work as a poetics of growth

In the labor of the fields 

longer than a man’s life 

I am at home.

The natural, generous confidence that emanates from good posture is preferred to the smug, blinkered swagger that comes from believing our own, and everyone else's lies. And there are lies everywhere, at every level, except the deepest, the level we call soul. The work is to discover, uncover, recover the soul by exposing the lies everywhere else.

Our first misstep was agriculture, the second, industry, and the third AI. It's highly unlikely there will be a fourth.

Empty of tension but full of resilience.

Silence is a giver, noise a taker. Seek the silence.

As long as curiosity is greater than fear, you will move forward.

Head, heart, gut. Thinking, feeling, being. Being (the ruthless silence) must come first otherwise thinking and feeling risk running away with themselves into fantasy and falsehood. This is why the first instruction in Taiji is always mind in dantien.

The instant is the giant lamp we throw / our shadows by

Thinking to oneself – what we call worry – is the opposite of prayer. Worry runs round in desperate circles. Prayer beams outward in simple, confident adoration.

                             Having come 

the bitter way to better prayer, we have 

the sweetness of ripening.

Physical work, when conducted with good posture and content heart, naturally lifts the spirit and releases it upward to the Heavens. To drag that spirit down and redirect it into our own pathetic narratives and commentaries requires both skill, learnt whilst a toddler, and a hard heartedness, also picked up early, from our parents mostly.

Visualise the sacrum/coccyx as plough share, furrowing the Earth as you walk. As well as digging into the root, this casts the heart and gaze up and out.

the gush of life that spills forth from pen or spine

We spend our formative years building a strong and solid platform from which we experience the world and express ourselves. Spiritual work endeavours to break up this platform and replace it with broad, elusive, fluid virtues like faith, compassion, humility, hope. This is a difficult process – a courageous journey into uncertainty and darkness, punctuated with fleeting flashes of insight. It can take decades before one fully sees the light.

Our journey must begin right where we are by seeing the ordinary, everyday world we live in, in an extraordinary new way.

A mind that insists on having all the answers. What a curse!

Here is the test of wisdom;

Wisdom is not finally tested in schools;

Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it, to another not having it;

Wisdom is of the Soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof, 

Applies to all stages and objects and qualities, and is content,

Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things;

Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the Soul.

Eternally return, without ever going back. Onward! Allons! Kadima! Yalla!

We have forgotten how to encounter nature.

Movement is what we are, not something we do.

love is understood as that act of absolute spiritual daring

Modern life offers a huge range and diversity of choice but almost no real difference.

Practice, simply put, is the struggle to break and remove bad habits by instituting good habits. There is an element always against the grain which requires utmost concentration. It's so easy to get it wrong. The first stage is deciding to practice, the second is deciding to practice better than before.

Proceed openly. But open to what? Not novelty but suffering. What used to be called God's will. Fully prepared to suffer for one's faith.

We are bees,
and our body is a honeycomb.
We made 
the body, cell by cell we made it.

Ethics is all about the experience of failure—but in failing something is learned, something is experienced from the depths, de profundis.

Those with a deep ache as well as a propensity for spiritual work feel they don't belong, either to family or society. They can be spotted easily when young by those with experience, and if we lived in a less ignorant society then such children would be given an education worthy of their specialness rather than coerced, by the system or by counselling, into the general mould.

faith is a proclamation that enacts life

The poor student prefers to practice their own version of the teaching. In this sense we are all, to some degree, poor students. We work to become good students: pure of motive and humble of heart; leaving no stone unturned, even the ones too painful to touch. The journey is not from A to B but out of interpretation and into reality, a reality at once unfathomable, unimaginable and uncomfortable.

eviscerate the old self so that something new might come into being

Without mind in dantien, everything we see is mere self-reflection.

The value of a plan of action is that it gets us started. But then we must be ready to abandon it otherwise the unimaginable won't open up.

Pride cometh before a fall – a downfall.

Modern life, with its myriad choices and selfish obsessions, is dissipatory hence weak – spiritually aimless. This is why we no longer have souls.

The important things are often accidental rather than instrumental.

Without mind in dantien – a measure of precision – presence is a muddy mess.

faith … not as the abstraction of a metaphysical belief in God, but rather as the lived subjective commitment to an infinite demand

Acknowledging the Other is good for the soul.

Only on attaining some measure of inner peace does one begin to realise just how much anxiety, how much energetic disturbance, is usually associated with each movement, thought, feeling.

To be really modern one should have no soul.

an ability to endure the tension created by uncertainties without rushing into rash or prejudiced conclusions

God made us not to love ourselves but to love him. Imagine how disappointed he must be.

FORGET SELF AND BECOME ONE WITH THE DAO

If each day commences with this reminder then we have a practice.
And the best way to forget self is to remember – care for – someone else.

Spiritual work is any practice good for the soul.

Not for one moment must we relax the vigilance and criticism made necessary by our own subjective trends.

The only way to progress is to practise all the time. Never a dull moment.

The basic flow of fluid, beyond blood or lymphatic, comes from the magnetic spectrum of the Earth’s upward energy thrust opposing gravity’s downward pull.

Practice attends the flame. Keeps the old flame burning. And the old flame is actually a young flame, an ageless flame, the flame you first felt glimmering a lifetime ago.

Our openness is not a willingness to try new things but an openness to the past: a remembering, an excorporation (out of the body), an opening to the embryo we still are. Regressus ad uterum.

Each part is either full or empty, and each part is both full and empty.

On average over 200 species are becoming extinct every day. And all because of homo sapiens – the wise man.

Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.

The only way to be authentically present, in other words, able to pass into a true future (destiny), is to work our way through the past.

If suicide didn't leave such a mess it would surely be a more popular option.

Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility.

Interrogate your conditioning, question received values, and reject the inheritance.

A loving heart or an expectant mind?

If you want to teach then the last thing you can afford to be is average.

Destiny opens to those who address their past.

Ever since that magical moment when my eyes opened under the sea I have been unable to see, think or live as I had done before.

The good student commits to daily practice not because it makes them feel good but because they have inklings of where it will take them – intimations of immortality.

The past keeps changing.

Practising in groups, the collective field heightens all physiological and emotional happenings and a new consciousness appears.

Core an inner corset, a resilient grip around lumbar spine, extending tentacle-like through legs, arms and neck.

I transition between the meditative processes of simply preparing the materials, to my desk or floor where I form the materials that become the body of the work.

The cardinal sin in Taiji is floating. This happens when the noisy mind won't allow the energy to sink. Habitual absent mindedness.

The figure of eights we practise are an external formalisation of internal movement. If they don't originate and emanate from dantien then they do more harm than good.

History and destiny—past and future—always lurking.

Cultivate peace of mind. All spiritual work start here.

It may well be that more and more of what people bring before doctors and therapists for treatment—agonies of body and spirit—are symptoms of the biospheric emergency registering at the most intimate level of life. The earth hurts, and we hurt with it.

the prevailing shibboleths of unlimited economic growth, dominion over outer nature and negation of our inner nature

Jaw and pelvis reflect one another.

It doesn't take many exotic holidays to realise that although the scenery may have changed, the person enjoying it hasn't. Memorable or intense experiences do not change us, they simply shake us up, knock us off balance, only to slip back to normal with a vengeance a time after. It is our repetitive daily practice that changes us.

Meditation is for those too proud to pray.

Continuity of practice is the secret to success.

A much deeper problem is how to engage the world at the level of heart rather than mind.

Body belongs to Earth, spirit to Heaven, with me in the middle.

LIFE STARTS WHERE COMFORT ENDS

Graffiti in Tel Aviv

In love with life. This should be a tautology.

Buoyancy is our birthright.

Practice finds its level. Without it we never know where we're at or who we are.

Mitstein – being-with.

Work sheds light. The gentlest of glows.

We cannot afford any collapse into self.

Teacher upsets, practice resets. The Way of Work. An endless tempering.

It is weight that gives meaning to weightlessness.

What the human race desperately needs is not democracy – the universal embrace of bourgeois values – or freedom, but a damn good cull.

Wrestling with reality.

Mind uses force. Spirit uses energy. This is the closest we come to definition.

centered in her belly core

The present moment, when lived with power and spirit, is not a forgetting of past and future but an embrace of both. The present moment becomes a portal through which flows your past, your ancestors, your destiny, your death.

The key to tackling ego is to dissociate it from body, mind and spirit.

After a wondrous experience be grateful, let things settle, then feel it resonating inside. In other words, treasure it. But for goodness sake don't try to repeat it otherwise you'll ruin everything.

Work brings us to understanding. Without work there can be no understanding.

akin to a flower in the process of blooming

Precise meanings are oblique.

Breach the respectful distance and pry open that can of worms.

A life full of choices – the privileged bourgeois life – is also, inevitably, a life fraught with indecision. A life where spirit constantly dribbles away on trifles.

It's not a matter of believing in God but of learning from experience that prayer works. Faith comes later.

within our lush spine

Man is estranged from that with which he is most familiar. We all have dementia – refusing to see the blindingly obvious.

Ambivalence – pin it down, it slips away. So just sit, and in the midst of contradiction and confusion, let it slip away. Momentary clarity. Enough to keep going and come back tomorrow.

Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself.

The only hope we have of shifting from thought to reality is to engage our body. First its physicality, its actuality, its particulars, but then its energy, its flows, ripples, undulations, its deep erotic nature. The work becomes an all-consuming eroticization, normally only experienced when making slow love or high/low on drugs. The difficulty is maintaining such a state without desiring consummation, without it becoming sexual. This our sobriety, our gravitas, our anchor.

What if our center axis is understood as a primal tube similar to a caterpillar and our spine as having the movement of a fish?

Ultimately a root is simply quiet mind. When the mind is quiet then body is still and has no wish to move from its spot. Then it will send down roots. Naturally.

If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.

Drive spine down through legs into Earth, like a stake, and tap the rising energy of Earth. Walk without losing this by leading with light knees rather than heavy head. Find a tree-lined promenade and walk it, back and forth, until you too have become a tree, albeit a walking one.

If you wish to develop a root then you must also develop a crown – a halo.

The cure for the pain is in the pain.

When it gets stale, which it inevitably will, find a new vocabulary – new concepts to work with.

When meditation slips into stupor you'd be better off not bothering. Or find a more stressful posture. Arms above the head. A posture that forces the back to work.

Work with gravity, Earth's and your own. Then the Other's.

We are not built from cells; rather we are individual beings using cells to become.

Stay ahead of the game.

Where there's pain there's energy.

Keep a handle on time. Don't let it run away with you.

It's not what you see that is art; art is the gap.

Ego is the consequence of holding onto things that should be let go.

I wish there were more humor in my work than I see in it.

Shallowly dreaming a very deep dream.

Taijiquan is studied not to become a great fighter but to learn a practical philosophy by which to live one's life, a philosophy with spirit – fighting spirit – at its core.

None of us can sit down for eight hours a day experiencing all the terrible effects that inactivity has on our bodies, and then expect a 30-minute taiji or yoga class to magically undo the marble-like stiffness we are instilling into our bodies.

If we fail to practice then we have no way of digesting and understanding the teaching, and then it will either become oppressive and heavy or we will protect ourselves from its searing truth by secretly mocking it. In other words, the only way to survive the teaching without practice is to become a poor student.

approximately 10 percent of all the humans who have ever existed are alive today

The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.

A lifetime's work and what do we have to show for it? Just a little more confidence in the fulness of our being. It's enough.

It doesn't matter what profession you're in, you have to wear yourself out. You have to burn yourself down to ashes otherwise there's no point.

All spiritual work has the same agenda: remove the one obstacle between you and reality, viz, self or ego.

One must beware of unnecessary excitement.

We don't skip meals so we shouldn't skip practice either, because we want to nourish ourselves.

Depression is the inevitable and unavoidable consequence of the death of God (or the lack of spiritual meaning if the G-word offends).

To learn an Internal art one must first learn to listen. This sounds trivial but it is not. To listen one must first suspend or stop the mind – stop interpreting, stop judging, stop thinking, stop opining and whining, stop the urge to interject or question – and then open and present the heart, allowing the ears to feed directly into the heart.