30 April 2019
Knowledge helps us manipulate the external. But for the Taoist, knowledge drives them deeper into the Internal.
The story of Plato's cave is still rooted in external dualism (either/or): either stay imprisoned and deluded within, or venture out into reality. For the Taoist, forays out of the cave allow them to also delve deeper into the gloom of their prison. Reality is neither presentable nor representable, not to the eyes anyway. Reality starts within.
The story of Plato's cave is still rooted in external dualism (either/or): either stay imprisoned and deluded within, or venture out into reality. For the Taoist, forays out of the cave allow them to also delve deeper into the gloom of their prison. Reality is neither presentable nor representable, not to the eyes anyway. Reality starts within.
29 April 2019
28 April 2019
27 April 2019
26 April 2019
Generosity is a consequence of being rather than giving as such. Of being centered and content – dwelling – in that part destined to always remain concealed from the world – your inner sanctum. If you can dwell there, in the very depths of your internal being, then wherever you are will resonate and throb with significance and spirit.
25 April 2019
Consider a musician the calibre of a Nigel Kennedy – his effortless virtuosity and flamboyant spontaneity. Now imagine the rigour, precision and dedication he must put into his practice to pull off such a show. What the performer practices is the opposite of what he performs. This is why practice is so important. Without it you have no anchor and so nothing of value to give.
My daughter has a beautiful antique Japanese silk kimono, which I recently found creased and crumpled in her wardrobe. The creases seemed indelible so I threaded a broom handle through the sleeves and hung it from a hook on the wall. Slowly, over weeks, the creases fell away and now it looks fit to wear.
This, in these weak agnostic times, is the difficult principle in Taiji: feeling the head suspended from above and allowing the body to hang, as though from a coat-hanger, and relax. Posture drops from above as well as rising from below, otherwise it lacks poise.
This, in these weak agnostic times, is the difficult principle in Taiji: feeling the head suspended from above and allowing the body to hang, as though from a coat-hanger, and relax. Posture drops from above as well as rising from below, otherwise it lacks poise.
Taiji – the Supreme Ultimate – the fundamental Taoist principle of generation and creation – is the separation and interplay of yin and yang. When yin and yang perfectly combine we get emptiness or Wuji. When they cling to each other we get chronic tension: a frozen shoulder, clenched jaw, stagnation, depression, fear – a frozen moment overstaying its welcome. Such conditions we heal with movement: movement of the parts with respect to each other but then also movement within the parts. The latter is more difficult and requires relaxation, energy and imagination.
24 April 2019
Relaxation in Taiji is always associated with sinking. Sinking because our tendency is to rise into doing, machination, plans; as though we ache for freedom from Earth's sluggish clamp and claim, which, of course, we do. But when we sink, where do we sink from? Not from aspiration, but from home – origin and source – of spirit: above, sky, Heaven, cosmos, God. And this our Taoist heritage, our pendulum truth: we spring from Earth and we drop from Heaven. The work a reconciliation.
23 April 2019
22 April 2019
21 April 2019
Each time I work nowadays (practice, teach) I rediscover the same secret: the heart aches to lift up to the firmament in wonder, reverence and adoration. This the missing ingredient that enables it all to fall into place. In Taiji it is usually expressed as 'head suspended from above' but it's more than that, as Dr Chi discovered. It's a matter of and for the heart. A leap of faith we should be making each and every moment.
20 April 2019
19 April 2019
18 April 2019
17 April 2019
15 April 2019
One comes to a religionless God, a different God, a God that led Carl Jung, when asked in a TV interview if he believed in God, to answer, "I don’t need to believe, I know."
As for those who will some day grasp this, they do not need "my" attempt, for they must have paved their own way to it. They must be able to think what is attempted here in such a manner that they believe it comes to them from afar and is nevertheless what is most proper to them, to which they are appropriated as ones who are needed and who therefore have neither the desire nor the opportunity to focus on "themselves."
14 April 2019
13 April 2019
12 April 2019
Meditation teaches to sit proud, with humbleness. Pride is thymus, activated by core muscles driving down into the cushion to maintain upright posture; spine an arrow pointing both down and up. Humbleness is the chin dropping/dipping into thymic energy (neck stretching, eyes cast downward) and siphoning along the smile of the jaw into the brain stem, then around the back of the cranium to the crown (headtop), where it lifts to heaven. This our ever renewing circuit.
The problem, for a Taiji master, with seated meditation, is its double-weightedness, or rather its lack of single-weightedness, its lack of humour. In Taiji we still sit (sit still), but upon a foot instead of a cushion. And if the leg is relaxed (as relaxed as it can be: that is, elastic) then the leg, simply by being happy, pumps energy into the posture. This energy then expresses itself in the upper body as shapes and moods, urges and playfulness – motion and emotion. This the humour – the light and lightness – of the Natural Process.
11 April 2019
On a park bench, watching a lovely little running class – punters being taught about correct posture and technique for jogging. But, interestingly, not one mention of the heart, of spirit, or of God. If you consider these – spirit animating the heart which strives to lift in joy to God – then not only does the technique lighten and largely take care of itself, but the running becomes a beautiful form of fulsome prayer.
Feel the ground beneath the foot, become aware of it, make friends with it, have a relationship. In Taiji our relationships are always friendly. Like a boxing match where two fighters ferociously try to kill each other until one of them wins, then they're hugging and smiling like old pals. In Taiji we are always already at the end. Post event.
10 April 2019
When the Desert Fathers reduced themselves with austerity, penitence and mortification, it was to arrive at a mindset capable of looking dispassionately into their own minds. If we look at our own minds then it's ego looking at ego, a situation doomed to failure since the ego always sees what it wants to see.
09 April 2019
Stepping in Taiji is always fraught, though it appears not so. Lifting the leg, then extending it to its new position, requires tension in the hips to hold it all together, which means, despite the best intentions, your energy rises a little. So, on placing the foot the first thing to do is relax back into the weighted leg, the one you're moving from, then visualize the pathway through the arch of the legs that your weight needs to travel to get to the other foot, and either throw your body with the weighted leg or pull your body with the leg that has just stepped, along that pathway. There should be the sense that the journey from one foot to the other has come from one sudden explosion of effort which has been stretched into duration. Leap from foot to foot, but drag it out. This our resistance.
08 April 2019
Science fiction stories, about artificial intelligence inhabiting robots which break away from humanity and take over the world, are meant to be warning premonitions of a foreboding and forbidding future, but really they are about our own past. We are the androids with the man-made minds who broke away from the natural and took over the world – a world we threaten to destroy.
The teacher had a life before he learnt the art he teaches. That life brought him to the art. It also taught him vital lessons which enabled him to excel at the art he now teaches. These lessons he probably will not be able to teach. He probably doesn't even know that he embodies them. And yet they are crucial for learning the art. This is the predicament of the good student. She must be able to look beyond the art and see what the teacher has from before, and try her best to catch it.
07 April 2019
An egoless mind is one which refuses to withdraw from the world in order to cohere around a sense of individual self. When you encounter one it takes your breath away because they are both present in themselves and present to you at the same time. So present they overflow their own being and into you.
Roughly speaking, it takes about a thousand hours of practice to get through the beginner's stage – to have the work begin to settle into your bones – and about ten thousand hours to achieve mastery, where you have largely been consumed by the work. If you practice on average an hour a day then mastery takes about thirty years.
06 April 2019
Commitment, resistance, solitude and love. These the four qualities that Heidegger says are required for "spiritual superiority." But why resistance? Well, firstly one needs to resist the forces of conformity in one's world (in Taiji we recommend yielding rather than blatant force – say Yes then do No). And secondly, it is only possible to spin a continuous thread of concentrated time when there is some resistance, actual or imaginary, to one's passage through time. This is the thread that must be clung to if one's bleeding (endless remembering) is to have power beyond the intermittent.
05 April 2019
04 April 2019
03 April 2019
The goal of this work (inner peace, enlightenment, spiritual integrity, excellence) is actually our natural state and is already there, in situ, deep beneath all the shit we've layered on top of it. So, the work is peeling back those layers and casting them off, one by one, once and for all. And this is what's difficult, this sacrificial aspect, because our stupid selfish culture tells us that we are entitled to a little of everything; that we, as free individuals, express best our individual sovereignty by picking and choosing. When it comes to spiritual work nothing could be further from the truth.
02 April 2019
01 April 2019
By the time we reach adulthood we are all experts at getting our own way. This is what being middle-class and bourgeois is all about – self-satisfaction. So, when a student protests that they lack the time or the self-discipline to practice then I know they are deceiving not only me but themselves – playing the pathetic victim for a little sympathy.