30 September 2018

Our normal, adjusted state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities.

29 September 2018


Illness presents an opportunity to see things differently.
On a roll? Careful it doesn't take you in the wrong direction.

28 September 2018

What people really need and demand from life is not wealth, comfort, or esteem, but games worth playing.
The master does not worry because he knows in his bones that there is only one law in the universe and that is the law of karma. Everything is in its rightful place.
One chooses the choiceless life, freely, uncoerced. This is the irony of the work. It must exist outside the prevailing culture otherwise it tends to accumulate rather than diminish.

Rigid mind – mindset – has a lot to do with setting the jaw.
Because we aren’t strapped together by some master tempo clock, I’m able to play my instruments and speak with the machine, not just program a pattern and press play.

27 September 2018

Mind's reference (and hommage) should be body – the centred body. It rarely is though, unless you're an athlete or a yogi. Instead we refer ourselves to externals: environs, plans, worries, and simply use the body to navigate a course through them. This effectively locks out the wisdom and knowledge of the body (and energy) and replaces it with what the mind sees and what the mind thinks.

25 September 2018

Turning effectuates a beautiful separation. Body flees a centre as mind finds it.
NOW IS THE BEST MOMENT OF MY LIFE 

T-shirt slogan in Tel Aviv yesterday.

The work should make you a better person, not just a better Taiji practitioner. If it doesn't then you're missing something.

Before the world has a chance to make me real (wake me up, entertain me) I should already have made it real. It's the only way to be ready.
Reality is a willingness to engage, to change.
We don't become something by knowing but by believing. This is why our way is through energy rather than consciousness. Energy is the iceberg of which consciousness is the tiny tip.

24 September 2018

Only a minuscule proportion of the sensory data processed by the unconscious mind (capable of processing approximately 11 million bits per second) is referred to the conscious mind (capable of processing approximately 50 bits per second).

23 September 2018


Hood the glare of the eyes, hide the white tremor of the hands, shade the stark reflecting face, assume the stillness of a tree.
One of our problems is that we conceptualise time as some sort of fourth dimension of space – another axis. We then assume that there is a vantage, an origin of coordinates, from which reality, and the passage of time, is observable. This is basically making ourselves a detached, remote (transcendent) God, a control freak, instead of a creature so firmly embedded in time and space that we define it. We don't inhabit time, we are time.
One does not become fully human painlessly.

Asked a friend this morning how his (nine year old) boy is doing:
—Difficult.
—How so?
—Cynical, cheeky and generally unhappy.
—A depressed teenager already?
—Exactly! And I have no idea why; he has everything money can buy.

Beginner's mind, beginner's luck. Come to things fresh, and mind is luck; before we mess things up.

In my clinical experience, the greatest block to a person's development is his having to take on a way of life which is not rooted in his own powers.
Spirit transforms the situation into an event – it introduces the potential for change: creative change, destructive change.
Awareness, spirit, organises not only one's being but the totality of the present moment.
Mindfulness directs the attention away from the stream of consciousness and into energy, movement.
When I was a kid it was:
—Take your head out of that book, and get some fresh air!
Nowadays it's:
—Turn off that screen, and read a book! ​

22 September 2018

Nothing has truth value except the here and now. In particular, what I make of it: my body's intersection with time.
always at the point of being lost
As you get older, external distractions (excuses) fall away. Still plenty of internal ones, of course, but that's the work.

21 September 2018

The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.
We tend to see and hear only that which confirms what we already know or want to believe. Confirmed conformists. In other words we look and listen with minds already made up. An open, empty mind will see the shimmer of difference and novelty everywhere. Everywhere.

Masters of Taiji are two a penny but masters of the Tao are rare as hens’ teeth.

20 September 2018

The differences are subtle, coloured by love.
When spirit slumbers, we ignorantly squander the gifts of the Tao.

19 September 2018

I think I’m obsessed with reality, I don’t mean realism but that sense of reality, like "I’m really here and I feel it" even though I can’t explain it.
Silent illumination.

It takes time to see the positive in the negative, to accept emptiness without getting sad, lonely or frightened.

This or that? Well, Taoism recommends a balance, an equilibrium, which means working at the one you're not very good at to bring it up to speed. And everything has a this and a that; everything is multiple, multiplicity, multitude. So our work is cut out. Straightforward really.

17 September 2018

Good tension – what I call Integrity – is the tone that floods your being when spirit rises.
Egotist: technical term for a student who loves himself more than his teacher.

15 September 2018

The way out is through the door you came in.

If you look at the great men in history: the leaders, artists, thinkers, then they'll all have fantastic spirit, they'll all be at least a little bit crazy, and most of them were probably poor fathers. If they were busy being good fathers then the chances are they wouldn't have had the energy – the undivided attention – to do their job.
Students nowadays demand private lessons, something that in my day we wouldn't have countenanced (and couldn't have afforded). They feel that if they have the undivided attention of the teacher then they will make better progress. This may be so, but they would have to do a hell of a lot of practice to make any sense of it, whereas most now take private lessons in lieu of practice. Without practice, private lessons simply feed the ego.
If you educate a person’s mind but neglect their body (and therefore their spirit) then you create a gaping rent in their being. You effectively create a schizoid personality (albeit a socially acceptable one).
The here & now is not an external event within which your presence is incidental. You create the here and now with your spirit, and without you there is no here & now.
Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.

The spine is your very own magic wand.

13 September 2018

It is easier to do one's duty to others than to one's self. If you do your duty to others, you are considered reliable. If you do your duty to yourself, you are considered selfish.
People object to what they consider my misuse of the words 'bourgeois' and 'bourgeoisie.' (They feel that maybe I have a Marxist agenda. Heaven forbid!) So I looked the words up in my dictionary and this is what it said: The middle-class, especially with reference to their materialistic values and conventional attitudes. And this is precisely what I mean.
The fascist within is not only the tin-pot tyrant judging and criticising at every turn, it is also the victim that needs to be led.
Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.

Have you noticed how 'Enlightenment,' in the hands of Western Buddhists, has become just another bourgeois aspiration, another ego-trip?
Life's biggest burden is procrastination, avoidance.
Living in the spirit of self-sacrifice.
Make a song and dance of it. The best remedy for depression.
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.

Much depression today is simply the inability to express the natural flamboyance of one's energy. There's no meaningful outlet and so the flame goes out.
Some people are lucky: they get through life thinking the ground beneath them is solid.

12 September 2018

The work has nothing to do with being special or feeling special, and everything to do with simple being, simple feeling.
Theory is in the mind; praxis in the body. And the work is their equilibrium.
I put it down to the mists from the river which have a solvent effect on reality.

Stressed, anxious, exhausted? Then the chances are you've bitten off more than you can chew – expectations are too high. Or, more simply, you don't really have the energy to meet the demands you agree to put yourself under.
If you demand or even expect the best of all worlds then you end up getting the best of none.
Modern middle-class life revolves around acquiring enough money to be able to tick off ever more exotic holiday destinations. ”I've been there! I've done that!”

A victim is not just someone bullied or oppressed, but anyone who refuses to question the conditioning that places them so firmly in a box, a mould, a rut. And, let's face it, we are all victims of the fascist within – the self or ego – at least most of the time.

Just saying something doesn't make it so. This is obvious and it seems trivial to even mention it. Yet it's quite shocking how often we behave otherwise. A case of believing one’s own publicity.

11 September 2018


The work, in most cultures, is likened to a path, a way, a journey. The teacher puts you on the right path, but it's your own efforts, your own practice, that takes you along that path. No practice, no progress. It's really very simple. The obsessive drive of the good student – the compulsion to work at every opportunity – is an expression of the love affair they have with destiny – their enlightened being. It is also the teacher’s job to give you a sense of this by awakening the best part of you – your fearless spirit.

Words provide sense, solidity, firm form, rigidity, in the chaotic welter of energy that life is. They slow the mind/spirit down to managable speeds.
Keep going till you break through. Or break down.
Body is simply the formal aspect of mind. A mind only needs conceptual structures if the body is out of shape.
they tore up paving stones in search of the beach beneath ​

10 September 2018

it is not the schizophrenic process that makes the schizo ill but the environment in which he or she finds himself
Words are token, and reject reality.
The main function of the news is not to inform but to control.
Language keeps reality at bay, and substitutes a world.

09 September 2018

theory cannot be developed without encountering a wall, and praxis is needed to break through

Courage consists in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges.

Good tension is what produces body-as-one-unit. It could also be called connectivity; not just connexion but connexion as one. This, of course, requires vision – the ability to 'see' the one whilst still bits and pieces. A musician hearing the note before he plays it. A sense of before, a sense of after. The bleed of time.
Real education has nothing to do with gathering information and everything to do with opening up (to) the unknown. And, more than anything, this requires a deep feeling for the vastness and sacredness of the unknowable.
Its a beautiful lesson how, in seated meditation, feet and hands gravitate towards dantien whilst elbows and knees extend away.

08 September 2018

Different moods, different modes, different worlds.

We live in a superficial populist culture that either mocks depth or simply doesn't believe it exists. Work is what you now do to roam and survive the endless inane surfaces. The notion that work is what you do to pierce the skin and delve into lonely but fascinating depths is now anathema.
Having an opinion doesn't make you significant; having good spirit does.
This work is for those with a strong suspicion that there's more to life than propagation of the species.

profound peace
constant sobriety
living boldness

Eradicate bad tension, install good tension. This is the work. Bad tension is blockage, pessimism, cynicism, selfishness – anything that impedes the flow of energy. Good tension is tone, spring, enthusiasm, life – whatever enables and encourages the flow of energy (movement).

06 September 2018


People are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them in a firmament of conventions and opinions. But poets make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the tear.
The early hours of the morning, for me, are meditation time. The quiet between 3 and 5 is so conducive. This was brought home to me 3.30 on Wednesday morning. I was about 20 minutes in when there was a power cut – the whole village went out. And suddenly I go deep into a quiet unlike the usual – more akin to desert quiet or the peace of Sinai. After about 30 minutes the power came back on with a bang: the light in the bathroom, the fridge, modem, printer all whirred into action, the overhead fan started its insistent rhythm. And I was pulled out of my depths. It made me realise that the environment we have created for ourselves constantly conspires to maintain our superficiality, our nervous anxiety, and deny us any deep peace.
Logic is always defeated by itself, that is to say, by the insignificance of the cases on which it thrives.

05 September 2018

At last, the work commences. Hallelujah. Progress now seems assured. Until one day, after three years, five years, ten max, you hit a wall. The work takes you to that wall; that's what it's meant to do. The wall is your wound, your blind spot, your refusal to be whole because then life – your responsibility to spirit – to spiritual life – would be unbearable. It's then a matter of banging your head against that wall each day until one of you breaks. The worst thing you could do is give up because you feel you've reached a dead-end.

04 September 2018

we take the indefinite article as an index of the transcendental

Over-mothered and under-fathered. Our children to a tee.

Step outside the box and glimpse the bigger picture (there's always a bigger picture). If you're blessed (it'll feel like a curse), life will force you to do this.
A life of glimmers and glimpses.

02 September 2018

Thoughts arise and dissolve within the field of mind. Do not accept or reject them. Rather let the mind wander as it will until a subtle sense of immanence dawns.
In this game the teacher is not a great deal of help. He just points a finger, without which you'd inevitably go in the wrong direction. The rest is entirely up to you.

01 September 2018

The most important thing in taiji, as in life, is connexion. And connexion, real connexion, is neither passive nor accidental. Connexion is expressive, intended.

The work – your work/problem – is embedded in spine, for all to see. Blockage, discontinuity, anomaly, hindering free flow. Find the kind of mind to unwind/unbind from tip of coccyx to crown of head.
as if in response to something calling to you from afar

We inevitably harbour bad karma, demons, locked doors, family curses, faulty DNA, kinky spine. And we have intimations—shudders—from earliest childhood. The longer we ignore it, the more difficult the work will be. And if we wait until we have no choice then its already too late. But, as we say, far better too late than never.
Just do the work, and, in time, you'll find out for yourself.