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.