Embody your principles. Live your principles. Bleed your principles.

Taiji has been my undoing.

Heaven is not a "place." Heaven is an insistence that there is more to life than what we see.

Remember learning to ride a bike? The breakthrough comes when you twig that balance requires movement.

the absolute preference of love over power

The Bourgeoisie have requisitioned Enlightenment. I suspect it was always a privileged pursuit.

We are all addicts. Addicted to Ego, tension, holding on. Addicted to ourselves.

Always use intention, not awkward exertion.

Put aside thoughts and feelings and enter the world.

Quieten the mind and the world closes in.

a kind of self-surpassing

We inhabit a dying world.

we consider life in all its concreteness but no longer live it

As soon as something is said with any conviction then the opposite becomes a distinct possibility.

Trying your best is never enough. You must become expert at borrowing energy, at getting the world to assist, because you won't achieve much on your own.

The Daoist imperative is to question privilege, regardless, and bring play back into the system.

Two insights vital for happiness:

1. You can't always get what you want.
2. When you don't get what you want things often turn out better than expected.

meaning is engendered by a practice that eludes comprehension

student duties

Let go and move on.

Cultivate generosity of spirit. That's the secret.

Host plays hostage to the guest.

beyond egoism and altruism is the religiosity of the self – self as infinitely responsible

The important things cannot be understood, cannot even be known, they just have to be accepted.

Always provocative.

The courage to allow Taiji to become something other than we took it to be.

If you have received a transmission of energy from your teacher then your Taiji will possess a life of its own. Let it take you where it will.

The encounter with the Other divests one of the time necessary to assess what has taken place and to choose how to respond to it.

prior to principle

The Daoist is a peace maker: bringing together opposites and encouraging them to play.

Sit and meditate and you will slowly begin to realise that the mind does not fit the body. There are parts of the body too active and full and other parts completely empty and dead. Only the daily habit of meditation will put this right. And it will take decades.

Growth is always difficult. If it wasn't then it would just be more of the same.

We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics.

If you're getting into meditation then invest in a zafu cushion and a zabuton. Might as well be comfortable.

Laugh it off. Whatever it is.

The extended welcome of the bourgeoisie: I'll be very nice as long as you play my game.

The only remotely natural things in our lives now are the Earth upon which we place our feet and the sky up to which we occasionally gaze. The in between is polluted.

Only the blest can bless.

It's a miracle how relaxing outward draws us home to dantien.

The grace of spiritual insight privileges us not with happiness but with responsibility.

A dear friend and traveller who died from cancer a month ago told me that he had stopped visiting this blog because it wasn't clear for whom I was writing. Well let me make it clear that I am writing for myself. This blog is simply my work journal: modest insights I address to myself in the absence of a living teacher.

When you go on an adventure you have to be prepared for it to become something you hadn't prepared for otherwise it's not really an adventure.

to keep the day sacred 

to keep it invisible

The very best habit to cultivate is laughter, especially in this game. Without that ability to express joy and irreverence at every turn you'll end up cutting your own throat. And laugh because you find things genuinely funny. Develop an all-consuming sense of humour. Then at least you'll be good company.

You don't get something for nothing. Allow preventative intervention and the spirit will pay. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It just means you'll then have a job of work to do. Nothing new there.

Where's your sense of adventure? Your desire to step into the unknown?

Let yourself be seduced into the safety zone and you'll find yourself trapped there because that safety will flatten your spirit. It takes a rare soul to reject this, to choose spirit, to choose the choiceless life.

Where only plans and what is planned are carried out, nothing grows. Growth, thriving, soundness are only there where the play-space is spared for the unplannable.

Entitled to absolutely nothing. Every little thing has to be deserved and earned.

Mind in dantien. The stopper in the bottle.

Rooting for the underdog. Not from a sense of justice but because that's where spirit is most likely to manifest.

losing oneself in the spiritual twilight of blueness

our only home is on the way to

Not imagination as fancy, but imagination as a form of thinking, as a form of being in the world.

Despite the work and our burgeoning expertise (or maybe because of it) there are always areas that must be explored yet remain inaccessible. This is why the Other is so necessary – so vitally important. It is their injection of otherness that gains us access – enables us to slowly realise the fullness of our own being.

The work is sacred and should be treated as such. Give it priority.

Poet as thaumaturge.

chthonic and metaphysical together

You have to believe your little bit makes a difference.

The gift of giving.

Practice (with) honesty and hone the spirit.

honest: honourable in principles, intentions, and actions; humble, plain, or unadorned; (archaic) chaste, virtuous 

hone: to make more acute or effective; improve; perfect

The tree roots soundly in the earth. Thus it flourishes into a blooming that opens itself to heaven’s blessing.

It's all in the quality of the smile you bring to practice.

Just because I say so, doesn't make it so. It's amazing how many people don't seem to know this.

Why practice? Well, do you have anything better to do? It is all about honesty: are you honest with yourself?

The poor student can only hear what they want to hear whereas the good student dreads to hear what they already know they need to hear.

We're all obsessive. It's just that most of us obsess about ourselves. Negative meditation.

I am calm 

Like the pulse 

Of a corpse

Each of us defined by an injury, a wound. Every now and then we rise above it and show the world what we could have been. These are the moments that count.

Without rhyme or reason. In this sense groundless.

The lengths we go to to stay the same.

To be rooted is to forego possession and to lose oneself.

Have you noticed how those that delight in labelling you obsessive can't stick at anything themselves?

Relax the grip of your mind on the world because that grip is not only strangling the world, it is also strangling you.

You just never know…

Given a burning desire to work at something, wouldn't it be a crying shame if that something was a waste of time?

both ready for the appeal of highest heaven and preserved in the protection of the bearing earth

An awareness that mistrusts knowledge. 

There's always a hidden agenda.

a good conscience our only sure reward

In the world but not of the world. 

Both on the Earth and of the Earth.

The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is pure the whole body will be radiant.

Hardness repels; softness attracts.

pacem in terris

Taiji attempts to reclaim Paradise.

Ego developed when we lost the Earth.

Our secrets make us who we are.

settle down

on earth

take root

in earth

sprout up

from earth

ora et labora

We are all framed by fear.

The teacher drags you down, lays you low, until well and truly earthed. From there your own efforts bring you up again. Practice, spirit, energy, strength.

the radical thrill of the monk’s gamble

A maturity borne of suffering.

The longer and deeper we venture into the one thing the more all-consuming it becomes. Life is too short for more. Or for less.

One makes an appearance only to be unsettled by the other. The Daoist seesaw.

The Spirit of Practice. Using repetitive action to generate novelty. Without such the work will always be egocentric – a reflection of self.

Why try to extract the self from the other, or the other from the self, if the merging of the two is the secret behind our cooperative nature?

Learn a Form and practice it daily.

The Internal is more container than kernel. An enveloping mist that makes mysterious. If the External is of the senses, especially the eyes, then the Internal is of energy. It is not sensed, in the sense of making sense of, but participated in. And it is not enough to be willing, one must first and foremost be deserving.

Everything starts with enthusiasm.

Finding inspiration everywhere. You're never quite sure it's not simply your own spirit bouncing back. A site of pure intense communication.

Man appears to be the missing link between anthropoid apes and human beings.

The teacher evokes a mist and the student ventures in.

The spirit of change. Now there's a tautology.

Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

Suddenly appear; suddenly disappear. Impermanence as absolute principle.

do what has to be done, again and again

Chronic tension: a sure sign I prefer things the way they are: under control.

Dicing with death. Without, life is lacking.

Of all our inventions perhaps the worst for the health of the back is the sofa.

I pity those who have never experienced the joy of giving selflessly to something greater than themselves.

the mind should guide the process as gently as a hand would hold an ancient parchment

It is not the teacher's job to convince the student of the necessity of practice. Only life can teach them that.

Western civilization is based on the assumption that human beings are more important and therefore more deserving than anything else on the planet. This is what our work needs to erode – mindless, indiscriminate humanism. It is far more dangerous and short-sighted than any religion. In fact it is effectively a religion. Atheism is the new religion. Albeit one without richness or depth. Without heart. Without hope.

A healthy immune system doesn't only protect from disease, it protects against everything, including the best efforts of the work to bring about change. This is why a temporarily weakened immune system can be to longterm benefit.

Everything is psychosomatic.

ἀδιάλειπτος: unceasingly