See not by looking but by touching.

True softness is springy not soggy; it returns energy.

A faithful heart, a thinking mind. The work slowly reverses which comes first.

The further down the line, the more commitment the work demands.

We pine for Nature and we mourn for Nature. We dream of a time when the mind, like the body and spirit, was natural, magical and free to roam.

Neither here nor there. A playful instability.

Zen's insistence on self-discipline and simplicity of living.

Wakey wakey

Poetry: an arrangement of words designed to spark the imagination and transport the soul.

It is far more difficult to let go of bad experience than good. This is why the ego is largely a collection of resentments.

The solution to your problem is to see who has it.

The good fills the mind but the bad shapes it.

Hridayam : a Sanskrit word usually translated as the Heart but a more literal translation would be this is the centre.

When there are thoughts, it is distraction: when there are no thoughts, it is meditation.

Firstly the work creates structure, form; then it destroys it.

The present moment is of value only in as much as it offers the only doorway to the eternal. The price of admittance is a spirit that burns.

Not I, but Thou, oh Lord.

I can work with anything that responds to touch. Animals are best, walls are good. Bourgeois humans are pretty low on the list.

The good teacher does two things: (1) wakes you up to spirit, (2) convinces you of the need to work on and with spirit until consumed by spirit. The good student then simply works, works, works.

in the trough of all this time just time

The good student is in love with the work, the poor student is in love with the self. The mediocre student vacilates.

Long life, low vitality. Not surprising that we're becoming much like the prepacked, processed food we eat.

Thoughts come and go. Feelings come and go. Find out what remains.

Most work to live but the good student lives to work.

The Taiji master is a wolf in sheep's clothing. A fierce yogic warrior swathed in a disguise of softness. To mistake that disguise for the essence of Taiji is to be fooled by appearance.

The winds of grace are always blowing, but you have to raise the sail.

Any kinks in the spine, and the energy simply won't reach the crown.

The joy in touch – the haptic; this the best medicine.

the “cellular” experience of bonds tightening between beings.

The first 30 years are all about quantity – how much practice can I get under my belt. Then the second 30 years are all about quality – refining the work until a fineness of spirit abides and abounds all the time.

Things go wrong when the mind refuses reality.

You’re either in love, which is leading you to uncertainty and excitement or danger, or you’re not in love.

The notion of saving the planet has nothing to do with intellectual honesty or science. The fact is that the planet was here long before us and will be here long after us. The planet is running fine. What people are talking about is saving themselves and saving their middle-class lifestyles and saving their cash flow.

Like a helium balloon: a continuous elastic enclosing skin containing a substance aching to burst free and lift upwards.

Go at the world – at life – armed only with a handful of beautiful principles.

The scientific mind, properly exercised, is built on two principles: a principle of curiosity and a principle of respect. Without curiosity there is no desire to uncover and discover, and without respect one finds oneself polluting the area of investigation.

Being interested means I am in charge. Being fascinated means that something else is.

Instead of incessantly talking to oneself, lift the heart and talk to God. This is the religious turn. Talking to oneself creates masturbatory loops that eventually collapse in on themselves and cause depression. Talking to God – that omni/presence both near and far – closest and furthest – lifts and extends both attention and affection, generating a gentle clarity – a light – essential for respectfully negotiating reality.

A spirit itching to play yet ready to fight, and vice versa.

The one thing one can’t possess in the ontological sense is oneself. One finds oneself “possessed” rather by all kinds of (other) beings.

Only through partner work (broadly termed Pushing Hands) do we learn to relate to ourselves. Don't resist ; don't assist. This our mantra. That is, instead of willfully doing something, we find the mind, mood and spirit that allows it to happen by itself. And such a mind always has two faces: one ruthless, detached and determined (mind in dantien) and the other playful, light and joyful (lifting heart).

We are symbionts on a symbiotic planet, and if we care to, we can find symbiosis everywhere. Physical contact is a nonnegotiable requisite for many differing kinds of life.

You show me two faces, 

that of a flower opening 

and of a fist contracting 

like the gripping of ice. 

You speak to me with two

voices, one thundering 

on the ear's drum, the other 

one mistakeable for silence. 

Father, I said, domesticating 

an enigma; and as though 

to humour me you came. 

But there are precipices 

within you. Mild and dire, 

now and absent, like us but 

wholly other – which side 

of you am I to believe? 

R.S. Thomas

Mind your p's & q's. Peace & quiet your mind.

What causes depression is our false conviction that everything can be reduced to words.

Whatever you do, don't use the work to fill the bourgeois category entitled 'Aren't I Special.' Instead allow the work to disrupt your categories, and start a fire destined to consume you completely.

Search for situations within which you feel small.

The profanity in reducing things to words.

For the record, John Kells had two teachers of Tibetan Buddhism: Geshe Damchö Yonten (Lam Rim) and Chime Rinpoche (Marpa House), with whom he studied in the 70's. He later told me that despite their elevated status, when it came to basic honesty and hard work, they weren't a patch on the Jesuit priests that had educated him as a boy.

The good student is someone willing to work through trauma rather than remain defined by it. And so the good teacher is someone willing and able to inflict productive trauma upon the good student. Obviously, considering such a delicate and dangerous state of affairs, some will go awry.

What the teacher can offer is always limited, and far from perfect. This means we have to do most of the work ourselves.

Only with the insight that not only my conceptions but my perceptions and affections are all functions of the pathologies I harbor will I start to venture through and beyond them. I is not me, as every Rastafarian will tell you.

The miracle of elastic is that it lets go and holds on at the same time. If it didn’t let go it wouldn’t stretch and if it didn’t hold on then it would break.

Capitalism [ego] is an abnormal, indeed pathological, system, and the opposition has been absorbed within it.

outside the logic of production

Spiritual, Internal, energetic work operates on a gift economy: the teacher gives a gift of teaching, which creates an obligation in the student to return a gift of practice. This is not a rational process open to either choice or negotiation but a naturally binding system akin to karma. That is, when the gift is received so is a debt which must, at some point or other, be repaid, whether I like it or not, and which nags the heart insistently until it is.

Joy is the elixir of finitude.

Hold the space with a spirit that gleams.

The basic toylike nature of things means that reality fundamentally is playful, dancing, raving, elemental.

Inhabit the excluded middle. This is the Taoist way.

From the flames of mental anguish and the ashes of mental collapse rises the phoenix of faith. This is the drift of a spiritual life, and of each practice session.

Work with spirit and naturally generate new material.

Mindful without being critical. In other words, compassionate.

Suspend the heavy hand of judgement and open up the world to curiosity, wonder and lightness.

Bad men are good men's material. And not only because they require cunning, patience, tolerance, but because they expose qualities inherent in us all.

It takes a long long time to acquire the humility and courage to see the self for what it is: a pure product of conditioning, a mere collection of, largely bad, habits. Then let the judgemental mind turn back on itself in mortification.

a fraught unity of spirit and flesh in a contingent mortal existence

The uncontrolled development of industry, technology, and science is the problem and not the solution.

Slowly – with practice, experience, time – we give up the anxious desire to be special. Then we can simply be, be what we are, what God made, and this has a stamp of authenticity, a naturalness, a timeless perfection that makes it far more special than anything we could have imagined or designed or wished for. Beyond the human mind.

Whispers from the ether.

Talent is a blessing, but if its successes lead you to believe it a substitute for work then it quickly becomes a curse.

Make light of it.

The link that attaches individual persons to society is so strong that, even in this so called 'individualistic society', people struggle to exercise the critical thinking needed to resist mass trends, and end up readily consenting to the annihilation of what they cherish most: their freedom.

The real teacher is always close to home if not within the home.

There is something melancholic and faintly undignified about an aging warrior, an old soldier. As though they've never met their match – never been truly tested. Warriors don't make old bones.

It's much easier to feel the harmful effects of a screen when you turn it off than when you turn it on. The same with music – when it finishes you realise just how peaceful and rich is the silence you've been selfishly obliterating.

Meditation is a natural response to Thanatos – Todestrieb – the death drive.

Tied

to a 

tide-line 

biding 

my 

time 

till a 

sea-change 

sets me 

free 

Sam Ward

If life hasn't demonstrated, time and time again, that you are the least qualified to make any assessment or judgement about your true Self then you are not living, not on the edge anyway.

Ecological awareness just means being aware that things happen on a bewildering variety of scales all at once, and that what that looks like on one scale is very different on another scale.

The word complicate literally means with many folds, and this is the mind, endlessly folded and folding into itself, onto itself. Each time we think to ourselves or about ourselves another fold is tucked in. Our work is a process of unravelling, ironing out, these folds, and training the mind to extend as free tentacles or sheets of energy.

Cocooned in mind – in self image. Or driven by passion, by energy, by movement. That's the choice.

Real intelligence is deeply aware of its own limitations, and failings.

Looking for inspiration. And finding it. Everywhere.

Beware looping into self – chasing your own tail – the inevitable consequence of a mindset that privileges self in any way.

When the connexion is used to serve self we have selfishness. When the connexion is used to serve the Other we have generosity. When the connexion is used to serve the connexion we have play. Playing together leaves both enriched. Always, if you can, work in the spirit of play; and vice versa.

That shudder in which subjectivity stirs without yet being subjectivity is the act of being touched by the other.

Reality TV. Now there's a contradiction.

Once, working with my teacher, over 30 years ago now, my mind must have been particularly agitated because he eventually snarled at me: "If you ever manage to quieten that crappy mind of yours then the shit will really hit the fan!" This statement taught me that true inner quiet – a quiet that comes from letting the noise fall away rather than imposing silence – opens you into the world of energy, which is more rich, active, difficult and dangerous than anything we could invent and impose ourselves.

Always under tension but never tense.

The greatest gift you can give the Other (the teacher, the comrade, the enemy, the true Self) is RESPECT – to put them first. This is practised by practising: by sacrificing a little time each day to the work. Without it everything in life is conditional upon it first pleasing you, and that is the opposite of respect.

Love through practice.

The inane internal chatter, which we all indulge, institues itself early in life. Effectively the price of membership to the human universe, it blocks out reality – the world of energy – in order to create a safer, more well-behaved thing-based world.

We invented God because we miss the canopy.

The teacher waits, patiently, hopefully, but not expectantly, for the student to fall in love with the work. Not with the teacher, or the teacher's words, or the teacher's spirit, beautiful though they may be, but with the work. In other words the teacher waits for the student, always mediocre to begin with, to become a good student. Then, and only then, can there be a transmission. My own teacher's rule of thumb was that if this doesn't happen within six months then it never will.

Nature, now sufficiently tamed and reduced, is the theme park of the 21st century.

Fascism is collective selfishness.