True presence is being true.

Always put the other first, but if they try to run roughshod over your spirit then thump them.

Spirit is the agent of movement and change. Mind the agent of stasis and balance. This is the way things are meant to be. Spirit dis-equilibrates and mind re-equlibrates. Spirit messes up and mind tidies up. Spirit the charismatic, unpredictable master, and mind the strong, silent (though dull and boring) servant. Problems set in when the servant begins to harbour resentments, and then ideas above its station. Spirit is brighter and quicker than mind, but mind is cleverer and more devious (a consequence of its natural job which is to maintain balance) than spirit. And because our culture emphasises mind over spirit, and educates mind over spirit, then it is now a simple matter for a clever, opinionated mind to get the better of an innocent, bright spirit. But a strong, dominant mind always harbours fascistic pathologies – morbid fantasies – as psychoanalysis reveals. Scenarios it desires yet fears to set in motion (hence morbid) because setting things in motion is not its forte. So it calls upon a weakened, disconsolate spirit to do its dirty work, and now everything is fucked up – topsy-turvy – arse over tit. Mind has turned the tables and enslaved its true master. This is the predicament we find ourselves in. If you have any interest in righting the balance then the first step is reining in the mind – learning to quieten and pacify it – and then reconnecting it to its natural task of maintaining balance. Take up this task with any seriousness, and, in my mind at least, you are a true hero. And as you gradually (very gradually) progress, so the spirit will begin to gleam as it once did, when you first entered this world.

Imagine, in your gut, a knot of worms: wriggling, writhing, aggravating. And, if only you could shit them out, you'd have some peace. Well, that's the modern mind: a parasite at best.

Forever, and thereafter.

A turn away from self is a turn towards God. So, Levinas says, the closest we get to glimpsing God is when we look into the eyes of the stranger.

When you read, assuming you want to learn from the experience rather than merely find fault, then you cut the author some slack, allow him his style, the benefit of the doubt. And bear in mind that whenever you're perceiving, you're effectively reading.

Getting your own way is the death of spirit.

God as verb rather than noun, action rather than thing, spirit rather than matter.

Love has its own reasons.

Difficulty forces the mind to focus and concentrate—to be firmly and attentively on the job. So create difficulties for yourself. Choose the hard way.

We think, being middle-class and well-heeled, we're free and able to design our own lives. This our stupidity and arrogance. The only thing we really design is the disguise that conceals our real life, which is always one of spirit, and always beyond self-agency. What is up to us is how much energy we apportion to the illusion and how much to the reality.

Sometimes I think kids know more than anybody.

The dialectic of heart and belly: heartwork / groundwork.

God is not a being, an existent, necessarily, but a way. A way of working, an approach to reality, a means to being.

Work in progress.

One cannot hope to get it right all the time. Is all one can hope for is immediate feedback – instant karma.

When, all around me, I witness those I love getting it horribly wrong, I have to just relax and remind myself that life is basically one long folly anyway.

It all boils down to confidence. The confidence to listen to spirit rather than ego.

Do God's work.

Mind continuous. During meditation one stays with the breathing – the activity – and during Taiji one stays with the movements or rather the flow of energy generating the movements.

The path of a pilgrimage is not an empty space between two places, to be traversed as quickly as possible, rather, it constitutes the very goal to be reached.

Sober mind, inebrious spirit.

Mind on the job. That's all there is to it.

the aura of distance

Spirit excited but internally gathered. This our basic tension/dialectic: form and content. Spirit threatens to overflow the bounds of propriety, otherwise it wouldn't be spirit, and the containing form threatens to stifle spirit into conformity.

Without hold there is no freedom.

Keep it simple.

Begging God for forgiveness is a tried and tested way of finding it in your big heart to forgive your little self.

Any way of working can only get you so far, so at some point it all has to be abandoned to start again. In a sense, this is the structure of everyday.

A smile of forgiveness – it's the only effective weapon against deep tension.

Even in company we find ourselves in a bubble of self that proves difficult to burst. The two obvious pin-pricks are touch and pain.

Suggesting and recommending an alternative.

Back then the bus would be full of people reading newspapers, busy swallowing exactly what the powers-that-be wanted them to believe. Nowadays, everyone is on their smartphone, wrapped up in themselves. And it's telling that this selfish world is virtual – unreal. We have forgotten how to touch and be touched – how to be vulnerable and listen to energy – how to generate spirit in an instant and emerge into presence.

the wish is gift to the 
spirit, is where we may 
dwell as we would

Clearly distinguish truth from fact.

The principle of movement or change. Movement helps you find the part that doesn't move, change reveals what does not change.

The teacher's job is to wake the student's spirit and bind it to a line of work that will keep it focused and occupied for at least a lifetime.

Taiji is all about balance. In a sense, we never move because everything is balanced but in another sense we are never still because we are always balancing – catching our balance.

On the up.

As students we all contain good, mediocre and poor, so the path is never easy. In fact much of the time it is a downright struggle. The secret is to keep things moving, and by that we mean circulating because in Taiji our movements, even conceptual ones, are always circular.

A fighting chance.

You know when you're tipsy (merry) and everything is funny and everything is beautiful? Well that's enlightenment, in a way. The task is to dwell there without the booze.

As we make our environment safer we rob it of the potential for spirit. We make it a place where ego dominates.

The spirit of delight comes in small ways.

Raise a smile.

Teaching in London last week, it was revealing that the comrades whose energy had improved the most since last time I was there were the two whose wives are struggling with cancer.

Without a root it's not Taiji.

Thought is after the event, never an event in itself.

I like the small things, the nearness, the quietness … crumbs, droplets, seconds.

The stupidity of the bourgeoisie is not that they believe their way is the best way (that is their arrogance) but that they really believe their way is the only way.

The good student has no choice. He doesn't think: "Golly, that's interesting! I think I'll work on that." She thinks: "Oh shit! I'm gonna be tortured by that now till I've internalized it."

Learn from rather than rely on.

The middle-class, by definition, is sandwiched between a ruling class who make all the decisions and a working class who do all the dirty work. And herein lies their basic deceit. They tell themselves that everyone is welcome to share their values (join their club) all the while knowing that those values demand the major portion of humanity remain their underlings.

THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR WILL BE SECRET

Graffiti

Enlightenment is not the end of the journey, it's the beginning. What goes before is preparation.

Those deep deep tensions only release on death. So prepare. This the work.

It doesn't matter. The call and consolation of spirit.

Familiarity breeds contempt, so the saying goes. Beginner's Mind is the opposite of this: familiarity inspires reverence and respect.

In the zone? Well why not stay there. (The zone is where you forget self and become spirit.)

The teacher's job is to interest the student in the long-haul: the lifelong process of refinement. To do this the teacher must come down to the student's level, a distasteful task at the best of times, without losing either composure or connexion to the Internal.

If you feel it, it's already External. The Internal is not felt, barely intimated. Conjured by belief.

When we eat, the hand brings food into the mouth. Try this slow stylized walk where the feet draw energy from the Earth into the body. The empty foot reaches forward, grabs the ground and pulls it toward the body. Of course the ground doesn't move so the body does instead – forward and down into the pulling leg. This way the front leg draws you forward by bending rather the back leg pushing you forward by straightening. When you straighten the leg to move you basically reject the Earth whereas bending the leg to move not only accepts and embraces the Earth, it also sucks energy up into the groin and dantien.

Beginner's Mind is the ability to engage an activity done thousands of times before as though it were the first time.

God breathes through us so completely…
so gently we hardly feel it … yet,
it is our everything.

The work boils down to the images you hold dear. Working on Ward-Off I simply imagine the Madonna cradling a treasure in her arm.

Why does it have to mean something? Isn't it enough to simply make sense?

The bourgeoisie love choices but hate decisions.

We must realise that our tension, our exhaustion, our sluggishness, hurts not only ourselves but everything we contact.

Invest yourself in all you do. There's fun in being serious.

My music is the spiritual expression of what I am—my faith, my knowledge, my being.

The back is a tree. This becomes clear when you massage a back. The lumbar spine is the bole or trunk of the tree, the sacrum extending into hips and legs is the root system, and the thoracic spine fanning out into scapulae, arms and neck is the crown of the tree. An expansive crown requires an equally extensive root system, along with an immensely strong trunk.

The principle of Heaven could also be called spirit and the principle of Earth, gravity.

Play, pay, ply.

First you imitate, then you innovate.

Find the place where cheering up and growing up amount to the same thing.

Now that the planet is dangerously overpopulated, surely it's time to find an alternative to the family as a model for living.

Off coffee at the moment. But on again soon no doubt because, as age teaches, time is circular not linear. Things tend to return, with alarming regularity. We are never really free, and why, on Earth, should we be?

A large part of learning is mimicry – the ability not just to copy but to catch the spirit of the thing.

ash tree 

aethers 

eraseth 

heartes

Good posture is a matter of growing up—from the ground up.

Tragedy wakes you up whereas happiness sends you to sleep. Now there's a depressing thought.

With practice the Taiji Form becomes our way of connecting. To centre, root, essence. To place, to time. To life, to spirit. To Other. It should be performed at every opportunity.

When a kid, so my mother tells me, I was always taking things to pieces to see how they worked. First my toys then household implements then the gramophone, wireless, my father's tape recorder. I inherited this, I think, from my father who spent endless hours under the hood of his car. I remember being amazed how different things looked inside from out. It only stands to reason therefore that there would come a time when I yearned to look inside myself and see how that worked.

Watch the earth as a heavening ball 
wound in hand to press the land, 
be stumped. The works are alive.

Find yourself with cancer or needing a stent? Then you've almost reached the end, the logical, meaningful end, at least. You've done your bit, and to carry on means overstaying your welcome to fizzle out pathetically at some meaningless, insignificant time in the endless future. Life is not for us, we are for life; and death – the event of death – claims only those who live, really live.

We spend a life in the play—the drama—of Heaven and Earth. These surely the most important and fundamental presences in our lives—inescapable so taken for granted. So how to name their principles? I suggest Heavening and Earthing.

You being whipped by the forces inside you?

Repression and depression amount to the same thing: not expressing feelings. The repressive is not allowed to express, or feels he isn't, whereas the depressive choses not to express, because life is easier that way.

cycle 

earth   heart 

arthe   thear 

rthea   rthea 

thear   arthe 

heart   earth ​

Centre, root, core, altar, inner sanctum, dantien

Heartwork, practice, meditation, taiji, call it what you will, is simply the place you daily touch perfection.

Nowadays the elderly are encouraged to stay young: swipe an iPad, share on Facebook, try new things and galavant the globe. Meditation is the opposite. It comes natural to an old person whose life is winding down and who has achieved mellowness and a degree of inner peace. A young meditator is learning to be old.

the multidimensional, interpenetrating recesses of age

Everyone wants to be special, and some people are, but never in the way they think they are. 
—John Kells

Specialness is like a stubborn refusal to be anything other than what you are. An inability to conform. Such creatures stand for something, they have symbolic function—they have energy as my teacher would have put it. And creature is a good word for them since they live by continually creating themselves, like snakes ever emerging from the old skin.

The depths plumbed by returning over and over—repeating over and over—with ever straitened means. Such is old age.

a pirouette on the edge
of a precipice

Everything I do is the environment.

Stay true and, in time, you become true. Stay in time and, truly, you become time. Time is not something that passes but something you make. Time and Mind are one.

A mind abiding in worship.

the moment one attempts to measure a moment, it's gone

What makes it all so difficult is that identity—self-image—invests in forceful effort to get noticed and accepted. The work is to be content with nothing.

When people ask my age, the response I usually get is along the lines of: "Wow, I would never have guessed! You look so much younger!" Now I know they are meaning to be complimentary but it worries me. Assuming they're telling the truth, it means that either I'm narcissistically preserving my youth or I'm not really living – I'm holding back and not allowing life to digest me. If I had great natural vitality then I would use it to live strong rather than long. Long life, nowadays, and I suspect all days, means that in some vital way one isn't growing up, one isn't really living, and so cannot, for the life of one, really die.

Make a present of your presence. Meditation and worship in one.

Shield me from suffering and let me live a long life. Such is the modern mantra. So much different from the one I would like to pray were I not so weak, fearful and hopeless: Let me suffer and die a glorious death.

the forms of domination, which are limited in number, reoccur in cyclical fashion

Between a rock and a hard place.

In our efforts to get noticed and accepted, we lose the source.

And it is to know its essential nature that I am seeking here. To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living.

Taiji is all pretend – make believe – the art of illusion. You act the part until one day you find it impossible to come out of character.

Love slowly like a ship full of flowers.

Life bursts into the world—a sudden externalization of spirit. It spends a little time making trouble, then a period of re-internalization before going back to the source.

Hearth (home) is the warmth of your own belly. Freedom.

When a child and through force of circumstance had to face real difficulty, I was surprised not only how well things turned out but how fully I became a different being in the process. Those experiences were the beginning of this journey.

Without the feeling that it can all be taken away tomorrow, we get complacent—full of ourselves.

It's a curious kind of life, where you dream one image and you paint another.

Have you noticed how we make up stories to justify self-obsession?