To know is already to have negated.

The poor student thinks they know best. The mediocre student is forgetful. The good student is faithful to practice.

It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives.

What makes a good student is not talent but a willingness to do the work.

the end of anthropocentrism is where the jubilance of the world begins

A mind full of thoughts is a recipe for disaster. A heart full of love and you can't go wrong.

Deep doesn't have to imply heavy. We're Daoists after all. From the depths to the heights.

Break the law.

Belly belongs to Earth, heart to Heaven. Yet heart and belly also belong to each other.

a darkness for non-visual exploration

beware the arrogant eye

Too much movement injures body and/or mind. Over a lifetime we expect only modest progress.

When it comes to the internal, words do not suffice. At best they approximate. Never rely on them as anything other than crude descriptors, and always be ready to give them up if they appear unreliable or no longer useful.

If you want to go deep then stop wasting energy on things of no importance. Stop leaking, start to focus. Concentrate. Extend the attention span.

Practice maintains, sustains and develops a connexion to an internal thread of spirit which the teacher has bound us to. In this sense our work is purely religious.

The truth is in the tears.

What each of us wants, more than anything, is to be heard. This is why listening, quality listening, gives so much more than anything.

Taiji is all about, and all in, the connexion.

It's come to this: thinking for nature, for the biosphere means thinking against the human.

pausing to breathe deeply

When I encounter people on a so-called spiritual path what usually strikes me is how enamoured they are with the idea and how terrified they are of the practice.

Ego/self is the petty tyrant. The skill is the detachment to see it as such.

go vegan, don’t breed

When things are going well, mind in dantien seems an unnecessary chore. When things are going badly, mind in dantien seems a distant luxury. How can we be so fickle, so ungrateful?

Make a home for the internal.

Ignorance is no excuse. In fact we always know, if we care to be honest about it, which ain't so easy.

capitalism’s fostering of narcissistic paranoia as an entropic equilibrium

Give care. Take care.

Move your own body as though it's someone elses. Move someone elses body as though it's your own.

The real work commences once we go beyond the pleasure principle.

the tremendous grace in not knowing and in leaving be

Winter solstice today. For the Celts the most powerful day of the year because the most internal. Potent because full of portent.

forsaking the wordy interiority of consciousness

Change your mind. From selfish to selfless. The order of the day. A project for life.

Relax into tone rather than slackness.

to meet incumbent 

death we carry 

within us a body

Eventually your motivation must align with that of the teacher otherwise you won't pick up the internal aspect of the teaching.

Usually, practice is something we do to make difficult things more easy. In our line of work, however, practice is a way of making easy things so difficult they become impossible to accomplish with our usual egocentric minds. This compels us to engage the spirit and start using energy. It just takes faith and patience. And practice.

dismantle the dominance of the human

Practice makes a home for the internal.

Practice – the work – purifies motivation.

The teacher points us in the direction of our fear.

The mind constructs a world to protect itself from reality, inside and out.

What are you afraid of? It's fear that holds us back.

To teach, to celebrate virtue, to persuade by example, to lead the court to its ideal self through wonder.

ordinary moments deserve our attention

Listen to the energy in your body rather than the stories in your head. This is the key to health.

The heart trusts; the mind doubts. Both have their place. Each requires the other.

Tense shoulders indicate a noisy mind, a fearful heart.

The quieter I became, the more I heard.

 

Neither one nor the other but both together in a fine generative balance.

The silence that rests like a young bird in your palms.

Happiness is the result of being at peace with oneself. By that token none of us are really happy, deeply happy.

Not all at once but over time.

for goodness sake

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

The first stage is finding a teacher and sinking your teeth into an authentic teaching. The second stage is applying and exhausting your talent on that teaching. The third stage is pushing beyond the point where you seemingly can't go any further. This requires all the heart you can muster, plus a healthy dose of grace.

What they don't tell you in New Age books is that spiritual work, i.e. work whose aim is the reduction of the ego, is fundamentally depressive. A natural consequence of courageously choosing emptiness over fullness. It takes years to see through that depression and begin to sense, appreciate and value the beautiful world of energy beneath it. This is maturity. In the meantime one manages the best one can.

Today we are all scatter-brained. Total victims to distraction. As far from anything originary as we can get.

A student studies. Without study there is no studentship.

To eroticise the work, desexualise the life. Every (spiritual) discipline worth its salt says so.

Only the shallow know themselves.

The good student needs just one word. The more detailed and specific the teacher makes the teaching the more he models it on his own experience and the more difficult it will be for the student to produce an authentic and unique vision from that teaching. The skill of the teacher lies in choosing the word and choosing the moment to utter it.

original empty nature

Don't worry too much about quality. It matters little how good today's practice is. What matters is that you practice again tomorrow, and then again the next day. The rhythm you build, the momentum you garner. With persistence practice becomes self-regulating and self-generating.

an "artless art" growing out of the unconscious

Dedicate the work to the opening of the heart.

This moment changes everything.

Yielding is what I do to encourage the truth to expose itself.

our machines are disturbingly lively, while we ourselves are frighteningly inert

Gather up your fighting spirit or the disease will defeat you!

The work demands a new alignment – a new allegiance – which we call destiny. This requires decades of regular correction from a qualified master – to steer through the inevitable distractions. Each correction smarts the ego but intensifies the quest for truth gently smouldering in the spirit.

religion is the observance of a rite that forms and maintains a bond

Success requires the student to fall in love with the work – with practice – its unrelenting truth and purity.

Meditation begins with the practice of sitting quietly, attending to the rise and fall of breath, and watching thoughts similarly appear and disappear in a field of silent emptiness.

 

Given that there's so much going on inside us: breath, heart, craniosacral pump, ancestors rumbling in the bones, destiny calling in the soul, why is it that we invariably choose to listen instead to the chatter in the head? Precisely because we know that voice is pure fantasy, and so never needs to be acted upon.

ascoltando

Practise as though life depends on it, which of course it does.

Listen to the life in your body rather than the voice in your head.

If you aren’t free of yourself 

how will you ever become yourself?

 

That's the spirit.

Setbacks make us mentally stronger.

Cultivate virtue: a feeling for truth, a love of truth. Truth does not feel good or bad, pleasurable or painful, it simply feels true: something in you knows it is right, despite the difficulties it poses, the questions it asks.

Shy away from difficulty and you'll get nowhere.

summon your whole being into a single mass of doubt

Hone the spirit with discipline.

if you don’t cut off the mind-road, you live a ghost’s life, clinging to weeds and trees

Depression is the end result of head overruling heart.

Why meditate? To calm the emotions and empower the spirit.

the invisible … is so close and immanent that we cannot gain the distance from it that vision or observation would require

Every phenomenon can be experienced in two ways. These two ways are not random, but bound up with the phenomena—they are derived from the nature of the phenomena, from two characteristics of the same: External/Internal.

Legs should hug the Earth rather than project a ramping ego.

Light draws out the sight but blunts the other senses. That's why I prefer night, especially for work.

Fear has become a social responsibility.

polish the good and correct the bad

 

You can't go all out to win. You have to master the technique of detecting winning chances based on the flow of the bout. And the only way to acquire that ability is through sheer devotion to training.

The teacher, if he's worth his salt, wakes up your spirit. Then, if you're worth your salt, you use that spirit to rouse the slumbering dragon inside. Thereby you come to make a difference.

It is good to learn to go without.

the hidden stillness … at the core of struggle

In the heat of battle, when consumed by spirit, it's that background strength – the fruit of practice – that makes all the difference.

 

What is it that makes the work 'spiritual' rather than self-serving? Humility, humility, humility.

a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance

The more you bleed in practice the less you'll bleed in the fight.

Every love contains a promise.

To become braver put yourself into situations where you're scared. 

To become stronger search out situations where you're weak.

 

It takes a moment to tell someone you love them, but a lifetime to prove it.

Stout of heart. Courage literally means all heart.

Meditation reveals that the subject of ones thoughts is always oneself, particularly ones issues: trauma, prejudice, opinion. When the mind is cleared of these then it is naturally quiet.

The student/teacher relationship is a bond which cannot be broken. It is honoured and kept alive through practice.

Wonder is the very engine of life.

 

Make small waves in your heart 

and be conscious of those waves.

When the teacher speaks, the good student is dumb-struck. This is because they listen.

It is good to learn to do without.

Practise listening and slowly it will become healing.

questioning empowers being

 

When, after twelve years or so of Taiji, I announced to my teacher that I had finally started to feel energy he just snarled: Welcome to the human race!

It is the very job of the ego to be blind to the soul.

Happiness is not the result of forgetting but of fully remembering.

a gesture of deepness

Trying to turn lead into gold is nothing compared to taking something mechanical like an instrument – a string and a bow – and using it to evoke a human soul, preserved through the centuries.

 

Head suspended from above, sacrum dropping like a stone, and the heart lifts naturally as it would in worship.

The dantien is pretty much where the womb is. This means that each of us starts our existence enveloped and nurtured in dantien energy. Such energy is natural to us.

It takes years of meditation for the fug to lift – no time to lose. Without clean air not only is it impossible to see or think clearly, it's also impossible to simply be.

Strange that those who have it laid on a plate tend to be the most bitter.

Aside from learning the theory and practice, there is a third factor necessary to becoming a master in any art – the mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern; there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art.

 

humility, courage, faith and discipline

Truth is neither agreeable nor disagreeable. Truth disturbs – knocks you for six. Stops the mind and rends the heart.

To love someone is not just a strong feeling … it is a promise.

The work polishes the window to the world. Then internal and external become one – unified in a shimmer of grace and spirit.

Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.

 

No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.

If we have to think then we will be slow, too slow. We train to respond instinctively, immediately, without thought.

When spirit is present everything is sacred.

Taiji is all about relationship: connexion.

Civilisation is what happens when you domesticate spirit. Life is robbed of energy and cluttered with things.

 

Shrug it off, whatever it is.

Subtract the self and you will find spirit.

It is all a ceaseless concatenation of associations.

The good student is haunted most of all not by what the teacher taught but by what the teacher failed to teach, by what was omitted.

the difficult bottleneck of silence

 

Yielding is not getting out of the way. Yielding is drawing the Other in, drawing close.

The teacher sees something in you that you don't see yourself. You vaguely feel something, some difference, something unique, something wanting to express, but it's the teacher (coupled with the practice he provides) that lifts the fog and slowly allows you to make deeper sense of yourself.

You are a guest of nature – behave.

Spirit and Soul: the Yang and the Yin of the Internal.

The fundamental root of speech is prayer

Spirit is the spark that gets life going, that makes life alive.

Subversive to the point of perverse.

A journey fuelled by the desire for truth.

The teaching – transmission – lends a sense of direction to the journey.

The work becomes internal when the mind stops.

To be just heirs we have to recognize the symbolic debt that binds us to our origin.

It's difficult (impossible) without a partner.

Give me love and work – these two only.

Spirit is the devil. The devil in the detail, in the difference, in the other. The unaccountable, the unknowable, the unconscious. Life is the marriage of heaven and hell.

the painful solitude of the journey

 

The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart.

Partner work teaches you to see yourself the way someone else sees you – to stop being so locked up in your own inner world – to enter the actual physical and energetic world around you as full participant rather than self-engrossed subject.

Peasants (people who work with the earth) have natural roots whereas the educated middle-class have poor roots because they never get their hands dirty – they work more with their minds and their fingers (keyboards) – heads in the clouds rather than feet on/in the ground.

Falling to pieces.

faith as a function of patience

 

Since these mysteries exceed my grasp, I shall pretend to have organized them.

Practice and you'll get somewhere; don't and you won't.

Taiji is not really about learning new things as much as it is about unlearning old things. Letting go of the past, the dear old past. There is something unbearably poignant about this: sad, tearful, heart-wrenching. Good practice leaves one emotionally blasted, torn asunder, blindly groping for a stone under which to crawl. Emptiness is the heaviest burden to bear.

Much of what the teacher reveals you will not comprehend — will not be ready for – so it must be stored away for a later time. The only way of getting ready – of becoming strong enough – is through practice.

nothing quite focuses the mind like dissonant details awaiting harmonious resolution

 

The longer the work endures the more taxing it becomes. Especially the inevitable pendulum swings. One cannot venture into the unknown for glimpses of insight without paying a price. A heavy price.

relieved to hear the unpleasant truth rather than a pleasant lie

Civilisation necessarily robs us of spirit and wildness. It effectively domesticates us. It does this by infecting us with fear. Fear of communism, of Islam, of viruses. But most of all, fear of ourselves, fear of who we really are beneath the plastic, civilised veneer. Fear of what's bubbling away in that terrible place called the Unconscious.

What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.

Relaxed hips allow connexion to the ground. Relaxed shoulders allow connexion to the Other. Relaxed eyes allow connexion to Spirit. It's all about connexion.

 

the tonality of our emotions

Outside the box. It's a relatively simple matter to slip outside the box made for you, but exiting the one made by you is more tricky.

never mind what comes to mind

Mastery is in little things.

The mistake is to confuse what is inner with what is outer.

 

the best wine comes from the most inhospitable soil

Suspicion as regulating principle. When it's going well I suspect I'm coasting, and when not I suspect I'm making heavy weather of it.

as steady as a great tree 

branching into delicate life

Spring into action.

If you find yourself presented with a choice then you haven't chosen soon enough. You haven't decided.

 

The religious person is an exception in every religion.

The reality we choose is far less real than the one thrust upon us. And as such is an inauthentic distraction.

as light as the spoor of an animal in snow

Awak(en)ing to a gerundial reality: sinking, dwelling, being, becoming. Admitting time at every level. Mind(ing) continuous.

Paradoxically, this essential emptiness, with its sense of non-being, provides the space which contains one’s sense of being.

What makes the work advanced is not technique but the quality of the mind we bring to it.

I've yet to come across a music that improves on silence.

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Instruction in Taiji is provisional. Not so much made to be broken as made to be interpreted and reinterpreted.

Indigenous people bear the deepest insights into human nature and have the best actual way to live as well.

Each movement, each step forward, lends a new vantage from which everything appears wonderfully strange, if only you inhibit the projecting mind.

I have seafoam in my veins, I understand the language of waves.

Cherish surprise.

Suffer a sea change. This is sinking. Allowing gravity to endlessly stream through the standing body, washing it clean of self obsession. A lifetime experiment in transformation.

When I read these words I see not truth but pride.

Traditionally a Taiji class provides correction of what's already been learned, a little new material, and an opportunity to work together with comrades: side by side and hands-on.

Hovering at that tender threshold where what comes in passes what goes out.

It's all about creation and surprise.

First we must leave home, the false home (family, conditioning, education). Then and only then we start the search for the true home. It's impossible to make authentic strides forward whilst clinging to the past.

the glue of habit

like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting

The teacher's job is to introduce you to the real thing. Your job is to fall in love with it, become obsessed with it so that you can no longer forget it, not even for a second.

it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self

Be patient and let the weight of your stillness pressure the moment to erupt into energy.

weaned from the things of this world

 

Mediocrity fears, and so belittles, excellence. This is envy – the herd instinct.

Read what's written between the lines.

disguised as fiction the truth occasionally slipped through

It's not really a matter of thinking for yourself but of completely rethinking what it means to think – re-imagining what constitutes thought.

it is not a technique but a surrendering

 

looking with curiosity, intuition, discipline, and patience

The real anchors the imaginary. The inanimate anchors the animate. What matters is the quality of the imagination, the richness of the energetic life.

look at the same things again and again until they themselves begin to speak

There is always a higher level, where all the rules change.

La réponse est le malheur de la question.

the monstrous aporia of temporality

Spirit is magnificent but soul is beautiful.

an unconscious consciousness

Picking and choosing is so much part of our culture and so much part of our nature that we don't even realise we're doing it. My teacher's teacher used to say that because of this Taiji in the West is only 2% of what they had in China in his youth (1930's). I suspect the same is true of Yoga and Zen and other Eastern arts.

The only true thought is one that has never found an individual to ‘contain’ it.

 

A yielding mind is always turning: side to side, in on itself, out of itself. Turn is change.

willing to suffer the truth

a relentless, hounding quest for truth

Intimating the ineffable. This is real communication.

a benevolent scepticism

 

seek knowledge in order to serve – that is love

Fear breeds fear; love breeds love. That's all the instruction we need. The rest is up to us. Put it into practice.

The good student spends a lifetime rooting out their stupidity. They don't look for beauty – how be so impartial? – they look for faults and endeavour to correct them.

thoughts without a thinker

Practice is the exercise and cultivation of faith and discipline. Without such virtues it is impossible to effectively surrender to work, Dao or even self.

 

we inescapably need others to establish contact with our inner self or, better yet, to allow our inner self to become us

The three dantiens: belly, heart, head – are effectively muscles, and as such they must be exercised. First we learn to relax them, let go, the same way we would a muscle that was proving intractable: embrace it and enter it with a warm soft mind – smile into it – maybe place a reassuring hand upon it or, better still, get someone else to place a reassuring hand upon it. Let it expand out of constriction – out of misery – and into fullness – into joy. Then we just wait and watch with an attentive but non-interfering mind for natural activity to reveal itself within each centre. This is difficult and may take a long long time. It all depends upon both the quietness and acceptance of the mind, and of course, patience, but a vigilant patience, one that spins an unbroken thread of concentrated time rather than one that takes the opportunity to break off and have a sip of water or check the phone.

prelexical : before words

pretemporal : before time

Most of Western culture is testament and paean to the noisy mind – the unbridled self.

in the crucible of self-acknowledged suffering

 

Do everything religiously: with care, with attention and above all with love.

A real teaching is strong stuff. It threatens at every level. The only way to survive it is to either believe or mock.

I cannot repeat it. The time is past. We have to catch it later – downstream – in its transformation.

Understanding is a process, a journey. A mist repeatedly rising and descending, each time revealing a different picture. Eventually, as it becomes clear that the picture is your own shifting reflection filtered through a limited understanding and imagination, you accept the reality of the mist.

imprisoned in understanding

 

Every man carries a badge: some symbol of his allegiance.

Quieten the mind and concentrate, and spirit will appear, changing (charging) everything.

The root of evil is envy.

Use spirit to hunt for spirit. It can be found anywhere. It just requires a willingness to look. And believe. This is awareness.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us.

 

The road to hell is easy to travel.

Solo practice is where we wrestle with the teaching – worry it to reveal its secrets. This will not happen in a class situation. The class provides material which then demands practice.

The eyes express what's inside as well as see what's outside, and it's this expression that connects with the world.

Without practice the student has nothing to give.

The end of a dissolute life is a desperate death.