It takes years getting clear enough to listen to one's conscience – the voice of God inside. Then there's no going back.

Peace requires sacrifice. This works on all levels. Warring states must be willing to compromise, and I must let go the source of my disquiet, namely my Ego.

Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.

I make the world a better place not by tinkering with it but by working on myself. All internal work commences with this insight.

Old wounds need to be reopened before they can heal once and for all.

Present the world with a patient listening softness. A whole lifetime can be spent investigating those three words.

Fear represses love. Knowledge inhibits spirit.

Security's a myth.

energy not force

Life lived right is a journey into compassion.

Blessed are the weak for they cannot resist.

Only when the movie stops do you notice the screen. Only when the small mind stops do you notice the big mind.

shine as lights in the world

Whoever robs you of peace of mind is your enemy. This is why the Tibetans say that your real enemies are your nearest and dearest. Those that take you for granted.

Stop worrying and start intending. Can't do both.

furthering through perseverance

If you want an internal life then you need to tighten up your act and stop leaking energy every which way.

trying to be surprised and undone and maybe even dismayed by what lies ahead

All spiritual and religious disciplines boil down to the same thing: quieten the mind, dissolve the Ego, connect to God.

Nothing separates the men from the boys (the true self from the false self) like standing.

Without rest we cannot grow. This is largely why we quieten the mind – to give it a rest, to let it grow – expand. And this is why the mind struggles against that quiet – to try to stay the same.

The good student practises diligently and effectively because there is nothing else they would rather do.

True lovers never really meet, they are in each other all along.

We all need someone wiser than us to tell us what's best for us, to point the way. Left to our own devices we gradually stray further and further from the path. That someone is the teacher.

So many excuses not to practise. The whining voice of mediocrity.

I must be sensitive to both the world's impact on me and my impact upon the world.

Pushing Hands – a general term for Taiji partner work – is where we study and practise the ethics of reciprocity. Not with the mind but with the heart.

rituals to protect, encourage, and guide us

It is not enough to listen to the Other. I must listen to the Other listening to me.

Knowing the theory doesn't really help, and reading all the books certainly doesn't help. Because eventually you just have to buckle down to some good old honest hard work and find it all out for yourself. You need to discover your own vocabulary otherwise you're just repeating someone else's words.

Relaxation, peace, freedom are all the consequence of a quiet mind.

The greatest gift I can give the Other is the challenge of my spirit. But I must really prepare the ground and myself first.

God's presence shines as the am-ness in all selves and the is-ness in all things.

To break the box that contains you, reverse the values that maintain it.

Meditation retrieves equilibrium – peace of mind.

Peace is never hard won. It is accepted softly as the special case it is.

Like water off a duck's back.

In meditation, go deep in the heart.

The good student gets bored operating within the confines of their talent so choses to live outside it, beyond it. This is why they appear bumbling and witless.

Depth of being we call soul.

Bliss is simply loss of self in the experience of equilibrium.

The teacher gives the student something to practise. Then it's up to them.

but now I think that poetry changes only the poet

The bodhisattva vow is the most noble sacrifice a being can make.

If, as a teacher, you are not practising at least as hard as your students then they will soon surpass you.

Nothing beats peace and quiet.

You cannot break a culture of us & them overnight. It takes a lifetime's work.

The winds of grace are always blowing, but you have to raise the sail.

The teaching is not a sweet shop where you pick and choose. It's either all or nothing. There comes a point in life – hopefully early on – when you learn that it's those events you don't choose, that are thrust upon you, that are best for you.

Mind how you go.

When you take everything away, what are you left with but mind?

Make sure it's the teaching you fall in love with and not the teacher. And without falling in love you won't get very far: certainly not as far as the Internal.

You cannot serve both God and mammon.

The modern mindfulness movement is a classic example of spiritual materialism – spirit in the service of Ego.

Don't see meditation as a selfish luxury but as a vital necessity without which you effectively sell your soul to the devil.

A stone-cold mind does not just sink, it plummets.

Practice is time devoted to the cultivation of the Internal, the invisible. And even though, at the end of the day, you have nothing material to show for yourself, it changes everything.

an intention of moving but not moving

Freedom is the aim of our work – the name of the game. Freedom from culture – from the set of habits which we mindlessly repeat over and over, day in day out, and which define our lives. To break free adopt wiser habits from the teaching and follow them religiously. These allow us to gather strength, vision and understanding without which freedom is but a dream.

A spirit tempered with discipline.

When you face the teacher your Ego must have a few cracks otherwise there is no possibility of the teacher sneaking in. Students whose Egos are all shored up are not yet ready to begin.

The biggest trickster of them all is language. A mind without language knows no lies.

In a sense solids cancel time but for liquids it is mostly time that matters.

The work creates threads of connectivity which it teases to keep elastic.

Very much out on a limb.

This ceaseless vigil.

Relaxation is the first stage. Then it is a matter of developing correct tension. This is ultimately undistracted awareness. An unbreakable elastic thread of listening. But there are many stages along the way.

sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought

Keep moving – circulating – or stagnate.

Spirit becomes an expression of gratitude.

Give up the mind.

Slowly pluck up the courage to let go.

Cowardice asks the question, is it safe?

A whole being pinched with worry. O what could have been!

In the thick of energy rather than things.

Practise and something always crops up. Something new, fascinating and necessary. Show gratitude for the harvest.

Warrior or worrier? What's the difference you ask. A worrier has a madness, a psychosis, talking to themselves incessantly, albeit in their head rather than out loud. Worry is that voice. Most of us are chronic worriers – we don't know how to stop. A warrior does not allow this voice because they know it inhibits both vigilant listening and snap decision making, two skills they would soon be dead without.

However you try to define meditation, it’s not that.

Cool pool dantien is natural lair to a stone–cold mind, quiescent and detached. Only then can fiery spirit rise and make magic.

Spirit simplifies, spirit amplifies.

Depth of compassion depends largely upon the size of your embrace.

When I think of Gaza, which I do often, living only an hours drive away, the phrase that always comes to mind is untold suffering. The absolute tragedy in suffering without a voice. Our work – our spiritual work – is to listen, to sincerely broaden our definition of the Other – from family to friend to neighbour to stranger to all sentient beings. Otherwise our work is hardly spiritual at all.

The only value of knowledge is in the strengthening, the disciplining, of the mind.

Don't just step like a cat, prowl like a cat, growl like a cat.

The good student takes things to heart, despite their protests.

The news is for those too lazy to find out for themselves.

If you feel oppressed then I think you have a moral duty to fight back whatever way you can otherwise your spirit is dead. Spirit simplifies everything. It robs you of choice and forces you to act.

A tree laden with fruit always bends low.

On the individual level oppression comes from the Ego – the inner control freak – which is always struggling to smother the spirit and institute a status quo, a habitual state.

When you reach for that apple the hand opens and the fingers extend. The same should happen in the foot as you step out. When you grab that apple the fingers clasp and the arm bends to bring it toward the mouth. The same should happen with the toes and leg to draw your body toward the ground you are claiming – as though you are pulling that little piece of earth up to your dantien.

Anything out of the ordinary is okay by me…

Meditation: instead of looking at the world, look at the mind creating that world.

God is in all men, but all men are not in God; that is why we suffer.

Sink everything so the spirit can rise.

Being in love – deeply in love, totally in love – is our natural state. Being out of love we are incomplete, bereft, suffering, unfulfilled.

The human is always between a reality it has not yet attained and a reality to which it is no longer limited.

Meditation: observing the passage of time; becoming the flow of time.

melting the solids

Everything depends upon the quality of the welcome I extend.

We can no longer bear anything that lasts. We no longer know how to make boredom bear fruit.

Build everything upon the hope of self-transcendence.

When I'm in the dantien, it is the one place I cannot see or consider. And conversely, if I can see, sense, regard, conceptualise the dantien then I cannot possibly be there.

The older you get, the more you realize that you are still a kid, and your early experiences are the ones that are now just opening out.

The more options we have the less likely we are to fully commit to any one of them. Choice is crippling.

True happiness lies not in getting what you want but in ridding yourself of wanting. Not in satisfying desire but in eradicating desire.

Falling in love is nature coming in.

If the truth be told, when I work (practice / teach) I have no idea what I'm doing or where it's going, I just trust the work, having a life / mind of its own, does.

Beneath the monkey-mind there is a limpid liquid awareness. Why on earth that should not be enough heaven only knows.

Where you stumble, 

there lies your treasure.

The Enlightened master feels like they've been around for thousands of years and yet they look like they're seeing everything for the first time. They see the world as it is – in its becoming – rather than their own reflection in it.

Obscured by clouds.

Enlightenment is realising once and for all that you are not your mind. You are what your mind obscures.

We must risk delight.

Let the sacrum smile. It's trying to. It's dying to.

We live in forgetfulness of our true nature. Most aren't much interested but for those that are rest assured that beneath the busy mind there is a simple gentle contented smile taking everything as it comes, as it should. To uncover that smile and expose it to the world is the work.

Peace is peace of mind peeking from behind the fog and fug of self.

Spirit is the frisson of difference.

Hell is life drying up.

Form and content. Container and contained. Irish spirit in a Chinese vase. A tension between.

Free to live an undistracted life.

It's all psychology – where you put the mind, what you do with the mind.

A mind anything other than reverent does violence to the world. Revere things, revere work, but above all revere the moment.

The practice of this art lies in sinking energy to the dantien and in purely using spirit to move.

In our work the mind does not think, it intends (directs energy) and it imagines (gives form to impressions of energy).

Sink. Be with the down and allow the up.