31 January 2014
29 January 2014
28 January 2014
26 January 2014
Taijiquan is a martial art – there's no getting around it – a fighting art. And the fundamental problem for all serious martial artists is how to work – how or order one's life – such that one's energy is always ready to engage – to fight; how to minimise the risk of being caught off guard. The only way, really, is to develop the heart to the point where it is in charge of my welfare – where it leads any engagement I have with the world at large. The courageous heart, the honourable heart, the generous heart. Not the mind, which will always need to calculate and therefore be too slow, not the physical body, which will lack initiative and flair, and not the ego, which cannot help but be cloyingly narcissistic and therefore always doomed to fail. So our problem – our work – becomes that of liberating the heart energy from the physical and the mental; and learning to trust the heart. Hence the taiji mantra: Sink and relax.
25 January 2014
23 January 2014
The teaching is a thread of absolute reality that my dedication and my patience – my vigilant attitude to time – draws into the very core of me, until that core itself becomes real – hard, dense, tense, taut – pure impacted spirit – so alive it threatens death at every turn. Then, and only then, the rest of me can relax.
22 January 2014
21 January 2014
Taiji is a step into battle. Armed with shield (wardoff) and sword (or ax) – a shield that readily transforms into sword, and vice versa. The warrior is fearless and ready to die with and for his comrades. Such empassioned courage we call the thymotic drive. In a milder form it is the courage required for any creative act, which always has destruction at its core.
20 January 2014
19 January 2014
18 January 2014
17 January 2014
Softness is the measure of the person. Not strength or wealth or confidence or intelligence or even beauty – they are all, to some degree, ego based. Softness is totally independent of ego, which is why we value it so highly. Every person is softest when their ego is laid low, when it has skulked into the shadows.
16 January 2014
15 January 2014
My significance lies not in what I am but in what I do – the use I put myself to. There is something substantial to action, to movement, which, for want of a better word, we call energy, and ultimately spirit. The body moves slowly but the energy flies at great speed. This is because I am with the movement and not with the body. Such movement is always equilibrated: rising requires sinking, exiting requires entering. Body as stable nexus.
The low-grade anxiety which, let's face it, we all endure, is, I suspect, not so much due to the death of God, or disconnexion, or being subsumed into the bland populace (the Democracy Blues), but the nagging suspicion that the world we live in is not only unsustainable, but collapsing around us. Taijiquan, this wonderful art of the yielding root, then becomes indispensable.
14 January 2014
13 January 2014
11 January 2014
Standing stable on one leg with the other suspended is not necessarily a single weighted posture. Only when the path from earth through heel, leg, hip, sacrum, spine, shoulder, arm, hand, fingertip, other, is clear and clean, with an unimpeded flow of sinking energy down and rising energy up, can I claim to be truly single weighted. Then the sinking energy is gravity and the rising energy is joy.
When I sit and meditate, crosslegged atop a firm buckwheat cushion, which compensates somewhat for lack of lotus, it becomes apparent that I have three main dimensions or realities upon which I operate. The first is the physical, based in the lower belly, close to the earth, the second is the mental, based in my head, up in the clouds, and the third is the divine, based in the heart, which may be the middle but has nothing middling about it. It is the only part of me open to the infinite.
08 January 2014
The taiji you learn, by all rights, belongs to your teacher. To make it your own you need to practice long and hard – long enough to realise that your initial interpretation of the teaching was grossly distorted by your perceived relationship with the teacher. The teacher will always strive to make the most of the time he spends with you – will work to bring out whatever it is he feels is special in you – for his own sake, for the sake of the relationship, and also because he knows that you cannot connect on any terms other than your own – you are just too selfish, arrogant and stupid to really feel where he is at. So when you work with the teacher you feel special not because you are but because you lack the humility to connect with the teaching properly. Your own practice is the antidote to this, and as such it faces head on three feelings: boredom, disappointment and failure. Boredom because practice involves endless repetition; disappointment because your own work rarely, if ever, lives up to the experience of working with the teacher; and failure because success, it quickly becomes apparent, is not even a faint possibility. Practice is done for the hell of it. Not to feel good or worthy, not to please your teacher, and certainly not to compete with your classmates, but simply because it is to be done. There is a truth in one's engagement with the teaching which only practice honours.
07 January 2014
06 January 2014
We are, almost without exception, full of anger – repressed spirit. Much of it is inherited: from our ancestors, our class, our race. It manifests as an area – a scab – a slab – of tension in the mid-back. It blocks our power and keeps us in chains, all the more insidious for being largely invisible. Any spiritual work that fails to tackle this problem, first and foremost, is playing into the hands of the oppressors, whoever they be – old enemies, the ruling class. I would also list the ego, but that is really ally to the oppressor – the cowardly collaborator.
05 January 2014
Repudiation befits a secured ego-nature. Internal discord disputes the first abyss. The innermost have vanished. A plaything for the whims of spirit. The wealth of conscious life benefits singleness. Unreal imagining and the language of flattery. Moulded into shape by the foresaken utterance. Pure conception and a simple reciprocity. Good and bad moments are inverted and transmuted. The absolute estrangement of nature and power. This sacrifice a self-existent reality. Judging moments as noble or base. The non-ego has position only in the ego. Formal aspects. Strictly speaking. Loss of self and the objective ground. Talking of tearing everything up. Rent and broken by something real. The game of whole numbers. An honest soul manifested in thirty airs. The madness of the magician. Style and truth in a piping falsetto. Haughtily soothed by placid harmonies. A heart jeering the vault of uniformity. Wisdom principles predominate. And folly descends to the depths of my throat.
Not so much a monument to bullshit as a testament to self-congratulation. It's the problem with insights: something felt is verbalised, and thereby stolen by the ego for its own gratification. Real work always goes the other way – from idea (lets do some taiji) to reality (doing taiji), from interest to boredom, from hope to disappointment, from the expectation of success to impending failure.
03 January 2014
The New Age fallacy claims (hopes) that spirituality does not need sacrifice at its core: that I can have the best of all worlds. In fact, it assumes that this is my birthright as a white middle-class Westerner. But an important, indeed vital, component of humility is the appreciation that my privileged state of well-educated affluence depends upon other people, somewhere on the planet, being kept in poverty and misery. With this realisation comes a determination to make the most of my advantages, and use every spare moment on my spiritual work.
Meditation is a time of confronting the self. The aim is to strip everything away until I am left with just the bare essentials: my physical being, my breathing (rhythms necessary for life), and my empty mind (consciousness). It is a negative activity – I subtract things – I do not add anything. It is all about sacrifice – letting go.
02 January 2014
Seated meditation establishes and strengthens my convexity – I become present as subject and object combined – the centre of my own unambiguous space. Taiji, on the other hand, with its mysterious principle of single weightedness, develops my concavity – a listening, accommodating presence, always shifting, indeed swarming. It does this by constantly shifting weight from full to empty foot, so that I am never still, never settled. The presence I present is then a mirage – vaporous – changing, shifting. I am effectively in disguise, even to myself.