29 September 2020

The good student is content with two lessons a year because she knows from experience that correction requires at least six months hard work to internalise.

28 September 2020

Silence is the eternal duty of man.

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Look for strength and you find force; look for weakness and you find energy.
A nocturnal spirit.
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

27 September 2020

Just pray you're one of those rare souls that gets it right when left alone.

Distrust theory.
As you whittle away, day in day out, it slowly begins to dawn that it's not the work that boring, it's you.

Spiritual work is all about cutting through the ego – the false – to encounter the real. The ego is just layer upon layer of accumulated conditioning, so thick and crusty that any sense of an underlying truth has been largely lost. The only times that truth gets a chance to peak through is when the ego momentarily cracks during trauma, and such events we spend most of our energy avoiding. We have become so successful at manufacturing an artificial 'good life' that we have no idea what a natural 'real life' is.
As a teacher, love all students equally. But only take seriously those that practice.
Hang on words and you'll always be misled.


 

The shaved pates on these Taoist monks
ride over nice pudgy cheeks.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Ne'er a truer word was spoken.
Every teacher asks their students to practice. Even the ones who initially sucker you in with promises of fun.
It's never that simple. Or is it?

26 September 2020

Be careful this time of year. Let the gruelling practice regime that's gathered steam during late Spring and Summer ease back. Reduce the hours and feel the intensity soften as the work gradually internalizes. Otherwise you risk injury or burnout.


 

Practice erodes ego; ego erodes practice. At some point you get tired of this seesaw and make up your mind.
My finger on the shoulder of the ghost who first touched mine.
All or nothing.
It is so important not to be there when the bomb drops.
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

25 September 2020


 

touching / the possibilities of / less
Did we not invent the one god to justify our dominance as the one species? To replace balance with nature with lordship over nature?

Belly is hearth and home, root and anchor: a gloomy day beside the fireplace watching movement in the flames. 

Heart is horizon, compassion, expanse and inclusion: a lazy afternoon picnic on a warm English meadow. 

Head is beacon, crown, responsibility: the bright light of a lighthouse piercing the night, saving ships from foundering.
a radiant silence falling upon the clamor
All Lives Matter. Even the ones you eat.


 

Students make headway when they start to practice, but they make heartway when they fall in love with practice.
Heart is a beautiful holiday but belly is home.

When our first cat died of old age we found her the following morning stretched into a long extended line as though death had been a struggle to squeeze through a tiny hole.
the Earth Altar where all our endeavors begin

24 September 2020

The mind will only quieten when you no longer have any interest in what it has to say. So when this space goes silent you'll know I've finally got somewhere.


 

Peace and prosperity. But for whom? The bourgeoisie? The majority? The whole human race? What about the over two hundred species the human race is driving to extinction everyday?
Rather ironic that this 'Information Age' should be happening as the gene pool of the biosphere is being wantonly ravaged. This is the inherent fascism in our species: our uncanny ability to focus only on ourselves as we mercilessly exploit the other.
Separate from the herd. Become a straggler, a rogue. What Whitman called a loafer. Otherwise you'll never see what's beyond the herd.
The teacher must protect himself from the smilers and the nodders – those that claim to understand. How can they possibly understand when there is no chance in hell of them ever doing the work that's required to understand? This is why my teacher retired from public teaching at 57: he was sick and tired of casting pearl before swine.
The greatest sin is turning a blind eye.


 

the agitated squirming of the city dweller who clings only to the telephone and radio
Civilization is built on repression and results in depression. Anger is a real gift of spirit and should be fearlessly directed. Otherwise we never break free.

23 September 2020

One of the consequences of learning to quieten the mind is that one begins to sense the whole from which we spring.
Do the work and eventually it will all come together. Without the work you'll have nothing to show for/of yourself but a CV – a stack of empty words.
Let us leave theories there and return to here’s here. Now hear.


 

Move with an aching beauty, deeply aware of your wake: the ripples and rhythms you leave behind.

22 September 2020

Getting into the legs is never easy; it's always daunting.
The relaxation that only comes with knowing deep down that you're living an authentic life with spirit at its heart. This is the relaxation we want. It's getting rarer and rarer.

The rational mind, which originally developed as a tool for cutting through superstition and finding the real and true, has become the means of robbing the world of poetry and magic and instituting information and depression instead. This is because it is now in the hands of people unqualified to wield it. Any tool of such power and potential is dangerous and requires a deeply humble egoless mind to properly put to use, otherwise it serves he who wields it rather than any objective truth.

Into this world we're thrown like a dog without a bone. Apparently Jim Morrison penned this lyric after attending a lecture on Heidegger whose concept of thrownness (Geworfenheit) resonated with him. The secret to living a worthy life is finding your bone, the one destined for you. And, in a sense, you don't find it, it finds you: it suddenly appears as though from nowhere, and if you have the balls you grab it, hold onto it, and spend the rest of your life gnawing away until it's given you what you need to slip to the next level.


 

history begins with bestial giants
"I was only following orders." Is this not the most obnoxious and cowardly of excuses? And yet is this not the excuse of all of us as we obediently believe and behave the way our culture dictates?

The only way to work on humility is to put oneself through hardship and deprivation. Most of us don't start until old age sets in.

A soft mind is one that does not resist the natural process.
let us not fool ourselves

21 September 2020


 

There is always a decision not to be exposed.

The prevailing culture privileges the myths of the majority, and in doing so blinds its members to the injustices at its core. I saw this in South Africa in 1981 and I see it now in Israel. This is largely why we cannot acknowledge those things that we need to acknowledge, and is why exile is an absolute necessity. This structure is also at play at the level of the ego – the ego prevents us seeing the blindingly obvious flaws in ourselves.

Take the difficult path. The easy one at best goes round in circles and at worst goes backwards.
The Dao that can be named – delineated in words – is not the true Dao. Words don't say anything, they just wake us up – help us remember. Not by bringing or investing clear sense but through their poetic richness – their capacity for absolute ambiguity. What my teacher called the shimmer.
we only need to loosen somewhat our everyday shackling to what is currently obtrusive and incidental, and already we will have explicitly experienced what is astonishing in experience


 

Death – the event of death – follows us around our whole life if only we care to notice. Awareness of death lends the dantien a tone – a background finality – without which spirit is always roused too late. And this is awareness: simple readiness for whatever befalls.
The teacher plants a delicate seedling inside the student in the hope that it will take root and eventually flourish. Practice is the nurture of hope.

20 September 2020

reverting to the primacy of the ear
Practice is time spent going through certain motions to awaken an energy the teacher has planted within.
Think you're escaping and run into yourself.


 

Relax the mind into the body. This is fearlessness.

A real teacher shocks – blasts you to pieces. This is his job. Your job is to then go home and pull yourself together. Practice as consolidation.

19 September 2020

Soften the mind, and let the body do it for you.
Condition the body to naturally return energy.
Imagination is more robust in proportion as reasoning power is weak.


 

The straight line cannot proceed through the torturous twists of life.
The first stage is study: find a worthy teacher and become a worthy student: study, study, study: lose the self in study: let the teacher suffocate you and remake you in his image.
Bifrost: the rainbow bridge of the gods from Asgard to earth.
The content of the work of art is not what the artist intentionally puts in but what the artist fails to keep out. Art, like life, is a mysterious business.

18 September 2020

The pleasures of love lasts but a fleeting but the pledges of life outlusts a lieftime.

principles take us back to the primordial

Work on dualities. They are everywhere – at every turn. Clearly and cleanly distinguish. Then get the components working together. This means in constant contest and strife. But a strife that is understood to be generative and productive. Like two loving brothers scrapping heartily for the love of the fight.
The hero speaks in metaphor.
Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance.
A war is waging.

17 September 2020

Nothing is more immediate and unequivocally present than the fight. An event of spirit. A matter of life and death.

16 September 2020

A coward dies a thousand times before his death
An open fontanelle: spiritual trepanation.
It is well-nigh impossible for a modern mind to grasp the concept of an Internal Teaching. A transmission of energy rather than a transfer of information. A decades long course in unlearning rather than a short course of learning.

15 September 2020

verification is fabrication

at the boundary of the human
The most important part of you is your word. More important than your desires, your opinions, your satisfactions, your comforts, your pleasures, your pains. Without a reliable word – the ability to make and keep promises – you have no symbolic function, no place to either be or go – no relationship with the future – and so nothing of real value to offer the world.
The teacher points out things that are staring you in the face but which you can't see.

14 September 2020

From the true opponent, a limitless courage flows into you.
When spirit rises, everything changes; risk enters the fray. Real change is never what one expects.

The bourgeois lifestyle denies or dampens spirit to keep things exactly as we like them. It can be seen at play in classes as students constantly take little breaks for a sip of water or to check their phone or simply to glance around. It effectively means that we have tiny attention spans for anything remotely difficult. Exactly when we really need to buckle down and concentrate – bring our attention and intention to bear – is when we chose instead to wimp out and take a break.

We are close to waking up when we dream that we are dreaming.

13 September 2020

People are controlled by fear. And it's been going on so long that we have become addicted to fear. When you are frightened you become passive – spiritless – and eventually you can't become active except in moments of anger. We each have a responsibility to tackle our own innate fear otherwise we'll never be able to fight back.
It's all in the dosage. Optimizing quantity to effect quality.
A perfect man breathes as if he is not breathing.


 

I did it my way... And failed miserably. To succeed at my way I must first spend many years obediently and diligently doing it teacher's way. Otherwise my way is all ego.
My teacher studied advanced Buddhism with a couple of highly qualified Tibetans. They taught him mantra, which he practised for a few years. He later told me that the only mantram I need bother with is the one he used: "I am not afraid." Like he always said, the only real enemy, in our game, and in life, is fear.

12 September 2020

Head above the clouds.

11 September 2020

Investigate your own devices. What do you uniquely bring to the work/world? In what way would the world be a poorer place without your endeavours? What do you actually contribute?

10 September 2020

We get by on land only by carrying a huge amount of salt water around with us.


 

Science has been vastly transformed from the simple impulse to understand the natural world around us, into a kind of hellish marriage with instrumentality, technology, capitalism, and the military-industrial complex.
It does feel that even if the virus hasn't been engineered, then the panic response certainly has been. I suspect that the invisible powers-that-be, who, for so long, have been getting unbelievably rich from economic progress/growth (from the population explosion), are beginning to worry that soon there will be no planet worth inhabiting, so they are setting in place measures to check that growth, starting with global economic collapse. Let's hope this works otherwise next on the cards is the cull.
let there be mountains around, let us stay in the Valley of Gloom
Drugs are useful only if you learn from them. By that I don't mean taking on board the inevitable insights they yield, but learning how to induce that fluid state at will, without the drug. Absolute non-dependence. And beware: you don't get something for nothing: if they give something then they also take, and what they take may be very precious – it may be something that you'll need later on – and it may be irreplaceable.
We become stronger by facing hardship. There is no other way. The good student learns to take and make hardship.

09 September 2020


es sind 
noch Lieder zu singen jenseits 
der Menschen
The negative is more importunate nowadays because the positive is always conditional. Yes, but…
Is there a greater joy than returning generosity? Is not every joy simply the joy of returning generosity?
Leave only a trace, the faintest of traces. It's all we can hope for.
those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality

One of the mind-blowing and life-changing insights that comes from Taiji partner work is that we are only in our bodies, physically, sensually and energetically, when we are touching and attending to the Other. Without coming to this a whole life can be wasted.
Responsive rather than sensitive.
People ask, "Why are you going to the same place every day?" But that's when you see the subtle differences. And that's when you get to know the wild.
Primed for fight or flight. This is what we mean by listening.
Prerequisites: Faith, Courage, Sincerity, and above all, a Sense of Humour.

08 September 2020


spirit unappeased and peregrine

07 September 2020

What matters is the work we do, not how we feel or what we think about it. I love the Carthusians. When they join the order they lose their name – they effectively die to the world – and when they actually die they are buried in unmarked graves. Forgotten. All that survives is the invisible resonance of enduring prayer they have created. Long energy.
Extend the attention, the breath.

06 September 2020

We have become blunt instruments. As individuals we have lost incision, precision and concision. We cannot focus our minds and direct our intent long enough to break through the boundaries of our paltry world. We hurry scurry like ants on a mindless mission.
the negative is the more importunate

the deeper unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being

Two sacred places in the body. Sacrum, which extends and intends downward into the earth, and front brain which expands and shines upward, proffering it's radiant splendor to the gods. To sully the brain with worry is the height of both vulgarity and foolishness.

05 September 2020

dishevelment and distraction have become an art form

04 September 2020

Find a tree, stand or sit beside it and meditate. Feel it helping your heavy energy down into the earth and your light energy up into the heart, head and beyond, energies that usually cling together in fear and disquiet. (If no tree then use a wall – zazen and the wall.) Trees are the best teachers.

03 September 2020

Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?


 

The mind's disease is that it cannot quieten down. In taiji we have discovered that the mind is only noisy and neurotic when we lose our conscious connexion with the ground. So in each lesson and each practice session we re-establish an intimate awareness of that connexion through legs and feet, and, as if by magic, the mind settles and quietens, if only a little.
If prospective students do not feel the value, let alone the necessity, of gentle pushing hands then they don't have the heart for taiji.

The mind looks for physical stability so that it can go walkabout, so that it can think to itself about absent or imaginary things. Nothing entertains it more than itself. It is the archetypal narcissist. Our work struggles to bring the mind back to the body by setting it the task of finding and equilibrating the energies in each situation it finds itself in.
A niggling suspicion that there's more than meets the eye.
And wild desire 
Falls like black lightning.

02 September 2020


A heart forever aching, forever breaking.

Consciousness is a filter – inevitably picking and choosing. This is why we reach beyond it, with a yearning, hopeful heart. Softness is a dream in every ache to become a better soul.

01 September 2020

It seems blatantly obvious to me that the more populous we become as a species, the less individual intensity (freedom) we each possess. The planet simply isn't large enough for seven thousand million magical spirit creatures.
We are all weanlings.
This penchant for individual happiness is slack and infantile.

A sparkle of authenticity rather than an image projected.
a practice of reintegrating ourselves into the ontological tissue

When the mind is subdued and held inside the body then the energy opens out into the unimaginable. But when the mind is outside looking on, giving the body orders, then the energy just follows the dictates of that mind.
A spirit so open it constantly derails the mind.