sitting still in meditation is the opposite to sitting still in front of TV

Language issues from a disturbed mind. Hence we emphasise silence.

knowing from within the penumbral space

spiritual discipline reduces self to reveal a gentle soul and an indomitable spirit

meditation: the space where 'are' trembles between 'is' and 'am'

find a worthy opponent

never sacrifice spirit for peace & harmony 

this would be weakness rather than softness

take the great step backward

sinking obviates thinking 

in fact sinking is the opposite of thinking 

thinking is head : sinking is tail

tend & attend

a mind content to quietly abide

in reality everything is infinite, or effectively so
in the man-made world everything is finite, meagrely so

without the protection of knowledge, preconception and expectation

head-mind does more harm than good
heart-mind does more good than harm
but belly-mind is unethical

You don't become soft by practising softness. You become soft by practising. Practising hard.

patience, literally, is the acceptance of suffering

We distinguish two types of sensitivity. One is a sensitivity to how the world is impacting me (often dismissed as mere selfishness), and the other is a sensitivity to how I am impacting the world. This is akin to empathy – feeling the other in relation to me – and is vital for relationships to have a chance of success.

Everything is odoured with infinity;
snow moves through high grass; everything is infinite.

If you’re working hard, then trust your own insights, even if they seem to go against the teaching. When I look back, the only regret I have is that I didn’t have the confidence to trust my own insights.

the final breakthrough kills you

we do the work because the work must get done – necessary & essential – of our essence

Dantien is a point as well as a region, and the more we advance the more important it is to locate this point with accuracy. It is a place of vigilance and readiness as well as quiet. In dwelling there the mind cannot settle into itself and think. To locate the dantien breathe in strongly through a tiny hole you make with the lips. The centre of the tension you feel in the lower belly is the dantien. If you don't feel tension then the hole is not small enough. I use this technique throughout the day to bring my attention regularly back to the dantien, and thereby to my own sobriety and probity.

Let us live in corners, and do chores.

practice is a chore, but a chore to fall in love with

spirit clears the air and lets us see

without spirit the mind will not leave the comfort of the head

Excessive thinking has made the mind unnatural. This is why we are so conflicted: our bodies are of nature but our minds are not. Only spirit can rescue us.

Adults are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.

Ego has enemies. The first of these is Earth, and the second is Nature. If it befriended either, they would reduce it to almost nothing.

This obsession with health… 

It’s not healthy!

Ego is the little salesman inside. The part that doesn’t mind lying through its teeth to get what it wants.

Traditionally in Taiji, the master is in his prime in his sixties. This seventh decade is when you see the fruits of all his hard labour. At seventy he then retires, soon to make a gracious, timely exit, before his spirit wanes, and his body falls into undignified decrepitude.

Please be responsible for the energy you bring into this space.

The workshy, although often well-intentioned, are unteachable and therefore doomed.

Equilibrium vibrates, resonates, shakes and shimmers. It is a place of pure energy.

The work is necessarily depressing. It gets the ego down. It serves a higher purpose.

Ego (the hell of self) is only necessary to survive society (the hell of other people). When alone we should be able to turn it off and simply abide in energy. This is the function of meditation.

A tight relax as of the sea 

Against the land

In flood.

A real enlightened master is invisible, or at least difficult to discern. All the light is inside.

meditation: enjoying the sound of silence

get into the muscularity of the work

familiarity breeds contempt so treat everyone as a stranger and everything as strange

my peace is there in the receding mist

humility is the putting aside of ego

let's start by breathing

meditation teaches us to revere everything

Energetic equilibrium is impossible to maintain with a distracted mind. And the worst distraction is self.

Young pilgrim, 

Do not turn away from 

the unruly ox that runs wild

in the forest of your mind.

depth of character is developed in surmounting difficulty

ever so slow, but still in motion

the quieter it gets, the more intense the listening

The mind is our own worst enemy. What makes it this way is thinking, or a certain excess of thought we call worry. The natural state of the mind is bright and empty, aware only of what it perceives: the body and the space it's in, with no ego generating excess content. Usually the only way to stop this worry is to distract the mind with something else – drown one noise with a louder one. We attempt to settle the worry through meditation and return the mind to its natural state. In Taiji we call this process yielding – turning our worst enemy into our best friend.

Young pilgrim,

Shed the distractions 

that define you and 

lay yourself bare.

the average mind is terrified of emptiness because it has never experienced it

if your mind talks to itself when you are alone then you are a worrier

spirit, at its lightest, is an air of mystery

Yesterday, on a busy train, an elderly lady sat next to me and, glancing around at the passengers glued to their screens, leaned to my ear and whispered, "Nobody looks out of the windows anymore." Windows open attention out onto a vista whereas screens funnel attention into an artificial world. Screens may in some ways expand your mind but they really narrow your vision.

There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only

eyes in all heads, 

to be looked out of

If you must know then know with such humble reverence that your knowing invests the known with spirit. This is love.

an inspired sense of urgency

stop resisting energy with the wilful mind

The Other offers an encounter. Their reality counters my self-centredness. Without that resistance I cannot access my own Otherness – the part of me not available to my ego.

Art is the cultivation of play.

I have enough life experience to know that when I don’t get my own way, that’s when interesting things happen.

a path of doubt and discovery

we need the spontaneity of a care-free child and the world-weary wisdom of an old soldier

spirit is responsiveness – an elastic responsiveness – like a kitten

My stroke of insight would be: peace is only a thought away, and all we have to do to access it is silence the voice of our dominating left mind.

life presents us with vital lessons all the time but we need to have followed an internal teaching for years before we are open and wise enough to heed them

each man is an island entire of himself until he learns to melt into the ocean of mind

if you work hard then you'll move on

confucianism is about making the world a better place
daoism is about destroying the world to reveal reality

conscious interiority is a cultural (learned) not biological (bioevolutionary) development

the first lesson in taiji (as in any course of study): do your homework 

and until the student heeds this it is impossible to move effectively to the second lesson

we reach the next stage when we let go of everything holding us in this stage

when it comes to an internal teaching, it's the parts you don't want to hear that you need to hear

the next stage always feels enlightened compared to what went before, but it's just a stage

the condition of being is thankfully beyond the condition of meaning

changing the external environment won't produce lasting happiness but it may encourage internal work

there are stages beyond enlightenment but those that get there are so withdrawn they become invisible

it's so important to reach heaven before you die

(nirvana, bliss, enlightenment, emptiness, no-mind, nothing, wuji…)

The small chatty mind that we are so enamoured of colonises and pollutes all other aspects of mind, especially the Big Mind we are trying to get to in meditation. So it's not a matter of getting somewhere seemingly inaccessible but of clearing and cleaning the space we already inhabit.

Rationalism is a secularized form of the belief in the power of the word of God.

before you get it you must work your balls off (largely because most of your efforts will be counterproductive) but once you've got it you must be careful not to overdo it

meditation: listening for the proverbial pin drop

when the good student reaches middle-age they redouble their efforts

When I taught for my teacher he encouraged me to phone students if they stopped attending, just to see that everything was ok. On one occasion the absentee answered: I got tired of John's second rate sermons. And I thought there's someone who has never worked hard enough to transform a second rate sermon into first class instruction.

Patience is truly my device, as we wait
for the past to happen, which is to come into
the open. As I expect it to, daily…

I know a married man with four children who drives out into the desert on his motorcycle every weekend. This is his way of nurturing and honouring spirit, and his wife understands how vital it is for his soul, and doesn't complain. She knows it saves their marriage.

soul is the sum total of all your experiences of spirit

before you act for short-term gain consider the long-term consequences

A student asked me recently why spirit is so important. Well spirit thrusts one into what Castaneda called 'heightened awareness' and what I call Reality. Without spirit, or rather without a certain excess of spirit, one inhabits a material world, very much of ego's making. Life with spirit is separate from life without spirit. They exist in different dimensions with almost no overlap. When spirit spills into the world it creates havoc, and when the ego ventures into Reality spirit fades or retreats. Practice is time we devote to spirit: sinking and relaxing – quietening down – whilst remaining hopeful so that spirit can manifest if it wants.

the tenderness of patient minds

cultivate the physical & mental tone of a warrior who needs to be incredibly alert & responsive just to stay alive

a romantic soul – always falling in love

body and mind have both a bicameral nature which we attempt to relax into and out of the unnatural oneness of ego

I have far too much respect for teacher and teaching not to practice assiduously. This is what makes me a good student. And as my teacher said – You've always been a good student, even before you came to me.

a person's attitude to pain reveals more about his future than almost any other sign I know

relax the mind into the body

real knowledge cannot be taught
you must discover it yourself

it is by metaphor that we grow

A teaching couched in words is mere food for thought whereas a teaching expressed with spirit is a stimulus to action or what my teacher called a call to arms.

The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you and dedicate your life to it.

Discipline gives us the requisite tone. It needs to be constantly renewed – reintensified – otherwise it slackens. Always look to up the ante.

a radical innocence

meditation: relaxing into bicamerality

The most common imperative in a Taiji class is Relax! and the most common response from students is How do I relax?

The instruction is: Put your mind in the tension and it will dissolve. This doesn't really help much because most people nowadays have an undisciplined mind that cannot be still or empty. Most minds are permanently and neurotically full of words and worry. So the first stage to any internal work is learning to quieten the mind, and this requires meditation. Indeed this is the definition of meditation: quietening the mind, or training the mind to be aware rather than think.

not fabrications easy as eiderdown
that prettify lies

meditation is like the rest of life: 99% bullshit you endure for the sake of the 1% pure gold

far better practise something wrong than not practise at all

an adult mind that has previously undergone disciplined training (education) will be easier to retrain than a raw uneducated mind

Relax the jaw by putting your awareness (mind) there. Imagine it melting down into the shoulders. Now relax the shoulders similarly. Imagine them melting down into the hips. Now relax the hips with mind. Imagine them melting down into the Earth. Simple.

excessive talking & thinking 

turn you from harmony with the dao 

cut off talking & thinking

and there is nowhere you cannot penetrate

honour your superstitions – gateways to the real

meditation: sitting still within the seething

Turning and returning in a narrowing gyre
The falcon espies the falconer.

We distinguish two types of tension: 

• unhealthy (chronic) tension – a fearful holding on, especially in the jaw, shoulders and hips; 
• healthy (dynamic) tension – a responsive elastic tone or tautness in the fascia and muscles that enables energy to flow. 

Unhealthy tension always works against healthy tension. It blocks energy.

Too many choices America. It's not healthy!

retrain the mind a site of pure awareness (emptiness) rather than thinking (fullness)

this can be a lifetime's task in itself

difficult & necessary

when the words stop then spirit is never far away

nowhere else you'd rather be
nothing else you'd rather do

growth & comfort do not mix

relax to find the correct tension

dispel despondency

fighting the forces of depression with cheerfulness & encouragement

so much unhappiness is due to confounded expectations so to be happy expect nothing

A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.

principles help you tighten up your act

truth is always unpopular

tension is great as long as it releases when necessary
without tension there would be no work

To break the grip of cultural conditioning – of orthodoxy – upon your being you must become a heretic and an outsider – an outlier. Work on what's culturally unworthy, offensive and taboo.

As I do these things, so shall ye do them, and greater.

it doesn't matter how much instruction you've received, you still have to find it all out for yourself through dint of hardwork

disciplined & rebellious

jesus never meant to be worshipped
he meant to be emulated

A while ago I was driving home tired, drifted off and clipped the central reservation with the car. Nothing serious but it didn't half wake me up, and I was wide awake for the rest of the journey. Sometimes (oftentimes) we need a jolt, a shock, to bring us to our senses and into full awareness. We must learn to do this to ourselves otherwise we fail to make the most of valuable practice time.

impervious in the ordinary way to every form of weather except the dead calm

good energy is the product of correct attitude: a cheerful openness to alterity

meditation: attending the moment as it unfolds

for most 'truth' is a label given to what they have been told is true

ensure your cheerfulness is true and not an attractive front with sinister designs for stealing energy

Space and time
Are not the mathematics that your will
Imposes, but a green calendar
Your heart observes

on the alert for a new model, a new image, because ego always manages to requisition the old one

meditation: training mind to be a source of good energy rather than self-interest

we only get better by pushing through difficulty

In Taiji the mind graciously relinquishes control so spirit can mobilise the energy which then moves the body.

I load myself down with chains and try to wriggle free.

is ego a virus?

when the end is nigh the work takes on a certain urgency

a sure sign of progress is finding more and more of your time being consumed by the work

Quell the infernal internal chatter. It all hinges on this.

It’s so normal to want a better life; it’s so unusual to set out to be a better person.

the good student thrives on the barest minimum of instruction

ego is personal : spirit impersonal

redeeming a remedial soul

It is imperative that the shift from head to heart, which is the intent of the work, goes via the belly.

it is important that the subject open itself up to an alterity and cease being folded upon itself in an interminable and torturous speech

zealous endeavour and assiduous effort

meditation is an acquired taste

Occasionally sit before a mirror so that when the mind seems impossible to pacify, you can glance up and see your calm serene reflection. Fake it till you make it.

Become aware of the background, what's implied rather than stated, the less than obvious, otherwise you'll never leave the thinking mind and dwell peacefully in the body.

I will urge my camel on until I am free from the bonds of space and time

practice religiously, that is, whether you feel like it or not

viscoelasticity

through dint of sheer hard work

the world of energy will open up to you only when you manage to break the stranglehold that language has on your mind

I on the earth will go plodding on,
By myself, cheerfully, till the day is done.

stay open otherwise you'll block reality as it unfolds/enfolds

when words cease then the mind works at a very different rhythm
language draws us into the pedestrian – the plod

no matter how tough your teacher was, one day you'll look back and wish they'd been a lot tougher

Two things need to happen to produce decent Taiji: 

• upper and lower bodies need to join 
• left and right sides need to separate

the whole is real : division is conceptual

practice generates interest
but you must discover this for yourself

meditation: becoming naked before your maker

having an opinion doesn't constitute thinking for oneself – if only it were that easy

ego institutes a world so it needn't be bothered by reality

our intellectual imagination has to overflow the humanist imprint

it's not a matter of learning something new but of becoming something old

turning worst enemy (head) into best friend (heart) – this is compassion – yielding

you'll only pin it down if you kill it first

attend the equilibrium : contrary flows creating an illusion of stillness, a reality of softness

at the root there’s no me

spirit is the energy of the liminal
neither one nor the other

meditation: dwelling in suspense and suspension

truth cannot be stated or spoken
it is revealed when you become quiet

Before my teacher started Taiji in 1967 he was a folk singer. I asked him once if he liked Bob Dylan. He said he loved the tunes but not the lyics. I asked why, since Dylan always sang about freedom, and his reply was telling: I already had far too much of that sort of freedom. The ego is not meant to be free. It's job is to look after the animating spirit. It is rightly shepherd of being rather than a being in and for itself. When it gets ideas above its station it desperately needs to be knocked down to size otherwise it will quickly become like a spoilt child.

Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves.

the mind will always find an excuse

weed out the time-wasters

let the words return to what they leave unsaid

All religions say the same: the union of Father Sky and Mother Earth produced us all. Each of us, in essence, a Jesus or a Buddha: children of God, at heart. The task of life is to peel away the endless layers of conditioning so that our essentially divine nature is revealed.

What is hell? Hell is oneself.

If, as the song says, the ugliest part of the body is the mind, then the most beautiful is surely the heart. And the best way to work on the heart is to attend to the needs of the other.

meditation: marvelling at what is revealed when the mind is allowed to clear of the fug of self

when we properly relax, mind as we know it disappears

sitting on the cushion, slipping into a form, should feel like coming home

You’re momentary, ephemeral, 

Aflutter like a flame caught in a gale.

you are god's creation

ego is your creation 

which is more interesting?

work gives hope

meditation: daily soul-searching

To begin with, practice is desultory at best. But slowly, as you start to appreciate its value and its necessity, it will gain consistency and regularity until the whole day contains a gentle thread of concentration.

Language is a genetic defect with no immunology.

the mediocre student wants the teacher to agree with them
the good student wants the teacher to correct them

meditation: conjuring a mirage by presenting a visage

meditation: a time we endeavour to fill with joy

The most important thing in Taiji (as in Life) is listening. Yet we invest so much energy in protecting ourselves from what we don't want to hear.

The touch must be very brave and very gentle.

We are all in love with the sound of our own voice. Why else would we chat to ourselves all the time?

those with big egos don't like to bend their legs

the bourgeoisie demand everything on their own terms

The reason most people don't get poetry is because they can't read. Reading is not just stringing words together meaningfully; it is becoming what those words signify. It is fundamentally emotional (energetic) rather than rational (sensible).

Joy is escaping because we are caught in a swirl of permanent excitement.

just because you understand what the teacher is saying, doesn't mean you can do what the teacher is doing

a tattoo is a useful reminder of how stupid you once were

eschew sensitivity that shrinks from the real

Ego is built upon a foundation of tension in the hips and lower back, so relaxing and softening this area is the most direct means of undermining ego.

swiftly don the armour of your perseverance to still the troubles of your mind

bear in mind that if you disagree you probably haven't listened

never stop delving

the ego's job is to keep out the real by instituting a world

Listening is not simply attending to what the other says, it is putting yourself in their shoes.

Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

a spirit that is difficult to beat

keep your wits about you

the healing is in the listening not in the manipulation

Any formalised system necessarily suppresses spirit. So there comes a point when you have to break away and go your own way.

le besoin d’être mal armé

I have a friend here who was placed in the commando unit when he did his military service. He told me that he had to be a dumb teenager otherwise he would never have agreed to do the ridiculously dangerous things they ordered him to do. It is the same with our work. You need to start young – before you become sensible.

believe in something sacred that obliges unconditionally

Only when you no longer have a mummy to run home to will you start to make internal progress. The internal is refuge and comfort enough, and it must become the place we naturally want to dwell.

If the student wants an internal teaching from a teacher then they must inspire that teacher to want to teach. The best way to do this is by practising hard. If the teacher feels confident in your willingness to work on what they give you then they will be more likely to give. It's only natural. Otherwise, at best, they will take your money and go through the motions.

man is at his most human when he is revealing the animal side of his nature

everything in our civilised domesticated lives conspires against spirit (if that's not a contradiction in terms)

meditation: sailing to byzantium

The teacher sees something real peeking out from behind your ego. They know you better than you think you know yourself. So listen and obey.

Clearly distinguish thinking and daydreaming. Thinking usually occurs through language as a dialogue with oneself whereas daydreaming is a state of reverie where images and feelings surface from somewhere other than the consciousness.

As you work, the mood grows on you. There are certain images which suddenly get hold of me and I really want to do them. But it’s true to say that the excitement and possibilities are in the working and obviously can only come in the working.

when it comes to fighting (engaging reality), mind is always slow – behind the times – which is why we must have spirit

relax into happiness

it all becomes revealed in the fullness of time

the mind is conservative and censorious when it thinks

between the neutrality of the grey black of being and the endless torture of the solipsistic cogito

let the physical transform the mental rather than the mental control the physical

words neither annunciate nor describe reality, they protect from reality