up meditation. It is the only disciplined way to go beyond.

—What should I practice when I get home? 
—Mmm, I suggest you practice spirit. 
Spirit brings life. When spirit is roused the practice comes alive and does itself – no longer toilsome or difficult but light and joyful.

we live at a distance not only from the source but from ourselves

why should he guard a shrine so alone, 

so apart, 

on a path that leads nowhere?

The time of your life. This is, literally, the time of your life.

Every bad deed, every misdemeanor, every karmic debt, must be made up, repaid. This is done, when, with a willing, open and loving heart, we transmute energy from base to fine and transmit it upward to heaven. We just have to make sure we start this process whilst we still have a posture to maintain it.

Live to maximise not pleasure but understanding. Go against the contemporary grain.

You have to practice until you die.

Be true to what you believe, even if it means the death of you, which, eventually, it will, of course.

Now’s the time. There is no later.

Brimming with confidence, thinking nothing of oneself.

Mind takes me out of the present. Mind brings me back to the present. But spirit dissolves the present.

Mind and body are one thing, like the two sides of a sheet of paper.

When a culture is unethical to the core, what does it mean to break the law?

We do things one after the other. That is all.

The relaxation we are looking for is the one that allows the body and the energy to sink whilst bringing up the spirit. This is humour, especially laughter.

It is generally understood in the martial arts that meditation brings the benefits of a calm mind but it also sends the spirit to sleep. And I must admit, the experienced meditators I've encountered have been a mite shitless.

Smile into dantien.

Spirit brings existence to life.

We expect the world to entertain us, to lift our spirit. But that is our responsibility as creatures – to make sense of the world by rousing its spirit.

Joy is presence.
Suffering is absence.

The true person is the one who arises in the midst of unanticipated circumstances. It may be an unexpected, unrecognizable self. You may see the slippery side of your personality at that time; you might fall on your face and feel foolish. That’s the risk of allowing ourselves to be fresh each moment – we might actually become authentic human beings.

Reality tickles. That's why the monk giggles.

Truth is an encounter with otherness. Everything else is pretend.

We sit to meet that which we cannot know.

Pay attention. Consider it the price of admission.

The reason children can be so full of the joys of life, so care-free, is because they generally have an adult looking out for them. So if we would like the same abandon we must split off part of the mind to behave as the vigilant adult. This is mind in dantien.

The problem with an intelligent mind is that it can always find the most wonderfully rational reasons to do exactly as it pleases.

The main impediment to progress for the good (hardworking) student is lack of belief in themselves.

Bourgeois culture is founded on two concepts. That of the WC and that of the shopping mall. The assumption that anything unpleasant, unsavory, undesirable or nasty can quite simply be flushed away, to become someone else’s problem, and the belief that anything desirable should be available to buy, if only I find enough funds. Availability and avoidability.

When I started this work it was generally understood that it required immense sacrifice, namely the sacrifice of what I call empire: the career, the wife, the brats, the holidays, the pension, the whole fucking shebang. Not because these things are necessarily bad but because they sap too much vital energy, take away too much time. Nowadays students seem to be so brainwashed by the bourgeois dream that they cannot even imagine an alternative, so they take spiritual work to be a mere minor option.

Trade those blocks of tension, full of childhood trauma and repressed desire, for an overall elastic tension, gravitating to dantien. We call this awareness, or vigilance. 

This busy mind, sometimes clear, sometimes conflicted, is the human condition.

A good teacher transforms your aspirations, informs your inspirations.

Bumped into a neighbour yesterday who's into all this New Age shit: "How was the workshop in the desert last weekend?" I asked. "Very nice! Quiet, peaceful, relaxing. I really enjoyed it. But when they used the word 'magic' in their advertising I was expecting something more like Harry Potter..."

Don't hold on to the arms; they can look after themselves. When properly relaxed they feel as though they belong to someone else.

Awareness is when the mind is here.
Anxiety is when the mind is elsewhere.

When we’re most completely ourselves, we’re most completely free of ourselves.

Practice pushed us through our limitations.

Consider two scenarios. The first: you win millions on the lottery enabling you to spend the rest of your long life in comfort doing exactly what you want to do. The second: you are told you have terminal cancer with six months to live, six months of chemo hell, experiencing life in its full intensity because you have no choice. Now which scenario is the meting out of good karma and which of bad?

From an abusive father to an abusive teacher. Just goes to show: you can run away from home but you can't run away from karma.

If you feel coarsened by class or culture then abandon them.

the gift of practice

One at a time.

Meditation is a tried and tested technique for relaxing anxiety into awareness.

To selflessly serve another's selfishness is not only dumb it is bad karma.

Anxiety and awareness are opposites. Awareness is the result of relaxing into what is; anxiety is wanting things to be different.

THAT'LL TEACH YOU

Graffiti in Tel Aviv today.

"Being-time means inhabiting time. We think of time as passing, but to inhabit time implies to know it as breath and awareness. Being-time is breathing time, expanding and contracting … we live inside of time. When we are not paying attention, we live outside of time."

Happy go lucky.

Relaxation is a falling apart. Tension is a coming together. We relax relax relax to expose necessary tension, natural tension. This is our elixir.

I remember once at class, after a strikingly revelatory practice session earlier that day, enthusing to my teacher about it until he cut me off: "I have enough problems with my own ego without having to contend with yours as well." And I then realised that my feelings and thoughts about practice were not only irrelevant but illusory – another manifestation of ego.

Truth is not something to experience, to feel, but something to become.

To succeed in this game you need to do two things: start the work and then continue the work. Most never start of course, and of those that do most do not continue. What is the work? Well it is quite simply your own private practice devoted to cutting through ego and forgetting self, work which must be directed by a qualified master. The work is not the time with the master, work is what you do after you've seen the master. Work is not necessarily difficult, gruelling or unpleasant, but it often is, and that is no excuse not to do it. Eventually work is done as a matter of course and the experienced student learns wisely to mistrust and ignore all feelings about it.

Feelings are interpretations and as such mere whimsy.

Meditation allows you to cheer up without having to open the door, computer or phone. Simply by sitting and being and joining the flow of passing time.

Spirit is the pest on the crop, the weed on the allotment, the devil in the detail that upsets human control. The human agenda, at least since the end of the Pleistocene, is domestication (gentrification) which effectively means eradicating free spirit wherever it manifests: "There are less than 3000 tigers left in the wild. There are more than that in captivity in Texas alone."

It is by our likes and dislikes that we cut ourselves off from the unconditioned mind.

You will not be punished for your laziness; you will be punished by your laziness.

Energy naturally fills the space opened up by contradiction. Without contradiction there is no energy.

In the world of spirit there are no guarantees. The only thing you can guarantee about spirit is that if you try to control it it will either scarper or bite.

There is a world (literally) of difference between a student who is quiet because they are daydreaming and a student who is quiet because they are totally with the energy of the moment. That difference we call spirit.

Procrastination, laziness and other subversive vices.

All spiritual disciplines say the same thing: the only way to succeed is to fall in love with the work. We recommend a slow gradual fall, more like a traditional arranged marriage than a falling head-over-heels (we all know how that usually ends). And remember: love can only be called so if it exceeds self-love. Success through excess.

Good instincts, talented and lazy. The epitaph of the average student.

Each chronic tension represents an aspect of self to be worked on, and away, gently, patiently, persistently.

Formal practice. Practice of form. The form is always the same form, we always start from the same place, but as we relax into form the form itself relaxes, becomes a bit bendy and elastic, and changes into something else. This is the magic of practice – by repeating the same thing over and over we get to somewhere not only new but unimaginable.

driving each moment to the brink of eternity

Enlightenment is not a prize waiting on top of a mountain for those brave and dedicated enough to climb. Enlightenment is in the gutter – underfoot, all around – and we are too busy, too proud, too stupid to see it. And then when we do finally wake up, it's not enough.

There comes a point in life when you just have to wake up to the fact that this is it – it doesn't get any better than this.

The first instruction in Taiji is mind in dantien. Now the body has a dantien – a physical/energetic centre deep in the belly – but so does your being, it too has a dantien – a spiritual center or shrine about which your day and your life organise themselves – and this is your own daily private practice. Without such a centre life is just a little aimless: swanning from one sensation to the next; no sobriety, no discipline and no real devotion to anything other than self.

Satisfied with what is, with what's here, now. This is enlightenment.

Time is inside of us.

Humour is a measure of the incommensurability in a system; the immiscibility, contradiction, difference. It is always considerable, even in artifical systems, if you have the heart to see.

Accepting and releasing into just what is, is the homeopathy of Zen.

To snobbishly dismiss an insight because it does not emanate from a great master is not only stupid and ugly it is also bad karma.

Your left side thinks your right side a controlling bastard, and your right thinks your left an indulgent wanker. Unfortunately (or fortunately) they're both correct. And therein lies what my teacher called the humour of the natural process…

Seeing partially is suffering.

Sink into one leg and you become one thing. Sink into the other leg and you become another thing, similar to the first but a little different all the same. Now walk and feel how you constantly shift from one to the other – you become a shimmer.

What we call ‘I’ is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale.

Why do Buddhists giggle all the time?  a student asked recently. Well, firstly, they don't giggle all the time, they tend to giggle when they are pressed to speak, and I think it's because the detached part of them, the part their work cultivates – not to commentate as the average person but to embrace in compassion – sees clearly how ridiculous and futile verbal communication is and then their only recourse is to either stop, continue in frustration or continue with laughter. Their intelligence and compassion makes them chose the latter.

As though suspended in space, in time. In the world but not of it.

Meditation offers the simplest understanding: I am nothing, absolutely nothing, yet everything depends on me. And, beautifully, this just happens to be the mindset we need to save the planet.

If your mind is empty, it is ready for anything, open to everything.

As the breathing deepens, as awareness of the breathing deepens, body and energy slowly part and it becomes clear that energy leads the body, energy breathes the body. As the breathing and the awareness deepen still it becomes clear that my energy is itself being breathed by something beyond me of which I am a tiny though significant part.

Not two, and not one. Two become one, and one becomes two. Principle of Union, and Principle of Proliferation. Legs-spine, arms-heart, eyes-sight, ears-hearing, nostrils-breathing, lungs-diaphragm, kidneys-bladder, ovaries-womb, etc.

A meditation session starts with watching the breathing. But by the end we have become the breathing. All diaphragm.

When we meditate, all that exists is the movement of the breathing, and awareness of this movement.

"This is the most important teaching: not two, and not one. Our body and mind are not two and not one. If you think your body and mind are two, that is wrong; if you think that they are one, that is also wrong. Our body and mind are both two and one. We usually think that if something is not one, it is more than one; if it is not singular, it is plural. But in actual experience, our life is not only plural, but also singular. Each one of us is both dependent and independent."

A population keeps on expanding until it either runs out of space, runs out of food, drowns in its own shit, or becomes host to another parasitic population.

We have become entertainers and/or entertainees – gadding from one trivial pursuit to the next, from one ego-massage to another.

The birth of agriculture was the birth of the unnatural so, to get a handle on our concept of 'natural' we need to at least contemplate the pre-Neolithic mind. A mind before writing, measuring and monotheism.

The two most important days of your life: the day you start meditation and the day you stop meditating.

If there is a down there must also be an up. Central Equilibrium. The work is to first understand this and then to embody it. Then you don't just take it around with you wherever you go but you create it by being.

Our virulent species.

If you are not happy here and now, you never will be.

The mind – tricky customer – is very good at editing out things it would rather not face. This is why it is dangerous to let the mind direct your work – you end up working on only those parts the mind is prepared to allow – basically the easy bits and the fun bits. Instead we recommend just doing what your teacher tells you. No complaints, no regrets.

Think with your whole body.

It is easy for a clever mind to get the better of a good heart. Therein lies the source of all our problems.

To study ourselves is to forget ourselves.

The heart's desire is to simply lift in lightness and light. What prevents this is an impure mind – a mind clotted with self.

The mind is much better at avoiding problems than solving them.

It's too late to be ready.

Real intelligence is acutely aware of its own limitations, and soon becomes far more interested in what it necessarily blocks out in order to function.

Still the mind so the heart can speak to God. The mind doesn't even have to listen because the heart always says the same thing: I need you.

The heart lifts humbly like the hands of a beggar.

Depth of character seems to have a lot to do with how much suffering you've managed to get through.

Intelligence interrupts the heart.

Your connection is not secure. Apparently.

We talk to ourselves to hide from the presence of God.

Self, obviously, is a cultural artifact. But then so is mind, and body too. And so is Nature for that matter – or what she has become – a pathetic picturesque shadow of what she was before humans interfered.

Quietening the mind is just the beginning. Then you have to get naked.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.