31 December 2009
28 December 2009
27 December 2009
26 December 2009
Finding center is about realising that I don't need to apologise for being here : I have an absolute right to the space I inhabit and therefore since I am alive that is vibrating I have not only the right but the responsibility to affect my environment and everything in it with the fact of my presence that is my energy : things around me should sing my tune as I theirs.
25 December 2009
24 December 2009
God is the deep intelligence – the depth – pervading the vast web of connexion that is existence / universe / cosmos. When a system of connected entities reaches a certain size then the energetic resonance of the multitudinous connexions naturally harmonizes and coheres into what we could call intelligence. An intelligent system (being) possesses strategies for self-preservation and self-renewal, and these involve remaining whole – holding onto the component parts. The problem here is that the intelligent systems we are members of – families and societies – will naturally hold us back from breaking free. Hence the Tibetan adage that our greatest enemies are our nearest and dearest. What we often fail to realise is that ego is also an intelligent system that contains – possesses – us. As, of course, is spirit, but in a very different way.
23 December 2009
Inspired by John Cage's experience, I sat in an anechoic chamber for five hundred hours over a period of two years and listened to the sounds of my own body. I began to correlate different states of consciousness with the different sounds of my nervous system. Being a trained musician, I noticed that the high-pitched sounds of my nervous system consisted of several sounds in different intervals. Then one day I brought two tuning forks and tapped them. Immediately I observed that the sound of my nervous system came into resonance with the sound of the tuning forks. It was then I realized that people can be tuned like musical instruments.
John Beaulieu
John Beaulieu
22 December 2009
21 December 2009
20 December 2009
19 December 2009
18 December 2009
The sea is like God’s big eye, where the edges of our own eyes bleed into the ocean, in saline ratio and roundness.
Eleni Sikelianos: For a Panel on Poetry & the Environment
Eleni Sikelianos: For a Panel on Poetry & the Environment
17 December 2009
16 December 2009
It is wrong to see softness as an accommodation of the other through judicious adjustment. The first stage of Tai Chi training is not softening to yield but softening to present – softening to find centre. Without an unambiguous centre – a precise location of where and who I am – there is no clear sense of what needs to yield. The centre is that core about which everything can soften but without which nothing has meaning or consequence.
15 December 2009
14 December 2009
Pushing Hands
Truth stands radiant – the erotic dimension where nothing happens. Let all this madness play an important social role. There is nothing at the end, yet what is born is part of the renewal, torn between. Still shining in your quiet mind, I was so moved I began blurting, you are not a stranger. What inner urges prompted the belief that keeps me homeless? Your failing ego brimming over with provocative humour.
13 December 2009
Sinking
The elevated heights my destiny draws me towards can only be achieved by plumbing ever greater depths : central equilibrium.
12 December 2009
Standing
There is no substitute for standing. A stance should be comfortable – not too deep – otherwise pain in the legs will kick in before the body is energized causing tension : grimacing. The energy that slowly manifests in the body should help me through pain barriers into ever greater intensity and relaxation : depth. The freedom I am after is deep deep down. Freedom for the average person is the ability to wander at will from one pleasurable sensation to the next on the shallow plane of mundane arbitrariness; they have no sense of using strict discipline and hard work to break through to deeper more fulfilling planes where the abiding energy is intensity of spirit. The discipline and work condition my character and strengthen my soul – make me a worthy vessel.
11 December 2009
09 December 2009
08 December 2009
07 December 2009
06 December 2009
05 December 2009
04 December 2009
03 December 2009
Tai Chi is a martial art incorporating & teaching the Taoist principle of Yin/Yang.
It assumes that only tension in body & mind prevents us from fulfilling ourselves.
Fulfilment begins when we stop being forceful and become energetic.
It starts with relaxation – opening to gravity – & simple movement to build an energetic connexion with the Earth.
From this connexion we build other connexions and thereby do things.
We are always just the middle-man : a channel for energy.
Always just.
It assumes that only tension in body & mind prevents us from fulfilling ourselves.
Fulfilment begins when we stop being forceful and become energetic.
It starts with relaxation – opening to gravity – & simple movement to build an energetic connexion with the Earth.
From this connexion we build other connexions and thereby do things.
We are always just the middle-man : a channel for energy.
Always just.
02 December 2009
01 December 2009
29 November 2009
28 November 2009
27 November 2009
25 November 2009
24 November 2009
22 November 2009
21 November 2009
The mind is the source of all confusion, and the body is a forest of impure action.
Sutra on the Eight Realizations
Sutra on the Eight Realizations
20 November 2009
19 November 2009
If we use the word true to mean free of tension then true mind is simply an awareness of connexion, so soft and subtle that there is barely a distinction between awareness and energy. Mind becomes untrue when, out of fear, it tightens and disconnects. Such a mind then has a choice: to conquer fear, relax and reconnect, or to indulge the fear and remain tense and disconnected. This latter course, once established as a habit, leads to the creation of self or ego, which, simply put, is the consolidation of fear and tension. Thinking is the minds attempt to make something meaningful of disconnexion.
18 November 2009
17 November 2009
A moment is a span of time – to be precise the time it takes to move my weight from one foot to the other. If my attentions remain clear – unhindered by thought – at least for the duration of a moment then the heart will direct the energy in my body. The mind calculates and gauges and in doing so destroys creative impulse – energy – or weakens it to such a degree that it lacks the power to do anything of its own. The heart then remains locked up in the cage of the chest – safe but sad – unmoved.
16 November 2009
15 November 2009
14 November 2009
This hardness – awareness and attendance to such – is necessary for life to start to have meaning and significance beyond its simple living. Living life is one thing, but to live in such a way that each moment accrues not only experience and wisdom but spirit, requires me to be intimately ruthless with myself. Indulging ego is how we fritter away our vitality. Cutting through ego by honing essence is how we acquire enough fire to burn through the bounds of our own humanity and into freedom. No special practice is required – just a piercing and total honesty. Tai Chi simply offers a clear arena in which we can readily exercise such honesty.
13 November 2009
12 November 2009
11 November 2009
10 November 2009
09 November 2009
08 November 2009
Sensitivity has two stages – feeling and response. Ego can interpose at either stage. Firstly, it can block or bias feeling by taking my attention away from the real and into itself: we call this ignorance. And secondly, it can bring itself into the processing of the feelings so that my response becomes habitual – based on taste and personal preference – rather than true: we call this selfishness.
07 November 2009
06 November 2009
05 November 2009
04 November 2009
03 November 2009
02 November 2009
True softness and true hardness are not only complimentary, one is actually a function of the other. The (untrue) hardness we rail against in Tai Chi is really just tension and ignorance, or to be more precise: fear. Such hardness is our natural enemy because it prevents anything useful from developing. True hardness on the other hand is the steel at my core – my essence – and it gets harder – anneals – the more I keep it in my sights – the more I focus in on it. The work at hand is to shake my essence free of tension (ego) so that it can really gleam. True softness is then the field of pure energy that naturally manifests around this true hardness. The purer the hardness the purer the softness. I touch things with this softness. I am my hardness yet I manifest as softness. My hardness is my significance – it is what makes me a force to reckon with. My softness is my beauty – it is what draws the world of energy in – it makes connexion.
01 November 2009
31 October 2009
Arousal
If connexion's the be all and end all then I need to be constantly aroused: ready to fuck. Or, to put it less crudely, so ready to give and receive that my arousal wills exchange.
30 October 2009
29 October 2009
28 October 2009
27 October 2009
A useful sensitivity isn't so much feeling myself as the world bears in on me, but feeling the world as I bear into it. The former personifies the world – forces what I feel to my own image – I feel myself in everything. The latter and I join what's there on its own terms – I abandon falsehood in search of the truth.
26 October 2009
25 October 2009
The real world is the one of connexion – the one we enter into when our energy extends beyond our physical and mental boundaries and we begin to prowl. Connectedness is a natural state but one we inhibit and repress with our fear-based tensions and anxieties: our insistence that we are something special. This repression becomes depression and we have the malaise of the average person: ostensibly content, reasonably happy, but beneath the well-behaved veneer, seething with frustration. This is the frustration of denial: wanting – needing – connexion at every level, and not getting it.
24 October 2009
23 October 2009
22 October 2009
21 October 2009
20 October 2009
19 October 2009
17 October 2009
If the mind is only the body's invisibility then the poem is merely the unreadability, the non-transparency, the opaqueness of that mind.
Pierre Joris
Pierre Joris
16 October 2009
13 October 2009
12 October 2009
11 October 2009
10 October 2009
09 October 2009
Connexion
Connexion is everything, and the more I practice the more this fact is at the forefront of my awareness. The connexion – its establishment and nurturing – motivates and governs every action I make and every emotion I feel. At this level it is not the waist nor any other part of me that moves the body, it is the connexion itself – the energy of and in the connexion. I simply serve and support the connexion; and the ensuing communication.
08 October 2009
07 October 2009
06 October 2009
05 October 2009
04 October 2009
02 October 2009
01 October 2009
30 September 2009
25 September 2009
Sinking II
Sinking is really just softening to gravity – letting gravity into the cavity of my body where it becomes energy flowing from crown to sole. The work opens and clears the passage ways. This is the beginning. We know from the Law of Central Equilibrium that physical stability (the ability to support) requires energy to be balanced: opposite and equal. So, assuming sinking is not collapsing, there will be a rising energy from sole to crown and beyond maintaining structural and spiritual integrity. This is also gravity and also sinking.
23 September 2009
22 September 2009
Sinking
Sinking in Tai Chi is the mind dropping into the lower dantien – the belly. This happens when tensions – anxieties – are relaxed, and when the three dantiens – belly heart head – are vertically aligned. It is accompanied by a feeling of homecoming relief. Back to where I belong. The mind is always springing up and out from the dantien so sinking needs to be a continuously refreshing process: a balance of energies: central equilibrium.
21 September 2009
20 September 2009
18 September 2009
According to the Buddha’s teachings, the most basic condition for happiness is freedom. Here we do not mean political freedom, but freedom from the mental formations of anger, despair, jealousy, and delusion.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Thich Nhat Hanh
17 September 2009
16 September 2009
Softening is the mechanism by which I transform a forceful situation into an energetic one. It is an opening of my heart to welcome whatever's before me into my body. Any problem I may be having can always be reduced to one of resisting (keeping something out) instead of softening (letting something in). Yielding – letting energy in and through to the root – tempers and cleanses character and spirit and presents my centre – my sense of who what where I am – to the world.
15 September 2009
The ethos of Western civilization for the last 2500 years can be summed up in one phrase: divide and rule. This is how we control everything from people (class system) to knowledge (Logos, discourse, thinking) to our own compartmentalized minds and lives. In Tai Chi we instead opt for the opposite: connect and serve – we serve (support) by connecting.
14 September 2009
Once there was a child who was born with stubby wings at the shoulder blades. One said, "Someday these will be great pinions and you will fly." Another said, "Stand up straight or people will think you have a hump." All great things are done by the force of opposites. Preparing his argument with Milton, Blake sat with his wife Kate, both nude in the back garden, reading Paradise Lost aloud. Each poet should become Adam, naming everything new. We tell the archetypal. Face the sun, your shadow will be sharper. Condense everything into a ball, and throw it.
Ronald Johnson
Ronald Johnson
13 September 2009
The Earth supports and nurtures the belly, the belly supports and nurtures the heart, the heart supports and nurtures the head. What makes the head run away with itself – into its own imaginings – is lack of energetic support from below. The same way that a child will retreat/escape into the imagination if not given loving support. Support is our means of interfacing reality.
12 September 2009
11 September 2009
10 September 2009
09 September 2009
08 September 2009
Then again it does sometimes seem that the incursion of the Logos into primate evolution, enabling such things as irony (and for that matter science) may in the end turn out to have been about as beneficial as the award of a loaded shotgun to a loaded teenager on a Saturday night in prehistory.
Tom Clark
Tom Clark
07 September 2009
05 September 2009
04 September 2009
Dan tien III
For Stefan
I'm not sure it is important to feel or cultivate chi. But I do feel it important to develop the lower dantien as the centre of being. The breathing exercise below is great for this – making the dantien a physical reality. For more intensity just reverse the breathing.
The other necessity for gaining centre is attitude to the pressure of the other: to absorb and support this pressure with my own relaxing presence – no tendency to shrink or recoil – flinch. The other's energy is not something to retreat from, but something to receive and pour into. This attitude, which is a courageous one, is the beginning of the heart opening up into the world: the reflection of the rooted sacrum into the blossoming sternum. Back and forth like the two mirrors of a periscope.
I'm not sure it is important to feel or cultivate chi. But I do feel it important to develop the lower dantien as the centre of being. The breathing exercise below is great for this – making the dantien a physical reality. For more intensity just reverse the breathing.
The other necessity for gaining centre is attitude to the pressure of the other: to absorb and support this pressure with my own relaxing presence – no tendency to shrink or recoil – flinch. The other's energy is not something to retreat from, but something to receive and pour into. This attitude, which is a courageous one, is the beginning of the heart opening up into the world: the reflection of the rooted sacrum into the blossoming sternum. Back and forth like the two mirrors of a periscope.
03 September 2009
31 August 2009
30 August 2009
29 August 2009
Exercise
Breathe into the belly, letting it expand fully. Then breathe out and let the belly deflate. At the end of the out-breath continue breathing out by contracting the belly as much as you can. Now feel the centre of contraction in the belly – the place where all the muscles seem to be pulling into. This is the dan tien.
Dan tien II
The (lower) dan tien is associated with chi and the development of chi. Chi is breath, or the energy of breath and breathing. To develop the dan tien breathe into and from the belly. Then the abdomen behaves like a bladder or balloon that expands and contracts in time with the breathing. This bladder has an elastic quality: when it expands beyond a certain point then contracting tension starts to build up, and when it contracts beyond a certain point expanding tension builds up. The natural interplay of yin and yang: elasticity.
28 August 2009
Dan tien I
Internal means inside: to/from the inside. Home, back to the womb, my own womb, my own centre. From this place – my place – there can be no commentary – no holding back, only being and what being gives me: experience – being being. Here every moment is full to the brim so there is no time, certainly no time for time or words. When I am inside – internal – then my awareness extends outward from a centre of stability and knowing, touching and affecting everything I experience. Such awareness is goodwill. When I am not internal I must rely on my senses because I am not centred so not aware. By sensing but not touching I take without giving – I wound with the same fear that keeps me external.
26 August 2009
25 August 2009
24 August 2009
22 August 2009
Strength
In a sense strength is the one thing we shirk because we know that when we are strong – when we feel strong – then we are operating very much within our limits rather than pushing through and beyond those limits. It can easily be shown that the body, and therefore all our aspects, works best when it has to work very hard – at what we call “the point of failure.” At this point the situation/moment becomes energetic in a way it rarely does when comfortable because such situations demand all our resources, even those we didn't know that we had. This mustering of resource is achieved with spirit which takes over from mind and body in commanding the situation, and transforms everything in that situation in the process. Spirit is the energy of transformation and as such it cuts through all physical and mental (moral) laws and conventions – laws that only operate under stable external conditions. Spirit brings a different stability – the stability of charge and change rather than the stability of time and again.
19 August 2009
15 August 2009
14 August 2009
13 August 2009
12 August 2009
11 August 2009
The way of moving in Tai Chi, I was told, should be like the action of drawing silk out of the cocoon: slow, smooth, steady. If you do not pull firmly enough, nothing will happen; if you pull too sharply the thread will break. Cool, gentle and firm was the way to wind the fine thread onto a reel: this was for many years the image which I understood. So when I heard Chen Xiao Wang’s explanation of the name, I was startled. He likened the internal movements of chansijin to the writhings of the silkworm as it creates silk from within itself. The taiji body wreathes and writhes in an ever changing pattern of connected turnings. It was not the silk, it was the worm.
Kinthissa, Turning Silk: A Diary of Chen Taiji Practice, the Quan of Change
Kinthissa, Turning Silk: A Diary of Chen Taiji Practice, the Quan of Change
Spirit
Happiness, and its corollary suffering, are largely childish concepts that most maturing adults at some point in their life understand to be unimportant. There is only life and my engagement with it. If I engage passively – if I let life live me – then I basically live in the past, even if that past is only microseconds past: I just don't have the active intensity to engage life as it happens. If I dwell in/on the past then I live life through the mind, and that mind can then label and categorize as much as it likes because it has the luxury of time to do so. But if I actively engage life as it happens – if I live on the white hot edge of life's keen blade, then there is literally no time and so no mind and no language and no labels. To live this intensely requires a spirit that literally burns all duality to a crisp – a fighting spirit that battles any attempt to get it down, either from within (me) or from without. To master such spirit takes a lifetime. And once it is mastered there is little point, other than to teach, in living within the body – it holds you back with its heavy and probably failing functionality, and the master will often chose to pass on to a form of existence free of corporeal trappings. This is martial spirit taken to its highest level.
Of course we want people to be happy. It isn’t a sin or anything. But I wouldn’t
wish continuous happiness on anything. Why not? It would deprive them of
presence. They wouldn’t be able to act. We have to be contrary (but not contrary
to anything) in order to live. In order to feel life. This seems embarrassingly trite.
And perhaps that is closer (than happiness) to the fact. When the fact is what
happens.
Alan Davies
wish continuous happiness on anything. Why not? It would deprive them of
presence. They wouldn’t be able to act. We have to be contrary (but not contrary
to anything) in order to live. In order to feel life. This seems embarrassingly trite.
And perhaps that is closer (than happiness) to the fact. When the fact is what
happens.
Alan Davies
10 August 2009
Softness
Softness is a quality that develops as we listen to the Internal with the Internal. Softness indicates Internal awareness. The Internal cannot be verbalized, can barely be felt, yet it is most of reality. The rest – in which we find no rest – is the External: a small and trivial subset of reality: the only part our minds can wrest, and so that's what our minds do – for dear life. As human beings – creatures of God – we are perfectly suited to dwell in the Internal with full awareness. In fact this is what every cell in our bodies yearns for. So we have to train very hard from an early age to deny ourselves this reality and instead opt for the boring flat and shallow unreality of the External. The thinking mind is the bastion of the External. We think to give ourselves the seeming security of an external reality, but at the cost of losing almost everything.
09 August 2009
08 August 2009
Every wonderful quality – honesty, trust, generosity, courage, etc – will work against you if you let it restrict your behaviour rather than open up the world. And it opens in its giving. This is the spirited equilibrium central to every act, and in this sense equilibrium is spirit – the energy of balance – staying centred by engulfing everything equally.
07 August 2009
And our attachments to language are among our most perennial and unassuageable. It is through languages that we attach to what we think. And we do think that we think what we think. And so we’re pretty much most of the time attached to it. Zen is all about letting go.
Alan Davies
Alan Davies
From Greek to Irish, a great majority of the European words for "happy" at first meant "lucky." An exception is Welsh, where the word used first meant "wise."
Online Etymology Dictionary
Online Etymology Dictionary