31 March 2021
28 March 2021
27 March 2021
Every artist knows the negative correlation between feeling good and being creative. True creativity requires a vulnerability and a loss of control that feels just this side of unbearable. What sustains it on that edge long enough for the work to get done is spirit. The absolute necessity of spirit.
26 March 2021
25 March 2021
The realisation of the Higher Self. This our project. Realisation in the sense of a making real. What distinguishes the Higher Self is its noble silence; what distinguishes the lower self – the Ego – is its endless chatter, its neurotic noise. This is why spiritual work – work devoted to realising the Higher Self – is generally a matter of producing silence by dampening the Ego.
The first major discovery you make when you get into internal work is that you don't need mummy and daddy any longer. The second major discovery you make (almost as mind-blowing as the first) is that you don't need the self any more either. Now you can commence the work of their destruction. Spiritual work is always negative, always destructive.
24 March 2021
One of my teacher's oft-repeated sayings: The average person runs from one sensation to the next.
For him life was a matter (a practice) of investing time with meaning (continuity and contiguity) through dedicated sacrificial work.
Another of his sayings: If there was an easier way I'd have found it.
23 March 2021
22 March 2021
Domestication is the problem. The general infantalization of humanity. The solution is not buying a pair of sandals and tramping through nature weekends but growing up. Unfortunately this doesn't happen as a matter of course any more – privilege has put pay to that – now we really have to apply ourselves and work on it.
Take more risks
Tenderize your will
Develop a sense of humour
Bleed more
These are specific personal instructions I received at various times in my teacher's tutelage. None were elucidated. I was expected to go away and get on with it. I didn't consciously work on any, but each instruction nagged my mind (they still do) until I naturally found a way to work with them – my own solutions to their problematic.
21 March 2021
20 March 2021
Everything is connected, and the universe is a vast web of connexion. Versions of this are by now so often repeated as to be cliché. Yet the opposite is also true. Every thing is separate, discrete and distinct otherwise it wouldn't be a thing. And what is it that compels each thing to retreat and settle into its own solitude – its own being – so that it may simply radiate into the world? It is a quality I call nobility. This is what solo practice develops. Without a practice of solitude you have little of real value to give.
19 March 2021
There comes a point in the work when you just get stuck. You hit a plateau from which you cannot for the life of you escape. What is required at this point is not more work, more of the same, but a change of heart. The work must start to come from a different place within you. Not from your old end-gaining ambitious self but from simple love – for work, for life, for being – from the heart.
Je ne sais quoi. It is the mysterious element – spirit – that we seek to stimulate, invite, welcome, admit, not in order to know it but because without it things are just a little dull. It is what turns an ordinary experience into an event – a thing to remember, retell and relive – a teaching. The teacher has the ability to generate such events but only when stimulated, so if you are beginning to find the teaching monotonous and predictable the chances are the teacher feels exactly the same way about you.
Don't buy into the supersessionist propaganda of the bourgeoisie. The universal assumption that civilised is better than both primitive and barbaric because it developed later. If anything the opposite it true: civilisation, and its insistence that what makes us human (special) is our mind, have taken us further and further from both our source of vitality – our body and our spirit – and any potential for lasting balance with the natural world.
18 March 2021
Clearly distinguish full and empty. This principle is key to the higher levels of Taiji. It acknowledges emptiness and absence as fully functional aspects of being just as much as fullness and presence. Without a full anchor the empty would evaporate and disappear, and without an empty aspect the full would never move.
17 March 2021
It's those qualities the middle-class feel gives them a head start – wealth, privilege, education, niceness – that holds them back when it comes to spiritual work. At the foundation of real work is faith, loyalty, commitment and above all humility, qualities largely absent from the arsenal of those who live to pick and choose.
16 March 2021
15 March 2021
14 March 2021
13 March 2021
12 March 2021
11 March 2021
10 March 2021
It may sound strange but I can honestly say that after 37 years of rigorous (if not vigorous) practice, I am finally ready to start Taiji. Nearly forty years of groundwork. My teacher did warn me that it would take twenty five years, and given my stubborn stupidity and decided lack of talent, that easily inflates to what it is. Well, it seems persistence does pay off so don't give up!
When we talk of spirit it has nothing to do with the spirit of philosophy or religion. Neither Hegelian Geist nor the Holy Spirit. It is Spirit of Vitality – the life force. Bergson had an inkling when he coined the term élan vital. The phrase that sticks in my mind is Duchamp's sparks of the desire-magneto.
09 March 2021
08 March 2021
07 March 2021
06 March 2021
05 March 2021
Taiji, like most bodywork with a vaguely spiritual bent, is all about releasing chronic tension. This seems an impossibility at the time – how let go of something that has been with you since you don't remember when? You need what my teacher called foresight – the ability to finely feel how it would be without that tension. This is what makes humans special – their strange ability to slip time and sense their future – their soul. And this is why my teacher hated Ram Dass's indulgence: Be Here Now. For him it wasn't a matter of rejecting past and future and living only in the present, but a matter of embracing the whole of time with the fullness of one's being.