31 May 2018


Meditation: gripped in gratitude.
The speed by which the goal can be reached depends on this one thing alone; your willingness to practice every step.
Meditation: quietly solving the equality existence = consciousness = bliss.
It's not all plain sailing.
Meditation: fully entertained by the simplicity and richness of pure existence. Nothing more, nothing less.

30 May 2018


Happiness is a question of attitude, not a question of what's happening out there.
The female principle is restive, the male restless.
Unfortunately, the work, unless occasionally regulated by an eminently qualified master, starts to serve the prevailing power structure rather than subvert it; supports established conservative values rather than radical movement. The way Indian yoga ends up serving the caste system, or Tibetan Buddhism maintains archaic feudalism, or American Christianity fronts social iniquity and the horrible 'War on Terror.'

The miracle of the New Testament is that it is always New; it doesn't age. This is because it is all about spirit.
Become a radical and develop a root.

Happiness is reverence for all life.
The work is your gift to the Universe. You get nothing in return but the joy in giving.
Here in Moshav Ofer there is a pond, which, as well as proving a breeding ground for a large and healthy population of mosquitoes, also hosts a veritable cacophony of frogs. Every now and then, whilst meditating the early hours away, I hear one croaking past my window in search of a better life, a destiny.
A root is vital, as necessary as the air we breathe.
Imagine you're rocking a baby to sleep and any loss of attention will set it balling. This is the work: constant unremittent attention.

To Love is to share and serve.
The Anthropocene changes everything: homo sapiens is no longer the solution; he is now the problem.
The end of the line? There is no such thing. Spirit is the endless line. An arrow that flies in both directions at once and so seems to stand still.

The problem with mind is that it balks to ponder, interrupts the flow, refuses the future.

28 May 2018

Drugs wake you to the paucity of your world but they don't waken the spirit, only the teacher and the work do that.

Just love. The rest is bullshit.
The good sense that stops you taking a chance is the same good sense that chains you to ego.
The Bible is quite clear: after renouncing slavery it still takes 40 years of wandering in the desert (what we call The Work) before you are clean, strong and free enough to enter the Promised Land.
When I watch enlightened masters on YouTube, be it Adyashanti or Barry Long or Ramana Maharshi or Douglas Harding or Eckhart Tolle or Shunryu Suzuki, what I see they all have in common is the manner of their passage through time: they are constantly breaking open and spilling, inside out, into a future unavailable to the unenlightened.
If the drive to work doesn't outweigh the way you feel then you are doomed.

Put your heart, mind, and soul into even your smallest acts. This is the secret of success.
Consider yourself stateless, exiled, simply part of a process.
First the body relaxes then the mind quietens then the spirit awakens then the energy mobilises then the destiny – the true future – opens, takes shape. This is the dynamic – the sweep – of each practice session and of the whole life.
Relax and let the future unfold. Otherwise time is merely driving the past forward.
Freedom is not easy. Freedom is the most difficult thing in the world.

If the spirit doesn't burn to work then you are a slave to ego. But don't worry, you have plenty of company.
Ego is your very own personal Pharaoh, and Exodus is not a description of past events but a map to Heaven.
The teacher's job is to wake your spirit by making your life hell. And until you can clearly distinguish spirit from ego that's exactly what it'll be.
The work is your only hope. Squander it at your peril.
Read a little. Meditate more. Think of God all the time.

27 May 2018


The world of energy and the world of thinking are mutually exclusive.
The beautiful thing about natural objects is that they abide happily in their own energy – they don't clash with themselves. This is not the case with most adults I meet, which leads me to one conclusion: the human self is not natural – it has come from elsewhere.
Demolish the ego. Dismantle the mind. Undo the damage. Methodically, systematically.
Staying busy to keep from registering the deep despair in the modern soul is what therapists call active depression.

26 May 2018

Run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint!

Dantien is a tight fist; heart an open palm.
Without the bitter pill of work to balance and sustain that outward sweetness, you effectively become a spoilt child – flabby, petulant and selfish.
The great thing about being part of a body of work is that I can allow myself to be touched and enriched by everything without fear of being diverted or distracted.
Taoism is a principle of agnosticism. As soon as you think you know something you get suspicious and look for its opposite.
Come out of your self.

The heart is like a flower. Unless it is open, it cannot release its fragrance into the world.
The work should tire you to exhaustion, but never get you down. Learn, above all, to rest.

It's the misdemeanours that stay with us, that punish the rest of our lives.
Sitting, in a body, in a room, in a building, in a neighbourhood, in a city, in a country. All objects held in place by their own mass and solidity. And yet within each, at every level and in every niche, there is the dance and play – the music, movement and magic – of spirit. Meditation is waking up to this veritable symphony.

Ego, thinking, language, self: synonyms.

Enjoy simple things with total intensity. Just a cup of tea can be a deep meditation. 
Depression is the inevitable consequence of a prevailing ego – a monoculture of self. This, for me, is the brooding theme of both Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter: the deep deep anguish we all feel now that homo sapiens has well and truly upset all natural balance by dominating and polluting, beyond repair, Mother (Middle) Earth.
The last thing you feel like doing is the work, and yet the work needs to get done. So what to do? Quite simple: change your mind.
If you push something which really needs a rest then you'll develop an aversion – you to it and it to you.
Surprise your self.

The philosopher thinks (about) reality whereas the artist, by putting himself on the line and embracing suffering, creates reality.
Depression is the price of peace. To combat it you must find and fight the true war.
Top hat and tails.

25 May 2018

Driven to work by a vehicle fuelled with faith.

24 May 2018

A great way to filter out the superfluous is to ask 3 simple questions: 
What purpose does it serve? 
What is its environmental cost? 
Does it have emotional durability? 

I don't think existence wants you to be serious. I have not seen a serious tree. I have not seen a serious bird. I have not seen a serious sunrise. It seems they are all laughing in their own ways, dancing in their own ways.
The most insidious form of child abuse is giving them choices that we should really make for them.
What we seem to have forgotten is that God is a fundamental aspect of our humanity and that without we are somehow less than human.
There is a quote of Charles Olson's that often comes to mind: A poverty stricken ambience is the best for living and for loving. Poor in the sense of reduced, raw, free of luxury and distraction.
Investing form with lucid stillness

I have a confession to make: I love Osho. I know it's terribly unfashionable and I know I would earn far more credit with the Zen crowd if I damned him with faint praise as they do, but I have to admit that everything I've read of his is totally beautiful, and every serious Osho devotee I've met has had great energy. Turning the work into a dance and a party was a stroke of genius.
Have you noticed how nowadays we insist that our pets are as depressed as we are? Dogs are kept on leashes, by law now, and cats wear collars with bells to prevent them sneaking up on unsuspecting rodents and birds. And as soon as there's sight of a flea or a suspicion of worms, out comes the medication. Just like us really.
Don't try to force anything. Let life be a deep let-go. God opens millions of flowers everyday without forcing their buds.
If you're not inspired by literally everything then you're probably depressed. And to be inspired regularly you need an outlet for that energy: a creative endeavour, a passion, a love, that gives existence, for you, an inexplicable sense and meaning.
Moving meditation: the body moves and the mind is still.
One of the many invaluable lessons that Taiji teaches is that in a fight (and so in life) timing is everything. Choices will always make you late for the party.
Mind misses the point. It's aim and timing are all off.
A stunned silence.
So in the thick of things it makes no sense.
Experience is a form of paralysis.

I took to my room and let small things evolve slowly.

23 May 2018

Even with the lightest heart in the world, the lower back has to work pretty hard to maintain a good erect posture – a giving posture – through the day. But even a hint of depression, deflation, heaviness, and collapse is inevitable. This is why we must learn to master our moods – learn to be happy as a matter of course rather than only when the world pleases us. Let the bastards get you down even for a second and you are effectively retreating into the cesspool of self.
I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.
The arms issue from the spine rather than the shoulders, and the better the posture the lower down the spine.
Oh! that gentleness! how far more potent is it than force!

How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!
It is no accident that the word Now and the word New are almost identical.
Social media. Two words, one concept, all anathema.
As every hardened drug-user knows, it's all in the dosage.
The quality of the work is directly proportional to the degree of internal quiet attained. Nothing to do with how it feels. Feelings are part of the noise.

It may come as a surprise to some, but the teacher is not a whore; their job is not to pleasure you or give you what you want; their job is to offer a tiny bit of truth. And truth always hurts, and is always awful, because the truth effectively evicts you from the status quo, from your past, from the self, and offers an unforeseeable future, an impossible future, which you are now obliged to start living.

22 May 2018

Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.

As the decades roll by, the work feels more and more like pure prayer: heart talking to God in the absence of words.
always rain on the hills
Saying something does not make it so.

Without faith the world will get you down, eventually.
Thinking dislocates the mind – puts it out of joint. Meditation, especially moving meditation such as Taiji, brings it back where it belongs – in the body and with the breath.
The easiest way to rob someone of spirit is to give them a choice. Choosing – decision making – foregrounds mind and ego, and forces body and spirit into the background.

21 May 2018

The work contextualises the life, not the other way around.
Start with yourself and take leave of yourself.

There are certain lessons, vital to progress, that we cannot learn from the teacher. Maybe the teacher doesn't know or is withholding or, more likely, we just cannot hear. Some things are only learned by living, by suffering.
It never gets any easier.

Work that dwells on how the skin gathers information about the world, and how sight propagates conventions and deceptions.
Become a beacon, a symbol, a hero, a virtue embodied.
Meditation looks at the million and one ways mind interposes itself between me and the moment.

Getting to the bottom of it all.
Reading between the lines.
Breath is automatic, involuntary sculpture that brings us closer to osmosis with things.

20 May 2018

Meditation: a chance to savour every second. They won't last forever.
A free mind is one which is untroubled and unfettered by anything, which has not bound its best part to any particular manner of being or devotion and which does not seek its own interest in anything.

19 May 2018


Silence is God's first language.
The richness of a life has nothing to do with the variety of experiences, exotic or otherwise, that fill it. These are just clutter – indications of a restless soul that hasn't found itself or its work, and so wanders aimlessly. A rich life is one that goes deep into the heart, and such a life needs to be firmly anchored, in place, in work, in poverty, hence the anchorites of old.
For better or for worse.
Love, when attached to an object, soon becomes heavy and needy. This is why Buddhists preach non-attachment. Love with all your heart but let that love set you free by being itself free. Love is love of life. Love is the way, the Tao, of life. Love is life. When, for whatever reason, I am not loving then I am less (than alive). The work is simply to wake up to this, and to put love, as a process of giving (to life), central in life.
Where do we begin? Begin with the heart.

18 May 2018


The mind should be relaxed, quiet, awake, present and, above all, happy.

17 May 2018

an acceptance of the yoke of Heaven

Weighed down by a stone in the belly; lifted up by a halo above the head. This is the field, the playing field, the reality, we contend with in spiritual practice.

In the name of clarity and understanding we inadvertently rob the world of magic, of spirit, with our prosaic interpretations and explanations. Spiritual work aims to reinvest that world with the shimmer of magic, the dance of spirit, the gleam of beauty.
at the still point, there the dance is

16 May 2018


Pray for a rent, a rupture, where tears flow freely.
"Never give in to tiredness – it's always an illusion." 
—John Kells
They say that the most valuable and valued experience for the student of spirit is a broken heart.
Sit until the knees doth protest too much.
It is too late to start 
For destinations not of the heart. 
I must stay here with my hurt.

Meditation: happy to wait.
You have to imagine 
a waiting that is not impatient
because it is timeless.
The primary function of the eyes is not to see but to weep. The primary function of the heart is not to beat but to bleed. These are what we call giving.
"Only abandon a practice session if someone else needs your time and energy instead."
 ​—John Kells
Poetry transforms experience into beauty.

At the very core of being is a heart, a broken heart. Through the work that break empowers us. Without the work it fills us with pain and hurt, and we struggle to patch it up with words and stories.
"Coming to class is not practice. Teaching is not practice. Practice is what you do, on your own, in the privacy of your own boudoir." 
—John Kells ​
We don't learn from books or from teachers. Not really. We learn from mistakes.
It is not a teacher's job to make you happy. That is your job. The teacher simply provides the means.

14 May 2018

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

Bound in humility to the impossibility of the task.
Find something you trust is necessary but which you find impossible and spend a life struggling with it. This is the work.
Is there a place 
here for the spirit? Is there time 
on this brief platform for anything 
other than mind's failure to explain itself?
Imagine sitting outside in the rain.
Hell is self, Heaven is Heart. It's really that simple.

The darkness 
is the deepening shadow 
of your presence; the silence a 
process in the metabolism
of the being of love. ​
The teacher makes your life hell. Or rather they reveal to you that the life you live is a version of hell. And if they don't then they're just another Whore of Babylon.
It doesn't matter how intelligent, how sensitive, how 'spiritual' you are, if you're not engaged in some all-consuming work then you're effectively a waste of space.
When the teacher wakes up your spirit they also wake you up to the enormity of the task ahead, so you're never sure whether to thank them or curse them.
The nearest we approach God is as creative beings.

When the spirit is free it will naturally gleam.
The work is in two parts: spiritual and spirited. Spiritual work is about demolishing the ego, the self, and spirited work is about freeing the spirit from body and mind. In Taiji terms these are what we call Yield and Attack. And in the same way that attacking without a prior yield is not Taiji, so yielding without the ability and desire to attack is not Taiji either, it's what we call avoidance.
A comrade in arms – in spirit – is what I've always wanted. But in their absence I'll take solitude any day.
In the same way that a hot shower washes away the grog of sleep or the grime of day, meditation allows gravity and time to wash the mind and reveal the soul.
The meaning is in the waiting.

Without spirit, holy spirit, quiet mind is just an anaemic form of depression.

The choices we make – which we're making all the time – effectively behave as a filter ensuring that the world we perceive and partake in is the one we first conceive in the mind. This is how we create and live our own self-designed reality, and how 'self' is effectively the world we live in. Without this filter the mind would be literally blown apart and in all likelihood madness would ensue. But this is the nature of spiritual work – to slowly and gently bring down our barricades and start facing up to what's really there – a reality so belittling to self that it shrinks and shrivels, and yet so empowering to spirit that the once fledgling heart now burgeons. The world, previously a mere reflection of self, becomes all heart and soul.

13 May 2018

Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build
Your verse a ladder.

Working on spirit takes a lot of (spiritual) energy. So if you insist on wasting what you have on a nine-to-five or a family or pampering the ego then don't feel short-changed or hard done by when you find precious little for the real thing.
knowing the body's sweetness, the mind 's treason

Do your homework, assiduously, eagerly, joyfully, and you'll progress, slowly but surely. Neglect your homework and you'll simply moulder in the mausoleum of self, which, no doubt, you'll spend a lifetime decorating with all manner of bauble and trinket.
Humanity – our human being – is expressed perhaps most clearly by the imagination: our ability to spontaneously effectuate becomings or transformations befitting the uniqueness and intensity of the moment. This can also be called beauty or love or truth. These words are interchangeable.
Your teacher has two impossibly difficult tasks. The first is to wake up your spirit, and the second is to ensure that your private practice (which is your responsibility to institute) is demolishing ego rather than bolstering it. Once these tasks are complete, which can take decades, you're on your own.

12 May 2018

Under the spell of spirit one feels tight, together, sharp, but also loose, light, free. A different animal. Altogether capable.
Keep the home fire burning.
It's shocking how many teachers teach in lieu of any honest practice of their own.
When we are weak, we are
strong. When our eyes close
on the world, then somewhere
within us the bush

burns. When we are poor
and aware of the inadequacy
of our table, it is to that
uninvited the guest comes. ​

R.S. Thomas
Sit until the heart lifts. And it will, of its own, once what's holding it down falls away.
A phrase I would hear often when a kid: You're too clever for your own good! And I must admit, the students I prefer are those too stupid to get it wrong.
Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die.

Body is ballast enough without mind weighing heart down.
Lead with the heart and you won't go astray.
Practice only becomes a problem when you give yourself a choice.

11 May 2018

a cosmic ecology in fractal
Existence is the same as happiness and happiness is the same as being.

Spirit is the secret from which all others tumble.
There will come a time when one will have to forget all that one has learned.
Knowledge from faith rather than a need to know. ​

10 May 2018

render the mind quiescent

Caught in the precarious balance between growing up and growing old.

By going around enough it may be perfect.
A veritable stream of consciousness.

09 May 2018

the harvest of the moment
It's a question of scale.

08 May 2018

All or nothing.

Develop the vestiges: tail, pinkies (hands & feet), brain-stem, amygdala, thymus, instincts, spirit. This is the beginning to opening up the energetic body my teacher spent the last twenty years of his life investigating.

07 May 2018

Eat only when hungry, and then leave a quarter portion empty.
Hone spirit by homing in on essence.
Reel in the slack. Only then will giving strengthen.
Whether you work with joy or resentment is entirely up to you, that is your choice, not whether to work, that is all weather.

06 May 2018

When you stand or sit with correct posture – when you inhabit your allotted space – then there is no room for self. Your true space is always slightly forward of where you'd normally be.

Heavy squats taught me (something Taiji never could) that without a proud lifting chest the spine will buckle on the way down. Backbone requires thymic pride.
Find the mind for which getting it right comes natural. This is what in Zen they call no-mind.
Progress is a series of about-faces, reversals, each a sudden realisation that you have the wrong end of the stick.
the emergence of thought is the root of all mischief

We have to develop without knowing how.
The problem with living in a culture built on chutzpah is that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to find anything of real depth and refinement. Internal progress is, as my teacher once put it, a series of going-back-to-square-one's, and this requires a humility and a patience that only comes with long sustained application to a work that appears thankless and unprofitable.
If you have to understand in order to proceed then you'll never get where you need to go which is always beyond the mind.
A real teaching will take you to deep horrible places you'd rather not go, where you've unconsciously hidden your irrational fears. The teacher reassures: all the masters before have had the same ordeal.

05 May 2018

Scorch the ego by ignoring it.

A life and being structured by heart rather than mind.
Silence is the most potent form of work.
The real test of a yielding surface is not only it's softness but it's ability to return energy – it's elasticity.
Our terminology is somewhat misleading. Double-weighted means being locked into a static, forceful (non-energetic) unity whereas single-weighted means becoming a Taoist binary: full/empty, up/down, internal/external, body/spirit.
To access the heart simply relax the mind.

04 May 2018

Admit that you're bored rigid with the closed loops of self, and allow the spine to ever extend, top and tail.
Learn to rest naturally in God rather than self. It all hinges on this.
The point to be grasped is this, that Heart means the very core of one's being, the centre, without which there is nothing whatever.
Without a spirit fired by transmission, a mind honed with strict discipline, a body conditioned through pain and discomfort, and a soul yearning for union, the work simply serves ego rather than demolishes it.
Make sense through use rather than thought.

03 May 2018


The willful misinterpretations of the mediocre student.

01 May 2018

Abide in the heart and surrender your acts to the Divine.
It's a fine line between sensibly looking after your energy and pampering yourself stupid. Until the spirit is well awake you'll need a teacher to demark it for you.