You're your own worst enemy.

Compassion

Compassion has nothing to do with becoming embroiled in another's agonies. Compassion involves loaning your clarity of spirit for the other to see a path through their morass. An act of true compassion always strengthens both parties.

Happiness and Creativity

The Hassidics have the right of it when they say our first responsibility is to be happy and to enjoy ourselves. Real happiness has nothing to do with external circumstance and everything to do with an internal attitude to life. In a sense happiness is the easiest thing of all to achieve because is all it requires is a change of mind; but of course the mind is the hardest thing of all (to change). But of all possible activities, which is the one that most readily engenders happiness? For me, and I suspect for all, it is the creative process: the enjoining (enjoying) of spirit in the creation of life, and the subsequent breathing of soul into that life. As teachers it is our responsibility to give our students the means to improve their energy (i.e. stock Forms and exercises), but that is less than half of it. It is also our responsibility to encourage, enthuse and enhearten them to live creatively. This is only possible if we eradicate all calculation, criticism and judgement from not only our minds but our being. Then the act of teaching itself becomes a creative process.

Painting by Sam Stout

Yielding

Most of what passes for yielding is not yielding at all but avoidance. Yielding means not resisting. Yielding and resisting are antonyms. Resistance is simply the effort to keep something out or away, so not resisting – yielding – means to allow that something in or close. Avoidance (the other alternative to resisting) is withdrawing from the thing – taking yourself away from it – replacing real life with a comfortable one. Now the one thing we all want to avoid at all costs, as human beings and probably as living creatures, is pain: we don't want to suffer, even though we know deep down that pain and suffering are not only unavoidable but necessary indicators of spiritual growth. To advance we must learn to yield to pain: learn to stop resisting it – allow it – relax into it – accept it as the positive indicator it is. When something becomes painful then it becomes testing: it starts to test our commitment to relaxation and openness. As taichi practitioners the one pain we must not only endure but daily search for is pain in the legs – to keep the legs relaxing into and through the pain and let that pain flood the whole body. When we yield pain cleanses the body and fires the spirit as nothing else can.

Renunciation - is a piercing Virtue -
The letting go
A Presence - for an Expectation -
Not now -
The putting out of Eyes -
Just Sunrise -
Lest Day -
Day's Great Progenitor -
Outvie
Renunciation - is the Choosing
Against itself - 
Itself to justify 
Unto itself -
When larger function -
Make that appear -
Smaller - that Covered Vision - Here -

Emily Dickinson

Breathing

Breathe the world in. Awaken the creative impulse. Take your independent place. A true teaching empowers, doesn't limit or restrict. Open, enter and seduce. Work the pelvis: fuck the world and everything in it. Surprise yourself. Life doesn't need a teacher, it needs to be lived. Let emotions dance. Arise and enter the soul of the music. Smile and sing. Touch together. Express above all. Joy and happiness. Breathe you out.

Photo: Mara Moore

God is a verb, not a noun proper or improper.

Buckminster Fuller

When you lose yourself, you find the Beloved. There is no other secret. I don't know any more than this.

Ansari of Herat

Sinking

Bending & straightening legs with spine vertical but allowing flexibility & relaxation in the sacro-iliac joint, hips & coccyx. The pelvis rocks back very slightly on lowering the body, & rocks forward very slightly on rising. The inguinal folds of the groin should always be completely relaxed. The bum should certainly not be held in with muscular effort. Everything must relax into place. Strength is in the character (alignment & relaxation) & not in the muscles. The coccyx feels as though it is lengthening down – uncurling – as the body sinks. This vestigial tail then feels as though it enters the Earth, drawing energy from there & up the spine. On sinking the feet (and tail) feel like hypodermic needles – plunging into the Earth. On rising, the needles continue to insert down (the feet push down even more) as the plungers of the hypodermics (the legs & belly) pull to draw energy up.

Yielding

Yielding is the ability to open the heart and allow the other’s energy into your body. Rooting is the ability to relax this energy down into the Earth. Opening yourself to the other is only possible if you enter them as they enter you. A yielding mind is an opening and entering one, not a retreating one. Competition (pushing hands) is ruinous.

Body

Incorporate – bring into the body or make a body of. The heart expands, reaches out, and brings into the body. What is created must then be of the body – must image the body working well.

Love is latent in the soul like fire in the flint.

Arab saying