Feet make the best hands and hands the most reliable feet.

The warrior never falls victim to mood.

pliability, a lack of inhibition, and a willingness to leave the beaten track

The hybrid body, basted together according to circumstance, is lovingly embraced, and turned inside out.

Imagination becomes reality. Liang coined this phrase to encourage students to activate their imaginations. My teacher hated it. As far as he was concerned, the imagination is an ego construct. He would always say beyond the imagination. Whilst I agree with him, I still feel that the reality we endeavour to gain access to in Taiji – the subtle world of energy – can only be approached successfully through the imagination. The imagination is one step removed from the coarse version of reality perceived by the senses, and the subtle reality of energy is one step further removed from the world of the imagination. Think of the imagination as a necessary stepping stone to the real thing.

Meditation: dwelling at the threshold.

Spirit tends to come into play only when it has to – when things get difficult. So always look for ways to make things more difficult rather than less. This our methodology.

I tend to stay out of the loop, culturally, so generally know nothing of current events – the so-called 'news.' Information is always edited, censored, incomplete, if not downright false. Now this is true of any mechanism of information production – there is inevitable selection bias – and it is most evidently true for the process of perception: what I perceive of reality I have already edited and censored myself. This is effectively the ego, and anyone who doubts that the ego is the most draconian and prudish of censors should try hallucinogenic drugs.

The path to freedom starts by loosening if not breaking the chains of family and culture.

Tell a student three times but no more. Repeating a lesson too much reinforces the student's resistance.

Spirit can be intense and focused but it can also be nonchalant.

Yielding is not just a technique used to win the fight, it is at the very heart of what it means to be a human being. Yielding is a melting heart.

the skin is a variety of contingency

a repose and a fertilization

We have stopped living in order to prolong life. A sign of institutional depression. A person who really lives is never going to make old bones. Real life – creative living – involves spirit – risk – and at some point that spirit will inevitably kill you. But what a glorious death! Far better than slowly whimpering to death.

Always come back to spirit, and spirit will always come back to you.

Meditation: sitting at the boundary of the mighty world.

Life unfolds for me like a theatre presenting a sequence of somewhat unreal sentiments; while the things of art are real to me and go straight to my heart.

we long for an incarnate transcendence

The Messiah is coming, and he's coming today! So the orthodox Jews tell me. And I believe them! It's a beautiful way to live – ever hopeful – ever producing joy.

supply time with the space that it needs for its weaving

We transcend self by engaging otherness. The way a performer needs an audience to access parts of their being unavailable to themselves. In retrospect they can honestly say: That's not me.

I try to play the way a cat jumps … completely natural.

right to the marrow

Transcend self by entering the moment. Dwell expectantly at the boundary of your being – where you bleed into the world and the world seeps into you.

There is only groundwork. Spirit comes with engaging the ground properly.

As you progress, the techniques don't really change. What changes is how you do them.

Life, on the whole, has remained rather mysterious.

refining and decanting what is vital in oneself

remember by heart

The good student doesn't just work hard; they learn to present themselves in such a way that stimulates the teacher to happily open up and share their secrets. We call this skill listening. It is a most useful skill to acquire.

Chinese cardiocentrism

If we have not opened in ourselves the void space that the respect for the difference of the other involves, we do not perceive all that their touch tells us.

Meditation: mind as place & space.

The artist touches the infinite through self-expression; the monk through self-abnegation. Different paths to the same end.

glimpses of time

The miracle of touch is that it unfailingly wrenches you out of the dull refuge of self and into the lively present where life is really happening.

Meditation is only meditation when there's nowhere else you'd rather be.

Come rain or shine; through thick and thin. Working religiously has more to do with duty and commitment than God and faith.

Meditation: a mind free of mental formations. Unattainably high standards. There's a certain joy in endlessly failing.

First pull yourself together, then let yourself go.

harts live in her irises

Meditation: learning to live with yourself.

The advent of our ‘to be’ perhaps happens in a meeting between us.

Why do we need the other? Because the other gives us permission to be ourselves. Without their touch we cannot be who we are, and we certainly cannot know who we are.

how do I keep my research alive? how do I arrive at creative questions? how do I make myself sensitive and receptive to things that I am not looking for, but which can be important?

How to make the world a better place? Two basic drives: letting energy out / expressing, and balancing / harmonizing. Messing up and tidying up. Yang and yin. Yang without yin is violent, and yin without yang is boring.

In reality, man becomes more and more weak, and the countless techniques to which he resorts cannot compensate for his lack of natural energy.

When you meditate regularly – a few times through the day – then you find yourself no longer at the mercy of moods. You start to possess what Nietzsche called an even cheerfulness.

your word is your bond

blinded by heaven

a withholding of the boundless ground that results in the self-extending delineation of boundary

happy in the process

How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of “Green”?

Don't lose heart.

leaving a snail's trail in the moonlight

Mind so often (so readily, so willingly) a plastic veneer covering and smothering the heart.

closed-eye vision

“Come to meditate”: these words must be uttered at the right moment—and not as a summons or a plan—but rather as an already carried out leap in advance that is now to be recovered.

Dantien, basically, is a sphincter: a naturally taut ring muscle that prevents leakage.

Mind in dantien: first clam up, then clamp down.

within our reach but beyond our grasp

Survivors, so intensified and wounded by experience, come home to a land of somnambulists – dozy people who cannot understand and don't want to understand. That's life, to a degree, for us all. So harbour peak experiences, let them reverberate through your being and your time. They will anyway, but awareness, as always, is everything.

Single weighted; single minded.

If something has to be done then why not be happy doing it, and why not do it well?

Better believe it.

The most important thing in the world is that the work gets done. No one else can do it for you. How you feel about it matters little.

What is a responsibility? To pledge oneself for something and sacrifice oneself!

an attuned silence, gained by struggling toward grace

Meditation is time. Meditation is being. Meditation is where time is being and being is time.

Life does not have to be long, it just needs to contain a few moments of real intensity, real love.

Meditation is time. Time to yourself, to be yourself, to delve inside and uncover, discover, confirm what you are and what you will become, in time.

Only if we are actually errant – actually go into errancy – can we strike up against truth.

Only by obeying the rules, obediently and religiously, does one eventually develop the energy, skill, desire to break free.

Let the mind move, fly, flow rather than think. This is the beginning of energy. Lines of flight. Flights of fancy.

First fathom the silence, to learn what may be said and what must be said.

Touching the truth, for a moment, is elating, and then devastating.

waken the love of old, the love of ancient days

You are not expected to complete the work, nor are you permitted to abandon it.

The physical ground precedes us. There despite us rather than because of us. Firm, reliable, neutral, beneath. In taiji our every action springs up from it, or rather from our root – our energetic connexion with that ground. The same with the metaphysical ground or spiritual ground which underpins all spiritual striving. This must be found in the depths of our being so that our endeavours don't spring from selfishness. It is touched in moments of real despair, hopelessness and terror, and it is only from that pit that we can rise free of the trappings of self. We must regularly venture into this darkness, befriend it, root into it, knowing that it is the only way to reach true light. This is the meaning of both humility and humiliation.

Leave barely a trace.

Have you noticed how a child absorbed in a book is completely different company to a child glued to a screen? Different energies.

Speaking with God from the depths of the Heart.

be silent about bearing silence

The noisy mind blots out the heart. The first step in heartwork is quietening the mind so that the heart can first speak and then be heard.

To be able to fall down in such a way that the same moment it looks as if one were standing and walking, to transform the leap of life into a walk – that only the knight of faith can do.

A path with heart takes heart.

Privilege the under-privileged. Tail, pinkies, ears, immigrants, the poor…

The most solitary heart makes the broadest leap into the middle of being, if on all sides the semblance of nonbeings stops its noise.

If something is unavoidable, for whatever reason, then enter it, embrace it. Time, existence, life.

The feast is forwards.

Barefoot, at least around the house, garden, beach. Unshod, discalced. Feeling the earth. Spreading, stretching, clenching the toes. Working the instep, the arch.

The point is to not allow ontological loyalties to shape being.

Desire sways ascent into me.

Always remember that the value of practice is not based on quantity or quality, but on the love of God that motivates it.

Music is mindful listening. Little to do with the production of sound, more in the ear/mind of the listener. Just stop and listen. Hear the various sounds, the levels of sound, the texture of sound, and hear how they all naturally organise themselves into one embracing soundscape with you at the centre. The world loves you simply by accommodating you.

Did you know that over 10% of all the people who have ever lived are alive now? That's what you call a population explosion.

The true world lives in a hovel further back.

ecstatic & horizontal

In one sense everything appears effortless – as though it does itself – but in another sense everything is laboured because I'm never allowed to forget my engine, my dantien.

The ultimate bourgeois pursuit is Enlightenment.

Breathing, when done well, does not simply bring in oxygen and push out carbon dioxide, it weaves an elastic connectivity through time.

Time to learn to be homesick.