The secret to losing weight is to feel what you gain by being always hungry: a reminder to be mindful.

a future and a past reconciled—a time undivided

What turns force into energy is softness—a willingness to change, especially the radical change we call failure.

Spine is a stake you drive into the heart of the Earth.

Softness resembles a child’s wish. That whispered promise: I will always be by your side.

If there is one trait common to all great interpreters, it is their capacity for intensification.

The deeper you go the more it becomes a question of authenticity. Not in the sense of 'Does it come from me?' but rather 'Does it come from the Dao?'

How do we welcome wonder?

Struggling to teach a particularly stubborn and cynical student about the gift economy the other day, when suddenly a bunch of local teenagers strolled past singing, in English, at the top of their lungs: "I don't care too much for money, cos money can't buy me love!"

the tyranny of self-consciousness

No society can understand itself without looking at its shadow side.

Sinking does not stop with bending the knees. Sinking is driving yourself down into the legs and into the ground. It is a ruthless act of humility, always rousing of spirit. My teacher's imperative: Become a pile-driver.

Problems, if you work with them, make you a better and stronger person. This is why the true believer thanks God for both the good and the bad.

There is a saying in Taiji: If there are problems in the upper body then look to the lower body. Specifically, sink your weight into the legs, and work from the root. Only then can the upper body properly relax and be light and natural—expressive of energy rather than ego. This advice applies not only to problems of posture but to all problems. ​

As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands; one to help yourself and another to help others.

Depression is a lack of feeling, a numbness to life – a lack of risk.

The first thing in Taiji is the root. Without it nothing works naturally – everything has to be fabricated.

Depressed? Then volunteer in a children's hospice. There's nothing so cathartic, and so uplifting of true spirit, than attending to someone who is dying well. And since children do most natural things better than adults it stands to reason that they die better too.

Problems arise when we feel the heart belongs to us. It doesn't, it belongs to Daddy.

For me the only things of interest are those linked to the heart.

Depression is just another name for chronic exhaustion. Tired to death with the falsity of modern life, with being a fraud, with living a lie.

Become a tree – a Faraway Tree in an Enchanted Forest – at least while you work. Then you’ll regularly access unimaginable worlds.

Depression is what happens when we no longer have natural enemies to keep us awake.

We all live in a world of 'make believe.' The religious are just honest about it.

Anyone who does not believe in miracles is not realistic.

The only book I've ever come across specifically on the subject of what we call 'Softness.' Also one of the most beautiful books I've encountered. Originally in French: Puissance de la douceur, by Anne Dufourmantelle. Click image for details.

Generosity, for us, is giving the benefit of the doubt.

We live in dumb insolence. Society demands it.

The attempt to escape from pain is what creates more pain.

The West recommends wishful thinking followed by willful action. The East recommends no-mind and non-action. I guess there has to be a happy medium.

I was born for it, I know for a fact.

The purpose of life is to learn to be simply happy. With no reference beyond what you are. This is enlightenment.

Love the work as your child, or mother, or both.

Maturity is indicated by an appreciation of vowels. Listening to the subtext. Reading between the lines.

without inner revolution forgiveness is merely wished for

Why do I continue? Because my spirit made a promise. In other words: it's a matter of honour.

The only real choice is between spirit and self. All other choices either boil down to this or are so trivial you may as well flip a coin.

Discipline and sacrifice. Without them it's all me, me, me.

It's not enough to have intuition. You must then have the courage to see it through.

When sparkling with spirit you're inspiring; when brimming with courage, encouraging; when in motion, emotional. But when bored you're boring, and when depressed, depressing.

Be other. Is this possible?

on the way to becoming-imperceptible

The most important thing to learn from the teacher is how to stand on your own two feet, or rather on one of those two feet.

Aim to overcome all anthropocentrism.

Not enough to have good instincts. You must then have the courage to act on them.

There is no limit to gentleness, rather a continual invitation to become infected by it – and that invitation can be broken in an instant.

The quantum leap comes when you finally love the work more than yourself. Fully prepared to be subsumed into energy.

Softness should never be an affectation. It comes over time as practice wears down your resistance to energy.

We're so accustomed to using the legs to push the ground away in order to move that it takes years to learn instead to use the legs as elastic pumps with which to bring energy up from the ground and into the upper body.

When standing – waiting, queueing, cooking, washing up – always bend the legs a little and feel gravity pulling down through you. Then you're practising.

Five thousand coats of lacquer were required in order to make a piece of furniture for the royal court in Beijing.

Turning is the abandonment of destination.

Softness is the secret lining, where the imaginary joins the real in a space that contains its own secret, making us feel an astonishment from which we can never entirely return.

Become pure movement – the challenge of Taiji which we manage by turning.

Softness expands the present.

Civilization is a set of rules that enable its members to coexist without ever having to expose their inner truth. In fact the fully civilized individual no longer even suspects he has a truth. He is pure simulacrum – a cultural artifact.

life as journey or becoming instead of narcissistic confirmation of self

Spirit loves a fight.

The majority, by its very nature, is fascist (oppressive), especially when tolerant and understanding.

Progress (maturity) cannot be rushed otherwise it will harbour hidden flaws destined to reveal themselves when it's all too late.

The beloved other is nothing more than a surrogate entity for the imaginary love object.

Eventually, after decades of practice, the realization dawns that you don't have the talent to get where you need to go. The progress that can be made in a lifetime is minuscule. However, this realization, instead of disheartening, fills you with joy because now the pressure is off and you can simply work for the love of it. Then, and only then, do you find the freedom to make your quantum leap.

If looking something 'in the face' means seeing its 'truth' or 'evidence' then there is never any direct face-to-face. Every face is a bedazzlement, terrible and marvelous.

As the work erodes the self one loses subjectivity, content to be just another object with an intensity no subject could match.

In order to see, I must be able to not see.

Work up the courage.

Live in the spiritual affirmative at the expense of the self-affirmative. This is the true meaning of Resurrection.

A life is ethical if it abandons the realm of the livable for the unlivable.

From my own experience, and from what I observed in my teacher, and from what he told me of his own teacher, spiritual progress, no matter how slight, always knocks you down.

Now that natural spirit has been banished, or worse still – tamed and milked, it's up to us to use the imagination to invest reality (external and internal) with a little strangeness.

If life is the dance of yin and yang then death is their conflation.

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

What turns something so tediously trivial (sitting on your bum doing nothing) into something so endlessly fascinating? Spirit.

Mind within or spirit without. It's impossible to attend to both.

Become a master of suspicion. Question everything. Especially your own diagnoses (thoughts).

elude the imperatives of comprehensibility

Only what we do matters and if we do things differently for long enough then eventually what has been artificial, willed and arduous will become genuine, instinctive and easy.

Orthodoxy – right opinion – is always wrong because opinion is wrong or far from right or right for the wrong reasons and so effectively wrong. But orthodoxy is useful because it indicates what not to believe, how not to be. This is the structure of the social and the cultural, but also the structure of the psyche, the body, the energy. We could say that this is the structure of structure. So the habit we need to cultivate most, the habit that prevents the other habits leading to petrification, is the one of always upsetting the apple cart. This of course is pure spirit – the devil in the detail.

The trouble with human beings is that they invariably misjudge the fine line between use and abuse.

Spirit takes us out of ourselves and into life.

The intellect, so skilful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches the living.

William James, when asked why he loved especially the poetry of Whitman and Browning replied: "It always strengthens my backbone to read it."

ear

heart

hearth

__________

earth

A corporeity of consciousness, an intentionality of body.

Meditation: learning to take one's time.

It is not a matter of what as of how – not a matter of embarking on travels, adventures and love affairs but of experiencing everyday reality more intensely.

Ratiocination is the fearful struggle to impose the will of man upon reality. To reduce everything to the worst part of us. Anthropomorphism.

An enlightened master has found her centre and has no qualms about dwelling there.

Gentle thought approaches its objects uncompromisingly, allowing them to contradict its expectations rather than violently subjectivizing them with sympathy or the arrogance known as tolerance.

We think we have conquered Nature whereas, in reality, we have merely removed ourselves from it.

It takes time to acquire depth. A long time.

Each snippet evokes a quality of spirit enriching, through resonance, the mundane.

A line of work. Now there's a useful concept.

TALENT IS LUCK. THE IMPORTANT THING IN LIFE IS COURAGE. ​

Graffiti

For me reading is never pastime or escape but provider of insights. Concepts for living.

Sit to reach a point of having to move out of pure restive joy.

Sit to reach a point where you never need to move again.

It doesn't really matter how good your Form is. What matters is the quality of the spirit that drives it.

refuse the stupidity of believing that you believe nothing

Consciousness and mind operate best in the middle. Awareness and spirit operate best at extremes, edges, margins.

The post-modern curse is freedom of choice. The over-abundance of choices leads to depression and anxiety. Why? Because a field of choices without clear non-selfish principles to navigate a way through is treacherous. A veritable minefield. It is not the profusion of choices that makes us happy but the ability to make principled decisions. Even when we have chosen we still haven't decided. One choice leads to another and then another. Decision, on the other hand, by emphatically chosing, eradicates choice, and as such is an acute act of spirit. The mind choses but the spirit decides.

Northrop Frye compares the cultural envelope to the windows of a lit-up railway car at night. The lights inside cause the windows to act as mirrors reflecting the interior of the railway car. But every so often the lights flicker and fail, leaving the interior of the car in darkness and revealing, through the windows, an alien nature in which it is impossible to survive without equipment, preparation, and skill. Our experience of the world is for the most part the experience in the railway car at night when the lights are on. If we try to look into nature, beyond our cultural envelope, what we see is mostly a reflection of ourselves. But at unexpected moments this hallucination fails and we glimpse the imponderable otherness of the wilderness in which we actually live.

Everything here is presented as point of practice rather than bone of contention. Inspiration rather than insult. Spirit rather than mind. It should make us (want to) leap into action and try it out. How does that weird string of words translate into body and energy? Mind, for us, is at its most useful when tottering into madness.

stand in the world and change the world by your very presence

We distinguish between awareness (energy) and consciousness (mind). Awareness is a vague sense of things, feelings, premonitions, gleaned by being intimately embedded in reality (in being real). Consciousness draws an image from reality by stepping out of the real. The clearer we want the image, the further we must step. In Taiji we hover, as though suspended, in the rich space between awareness and consciousness. Spirit effectuates this suspension.

and the king shall live without an heir 
if that which is lost be not found

We live not in nature but in what we have made.

Give your students methods, not opinions.

Progress is indicated by a desire to go back to the beginning where you miraculously find everything new and fresh.

I would like to be conscious as a flower is conscious. Simply affirmative.

a willingness to arrive someplace different than intended

Resist the temptation to speak, out loud and silently.

The human being, like all creatures, simply desires to love (express) and be loved (belong).

It must take time, so give it time.

Science says if it's not repeatable then it’s not real. We say if it is repeatable then it’s not real. For science, the real is anything untouched by spirit. For us the real is spirit and anything it touches.

Beauty reflects the world’s inconsistencies.

The subject must escape itself to be itself.

When we took on board language we jettisoned silence.

Complete chores in a mood of reverence.

Imagine what it's like for the baby before language, when it lives in reality, in energy, rather than amongst stories, amidst words. That's the reality we strive to touch, if only fleetingly. And that's why, when we get it right, it feels like a homecoming. And why we then weep the tears of the prodigal son.

Being bored is the same as being boring.

A lifetime learning to love.

The screens that have invaded our lives (and radio, books, the internal chatter before them) are distractions to avoid having to interface with actual reality. Reality used to be too painful, too frightening, too real and people needed relief, respite. Nowadays reality is too dull, too boring, too trivial and people need more excitement, more stimulation. Testament to our increasing inability to connect.

Words are always after the event. Events always exceed all that can be said of them.

When we were kids we used to play a silly game where we’d repeat a word or phrase over and over, like a brisk mantra, until it magically lost all meaning and just became abstract rhythmical sound. This is what we do with the work, repeat and repeat and repeat until it loses all referential and representational power, and becomes its own naked, living self.

The day goes from screen to screen. A sad continuity, a virtual reality.