the earth dances in things and these in turn gesture forth the world

Breathing tonifies time.

From heaviness comes lightness; from discipline comes freedom.

Science only looks at the first layer.

The reason we no longer settle into our own being is because we can more easily settle into an external frame. Then, high and mighty, we judge all around, remaining remote from our true selves. 

The guiding principles of the Tao are: 

• Everything in the universe is part of the whole. 
• Everything has its opposite. 
• Everything is evolving into its opposite. 
• The extremes of one condition are equal to its opposite. 
• All antagonisms are complementary. 
• There is no beginning and no end, yet whatever has a beginning has an end. 
• Everything changes; nothing is absolute.

What's important is not opinion – whether I like or dislike – but how I put things to use in the noble endeavour of becoming a better person.

Given the ham-fisted quality of attention nowadays, it's probably better distracted than focused.

Mastery is knowing what needs to be done.

It's not about knowledge acquired but practice suffered.

earth as sensuous appearing

Taijiquan is all about yielding when you get into a fight: probably the most difficult scenario in which to try to present relaxed, yielding softness. The only way it is ever going to be possible is if you are already yielding in every other area of life. Yielding must become the way you live your life – the motor which takes you through your day.

Stop being such a landlubber: develop sea-legs.

Human being is out of order.

The Bourgeois Frame: the world is as I like it. 

Work soon puts pay to this.

placing practice at the heart of method

Suffering exists to be embraced rather than avoided. This insight marks the beginning of real work – the start of the journey.

Nothing more difficult than working on softness. Letting go of structures we hold dear as well as those we're glad to see the back of.

Ego forces every thought to its foreclosure

Force and hardness are the consequence of ignoring the Other. No longer an equilibrium between complementary though very different parts but an institution/monopoly of the One – the Me.

Equilibrate: strike a balance, a harmonious chord. This is yielding.

the edge of silence

Seeing the vital spirit means taking emptiness and quietude for substance, the firing process for function, refining vitality into energy, refining energy into spirit, and refining spirit back into emptiness. This is the study of driving energy by spirit.

The good student doesn't practice because they want to – it's not a matter of choice – but because they have to. If they didn't they'd get no peace.

devout and affectionate meditation

Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow – that is patience.

Some things are best left in the dark. Too delicate, too sacred to withstand the coarse rays of reason, the cold light of day.

For the best.

Acknowledge sources. Dedicate. Give back.

Learn to trust. Not so much the Other as your own ability to yield, to make good.

The better your energy the more trouble it'll get you into until eventually it's the death of you.

Prayer is its own reward.

Repetition is the ritual of obsession ... a way to jumpstart the indecision of beginning.

For the average person, thinking for themselves means having an opinion.

No artist worth their salt desires to communicate. They have something inside itching to come out and if it didn't then they would die. They are a force of nature. Communication is by the by.

The Real is indifferent to every attempt at representing it.

Without a bond of faith – a religiosity – it's all a little hit and miss – aimless.

In delving deep there is always the risk of digging your own grave.

Look and the mind calculates distance. 

Touch and the heart registers connexion.

The work is a lifetime's struggle to recognise and come to terms with inherent stiffness (limitation) and push into suppleness (infinity).

we have to keep on cleaning the mirror

The best way to deal with an over critical mind is to turn it on itself. It soon learns to be understanding and tolerant.

fastened by a leash of longing

Far better practice something than nothing, even if you get it wrong.

Insights mean nothing if you don't work on them, internalise them, insist on them.

Great philosophy, like great art, should help us to overcome the absences and distractedness of everyday life, and to be there in italics.

We're all the same. Full of ourselves. Full of pride in our capacity to reject destiny – the real – and design our own life. We all need to work on humility.

Gently but persistently, taking inevitable setbacks in ones stride.

This Age of Excarnation

As sure as night follows day.

Death destroys a man; the idea of death saves him.

Instead of being with thoughts, be with the breath – the breathing. A sure way to connect with energy.

No fair-weather friend.

'Being happy' and 'bestowing happiness' should be the same.

Everything in our comfortable lives serves to slacken dantien. Meditating on death is the antidote.

rest is in a genuine sense the highest concentration of movedness

Virtue is not something you turn on when it suits you. Virtue should be a fact of your being – oozing from every pore. It comes from the conviction that destiny is to serve the Tao rather than please oneself. Forget self and become one with the Tao.

Don't let the bastards get you down.

One serves by listening and encouraging. What my teacher called enheartening.

I call it the wc syndrome – the notion that you can press a button and all unpleasantness is flushed away to become someone else's problem.

Devastation is no mere turning to sand. Devastation is the high speed expulsion of Mnemosyne.

In the spirit of self-sacrifice. (That'll be the day.)

Students complain that they can't or don't feel energy. I tell them that they can and they do but they either reject those feelings or fail to notice them. They have already decided what energy should feel like long before they've had a chance to feel it. If I were to tell them that energy makes one light-headed and nauseous would they still be keen to feel it? Or tender and tearful, or constantly on the verge of collapse? It takes years to learn to live in and with energy.

Living gratefully is the beginning to living graciously and gracefully. It is the opposite of taking things for granted.

The internal monologue is a manifestation of self-pity. Maudlin, muddy and cloying.

a spontaneity which accomplishes what appeared to be impossible when we observed only the separate elements

We're all searching for something, we know not what. Only when we find it do we realise what it is.

My teacher used to say that he could only teach someone with poetry in their soul. It's so important to let yourself break open and weep on encountering beauty.

All too willing to believe. In this sense religious.

On exposure to the truth it is the good student who has the worst reaction: the look of mingled horror and terror rather than the knowing, nodding smile. This is because they instantly sense the magnitude of the work they will need to do to make it stick: to finally earn and bear it.

We don't need more to be thankful for, we just need to be more thankful.

Becoming energy.

Our only hope is to find something far more interesting – more worthy – than ourselves. Then let it take you where it will.

Idle thoughts are the enemy. To banish them, get into energy.

The good student is faithful. 

The mediocre student forgetful. 

The poor student fearful. 

Each of us composite.

For the thing to be a thing it must surrender itself into a play of relations, exist as a cluster and conglomeration of relations.

Sad that the pinnacle of bourgeois luxury nowadays seems to be binge-watching Netflix. Class seems to be a thing of the past.

Real work commences on going it alone. Finally finding yourself in dantien. Your own reference. What previously passed for work was beating about the bush.

Exposure to the surprise of grace is the condition for meaningful existence.

Back to a more fluid time: before we learned to make a world.

move into the divine nimbus

Growing up means reaching for the stars.

It all boils down to what you fill your mind with.

Thinking makes the mind heavy. Contemplation makes it light.

The middle-class may have less children nowadays but they make up for it with cavalier consumption.

people who once had dreams and epiphanies now admit only to devices and ornaments

Yielding is the most important concept in Taiji by far. Not only a martial technique but a practical philosophy, a way of life, a means of encountering the world meaningfully: with softness – a melting rather than a clash. The mind must be quiet in order to fully attend to the miracle that opens up each time we touch the world softly.

If it's not making you a better person then why are you bothering?

Singing releases spirit from its bony confines. Encourages levity – a lifting.

Work devoted to change rather than maintenance must contain boundary-breaking intensity at least some of the time.

What awaits me is not a deep Truth that I have to identify with, but an unbearable truth that I have to learn to live with.

Bourgeois means built on capital rather than faith.

They say the qi follows the eyes. It's more that both follow the intention.