centered as a steely mountain in cloud

Listen to your body the way an experienced horseman listens to his steed – by joining, yielding and gently intending.

gossamer so unceasing it seems real

Depression is the result of refusing destiny.

I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world.

Mind in dantien is like having a finger on the trigger. It lends the feeling of being both hunter and hunted – holding oneself in until the time is right, until the time to fight. It has nothing to do with happiness and everything to do with readiness.

I am alone.
The weight of love
Has buoyed me up
Till my head
Knocks against the sky.

It is only by repeating the same thing over and over that we begin to notice the subtle differences. This is one rationale behind practice.

The work weans us off dependencies that aren't good for us. This is never easy – fraught with fear and heartache – but without such work we remain infantile – locked in a life that cannot open up into fullness.

To be part of a solution rather than part of the problem, we have a responsibility to think against the (value) system we have inherited.

The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity.

Embrace discipline like the life-saver it is.

Ignorance, stupidity, unawareness – call it what you will – is no excuse.

The wrong sort of stillness is a frozen or petrified stillness. True stillness is always full of movement. Potential energy.

At the cutting edge.

Form is content as deployed. Content is form as imagined.

meticulous & inspired

The intending mind – quiet, still, focused – harnesses spirit to direct energy from the dantien. It's like having a fierce temper under hair-trigger control.

alive to the subtle gist

Those on a spiritual journey seek Enlightenment – the end result of eradicating (the control of) ego. But if you were suddenly to lose your ego then you would go mad because it is the ego that keeps us together and assembles our world. To survive and flourish without an ego requires a different mind, a mind that has mastered intent or intention. Intention just means in-tension, but it is a good tension, an intense, elastic, focused tension that sustains and directs energy. It takes decades of dedicated practice to develop, understand and control intent, and the energy most important to its utilization is spirit, which is why I rattle on so about it.

Important things cannot be explained.

Keep 25% of the mind in the dantien. Consider it an anchor, preventing the mind from wandering.

A noisy, self-obsessed mind is an affront to nature, and it would never survive in a natural world. It is a measure of how deeply bored and restless we really are, and how spiritless we have become.

The right choice is the risky one, the one that requires a courageous heart brimming with spirit.

People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.

The enemy is ego. Can't get clearer than that. The allies are what Heidegger called the fourfold: earth, heaven, mortals, deities. These are all operating upon us all the time but, by being largely unaware, we resist. The work is to make space inside (relax) and let the fourfold in.

Mind is not naturally a place of thinking. It is more a site of energy, specifically the energy we call intent.

The teacher's job is not to make you feel better but to correct your practice. This stumps those that don't.

Most of us spend a lifetime feeding our demons and fighting our allies.

Honesty, sincerity, respect.

The mind is an old crow 

Who knows only to gather dead twigs

Great teaching is not couched in language. It is never mere words of wisdom, because these are always misinterpreted – they always miss the mark. Great teaching is a transmission of energy – a magical event that wakes up something essential in the student. What Heidegger called the genuine jolt.

A good teacher doesn't tell you what to think, but gives you something worthwhile to work on. Then it's purely up to you.

Impeccability starves the ego.

Relax & sink rather than sink & relax. Relax means stop feeding your anxiety. Sink means intend downward. Don't just passively open to gravity – join forces with gravity.

liberated, i.e., newly poetized

The inexperienced teacher will try to help. The experienced teacher will let you stew.

Our problems stem from having forgotten how to practice virtue.

Progress in this game is a slow waking up to our own stupidity.

Despite our best intentions, we resist like hell. This is because we have lost all understanding of intention.

The pathology is to want control, not that we ever get it, because of course we never do.

Every established order tends to produce the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.

Sink and relax. Eventually your sinking is so active, you become a pile driver, and a distracted mind is impossible.

Only time will tell if the path is right.

The principles of Taiji have levels of depth. This is why practising the same old thing, day-in day-out, never gets boring – the principles we work with deepen.

Teachers – whoever wants to teach must be able to learn how:

1. to come to an ever deeper knowledge of the essential;
2. to be silent in the face of that which is properly to be taught;
3. to preserve the gentle superiority of the exemplar and not let oneself slip into a false camaraderie.

Avoidance is only ever a temporary solution. In putting off the fateful day, it misunderstands spirit and time. Not enough of one and too much of the other.

If the stomach is full of food or the gut is full of shit then you will not be able to function with any degree of spirit. This is why people vomit and defecate before a fight. The body knows what's best for it. Pity we can't say the same for the mind.

Peace of mind. Without it everything is wrong. No one can give it to you, that's your responsibility. Others can take it away, but you can always regain it, in time, with work. That's meditation – returning to equilibrium, equipoise, sanity.

Without a detached, ruthless core, compassion will cause your energy to dribble away.

the poetizing power is still in darkness – yet it is there!

What's your mettle when the shit hits the fan? That's the real test, not how you are when all's hunky dory. Everyone's nice and easy when things are going their way.

To work on the mind with the mind: how stupid can you get! My favourite Zen apothegm.

An unpeaceful mind burdens the world.

Watch your diet. Avoid anything that bloats – belly or ego.

Who knows in what we have become mired?

Taijiquan is a warrior way, and as such eschews all indulgence. The test is not how do I feel but can I fight right now.

The teacher shows their love by making your life difficult. In this sense they mimic the Dao. The good student learns to do it for themselves.

Solo practice improves your energy whereas partner-work improves your character. But only if you're the kind of person who forgets self as soon as they lay their hands on the other.

Without solo practice you have nothing of value to bring to the partner-work, to your relationships.

the genuine jolt

Most of us have lost that sense of unity of biosphere and humanity which would bind and reassure us all with an affirmation of beauty. Most of us do not today believe that whatever the ups and down of detail within our limited experience, the larger whole is primarily beautiful.

Most would object and argue that they do in fact believe the larger whole is beautiful. But unfortunately, just saying something does not make it so. Just because you say that you believe does not make you believe. Belief must be demonstrated and expressed at every level of your being for it to be real. You must feel it in your deepest heart, a terrifying place that most of us have no access to, and you must be ready to sacrifice everything for that belief. Believing something so simple and so fundamental is not just a whim but a lifetime's work.

The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.

Words have become mere purveyors of information. Our words no longer have power in themselves because we no longer have the personal power to keep them – we no longer have power in ourselves. Words, at their most powerful, promise and bind, and once made should never be broken. If you break your word then your being is rent and will leak until healed. Healthy fear – the fear that binds us to our promises and makes us honourable and trustworthy – is as necessary as healthy love. It's not love that makes us special but honour – honouring the pledges we hold in our heart.

an obstinate tenderness

Love thyself as thy neighbor

It (life, work) begins with a pledge, a pledge we make at the point of conception.

Picking a way through rough terrain.

higher affiliation and deeper rootedness

A semblance of quiet mind can be achieved by pacifying the ego. Such a mind is smug and self-satisfied. We need a quiet mind that comes with abandoning the ego. This happens when the heart learns to balance love and fear. Yin and Yang. Mind continuous.

I remain the same person but I’ve become older.

It matters little how much talent you have. We all could do with more. What matters is to venture beyond where your talent takes you, and this is only achieved through dint of hard work – and with the grace of god.

the fierce urgency of now

My son, whose total rejection of the conventional I have absolute admiration for, has a wonderful word for the bourgeoisie. He calls them losers. They appear to have so much yet they've lost the most important thing of all.

Flowers tell us about the delicacy and tenderness and whimsical poignant hopefulness of the earth.

The path of the sinner 
is strangely lined 
with many beautiful, sophisticated fetters.

Do the right thing rather than the easy thing. This is courage.

We are all slaves to some master or other. The important thing is whether that master will lead you to liberation of some sort. The usual master nowadays is ego or self, and that certainly won't.

The good student does what needs to be done. The poor student does what they want to do. The mediocre student has their doubts and fears.

embrace the difficulty, without compromise, without condition, without strategizing, without economizing, without why

truth becomes actual by way of a work

The student shows respect for the teaching by practising. Without practice there is no respect. It's as simple as that.

Despite (or because of) the plethora of choices at our disposal nowadays, we are more limited than we have ever been because our basic energy – our spirit – is so poor.

Our problem is our sensitivity.

the "individual" is inconsequential and counts only inasmuch as he secures for himself in effective work a possibility of repeatable impulses

Ego builds barricades – line upon line of defence for the self. Breakthrough happens when insistent practice builds enough pressure to burst through one of these barricades.

Mankind no longer knows what to do with itself

Choose the choiceless life.

Ego is built on the wrong sort of sensitivity – where the slightest thing sets off the anxious mind.

the air, you know, is not just nothing: it is a medium like the sea but thinner

Full of feeling yet empty of feelings.

keep on renewing yourself not so much by a process of orderly growth as by a continual breaching of boundaries

False home is ego-mind. True home is heart-mind. The work is the slow, toilsome process of moving home.

Take it to heart. This is listening.

the ideal space must contain elements of magic, serenity, sorcery and mystery

Courage is nearly everything. Our pure impulses are always right.

Attention. Pay attention. Pay with attention. Attend class with punctuality and regularity. Attend the teaching with an open ear and an open heart. Attend the work with joy and enthusiasm. Practice is simply a measure of the sincerity of the attention.

satisfied with being ourselves, however small

Give every thing a second glance, a second chance. This is the literal meaning of respect.

the hazardous initiative

They are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.

A noisy mind masks the restless heart. Restless for god, for home.

Do your thing.

Human beings have always had access to energy – to worlds of energy – but the knowledge to navigate these worlds, painstakingly gathered over millenia by lineages of mastery, has largely been lost. And so we are left with the infantile world of technology, devoid of energy and devoid of knowledge. And no one asks why.

The real difficulty in life is the lack of difficulty.

Quieten the mind to hear the voice of god. The most subtle call imaginable.

Work hard to become soft. Seems like a contradiction but it doesn't take much work to understand that it's the only way.

The problem with democracy is its inability to tackle long-term problems.

the powerless power of love

Goodness gracious!

Our work transforms: expending energy, creating goodness.

It doesn't matter which mind you're using – listening mind, compassionate mind, rational mind, thinking mind – they all work best when lodged in the dantien rather than floating around in the head. Head is large and spacious, airy and fanciful whereas dantien is cold and confined, dark and dull – the perfect anchor.

These exercises are like prayers. We're not just doing something for us, we're opening a communicative channel between ourselves and the energetic reality we're embedded within.

Prayer is a becoming-energy, if that's not tautology.

da pacem domine

My heart could receive god 
if only it chose 
to turn toward the light 
as does the rose.

It is my contention that the simple actions in life – those we perform automatically and without real care – breathing, standing, walking, eating, sleeping – could all be worked on and improved. And if we did so then slowly our smile would broaden, and we would learn to dwell in our body and our world.

Awareness of energy.
Awareness is energy.

The Time of Our Lives

God needs us to love him more than we love ourselves. Is that too much to ask?

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

The intelligent student understands that intelligence is as much a curse as it is a blessing.

Spirit creates novelty from sameness. Ego reduces novelty to sameness.

Mind in dantien is the natural anchor for a free spirit.

His feet lift lightly / with mere memory of gentler seasons.

all that is created in a fact 
is the language that numbers it

Kiss the ground with the feet. Then each step invests the Earth with love, and you with grace.

If for a Catholic every sperm is sacred, then for the bourgeoisie every choice is sacred.

What do you hold sacred? What do you feel you need? Would it not do a world of good to learn to do without? This is sacrifice, pure and simple. Working on the mind – freeing mind of attachment.

The one who has conceived what is grand must also live it.

That's the problem Frank, no one wants to be themselves anymore.

We need to talk. No four words have struck so much fear and trembling in the heart of men.

Using the legs and feet as mere workhorses – moving a careless, arrogant ego from A to B – ruins them. They harden and get depressed – leaden. We forget that they are only secondarily vehicles of motion. Primarily they are wise, sensitive, listening instruments that tell the mind where and when to go.

Itchy feet. Much more reliable than an anxious mind.

You must face the truth for what it is. It's not for everyone.

Mind doesn't really help.

Respectful listening improves the climate.

sprouted from crisis-driven cracks in the edifice of capitalism

Sink and relax. Relax and become heavy. Let the body become its true weight. We don't realise it but our anxious mind keeps us out of the legs, and gives us a false sense of lightness. We want a heavy body and a light mind, not a light body and a heavy mind. An anxious mind is heavy but it makes the body light – it's like nervously walking on eggshells all the time. So we're just opening up to gravity, letting gravity stream down through the body. As soon as you stand upright and bend your legs, you become energetically engaged with gravity, which pulls down through you. And if you get the dantien in the right position, which is usually slightly forward of where it naturally settles, then the heavens will have a similar effect on your heart. And when we turn the waist, we are effectuating a separation between the body and the mind – the good mind not the anxious mind. So gravity is encouraging the anxious mind to relax and disperse, and the turning is encouraging the good mind to come into the centre and find the stillness at the centre, and it does that by throwing the body outward. So four things to remember: gravity pulling down through you, operating mainly on your dantien because that is your heavy centre, your center of gravity; the bum in, so the heart can naturally lift up; the arms and the body and the flesh thrown away from the turning center; and your mature mind – not your infantile anxious mind – drawing into the center around the belly and the spine.

It is a very gentle message, that of the walk through time, laid alongside the message that all time is simultaneous.

It's not long before the rot sets in. This is why spirit is so important. Spirit disrupts the status quo, dispels moods and miasmas, evokes magic and sparkle. Spirit freshens up energy. But this is also the problem with spirit. Spirit can make something of anything – this is what it does, it creates events – but without the wisdom to stand back and assess a situation rationally and dispassionately, it often simply invests unworthy situations with seeming value, situations that would be better abandoned altogether. Spirit is like the icing on the cake – if you put enough on you don't realise the cake itself is stale.

The human being—a steep path in an ever stronger wind!

God left us with one job – steward of life on Earth. Looks like we've fucked up big time.

Enlightenment – liberation from ego – is not the end but a beginning. Imagine you've been incarcerated for as long as you remember, yet each day you've spent a little time digging a tunnel to freedom. Then one day you manage to break free. Would that new found freedom be wonderful? No, it would be terrifying. Nothing about the life you'd led inside would have prepared you for life on the outside. It would mark the beginning of a very different (and probably difficult) stage.

…and the magic to which it leads us…

As long as we are not willing to suffer we will always be trapped in suffering.

Jesus Christ, Son of God, King of Kings, Prince of Peace, model for all. Christianity marked the intrusion of Platonism and Neo-Platonism into Judaism. It places mind – intellect – at the centre of the universe. But what is interesting is that it preaches a very different intellect to the rational mind we know today. The Christian intellect is accessible through the loving heart, not through the reasoning mind. For the early Christians, at least, heart and mind were not separate entities but internal and external attributes of the one reality.

Thoughts don't belong in the mind. They're an imposition, an intrusion.

Meditation attempts to get to the root of the basic anxiety that prevents us from dwelling peacefully and peaceably in our own body, mind and energy.

Espero Alegre la Salida – y Espero no Volver jamás.

I spend a significant amount of time on public transport – buses and trains – and my favourite pastime is secretly watching conscripts, of which there are many in Israel, military service being compulsory. When they are unaware of being observed, just quietly sitting, they are in their essence: magical creatures breaking apart and spilling forth a tenderness – a quality of soul – that always takes my breath away. I can't see that quality in myself of course, but I acknowledge and respect that it must be there when I appreciate it in them. This is why compassion is so important – practising compassion for others by connecting to their essential humanity is the only way we can do it for ourselves. All other self-love is just pampering an already bloated ego.

Tone of voice.

Artificial intelligence. Is that not the thinking mind?

Battle the ego, but intelligently, never face on, otherwise you'll always lose. Your ego would far rather you die than it lose control.

There is human nature, there is knowledge; and then good and bad arise.

Still the body, quieten the mind, and become aware of energy.

Mind continuous. Continuity, contiguity. No dead space, no free space. A Parmenidean universe, with no net movement. Mind and time become one undistracted, unbroken thread. This is the aim of meditation, and all internal work.

A change of vantage lends a shift in perspective, and suddenly everything is different.

Discipline gradually wears down the ego. There is no other way.

to be transparent as an April twig

The good student knows what's good for them.

The bourgeoisie feel entitled to the good life – a life full of goodies and devoid of discomfort. So they expend their energy manufacturing the good life. And when it all starts falling apart, which, if they're lucky, it inevitably does, instead of waking up they numb themselves with painkillers, antidepressants and therapy. Heads buried in the sand.

The perfect student has reconciled need and want – they desire what their progress needs, even though this be pain and suffering.

Work against the flow but never against the grain.

As one, a dark recess 

That probed recedes 

Past that portal whence 

The milling seed germs teem.

Don't change the world, change yourself. And you change the self not by reading or thinking or sitting on the sofa but by activating your spirit and improving your energy. Then the world looks completely different anyway.

Meditation is only effective if you're already in great physical shape, otherwise it will just make you more slack and shitless.

Are you sure you want an awakening? Because if so then something will have to give. Something will have to break.

No complaints, no complaining. If things aren't quite right, aren't quite they way you'd like them, aren't perfect, then there's no one to blame but yourself – your self.

Original sin.

Fundamentally flawed.

Spirit scares away demons, fears, limitations. When spirit rises we suddenly awaken to the fact that reality is far vaster and more mysterious and more dangerous than the pathetic and paltry world our minds construct. The main reason we're terrified, normally, of spirit.

Although the guidance of a superior teacher and practice with fellow students is indispensable, the most important thing is one's own daily practice.

Honour the teaching. Do it justice.

It's always the junctures – those places where something changes – those are the important places. It's not the smooth steady state places in between… People don't know how to concentrate anymore. Most people's concentration is so hard and anxious that it blots out all energy. And then as soon as they get distracted – either I say something or their mind is drawn to something else happening in the room – suddenly, for a fraction of a second, they get it right. And then of course it goes. So it's those places where you get distracted, or where your mind wanders a little, those are the important places. In a sense the places I'm unaware of, those are where energy manifests. This is why it's not a simple matter of being aware – you have to be aware with the right mind. If you're aware with the normal anxious mind then it's the death of energy. Which is why mindfulness is so difficult – because you want to be mindful – full of mind – but full of the right mind not full of the wrong one. For most of us, all our problems stem from the fact that we are full of the wrong mind. Full of anxiety and noise. The prize in taiji is light mind – it's the most difficult thing to produce. And we do produce it naturally but usually when we are unawares… If you were to suddenly become enlightened, Heaven forbid, what would strike you is how that experience, that feeling, that understanding, has been with you your whole life and you've just ignored it. It's been there waiting to leap in and take over but you've pushed it out. The thinking anxious mind constantly pushes out reality and replaces reality with an image that it prefers.