when you work with the other you must be able to produce a good mood regardless of how you feel otherwise you're wasting golden time

In taiji we don't simply move the body. We allow movement in and out of the body. Allowing it in is called yielding. Letting it out is called attacking.

Poetry at its best is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.

see omens everywhere
and learn to read them

a relaxed body requires a playful spirit

the body moves to stick with the opponent

When in 1992 my teacher told me that I was now a qualified master he added: Don't let it go to your head, is all it means is that you've officially begun.

mediocre monks are pathetic
would-be masters are sadder still

you need to stay with a qualified teacher long enough to learn self-regulation

eventually not even a hint of sullen in this art

if you want mobile hips, develop floor habits

The work you do in class, whether as student or teacher, does not count as practice. Personal practice is between you and your maker.

A real man is one who fears the death of his heart, not of his body.

meditation reveals the problems with me

humans are agents of imbalance

sparkle like a glass of champagne

Relaxation is only possible when the mind empties and the heart fills. We don't relax into what we know but into our myriad connexions.

the dream had kept recurring
all his life, repeating one instruction:

Practise the art

relaxation requires a shift from head to heart

it's all in the mind

as we have advanced technologically we have regressed spiritually

Earth wants your body and Heaven wants your spirit. Life is a force that holds them together for a while so energy can be moved around.

Two buckets were easier carried than one.
I grew up in between.

ointment of ghee & thyme oil for the thymus

like a ripple perfected in stillness

 

depth has become a dirty word

euthymia (εὐθυμία): gladness, good mood, serenity, cheerfulness, literally "good thymos"

Come in, come in, I say to all the fragments.

a distressing instability created by waking up as much as possible and letting go as much as possible

a listening that hears what no one else can hear

loving makes connexion
thinking breaks connexion

Today one of those "O shit! I've been doing it wrong all these years" moments...

You don’t seek the way. The way seeks you.

use spirit to make your world radiant

listen to energy with your energy

a music that teaches how to listen

meditation: learning to be in the body rather than the mind

We all came out of Babyn Yar.

start the day declaiming poetry
for the health of the heart-mind – the imagination

give solace

let the cushion be symbol of inner peace and the form be symbol of spirit

Our relationship with the work is like a marriage. They belongs to us; we belong to them. We make demands of them; they makes demands of us. It will only work if you commit 100%, and if you are willing to change.

if you're too careful, your whole life can become a fucking grind

everything in our bourgeois lives demands we consume more than our fair share

the good student knows she has no choice

unclench the sacrum

the other challenges me to emerge from solipsism

the principle of gift economies: “the gift must always move”

feel the ground not a hard supporting surface beneath but a fine energy rising through the body

energy interfaces imaginary & real

a mind attending central equilibrium rather than a mind that knows what it's doing

To get energy up from the ground into the hands I must unify upper & lower body. To move around with agility I must split left & right body. I am the delicate play between left & right rather than a central authority telling the body what to do.

just another set of lines on the palimpsest

feel the life (spirit) in the exercise not just the work (effort)

energy fills the interstices

the majority: force in numbers

feelings of bliss indicate a switch from left to right brain, anxious mind to compassionate mind, language to silence

To me his relationship, his bond with everything in creation was so amazing, no preconceived ideas, just a meeting between him and a creature, a tree, a cloud, anything. I called it love, but it was something else – Bejahung in German, “saying yes.”

eventually force wins out which is why spirit has retreated to the margins

live sustainably

only a heart full of love can properly lift

Switch from:

left brain to right brain
petty mind to grand mind
head to heart
self to other
force to energy
short term to long term
wanting to giving
outside looking in to inside looking out

the doors of the hearts of men in reality are the doors of heaven

light   head
heavy sacrum

concentration & consecration

it is neither noble nor necessary to worry

If you've ever tried to release a recumbent person's neck then you'll know how heavy a head is. You'll also appreciate just how light and buoyant the mind needs to be to balance that heaviness.

the never-resolved tension between desire and restraint where neither prevails over the other but both coexist in a constant precarious equilibrium

feet cling to the ground like two limpets on a rock

feet root into earth
head top pierces sky

the aesthetics of ascetics
beware romanticising extremes

everyday there is a holocaust of farm animals accruing terrible karma for mankind

just wholeheartedly sit

don't be afraid to expand your horizons and see the bigger picture

each of us centre & circumference

body:

unify upper and lower
split left from right

in one sense
stony still

in another
brimming

with activity
& enthusiasm

continuous practice is the circle of the way

the good student finds it impossible to avoid the truth

soul develops when we serve spirit

ego is not so much trickster as fraudster

In meditation the mind is with the breathing. This begins with mind bringing the breathing up into the consciousness. But slowly, as everything relaxes, the breathing draws the mind into depths beneath the consciousness – into energy.

When you find your place where you are, practice occurs.

as mankind takes up more of the planet so ego takes up more of the mind

dumbstruck & dumbfounded

if you have to be habitual then make them good habits

We think the twentieth century the most murderous and barbaric since so many people met early violent death, yet the fifteenth century was worse. It's estimated that up to one hundred million native Americans died as a result of European colonisation. That's over ten percent of the world population. So significant it produced climate change.

The experience of emptiness engenders compassion.

play in the system but no slack

empirical & impeccable