You can't always get what you want.

Students often complain that they can't feel energy, and it's not surprising really as they generally insist on controlling every aspect of their lives. Control is the death of energy.

I was born full of holes … I admit it, I'm an enclosed hollow…

We are wretched sinners – all complicit in the anthropocene. To live balanced lives, we must make reparations with a significant portion of our energy. We must give something back.

How best engage with life? Faithfully, passionately, prayerfully.

Full of emotion yet not emotional.

An intelligence acutely aware of its own limitations as a means of navigating through life. An intelligence always ready to listen to the heart.

playfully losing control instead of stridently taking charge

We work on self-awareness not to glorify or indulge the self but in order to move past and beyond it.

The onus should be on the student to please the teacher. When this reverses then the teacher has become a whore.

Instead of using the body to convey a busy mind from A to B, use it to generate energy and engage energy.

Everyone finds their level.

dependent on a tension that denotes powerful connectedness

The only sure way to succeed in this herculean task of quietening the mind is to fall in love with the beautiful world of energy that quietness reveals.

Discipline takes us home. 

The poor student is full of excuses. And what's amazing is that they actually believe them! Or do they?

Despite our cleverness – our calculating, controlling, scheming minds – we inhabit a world saturated with unintended consequence.

just a deep overall shine

Back to the womb. To a time before artifice, before thought, when we had nothing but movement (energy) and growth. But also ever returning to the site of womb – to the dantien.

We invented God when we lost Nature.

The Great Escape: methodically, patiently, little by little, digging a tunnel to freedom with a veritable spoon.

Freedom from self comes when the spirit is completely bound up with something far greater than self.

ecstatic inherence in the truth of being

If you are brave enough to push gently into pain rather than pull away from it then the spirit will rise giving you the means to not only bear it but use it. Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

Worry would be fine if you actually intended it rather than remained victim to it. This is practice; really.

The average notion of home is a false home – a place of safety and slackness, where we know we can be at our worst with impunity. Home, for the average person, is where they are always off guard. For the martial artist, and for the true spiritual adept, home is a taut dantien.

If you externalise the internal then it is no longer internal. Guard your privacy from everyone, especially your self, your ego.

what is essential is not the human being but being

Rise above family, nation, race, species. For this you need to live in exile – far from home.

Externally relaxed, loose, open. 

Internally tense, taut, closed.

The internal monologue reinforces the ego. That's its function.

The teacher points you in exactly the direction you would rather not go. This is why they are so challenging.

What matters is eternal vitality, not eternal life.

Nothing puts up a fight like the ego. You'd maybe expect a student of spiritual work to be calm and peaceful and compassionate, and they are, some of the time, but at other times, as the ego fights back, they are brimming with anger and resentment and self-pity. This is the way of it. The student in time learns to weather the mood swings.

We propose that instead of talking to yourself all the time, you listen to energy. Sounds simple enough and yet nothing could be more difficult or more revolutionary.

There is a famous Zen poem called Faith In Mind. It starts with the sentence: "The Dao is not difficult if only you do not pick and choose." For me, freedom of choice is the curse of modern (bourgeois) life. When spiritual teachers talk about freedom they mean freedom from ego, which is the opposite of freedom of choice because choosing comes from, and therefore stimulates, the ego. A life dominated by choice never goes deep because given the choice we always chicken out. As my teacher used to say: "You are truly blessed to know you have no choice." This is why I hardly ever read about Taiji or Qigong or Meditation, or watch YouTube videos or the like. When you are following your own nose, assisted by a transmission from an absent but ever-present teacher, then you cannot allow yourself to be put off the scent, to be distracted by the possibility of alternatives. You make a choice – one choice – which then clears the field of all others, and suddenly life is very straightforward: you have work to do and you do it and so be it.

The good teacher is well-aware of being just a step ahead of the good student. It's that closeness that makes them buzz.

We aeronauts of the spirit.

A transmission of energy is a thrust into the unknown. If you work with it and follow it then you will be taken down an ever more lonely but tender, difficult but fascinating path.

The teacher says things not to be understood (in fact expecting to be misunderstood) but to stimulate the student to practice. Understanding comes through practice.

To think for yourself you must think against the self – against the trend, the herd.

We quieten the mind to listen. We listen to heal. We heal to enter the fullness of being. We aim one day to make this constant and continuous.

For you there is but one commandment: be pure.

By imagination we mean a listening so acute, so sensitive, that it hears things that aren't quite there. Not yet anyway.

If you're a good student (compelled to practice – can't not practice) then look back and see when it was you made that pledge. When did you discover the secret of work? It was certainly before you met your teacher. It was that pledge that drew you together.

duty by an unforced will

First thought best thought (but don't jump to conclusions).

an almost febrile passion for unearthing

Meditation: quiet the mind to find the heart to praise god.

Develop an eye for beauty and an ear for quiet. These things don't come natural any more: you have to work your butt off for them.

The real work commences when you realise you don't exist.

The artist digs down – deep down – to dredge up something they don't know – for sure – exists.

You have become cold to everything that previously had value, colder than ice – but those who touch you now claim that you are red hot: and pull their fingers quickly away in the belief that you have burned them. And soon there will be people who seek you out in order to warm themselves on you.

Chances are our final years will be full of pain so, unless you're prepared to end your days drugged to the eyeballs, learn to deal with pain.

Not a matter of taste or opinion but of truth and therefore honesty.

Open up to the poem and the poem will open up for you.

Show willing.

the poet gathers arrows for the ventilation

The three most important things in Taiji: listening, yielding, spirit. Listening is our way of being in the world, yielding is our way of responding to the world, and spirit is the magic ingredient making it all possible.

Far better practice wrong than not at all.

Force will generally overpower energy unless the person with the energy knows how to yield.

Rouse ire and fire.

a shimmer of possibility

The better the student the less the teacher needs to give.

Nothing is what it seems.

The inevitable corruption in wealth and health.

The more we learn to hold on to dantien, the more we can let go everywhere else.

The silence adhered to me.

The work exposes a world of fleeting glimpses and subtle feelings. Partake without desire: without wanting to profit or regulate or define or, heaven forbid, control.

Yielding mind comes from a dantien ever drawing into itself. Withdrawing.

I rarely draw what I see. I draw what I feel in my body.

Don't just consume; contribute! Not as another cog in the system, another sheep of society, but by presenting an example of a better way to be and a better way to live. More aware, more passionate, more compassionate. Softer, sweeter, kinder. Graceful and gracious. Yielding.

You do it because it is the only thing to do.

The trouble with revelation is that it always comes with a bundle of hard work. And sacrificial work at that – letting go – the most difficult of all.

Change so slow – so imperceptible – it's irreversible.

It is not man who pursues truth, but truth man.

Floundering in the deep end.

Thought is the very denial of love.

Align with gravity (seated or standing – it doesn't matter which) and the body settles down in relaxation as the heart and mind lift in adoration. It's natural. What hinders this natural process is the noisy anxious mind terrified of the space that opens up – our artificial intelligence.

a dreamer struggling to awaken from a nightmare

 

Cultivate inner quiet, and listen. Wake up (to) subtle energy.

Always blinded, don’t believe your eyes.

What makes the work advanced is not technique but the quality of the heart/mind. Soft and compassionate. Quiet and faithful.

The work is in me, like a hill.

magic with friction

 

simultaneously stony and amoebic

Unattached but not detached. It's all in the quality of the connexion. The trust and support. The give and take.

Rise & shine

Without a transmission our efforts are somewhat arbitrary. A transmission is an energy that resonates inside – effectively a memory of the teacher – that acts as beacon, directing and regulating not only practice but also life – destiny.

the tyranny of heaven

 

You need a certain perversity in this game – a penchant for pain, a willingness to suffer. The more you bleed in practice the less you'll bleed in the fight.

To make a habit of practice, set a Rule. For example: 3 Short Forms, 10 minutes standing meditation, 20 minutes seated meditation daily. Keep the rule religiously. My own teacher said only consider breaking the rule if someone desperately needs your energy instead. Never let your own feelings get in the way. The whole idea of a rule is that it cuts through your superficial laziness to a heart of courage and destiny beneath. If you find yourself breaking the rule often then reduce its demand otherwise you'll weaken your resolve.

we are witnessing ‘the end of the analytic ideal’

If you want a better understanding of listening then visit a good psychotherapist, a professional listener. Their listening gives permission for your defences to drop and your heart to pour out. When this happens you realise that living bottled up is not really living at all. You also realise that what's in the bottle changes everything. True listening always encourages: opening, flow, energy, change, transformation.

I'm a contrarian by necessity not by choice.

Time to let the silly stories slip away. This is meditation.

Gradually we learn from experience that doing the work is easier than not doing the work.

Doing the work that begs to be done rather than the work we want to do.

The deeper we go the more out of our depth we become until eventually we're swallowed up. Hopefully by then all fear of the deep, the void, the unknowable, death, has been vanquished.

Space, then, appears as a marquetry of time.