A meeting of minds.

Tai and I recently enjoyed A Beautiful Day In The Neighbourhood in which Tom Hanks does an extraordinary job playing Fred Rogers. One of the scenes that particularly struck Tai was of Mr Rogers praying. His manner of prayer was exactly the one I was taught at Sunday School in 1963. One kneels beside the bed, clasps hands together, closes the eyes, and remembers by name and with affection each and every person you have ever met. By doing so you are keeping alive and vital all the connexions of spirit you have ever made. The sum total of these connexions is what we call Soul, something that nowadays is entirely neglected.

Like a bonfire, a good fire, beside which others may warm themselves. A beacon, symbol, example.

Make do with less.

Let go of your shit.

As I move into a leg, the leg is also moving into me. And this is largely why we move – to get the ground beneath that foot into the opposite hand.

Prayer is the purest form of giving because it expects nothing in return.

The hips are all-important. They should be so open and relaxed that the knees have a life of their own. If not then the legs, simply by supporting your weight, will be constantly driving the pelvis and sacrum up and back, out of alignment. This gives us what we perceive as safe-distance but it is really a tragic disconnexion with ourselves. We do not inhabit our own space, we are always behind it, afraid of the spot-light, afraid of the plunge.

Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I'm gazing at a distant star. It's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago.

Nowadays, when someone tells me about a book they're reading, I generally find, upon further questioning, that they're not reading the book at all but listening to an audio version whilst commuting. Hardly close reading.

Those who have not crossed the river yet should not laugh at those who have drowned trying.

A stream of consciousness. Continuity. Contiguity.

Flitting from one distraction to the next. The modern mind.

heedful & circumspect

Consciousness may be defined as the ability to hold two opposite or paradoxical realizations in the same moment – what might be called radical inclusion. It is this ability to stop identifying with either opposite that evokes a third force called presence.

The miracle of a child's smile.

Give thanks. Show gratitude. Say thank you. The simplest – and the best – form of prayer.

The most valuable thing to teach your child is how to pray.

As the human world de-distances, the human soul becomes more remote.

an eternity born from the instant

The inner strength to face death with dignity and aplomb.

The richer the neighborhood, the more energy goes into keeping up appearances. This is why our work, which struggles to erode appearances and reveal something real, is, effectively, affectively, a journey into poverty. And I don't mean that metaphorically.

What determines quality of life is the way I (chose to) interpret the events that fill it. This the stoic ideal.

Nothing beats peace and quiet.

The teaching offers a new way to go at life. Always it does this because always we slip back to our stubborn old ways. Each practice session is a being born again – a deep remembering.

Finding a teacher, or, more accurately, finding a teaching, is to suddenly find meaning, a flash of meaning. We then spend a life honouring this moment.

It's not strength that's required in this game but weakness. Too weak to resist the call to arms – the summons of soul.

We believe what we want to believe.

The spirit is relaxed but internally gathered.

humility, gentleness and love

Fugitive secrets. It's no use chasing or grasping. Just sit and wait, appear disinterested, and they'll come to you.

Take care. Give care.

Taiji slowly – over a lifetime – relaxes the legs. It would happen anyway, probably, but unawares. It's the awareness that's important.

A life of debts I can never repay 
pushing in on all sides 
like the weight of the sea.

Don't get lost taking care of the world.

When driving, especially distance, try a firm cushion in the small of the back. It keeps the middle and upper back free of the seat, forcing the lumbar spine and belly – the core – to do its work.

Meditation is a letting.

I suspect the real masters are invisible, like the real leaders. You don't find them, they find you. And then you spend the rest of your life cursing the day they did.

One gazes at the world with alacrity and courtesy and becomes less.

Taiji seems so delicate before the monomania of technology.

What makes a good student? In a word: passion. Passionate interest and concern. An abiding sense of justice. The ability to forget self in the midst of battle. Negative capability. A taste for reduction. Willingness to take orders, especially ones that seem impossible. An unquenchable thirst for depth…

We teachers threaten to become caricatures of ourselves we harp on so.

Anything worth doing will be just a breath shy of impossible.

we have subtly passed over into a sense where life is excessively easy

Yield is incoming. Attack is outgoing.

the ungraspable diversity of here

Yield is straight becoming curved. Attack is curved becoming straight.

There is something harsh and violent about the human gaze. Eyes that look without wonder but with a neurotic need to name then calculate then use. Eyes that take the world into a heavy head rather than a light heart. We do the world a favour by turning away from it and letting it be. We ruin everything. That's our nature.

in contemplation one loves the world and wants to be in the world in love without skewing it

an elastic ecstasy

"That was a good session! We'll pay for it later." The understanding that a good session ventures new territory – growth – and so is inevitably followed by pains of recovery. Those that don't understand this have never worked.

a heart of darkness

It's not a matter of learning something new but of remembering something old. Something very old.

the truly momentary is not the transient but what opens up eternity

Leap into the unknown, but never jump to conclusions.

Mind is in your energy not in your head. 

Or, more specifically: small mind is in the head; big mind is in the energy. Small mind calculates, plans, worries. Big mind dwells, feels, ruminates. The basic difference is one of time. The small mind is hasty, impatient, tense, and so is restricted to chronological time – a present coloured by a past, moving into a future. The big mind, on the other hand, is slow, fluid, relaxed, and so not restricted to the present but ever seeping into eternity.

Since the advent of agriculture we have been against nature.

Slow down.

Studentship begins not when you commence classes with your teacher but when you finally commit to a daily regime of practice, a regime which you rightly hold as sacrosanct. My teacher had a phrase to describe students who had yet to reach this stage: "Not ready to begin." He had another phrase to describe those who felt they had a head start because they'd read a few books or visited other masters: "Worse than a beginner."

that toward which we are hiddenly compelled

Anything half-hearted is doomed to failure.

Perhaps the easiest way to shift your energy, to invite spiritual growth, is to change your diet – change what you chose to take into body and mind. And it is always a source of amazement to me just how reluctant most students are to countenance this.

What happens when desire and expectation are confounded rather than satisfied. How much better is surprise than satisfaction.

quiet & connected

the oscillating site of the moment

This age of the complete absence of questioning can be overcome only by an age of that simple solitude in which a readiness for the truth of Being itself is prepared.

My teacher would sometimes delight in reminding me that, of his good students, I was the least talented. "But you're the hardest working, and it's that that'll save you. Talent never saved anyone."

When the words stop coming then you'll know I've got somewhere.

Trusting the Earth, not as something firm to rise up from but as something aching to subsume and take you into its secrets. For this you must be drunk with relaxation. Stupified.

behind me a stable predictable, inauthentic world – ahead, the passional plight of the new beginning

Friendship corrupts the student/teacher relationship.

The position of the foundation stone – the sacrum – is crucial. Your whole relationship with the world depends on it. Consider it the most important bone in the body – the centre. And ensure it rests on a strong foundation (legs).

Time-space is the gathering embrace that captivates and transports at once.

Meditation is, at first, a becoming quiet, and then – and this follows naturally – a calling to the abyss to open up and reveal itself. This is why it's so terrifying to even countenance let alone contemplate, and why real meditators – successful ones – are rare indeed.

Truth is never absent, but always withdrawn, undisclosed.

About the only thing it's well-nigh impossible to warm to is selfishness.

a soteriological opening into a new beginning

Spine sinks in the sense of plunging down into earth, but rises in the sense of stacking from the ground up. Sinking is what is happening to the spine but rising is what spine is doing. Passive and active.

Haunted by the mistakes your teacher made? So you should be.

a trembling centre

Spiritually, the human being is a channel, a go-between, a pathway via which heaven and earth communicate. So, technically speaking, the root has two ends: feet and legs drawn by the gravity of earth, but also heart and head sucked upward by the vacuum of heaven. Little old us, stuck in the middle, stretched both ways, resist like hell, and hence our first disconnections – the start of individuation.

Hardness is an excuse for rootlessness.

From the ground up.

Living (loving) on the verge of tears. I love (live) the image of falling – falling into love – into feeling – into heart – into life – and, when the time comes, into death.

the horizon is revealed to be only the side facing us

Intellectual endeavour – head work – inevitably builds castles in the air. Pristine well-defined and well-behaved edifices lacking adequate grounding in reality and so devoid of natural energy and spirit.

The head always wants to be in control – to rule from on high – and in doing so cramps the body's style.

A head heavy with information, knowledge, thinking, will tend to fall forward and cramp the heart, uprooting the spine in the process.

The head is meant to be empty so that the world can flow into you through it. When the head is cluttered with concepts and ideas and thoughts then the world is not experienced, it's imposed upon.

A head giddy with grace and wonder will tend to pull backward exposing the heart to the lift of heaven, and allowing the spine to sink through the legs and into the ground.

silence in a noisy world

Wherever you are, who or whatever you're with (person, creature, book, vista, rain…) turn off the critical mind and let yourself fall in love. It's aching to happen. It will show itself in a gentle smile of contentment.

I just can't imagine eating anything with a mother.

Everyone has something to offer. Or, as my teacher used to say, Everyone is a master of something. So just discover what it is and they become your teacher, at least whilst you're together. Teacher for a day, father for a lifetime.

I will non-willing.

An important aspect of meditation is sitting with death – sitting over or beside your own death, your own dying. So beckon death and sit with him.

By shying from death we make dying that much more difficult a task when it comes.

The only thing we know for sure is that we will die, and yet we behave as though we're immortal.

The mind (and the body for that) is a mansion, a veritable palace, and yet we insist on spending a life squatting merely a couple of rooms, never even imagining that there's more to explore. Everyone travels to ever exotic vacations yet remain stuck in internal poverty and dullness.

allow what is far to come near, to be near in its farness and far in its nearness

Meditation gently focuses the mind – brings it down to a point, an abyss – so the energy can open up and do its thing. This we still call thinking, but a different thinking to usual.

The problem with any tool (including the mind) is the temptation to misuse it – to get one's (own) way rather than to find a way. The temptation to turn it into a weapon of selfishness.

respectful intimacy

The most wonderful feeling is that of helping another creature. Because it's forever.

Man can embody the truth, but he cannot know it.

The world is its names plus their cancellations, what we call it and the undermining of our identifications by an ungraspable residue in objects.

We grow up when we finally accept there's no one to blame but ourselves.

There's work to do, and no one can do it for us.

Trust the teaching; trust your karma; trust in spirit; but above all trust practice. Practice provides immersion then perspective and equilibrium. A way forward.

outside the distinction between activity and passivity

sitting with winter
sun on my face
sheer bliss

I am not called to be successful, I am called to be faithful.

Life is a finite series of ups and downs. Slowly we develop the equanimity – the equipoise – to steer a course with courage and humility.

Remember the movie E.T.? The cute little alien with special powers who gets stranded here on Earth and endeavours to send a message home for a rescue party? Pure Kabbalah. The story of the spirit's time on Earth.

Higher than actuality stands possibility.

thrust aside interpretative tendencies … and attend more closely to that which shows itself

Projecting one's life onto the horizon of death. Is this not precisely meditation?

Global warming is the rising ire and irritation of Mother Earth as she realises that she has a serious infestation of parasites, namely human beings. Soon she'll start scratching and then there'll be all hell to pay.

The true master is a master of mood.

preserver, steward, seeker

Be careful! The work is tearing down old structures whilst erecting new ones – a procedure fraught with risk and danger.

It's no longer a matter of learning but of remembering. Recalibration, re-equilibration, ongoing tasks which never end.

The therapeutic fallacy: the erroneous conviction that someone else can do the work for you.

For the artist, "home" is not a place but an activity, viz work. Artists are most at home when working – when creating.

Forgetfulness is the curse of mediocrity.

The present is not some endless series of now points that I watch flowing by. Rather, the present is something that I can seize hold of and resolutely make my own.

How could what is never concealed escape our notice?

There’s a saying isn’t there – Life’s a rollercoaster ride – meaning full of twists and turns, ups and downs. Well, when it is we tend naturally to house the correct tension, especially in the belly; a protective tension that holds us together through thick and thin. I find that riding the rollercoaster (with my daughter) at the local Luna Park, demands just such tension, though a more extreme version.

There are two types of pain in this game. One that says "No! Keep out!" and one that says "Yes! But be careful." Learn to tell the difference.

sheltering the truth in some fashion or other (such as thoughtfully or poetically, or by building, leading, sacrificing, suffering, rejoicing)

independent dependent being

Real stillness is the rarest thing. This is why, for a living creature, the inanimate is a constant source of wonder. How on Earth does that rock, that shoe, that teacup stay so still when everything else is moving, shifting, boiling and roiling.

Develop a relationship with pain. Rather than shying away, try to relax, open up and embrace the pain. Then it often dispels.

Time is a pouring forth into the world. Each object is not only, or even primarily, a noun but a verb. The room is room-ing. My teacup is cup-ing. Steven is not a fixed separate object (nor subject) but a Steven-ing – a developing passage through time.

Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

practice restraint in naming the world

We tend to consider illness and injury as bad – the consequence and indication of something wrong. But in this game nothing is bad and nothing is wrong. Everything is meaningful and everything is useful and everything is helpful.

Something needs to lighten otherwise you'll collapse.

Yield and attack. Two complimentary modes of being (in the world). Attack is extension – spine strengthening and arching to extend energy straight out into the world. Yield is intimate – drawing the world in for a hug and a huddle.

to accept the unknown with equanimity, with care

not only are most words lacking but, above all, grammar

Something needs to soften otherwise you'll break.

Unfortunately, it's possible to get everything wrong. So the good student is ever suspicious of even her own endeavours, and ever vigilant for any clue or insight as to how things could be done better.

The best way to get out of the head is to get into the legs. Sink.

early bus to town for teachings better 
follow the drumming woodpecker into the woods

a mode of elastic fluidity

The good student never finds herself at a loose end. There's always work to be done. Every moment, a moment of practice. Discipline is exercised in resting.

a soothful abiding

Each creature a veritable miracle. A coming in of an outside world and a going out of an inside world. In Taiji we investigate what manner of transformation is taking place; how one affects the other; how to harmonize and adapt; how to yield.

to awaken we must experience first that wonder

The intensity of life, and therefore awareness, is directly proportional to the proximity of death.

When a kid, beginning to suspect that things weren't as they seem, I remember thinking: "Everyone's out to get, so just maybe the secret is to give."

Make the world warm to you. Be generous.

Steadfastness includes:

• Strength—(by no means a mere accumulation of power; instead) the mastery of the free bestowal of the broadest fields of creative self-surpassing. 
• Decisiveness—(by no means the hardness of obstinacy; instead) the security of belonging to the event, the entry into the unprotected. 
• Mildness—(by no means the weakness of leniency; instead) the generous wakening of the concealed and retained, that which ever strangely binds all creating into what is essential to creating. 
• Simplicity—(by no means the "easy" in the sense of the everyday, nor the "primitive" in the sense of the unconquered and future-less; instead) the passion for the necessity of the single task of securing the inexhaustibility of beyng in the shelter of beings and not letting go of the strangeness of beyng.

No teaching is complete. There comes a time when it's no longer possible to ignore the gaping hole. Then it's time to go your own way and start again from the beginning.

a mode of ecstatic fluidity

The teacher cannot awaken the student's curiosity. Life must do that. The teacher provides a teaching: a path and the equipage required to travel. A vein and tools to mine.

A radical agnosticism. A not-knowing. An un-knowing. All provisional. For the time being.

things as they truly are in their suchness, untouched by our conscious strivings

In this country … you are innocent until proven poor.

Dantien is terrestrial – centre of gravity – but heart is extraterrestrial. It's the heart that contains the heavens, not the head.

You find it with infants. Catch their eyes, or they yours, and that moment just before they smile, when it could go either way. The glimpse through that crack into the soul makes a day.

"That was a wonderful experience! Let's do it again!" A recipe, if not for disaster, then at least for bitter disappointment.

In the very heartland of wealth and liberation, you always hear the same question: ‘What are you doing after the orgy?’

The work is a drive, as primal as food or sex; an instinctual yearning for something beyond this world.

Soul is a realm of pure subtlety, ever withdrawing from all but the most humble gaze.

Never be afraid to mix your metaphors.