Change

Change is easy. What is difficult is coming to the decision that change is what you really want.

Not really change – rather maturation – wisdom. As someone once said: A man does not change, he just stands more revealed.

But to stand more revealed everything must change.

Real change doesn't accrue, it sheds.

Love

I want my Tai Chi to be a way of investigating and practising love. If love is the driving force in the universe, which all spiritual disciplines tell us, then every action I make and take, from the tiniest twitch to the grandest sweep, should be motivated by love and should be an expression of love. For this reason my Tai Chi has little to do with postures and techniques (what I call the clutter of Tai Chi). It is the attentive and loving awareness I bring to whatever I do.

Hale & hearty.

3 months today

Ineffability, openness, spontaneous presence, oneness.

The Four Great Samayas of Buddhism

Change

This is a difficult one. How do we change? How can we change? The usual approach in Tai Chi, what we call the Kung Fu approach, is to improve by working hard – practising moves and techniques endlessly, acquiring skill and power. Now the problem with this approach is that the change incurred tends to be external – cosmetic – and deep down the person remains the same frightened and neurotic individual that felt compelled to work obsessively hard in the first place: the work has been a form of retreat or hiding from basic insecurities and inadequacies, covering internal weakness with a gleaming armour of strength and expertise. This approach is based on the assumption that I need to be better than I am. As soon as we enter or construct such a world we have hierarchies and dualities – this student is better than that one – that teacher is better than this one – today's practice session wasn't as good as yesterday's, etc – we have external standards to which we feel we need to aspire. Such a world is competitive and comparative and will only serve to prevent a student or teacher from real internal change: one aspires to be the best – a position from which one never need face one's weaknesses again: (if you're a good boy then you'll go to Heaven.)

So what then is the alternative? Ripping yourself open, exposing your heart, and hoping for the best? Absolutely not. There is no need to suffer. Martyrdom is a complete waste of time, energy and life. The alternative – not really an alternative – actually the only possibility – is to completely accept the way you are at this present time. To accept you need to know, and if you accept you will know, because when you can deeply and honestly say to yourself that you are OK – you are perfect as you are – and what's more you are happy as you are – then all of your character exposes itself because it no longer has reason to hide; and this is the biggest shock – the most terrifying prospect – to fully and truly see yourself in all your glory and not feel pride or shame or whatever – simply to accept. Such acceptance is love and it is only with this healing love from yourself that you can move on, that you can change at the deepest of levels. It's like one of those Zen paradoxes: you can only move on when you are happy as you are. And this cannot be used as a technique: accepting yourself in order to change wont work because the acceptance will be superficial. It has to be entered into whole-heartedly and with complete honesty. And the beauty of it is that in learning to accept yourself you certainly learn to accept others – your critical comparing mind just stops and you see things as they are – beautiful and perfect.

The best (only) defence is an open heart.

Softness

Softness, as we know, is non-resistance. Allowing things to be and to develop not as separate entities or events, with us as passive observer, but as parts of ourselves, because everything we witness is part of ourselves – is taken inside in the act of witnessing. This is yielding. The enemy of this perfectly natural process is the thinking mind (which is also the fearful mind – the mind only thinks because it is afraid). The thinking mind cannot experience, it can only think (fear), and as such it constantly filters the present moment through the gauze of past experience and future fantasy, reducing and distorting it enormously. The thinking mind records the moment or the event or the experience so that it can replay it and repeat it at its own leisure, because one thing the thinking mind cannot do is operate in real time – it is far too slow and disconnected. But this is like analysing a painting or a photograph of a scene instead of experiencing the scene itself: it completely misses the fine texture of the experience – that part that cannot be faithfully documented. This is the softness of the experience. It is the part that does not resist and so cannot be recorded. It is elusive and will only present itself to our softness, which is why hard people just cannot comprehend that it exists at all. So when touched by a soft person there is no flow of energy – no passage of information – no communication as such. Instead I am transported – I am taken into a different reality to my own. And this is why we push hands. It isn't to test each others rootedness or yielding ability, it is simply to wake up to the fact that each of us is a unique creature – a living entity with a unique heritage and a unique place, and that that uniqueness is in the softness of the person, not in their mind or body or spirit.

Spirit in the service of the mind is willfulness – it cuts through life like a machete through the jungle – carving a path but reducing the environment enormously.

Yielding

Yielding, for me, has nothing to do with evasive action. Yielding is simply letting the other person into my body. Then through that body into the Earth. To let the other in I must make space, which means I must leave, or at least my tension, my self-image, my thoughts, ideas, opinions, criticisms, my noise, my sleepiness, my shit, must leave because there simply isn't space for both of us: I block their flow into and through me. It is my spirit that both invites – entices – and then clears the way through. It does this by calling to the spirit of the other.

First rain

For the love of it.