I’m not one of those people privileged with doubt.

When you know something, that knowledge is packed away somewhere – compartmentalized – even (especially) if you're thinking it now.

The mind grows through exposure to truth.

A root in taiji is an extension of energy down into the ground from the foot. It happens naturally when mind in dantien intends up and out, but works best when standing on one leg, with a relaxed hip and an extending tail bone. Like everything else in taiji, it is an example of Central Equilibrium.

Consider the eye. When, apart from looking in a mirror, does the eye see anything of itself? An eye with a cataract may see something like a cloud, which is its cataract; an eye with glaucoma may see its glaucoma as a rainbow halo around the lights. A healthy eye sees nothing of itself—it is self-transcendent. 

What is called self-actualization is, and must remain, the unintended effect of self-transcendence; it is ruinous and self-defeating to make it the target of intention. And what is true of self-actualization also holds for identity and happiness. It is the very “pursuit of happiness” that obviates happiness. The more we make it a target, the more widely we miss.

start every session 'without memory, desire or understanding'

For the time being.

RULES FOR ZAZEN

Practicing Zen is zazen. For zazen, a quiet place is suitable. Lay out a thick mat. Do not let in drafts or smoke, rain or dew. Protect and maintain the place that contains your body. Day or night, the place of sitting should not be dark; it should be kept warm in winter and cool in summer.

Set aside all involvements and let the myriad things rest. Zazen is not thinking of good, not thinking of bad. It is not conscious endeavor. It is not introspection. Do not desire to become a buddha. Let sitting or lying down drop away. Be moderate in eating and drinking. Mindful of the passing of time, engage yourself in zazen as though saving your head from fire.

When sitting in zazen, wear the kasaya (monastic robe) and use a round cushion. The cushion should not be placed all the way under the legs but only under the buttocks. In this way the crossed legs rest on the mat and the backbone is supported by the round cushion. This is the method used by all buddha ancestors for zazen.

Sit either in the half-lotus position or in the full-lotus position. For the full-lotus put the right foot on the left thigh and the left foot on the right thigh. The toes should lie along the thighs, not extending beyond. For the half-lotus position, simply put the left foot on the right thigh.

Loosen your robes and arrange them in an orderly way. Place the right hand on the left foot and the left hand on the right hand, with the ends of the thumbs lightly touching each other. With the hands in this position, place them close to the body so that the joined thumb tips are at the navel.

Straighten your body and sit upright. Do not lean to the left or right; do not bend forward or backward. Your ears should be in line with your shoulders, and your nose in line with your navel.

Rest your tongue against the roof of your mouth and breathe through your nose. Lips and teeth should be closed. Eyes should be open, neither too wide nor too narrow. Having adjusted body and mind in this manner, take a breath and exhale fully.

Sit solidly in samadhi and think not thinking. How do you think not thinking? Beyond thinking. This is the art of zazen.

Zazen is not learning to concentrate. It is the dharma gate of great ease and joy. It is undivided practice-realization.


Excerpt From
The Essential Dogen
Kazuaki Tanahashi ​

When genuine faith arises, practice and study with a teacher. If it does not, wait for a while.

Awareness is at the forefront of the mind whereas knowledge is safely tucked away in the background. Awareness is of the present, knowledge of the past.

The cost of safety and security – of peace – is boredom and depression. Eventually. Inevitably.

Love is in the air.

In the face of the loved one, the mind stops and the heart opens. This is what love does, it stops the mind and opens the heart. The work is to love all, to have this same response to the Other, whatever the Other: stranger, creature, event, moment.

Meditation is a stake-out. Sitting quietly, unobtrusively: watching, waiting, listening for spirit to stir. Then following, at a distance, wherever it may go; without being noticed, without interfering.

Poetry is strong, stronger than tense, longer than tense, 
more than a habit of wrist, a blister of finding, a 
throat to go. It lands me 
in blind lands, it hovers my solace.

Single-weightedness reveals me to be two people: one on the left leg, one on the right. They are not quite the same. Twins. I call them the Chuckle Brothers because their interactions make me laugh.

If you fail to find joy and delight, imagination and creativity in your heart then you are probably over-tired or over-stressed. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Everything about you is expressed in your movements. You are clearer to others than you can ever be to yourself. My teacher used to say, The only person you need to be honest with is yourself, yet this is an impossibility. You are you, yet others have to put up with you. Without honest (immediate) FEEDBACK there is no hope. Polite society is the curse of spiritual progress.

When the cat’s away the mice will play. (The cat is mind and the mice are energy and spirit.)

Like a small child, looking up at a weird world occupied by giants.

The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul.

How to work on spirit? Find a particularly bad habit amongst your arsenal of habits and work on the seemingly impossible task of letting it go. Think of this as a practical koan. Don't let the task either get you down or defeat you. Try, over time, every possible strategy.

Wisdom is knowing intuitively (knowing without knowing) when to say Yes and when to say No.

Love is the ether. Not space, but the subtle continuous medium that fills space. What the Easterns call Mind. Mind continuous. Undistracted mind, tracing time, and thereby, through extension, touching eternity.

The spirit of adventure.

Tackling an Apollonian task with Dionysian fervour. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Exercise: decide to do something, no matter what, and do it exactly at a certain time.

The work demands your best energy, so don't squander it on other things.

In each class the teacher rekindles the flame of truth. The good student then endeavours to feed the flame with attention, practice, meditation, study, mindfulness. The mediocre student, usually well before the next class, lets the flame go out through forgetfulness, carelessness, laziness – busying themselves with other things. The poor student is so terrified, so contemptuous of the truth, that they extinguish the flame, as soon as they leave the class, by mocking it, at least in their own fearful mind. Which begs the question, why they keep coming. Despite themselves, beneath their selves, they obviously love the truth.

You live in a dream. You are waiting to begin to live…

let's not pretend we know our motives

In every touch discover the touch of otherness. Be interested, excited, astonished.

Warrior or worrier? It's entirely up to you.

living beyond psychology

The foreigner allows you to be yourself by making a foreigner of you.

The opportunity to be dull 
makes cowards of us all

Thankful for small mercies.

Turn aside from what we know and face the Other.

the erotic dimension of gravity

the trick is to discover your density

In meditation, one becomes an instrument, like a radio, allowing Heaven and Earth to send each other energy and messages. These messages travel via the spine, not the mind. Any mental activity congests the airways. It is not our place to listen in, to read the messages, but simply to be, empty of self and full of the flow of energy. We call this state adoration.

It takes a strong back and a soft front to face the world.

Casting an opinion (indeed, opening the mouth to speak) is like a dog pissing on a lamppost – little more than adding one's own stink to the general stench – a crude way of claiming ground.

Without the strict discipline of meditation – that hard-won stillness of body and quietness of mind – the Great Emptiness at the source of mind would unhinge any mind open to it, and tip it into madness.

We do not possess an ego. We are possessed by the idea of one.

Nature is never finished.

The source and essence of the internal chatter is fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of loneliness, fear of evaporating if ever it were to cease. It stems from a lack of faith in spirit.

By excluding myself; by excluding myself, I’ll grow.

Hunter-gatherers do not have religion as such. They see spirit everywhere, in everything; they are animists, and to them everything is alive. And, living in natural environments, they are quite right since natural things contain spirit: the spirit of creation, the spirit of place and connexion, and the spirit of duration or span, and so they are alive, though maybe not organically so. Man-made artefacts and environments are artificial and are largely devoid of spirit. They can acquire spirit over time and with correct use, so an old church or cathedral has much more and better spirit than a new supermarket, and an old set of well-worn tools has better spirit than a new unused set. However, as our lives became more removed from the natural, it required the invention of a remote transcendent God and a mythical Garden of Eden where lost spirit thrives naturally, awaiting our return.

cultivate virtue with resolute deeds

yielding attains the middle outside and submits to the firm

Before I started Taiji I worked as an improvising musician for a few years. What I could never understand at the time was that my best performances inevitably came when I felt wretched, and my worst performances came when I felt great. I had to admit that creativity – moving people with spirit – has nothing to do with how one feels, and everything to do with how well connected one is with spirit at large. This connexion we call authenticity, and it requires a raw vulnerability, painful to experience and difficult to sustain.

do not tarry long but push on

All spiritual disciplines implore us to live in the present: to break habits, abandon conditioning and live authentically, here and now. However, to live selfishly, hedonistically, here and now, at the expense of the future, at the expense of our childrens planet, is not what they mean. This is the difference between the presence of a master and the presence of a child. The child's spontaneity is because it has neither fear nor thought of past or future, whereas the master's spontaneity is the result of his embracing both past and future and funneling them into the present. This is what we call growing up or understanding and it is the source of the master's gravitas. In some way they really do have the weight of the world on their shoulders.

I worked in such a way that I could say that it's not me.

gentle without, strong within

In order to accrue the energy required for the spirit to break free of the clutches of ego, one must live an extremely strict and disciplined life.

those who wish for truth take joy in doing the work

Destiny has nothing to do with the career, the spouse, the brats: they are incidental, accidental, expedient at best. Destiny is raw, pure life, unlivable by most. It awaits beneath the false values and conditioning that stick like a thick weighty scab to your tender shoulders. Touch destiny, even fleetingly, and you've given something vital back to the universe.

Every departure from the Tao contaminates the spirit.

Practice sacrifices time, usually spent polishing the ego, for the sake of dusting the spirit.

By practicing quiet strength within and gentle acceptance without, you acquire a grace that dissolves all barriers.

One must become eminently still to appreciate that reality is not a world of solid objects but a world of pure movement.

For the psychotherapist, childhood trauma is a block that prevents the patient functioning properly in society (as if that were an absolute goal in life). For the spiritual teacher, childhood trauma is the spur that drives the student to find and then do the work.

Leave the world of thoughts and enter the world of energy.

There is a famous Zen saying:

Before studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains. Whilst studying Zen, men are no longer men and mountains are no longer mountains. After studying Zen, men are men again and mountains are mountains. 

So what is the difference between before and after? The difference is in you. Beforehand, like all average people, you perceive the world through the gauze of ego. The job of your teacher is twofold: firstly to convince you that there is a more vital and interesting way of being and perceiving, namely through energy and spirit (in fact, on one level, the student already knows this otherwise they wouldn't have sought out a teacher) and secondly to teach a methodology to bring about the slow, arduous and inevitably painful process of abandoning ego and entering, for good, the world of energy. ​

make an offering of stillness

do your work, then quietly step back

The I Ching doesn’t tell you what to do but rather suggests the energy or mood with which to do it.

In order to listen one must become quiet.

turn over a new leaf and make a fresh start

On reaching an impasse, pray for calamity.

to work on what has been spoiled by the parents, love must prevail and extend over both the beginning and the end

Double-weighted maintains a status quo. Single-weighted pressures change.

Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.

Pray for conditions, situations, occasions that offer no choice.

Nothing humbles like setback, injury and illness. And if it needs to come to that then be assured that it will.

Silence is where we hear something deeper than our chatter.

An equilibrium of two qualities saves the day, makes the life:

1. Work – a life-long, duty-bound seriousness; a gravity.
2. Humour – a lightness that sees difference everywhere, and so laughs, at everything; especially self and especially death.

The general and the particular – two opposite scales operating at once.

We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

The next stage is hard-won indeed.

Our privileged lives render us largely incapable of mustering the intensity required to face real pain and suffering with a smile. We have become weak, and that weakness is expressed most clearly in our humourlessness.

But by the grace of God.

Do you have the courage to face what's there?

A root naturally develops when you learn to put your foot down. When you intend each step.

Remember that an artist's life is an intense search for truth.

The problem with comfort, when taken to the extreme that it becomes a way of life, is that it encourages laziness, carelessness and selfishness.

Don't live stressfully; live dangerously. Again, a matter for spirit.

Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth 

But it takes a hero to get out of one

calm your mind 

follow your breath 

simplify your life

It doesn't really matter what you do, ultimately. What matters is the intensity with which you do it – the spirit.

The nicest thing ever said to me:
You don't teach Taiji; you teach relationship.

The greatest teacher is pain, but only if you work with it: let it rouse the intensity to not only bear it but appreciate it.

when genuine stillness 

pervades your existence 

the subtle universe appears

Nothing is what it seems. Nothing as solid as it first appears.

It’s all a matter of how much freedom you can stand.

Where there's a will, there's a way.

Meditative stillness listens attentively for subtle energies, micro-movements, normally lost in the hullabaloo. This is why that stillness must not be stiff or frozen or imposed. It is a stillness that bristles with anticipation. The precarious stillness of dynamic equilibrium.

Holding together a kind of tension.

Spirit occupies the space between the real and the imaginary. Sometimes appearing, sometimes disappearing.

A painting, you know, it's all dirty material. But it's about transformation. Taking that earth, that heavy earthen kind of thing, turning it into air and light.

A modern education turns the mind into a cruel instrument whilst neglecting body, heart, emotions, energy, spirit and the other.

Attempting to repeat a good experience leads to disappointment. This is where the destructive element of spirit comes in useful. It breaks the mould. Cuts through habit.

Spirit is a belief in pure movement.

The mind, deep down, aches to be shaped and led by spirit.

the vis inertiae of habit

The only thing that gets one down, spiritwise, is the cloying, heavy, fearful mind.

If you shrink from pain, you'll get nowhere.

Suffice it to say that since this revelation, I had reason to look around for scholarly, bold, hardworking colleagues (I am still looking).

Mastery lies in little things. The true master is not only a master of their art, but a master of all the little things that fill an ordinary day. In this sense, mastery is a mind ever where it should be, never with itself.

The Eastern way is about changing the self to suit the environment – externally passive, internally active. The Western way is about changing the environment to suit the self – externally active, internally passive. We need to strike a balance.

Real teaching bypasses the convolutions of mind and goes straight, spirit to spirit. For this to happen, the student must work so hard their physical energy is at fever pitch – bristling with intensity and awareness. At once deeply relaxed (resigned) and intensely agitated (ready). A seasoned warrior.

the great link into the earth

Sitting patiently

awaiting grace

a grace that

in all likelihood

will never come. 

So be it.

Having spent a life excelling through a clever mind in a culture that values a clever mind above all else, it proves well-nigh impossible to give it up in order to develop a fledgeling heart into a mature loving heart. My only hope is work.

the revolutionary man has not yet appeared

Mastery is simply giving everything your full undivided attention, naturally, out of respect; because you can't live any other way.

An even cheerfulness is the reward for a long, brave, diligent, subterranean seriousness for which, admittedly, not everyone is suited.

May seem meagre recompense for a lifetime's work, but, in fact, it is everything. ​

Work works.

We are involved in a life that passes understanding and our highest business is our daily life.

Watching this little film it is clear why the Chinese liken the heart to a golden chrysanthemum. Now imagine a black chrysanthemum and the film played backwards; that would be the dantien – a dark centre of gravity, ever furling into itself – just as necessary. Together, these constitute the two principle forces in a life: gravity and grace.

When a kid, back in the sixties, my dad bought me a shortwave radio. It had three dials: a volume control, a coarse-tuning knob to locate a radio station, and a fine-tuning knob to pinpoint the best signal from such a station. Nowadays I often get the feeling I'm using the fine-tuner when I should be using the coarse-tuner. In fact, truth be told, I often feel I haven't actually switched the set on yet.

If it doesn't need to be said then don't say it, and if it does need to be said, say it such that it has to be heard.