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?