This truth can be spoken only by those who live it, and heard only by those who heed it.

Energy does not circulate in us, we circulate in energy.

Eventually everything connects.

The positive NO

Happiness is becoming totally transparent for God, without shadow or lie.

Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden.

A lifetime spent slowly learning to trust the principles – to believe that up is truly a consequence of down.

The soul is not in the body, the body is in the soul.

To understand time as a linear series of contiguous instances is narrow-minded. Time is the flow, the surge, the energy that connects these instances together into one impassioned wave; not the movie reel but the motor in the projector and the light that shines through. True mindfulness is to be with and within this flow, always aware of causal relationships (past) and likely consequences (future).

Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

The teaching does not reside inside me, I reside inside the teaching.

A lifetime spent slowly learning to watch and listen compassionately – with the heart – without interfering or manipulating.

With a living teaching – a path with heart – understanding is always provisional. Next year I will be at a different place, a place I couldn't possibly be now. This makes for a painful ride – or maybe uncomfortable would be a better word – always having to move on, leave oneself behind, adapt to energetic progress/process.

Gravity is enough, but only if we stay awake.

The air is all softness.

Silence, obedience, joy. Quieten the mind, subjugate the ego, express the spirit.

Force is too much energy. So one way to get into energy is to first establish a force and then lighten it until it is threatening to collapse or disappear. That point, the point of failure, is where energy manifests.

Now that we no longer die, fear of death has been replaced by what psychologists have dubbed FOMO – fear of missing out.

Ever on the verge of tears.

Into this world we're thrown 
Like a dog without a bone. 

So the meaning of life is to find a bone to get one's teeth into, and spend a lifetime gnawing away.

Global warming is an inevitable consequence of the burning of fossil fuels. To me that is totally obvious.

My daughter, like everyone, loves magic. After watching Dynamo levitate from the top of the Shard she was ever asking how he did it. So I found a YouTube clip revealing how the trick was done and asked if she wanted to watch it. "No way dad! That'll spoil everything!"

Lighten up! The closest we get to a universal imperative.

the tyranny of choice

I don’t know anything. But I want to!

In Taiji we prize two qualities above all others: lightness and softness. Both belong very much to the realm of energy rather than force, the main difference being that lightness is outward and softness is inward.

Swings & roundabouts. Back & forth. Round & round. Ups & downs.

Humans are very good at solving problems but not so good at heeding warnings.

Do less, more thoroughly.

Greater choice is a contributing factor to the epidemic of depression and related disorders in the Western world.

The legs push me up from the ground, supporting and extending. This is obvious. However, as good Taoists, we know there must be another side to this coin, a subtle opposite approach that softens the obvious and makes the situation energetic. This is the capacity of the legs to grip both the ground and the dantien, and hold them, draw them, together.

Share and share alike.

If the first instruction in Taiji is Mind in dantien, then the second is Sink & Relax, or, as my teacher sometimes put it, Get into the legs. The legs extend down into the Earth and up into the dantien. It is this double extension that allows energy to flow.

Suffering stems from an inability to keep silent.

The dilemma between freedom and coercion is, in a way, at the heart of all pedagogy – we have to be forced into education in order to be capable of being free.

Develop the legs as energetic pathways between Earth and dantien.

Hand on heart

Destined to fail. There is something quite liberating about that realisation.

Choose just one path,

and be as one with it. 

Other paths must wait.

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole

A day filled with gestures of kindness.

Misplaced optimism ends in tears.

Self-restraint, as concept and as principle. A concept is an idea or visualisation that can be worked and played with, whereas a principle should operate at all times and at all levels. When self is restrained then the space freed up fills with those old-fashioned virtues – heart, dignity, character, nobility, spirit, love. That's the idea anyway.

Faith is helpless attraction to the Divine.

Spirituality comes from above, but is always lived from below.

Don't use force and don't scrimp on the groundwork, otherwise there will be no internal progress – everything you do and make will be phoney – and at some point, when it's probably too late, you'll have to go back to basics and start over.

It takes time so give it time. It's not a matter of how far you get but of how real is the progress you make. And real progress will always be miniscule no matter how much talent you have or hard work you put in.

It seems to be every bourgeois parent's dream nowadays to have a child which the experts have labelled 'a genius.' And yet I suspect that the really special kids – the potential saviours – are not those who do their parents proud, but those who make their parents' lives a living hell; those who struggle and fight against whatever system is trying to categorize, contain and mould them.

The more opinions you have, the less you see.

Overpopulation, overconsumption, overtourism.

The biosphere's information is contained in the diversity of its DNA. So, although we like to think we're living in an Information Age, from the perspective of the rest of life on the planet it's an age of total disinformation – important irretrievable information is being lost quicker and on a larger scale than ever before. And this is the thing: we have become so unnatural, so anti-nature, so deathly, poisonous and polluting, that whatever is good for mankind is likely to be bad for life in general, and vice versa.

Climate isn’t an issue—it’s a lens, a way to understand the economy, politics and foreign affairs. If growth was how we understood the 20th century, survival is how we’ll bottom line the 21st. 

The most radical, far-reaching and intelligent proposal I've come across in a long time.

Tourism. How many different places on the planet have I taken a dump? How far and wide have I distributed my filth?

Before you say cut, wait 5 seconds.

The world is as you are.

The work helps me live, and one day, I dare say, it'll help me die.

A mere provincial artisan.

The work does not bestow health. It presents problems, difficulties, unease if not disease, which we engage, and hopefully solve, through practice. This process gradually makes us better people. And what does that mean? Able, compelled, to align, awaken, heal the world.

I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.

The conditioned body is elastic. It wrings itself to generate energy, power. Like one of those small, balsa airplanes we had as kids with a plastic propeller and elastic-band motor.

The work, the practice, is, each day, a sacrifice, an offering, burnt in the heat of passion, we lay before God.

Without a sense of, a feeling for, ancestry, we are lost. Without a sense of place, of home, homeland, we are, too, lost. We find these, eventually, in the soul.

Facts do not convey truth. That's a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.

The highest virtue is to intuit.

I'm sorry but I just find it impossible to take a meat-eater seriously. My teacher was a strict vegan and would often complain to me that certain of his students stank of death or of sour milk. He lived off apples, strawberries and tofu so always smelt sweet.

Rush at your own peril.

making it up as we go along

Like every other being, I am a splinter of the infinite deity.

The touchstone is being alone with yourself. This is the way.

Meditation: a time when you realise, yet again, that being is enough.

Think of yourself as a torch, beaming up to heaven.

Gratitude & humility. Magic, essential ingredients.

Through a lack of love everything hardens.

Our only hope, as a race, as individuals, is to understand energy.

My teacher said it, Castaneda said it, and many others too.

Divested of self, invested with energy. Each a consequence of the other.

Shift the attention from quantity to quality. How well do I do this? Can I do it better?

The enlightened master doesn't do things, she lets things happen. The unenlightened master simply practises.

The psyche is in its nature religious. 

The daunting thing about reading Jung is that there are no end of astonishing insights.

There's a big difference between talking as a teacher, which is easy, and talking as a poet, which is heartbreakingly difficult if you want to talk honestly.

Legs stem directly from dantien rather than hips. Arms sprout straight from heart rather than shoulders. Eyes beam from brainstem (primitive brain) not optic nerve. Think of the limbs as antennae, receiving and transmitting messages from Earth, Nature, World and Heaven. It is not our place to know these messages, only to act as conduit.

There is a direct relationship between heart and soul and an inverse relationship between mind and soul.

Life reveals we always bounce back (it's a bouncy road). Then one day we don't.

A planet populated with trinkets.

Only fidelity to love and voluntary devotion lead to my stellar nature.

We are imaginative creatures, and that imagination needs to be fed, as much as our stomachs, otherwise we quickly lose heart and become depressed.

Let go the knowing mind and develop the loving heart.

Soul is a capacity for suffering.

On its outer surface, time is vulnerable to transience... In its deeper heart, time is transfiguration.

multicultural inclusion only ever serves to erase indigenous people

Start and end each practice session with a dedication, invocation, blessing. "Spirit, thank you for bringing me home." Or some such.

Head in the clouds, belly in the Earth.

The poor student thinks he's already a master. The good student knows she's always a beginner.

God enters through the wound.

I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.

In the absence of actual Enlightenment – permanent happiness – the most important thing is to have something meaningful that we can always return to. This is what we call practice. For me there must be two components to practice: a part we do alone, confronting solitude, wrestling with the self, and another part we do with others, companions, comrades, patients, students, clients, preferably with some hands-on time. These two aspects feed and regulate each other: without solo work we have little to give, and without partner work we lack the ability to forget self and help others.

We don't get wounded alone and we don't heal alone.

It's not yielding that frightens us but the necessity to attack. When we are in the world correctly then we are always yielding and always attacking, always listening and always responding, always taking, always giving. And this is responsibility – knowing we have no choice but to partake.

We don't really heal anything; we simply let it go.

If we really loved Nature then we'd leave her well alone. We moderns are so out of touch, and out of tune, with Nature, and with our own nature for that matter, that any contact with us is polluting.

Happiness

The word happy comes from the Old English word hap which meant luck, chance or fortune. The idea that some things just seem to happen, by happenstance, for no discernible reason. So, happiness is an intensity of spirit that allows one to not just passively accept whatever comes but to actively engage with it and use it to propel one deeper into destiny. The best image I can think of is surfing: abandoning oneself to energy, to the flow, but at the same time being perfectly controlled and balanced – toned and honed – within oneself.

A happy person never complains, not for long anyway.

Happiness is not something the world bestows upon us but something we give back to the world.

The secret to happiness is balance and resilience – the ability to yield but then bounce back.

Happiness is a way of life, not just a chance occurrence.

Happiness is for life not just for Christmas.

you and i are more than you and i because it's we

Taiji Heartwork. Taiji with a twist. Using the externals of taijiquan to open the heart, connect with spirit and develop a soul. And all a simple consequence of attending to the safety of the Other.

The apprenticeship is only over when the past is finally forgiven.

Fledgling spirit, like all fledglings, needs encouragement and nurturing. But once established, spirit needs conflict and antagonism to develop.

For those with vision or destiny, the most important thing in life is not to get distracted, side-lined, by things of no importance. For those with neither vision nor destiny, the most important thing is to live a life of endless distraction in order to cover up the horrible hole of existence.

I think against myself.

The heart is the inner face of your life. The human journey strives to make this inner face beautiful.

Heidegger's walk. I'd love to know where he learnt it.

Just because you've heard it all before doesn't mean you have it. And if you have heard it all before but don't have it, working inside of you, all the time, then obviously you're not listening – not becoming what you hear.

The majority is always wrong because the majority is never really open. It doesn't listen. It merely proffers membership to itself. It patronises. This is the fatal flaw in democracy.

Solitude, stillness, silence.

For me, true courage is denying oneself the option of rejecting the Other. True courage is accepting love as the only way (forward).

To be open is to bleed. Necessarily. It's not easy, in fact it's downright difficult – agony – most of the time. But not always. Every now and again, usually when you least expect it, it inspires – fuels your vision.

Listening is only true if it is open to becoming what it hears. True listening is always transformative.

In one sense immaculately poised, and in another out of phase, out of joint, off balance. In other words, forever on the turn.

the necessity of reaching divine stillness by embracing motion wholeheartedly

Darkness is the ancient womb. Nighttime is womb-time. Our souls come out to play. The darkness absolves everything; the struggle for identity and impression falls away.

Jesus chose the company of the poor, the sick and the reviled not because he felt such people needed his patronage but because such people have better energy, better and more available spirit, than those that live cocooned within wealth and health. And the reason they have better energy is because they have no safety net and so no choice but to be open.

clearer by being repeated with changes of perception and context

Man's fatal flaw – the self – needs to play itself out, I guess. It's just a shame to destroy the wondrous diversity of millions of years of evolution in the process.