When you do the Form it should be as though that next movement is all your heart desires.

Heartwork, of which Taji is a subset when it is done well, is all about waking up and retraining the heart to desire and intend maximal connectivity. Intent – the expression of the joy of life – shifts from head to heart, and my actions become eminently affirmative rather than conditional.

"The teacher exhibited the same type of egocentric symptoms that he stigmatised in his students."

Sound familiar?

Like a good musician who, rather than fill the space with sound, explores the space with sensitivity.

"Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it's the transparency that counts."

Slowly, evenly, effortlessly. This is the surface effect of Taiji, its external manifestation, concealing a very different internal reality. (An automobile extends smoothly from A to B because it has an engine able to generate, harness and transform the energy from a series of combustive explosions.) The extended practice of Taiji gradually accrues a degree of awareness and control of its internal workings, not only to do better Taiji but to learn (internalize) some general principles of life.

"In one moment you lose all the tawdry aspects of your character. You have no more ego, ambition; you don't fight with people. You see how ludicrous it all is."

Tzimon Barto talking of the death of his 17 year old son.

"When we speak the word 'life' it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach."

The work is all about liberating desire from the object of desire. A process we call relaxation, and a state we call peace. Liberated desire is simply free energy: magic, illusion – possibilities destined never to actualize. If I am attached to the world then these become hopes and dreams. If I am unattached – always relaxing – then these proliferate until they envelop and consume me. I then exist equally as external and internal: a balance we call Central Equilibrium.

The Bourgeois Fallacy, Part 1:
Freedom is freedom of choice.

It's not what you do, it's that you do.

The good student doesn't get bored; not with the work anyway. She takes delight in the most inane and repetitive of exercises because experience has taught her that with lightness of spirit the work will always open up and begin to blossom.

"the self is nothing more than the fluidity of its perceptions"

Life is really very simple, or it can be, should be. It is just a matter of perception and affection. The more I slow down this process and intersperse my own thoughts, the more I distance myself from life, and the more trouble I ultimately create for myself. The problem with civilized society: a society that endeavours to create polite space by slowing down or inhibiting responses, is that honest feedback, preverbal feedback, is also repressed. As students of Tajij we strive to read (or listen to) the faintest and most fleeting of signs, signs that appear and disappear far too quickly for the mind to register. This is why the most important part of us is the part that feels: the heart, the obvious seat of the affections but also the organ that senses (perceives) pure energy. If the breath is the bridge between the body and the mind then the heart is the bridge into energy. Or maybe we should just call it feeling.

The work is to intensify my position – my point of view – without in any way casting judgement upon any aspect of the world I am viewing. Judgement both belittles and hardens: carves in stone and casts in stone. It always does the world a disservice. Ultimately, though, it is me who suffers most because my heart becomes similarly set: in a stone of stubbornness.

The Bourgeois Fallacy, Part 12:
Wealth and health are the path to salvation.

Freedom is a buoyant openness that allows the world to always take me by surprise.