no substitute for hard work

We have learnt to survive the real by cutting off from it and replacing it with something more palatable but less engaging. This allows us to get along nicely but ultimately leads to depression and unfulfilment because the spirit atrophies.

we are conspirators, with our hands on the cold urn

A real non-conformist refuses to conform to the self.

We talk to ourselves to blot out the real.

the benevolent but fraudulent adult world

Always give more than bargained for.

Our hands touch, our bodies burst into fire. The chair, the cup, the table—nothing remains unlit. All quivers, all kindles, all burns clear.

We've all been given a modicum of talent – a destiny – so go ahead and develop it otherwise there'll be hell to pay.

The choice we have, but which we don't realise we have, is to be either in the body feeling or in the mind thinking. Can't be both.

Old Norse mjūkr soft, mild, meek

Jesus wasn't preaching to the likes of me and thee. We bourgeoisie are the pharisee. Our only recourse: pray to be brought low.

the small, invisible, quotidian growth of the day-to-day, where outwardly nothing happens

Practice repeats the same to generate difference. True difference can never be manufactured or planned or designed – that would be artificial, fake (as well as a contradiction) – it must be the product of an ongoing natural process. It is the probable result of deeper context always being incomprehensible and incommensurable.

Shoulder width. Any wider is double-weighted.

Trance is attained through sustained rhythmic repetition. Energy builds up until it ruptures the skin of appearance and allows the real to flood in/out, changing, for a while, (forever), everything.

Practice is more of the same. Until it becomes different.

The mark of really loving someone or something is unconditionality and excess, engagement and commitment, fire and passion.

holding faith in the right way, that is, not holding it at all but being held … in love and service

Using the eyes – the focus – not so much to see but to lock down the self so that one's energy can open up and out like an expanding fan behind. Ward-Off draws that energy round to the front. 

Success starts with failure.

Eventually we meet a wall that just cannot be breached and it seems that it'll end up being the death of us, but actually this is the wall that sustains us, and when it finally falls, when we finally break through: that is death.

The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.

Event: come out
Invent: come upon
Advent: come toward
Convent: come together
Prevent: come before
Solvent: come apart

Events of togetherness. This, Taiji promises, and, when open, delivers. Without, there is no progress, no egress from self.

Ever shaken the hand of a murderer? No? You'd be surprised. We bourgeois have little idea what goes on beneath the glamorous surface we gleefully glide over.

It's when thrust into situations we can't plan, control or foresee that we find ourselves at our best, our most true. Even if we fail miserably.

softened in the waters of doubt

All my life I keep starting over again, beginning at the beginning…

I have been very fortunate in the quality and extent of my education, Taiji and otherwise. If anything I have been overloaded. Hence my lack of enthusiasm for other disciplines, especially qigong and mindfulness, both of which are presently ultra-popular. I think what distinguishes the Taiji I was taught, and what makes it, in my book (in my life), so much better than the aforementioned disciplines, is that it is all about relating to others, what my teacher called yielding, putting the Other first and thereby cutting through the self. It is not easy, and no one promised it would be.

Traditionally in Taiji, beginners learn about relaxation, intermediates about power, and advanceds spirit. Once you get beyond that it's simply a matter of growing old gracefully.

Next time you feel like complaining, instead just shut up and put up. That way you will be neither reinforcing negativity nor wasting energy on things of no importance.

a poetics of obligation

Coiled like a serpent within the settled time of the present there stirs the unsettled and unsettling time which is out of joint, which disjoins the world, which prevents the closure of the world, which the metaphysical-theological imagination confuses with the eternal or other worldly.

Bear in mind that 'Goodbye' is a contraction of 'God Bless You.' I never once heard my teacher utter a careless Goodbye. It was always an emphatic, heartfelt 'God Bless!'

Give and receive blessings: heart-energy.

When I touch the Other, the Other touches me. When I am in the world, the world is in me. At our best we are porous and there is no interior. The Internal, the soul, the spirit, are not inside me, I do not possess them. If anything they possess me.

During meditation the spine behaves like an antenna, collecting and sending messages who knows where. Meditator as mediator.

we must make ourselves adverbs

The internal monologue, the noisy chattering mind, arises because the self is not satisfied with where it is, with what it has.

All critique proceeds from a dissatisfaction with one's lot – from inner gloom.

If content then why on earth belittle?

Prayer is the chiasmic intertwining of insistence and existence.

So remember the liquid ground.

Nothing is guaranteed.

The startled look on a person's face when they glance up from their phone and realise they are in an actual world.

It all depends.

Sometimes the only way to keep the future open, the only way to say yes to the future, is to say no to this or that.

Faith is not a safe harbor but risky business.

the event is the surprise

a radical softness : from/in the root

Lord, save me from myself.

More than the other senses, the eye objectifies and masters. It sets at a distance, maintains the distance. In our culture, the predominance of the look over smell, taste, touch, hearing, has brought about an impoverishment of bodily relations. The moment the look dominates, the body loses its materiality.

The quintessential First World problem: Too many attractive options.

The Laozi defines three categories of student: good, mediocre and poor. But really there are just the two – good and poor – and we all contain both in varying measure. The good student loves and works – gives – unconditionally; the poor student mocks and sneers – takes – always knows best. Heart and self. It is the teacher's job to force the student into situations where this dichotomy becomes obvious. It is then up to the student to regularly inhabit such situations and start to see the self – the poor student we all harbour – as the unwelcome foreign entity it really is.

μελέτη θανάτου

The more uncertain the future, the more important it will be to be in full possession of a sharp and ruthless spirit.

back and forth between being present in breath and lost in thought

Cynicism is the last resort of the intelligent depressive.

a virtuous immoderation

the radical ordinary

Taoist to the point of Gnostic. Complimentary opposites / conflicting opposites.

Shadow work is the path of the heart warrior.

Since we became civilized, we have lost access to the greater part of ourselves.

Imagine a condemned man in his cell the evening before his execution. A priest enters and asks: Shall we pray together? The prisoner, ripped open by circumstance, never having prayed before, instantly breaks, falls to his knees, and they recite the Lord's Prayer together. Imagine the gift each is giving the other. This is how I feel when I work with a student. And I'm never quite sure whether I'm the priest or the prisoner.

egalitarianism 
mobility 
gratitude

Brings to mind the first time I took my son to London Zoo over 20 years ago. We arrived at the window to the gorilla enclosure and I was thinking, So where's the fucking gorilla? Then suddenly I saw him, a magnificent silver-back, sitting so close to the window – so PRESENT – that I had failed to notice him. The shock was so overwhelming I instantly burst into tears, much to my son's chagrin.

For better to come, good must stand aside.

There is hope; though not for us.

Always this creeping suspicion that one has it terribly wrong.

Slaves to our own machines.

The basic lesson of life: suffering is best embraced rather than avoided.

The bourgeoisie: big appetites, small minds.

(The Bourgeoisie is my lazy blanket term for the self writ large. Simplistically the Bourgeoisie are those who have enough but would like more. We all have it in us – the selfish impulse – but what I call Practice, or The Work, cuts through that, opens a wound, and bleeds, generously, selflessly. What irritates me about the Bourgeoisie is that despite their expensive and extensive educations they find it impossible to think or feel outside their box – they refuse to empathise. And if Taiji is about anything it's about empathy – being willing and able to put oneself in the Other's shoes and feel what they feel, from their point of view, otherwise how on earth can one yield?)

pray
practise
prepare

Instead of being a consumer, become consumed. Let life digest you.

Sex, at its most meaningful, is an affirmation of the wound.

When we started husbanding other species we became husbanded ourselves: bred, penned, milked, slaughtered, butchered. This is the law of karma.

We look at a painting to know the painter; it's his company we are after, not his skill.

Love makes you blind, on the one hand. On the other hand, it sharpens your eye for the unseen and opens your thinking to the unthought.

The work includes any practice that over time improves the character.

Imagine things more arduous than they really are. The next breath, the next step, balance, the next spoonful. Then you'll concentrate and be more mindful.

The heart, for most of us, is like a safe we do not have the combination to. We think we know what we feel, who we love, but we don't really. Meditation is time spent sitting next to that safe, waiting for sufficient silence to start picking the lock. If you wish to start this work then just make sure you're prepared to face whatever you discover inside.

The subject slips into the dogmatic when its infatuation is lost to facts.

You and I live in a world no other human generation has ever known. No wonder so few of us are truly comfortable in the here and now; we’ve never had a chance to get to know the place.

Knowledge and understanding do more to obscure the heart than they do to reveal it.

Life is a journey back in time to something primative, primal, prior. As the body and mind march the beat of clocktime, inexorably toward death, the soul seeps into soultime where life and death are minor hiccups.

The biggest hindrance to progress is self, especially self-importance and self-pity.

In dwelling, think it a good place to be.

In our Taiji the Beloved Student is a student who gives to the practice in excess to what they receive from the teacher/teaching. (It was coined by Dr Chi to describe our own beloved teacher.) It is a far cry from the obsession nowadays with special offers and bargains. Nothing seems to delight the average person more than knowing they have received more than they have given. So what makes a student 'beloved' rather than simply 'good'? The fact that they work out of love.

j u s t c a r r y o n

On average each person now consumes about 5 times what a person did in 1820. That is, at least 5 times more than it needs.

We do not sing the songs, the songs are singing us.

Who ever is out of patience is out of possession of their soul.

Crises are high points that we experience as low points.

Find a practice and spend a lifetime refining it: more graciously, more humbly, more lovingly, more selflessly.

d o n t b r e a k t h e s i l e n c e

What strikes us instantly often reveals itself to be quite shallow whereas what we pass over reveals its hidden depths in time. And this is what people don't give now – TIME.

It is necessary now not only to 'know thyself' but also to 'know thy species.'

The public are finally beginning to take climate change seriously but are still unable to address, admit, face, countenance the underlying problem – overpopulation.

The real artist ruptures the veneer of civilization. The phoney artist heals it.

Empathise. Become the thing you behold. Let it upset and unset you. This requires heart – courage and compassion. Far more important than sensitivity.

I'm always surprised by the directions things take when I actually start writing. 

Or, as a college tutor would yell whenever he'd see me agonizing over a problem: Don't think! Write! 

And this is one rationale behind practice – it ALWAYS reveals something you'd never have discovered if you'd avoided it. Work is always a journey into the unknown, even when it follows exactly the same path as previous excursions.

a b a n d o n d e s i r e