"Heaven is this world as it appears to the awakened imagination, and those who try to approach it by way of restraint, caution, good behavior, fear, self-satisfaction, assent to uncomprehended doctrines, or voluntary drabness, will find themselves traveling toward hell … hell being similarly this world as it appears to the repressed imagination."

Before Earth can usefully develop my energy I must possess a well-defined centre of gravity. This is the dantien (belly) about which my physicality gathers. Mind in dantien – the first instruction in Taiji – aims to develop this centre, not just as an abstract point some distance from the head, but as a real physical entity: a heavy stone in the belly that the Earth pulls strongly when I manage to relax the muscles that surround it. The pull of gravity on my dantien keeps me grounded, and stimulates the higher centres to open up and operate:

• solar plexus (power and creativity) 
• heart (affection and love) 
• thymus (passion, desire and fighting spirit) 
• throat (expression and joy) 
• eyes (vision and foresight) 
• crown (higher energies). 

Without an athletic body, firmly bound to the Earth, I can never be full and free.

Front toes point in slightly (so that middle toe points straight ahead) to protect the knee.

When close enough to touch, the mind stops. This is because the mind not only thinks at the expense of sensitivity, the mind thinks in order to stop feeling.

the internal fold of an overrun border

A student is someone who studies – without study they are not a student. So, as students of Taiji, practice is a given: we practice, like it or not. The question is what to practice and how to practice.

There are two forms of spirit: the spirit of opening and the spirit of (en)closing. The first encourages an encounter with the Other, and the second enables an engagement with the Other. The first creates the event, and the second makes the most of it.

Taiji is a spiritual practice and as such its main concern is the understanding of impersonal spirit.

Taijiquan is a martial art and as such its main concern is the cultivation of personal spirit.

A word of advice: never practice something you don't feel to be true.

Truth and spirit are the same thing. So, in Taiji, a gesture/feature is true if it captures and releases spirit.

"Tyranny is seldom (in the long run, never) imposed on people from without; it is a projection of their own pusillanimity."

from a world of subject and object to a world of lover and beloved

Meditation provides a means of unveiling truth. It is, I believe, the only way to arrive at truth, as opposed to hearsay or opinion. Meditation is neither contemplation nor reflection, it is rather an emptying of anxiety (self) so that the veils of falsehood may gradually fall away. The truth it yields is largely silent.

"…like most chronic invalids the ego is fretful, irascible, cruel, bothered by trifles, jealous and inordinately vain. Its only freedom is in domineering over or hindering others; its only happiness is in solitary possession; and in everything it does it seeks, like Cleopatra, for a painless form of suicide…"

Two mantra:

• Amo ergo sum
• Omnia vincit amor et nos cedamus amori

What makes me present is the energy flowing through me: the transformations I effect and affect. My generosity.

Meditation is the sacrifice of time.