Worry is simply the call to prayer, misinterpreted. This call comes from inside (our own spirit) and from outside (Spirit at Large). Some problems – the important ones – cannot be solved with the mind; the heart must be used instead. Worship is a means of distracting and appeasing the agitated, selfish mind so that the heart can come to the fore and do its deeper work, a work the mind will never fathom, not until it's done anyway.

If you’re good at worrying, you will be great at worship; because it’s the same imagination serving the opposite purpose.

Today it's all packaging and advertising and very little content. Style over substance.

Spirit is the magic ingredient that allows the impossible to be realized.

Spiritual work is the struggle to control the mind. Stop it interfering – either by assisting or resisting – so heart and spirit can do what needs to be done.

Ego always tries to take centre stage, and, by doing so, acts and appears, the fool.

Each day, reaching beyond, takes its toll. But what to do?

This damn autocorrect always changes work to world and world to work.

If you have to ask, you'll never know.

Rise to the challenge.

The two most important qualities in Taiji are softness and lightness. They are often mistaken, but they are not the same. If anything, they are opposites – complimentary opposites – Yin & Yang. Softness is slow & seductive; lightness quick & lively. Female & male.

Form and forum are not the same thing. If anything they are opposites.

The essence of Taiji is yielding – the creation of loving, contained space. A turn and the return. Circles. It is painfully beautiful. It makes you smile and it makes you weep. Without it, the world and the work and the word would not exist.

I like everyone, as long as I don't have to spend more than an hour in their company.

It takes a long time to sound like yourself.

Meditation, especially moving meditation (is there any other?), stretches the moment. It literally makes time.

Always listen for what you can leave out.

God listens not to the words of prayer but to the heart that prays. This is the difference between confessing to God in the privacy of prayer and confiding to your public on facebook. God forgives and forgets so that you can let it go and move on whereas facebook stores it up and sells it to the advertisers. Surveillance capitalism.

If you're not nervous then you're not paying attention.

Consciousness is presence of mind. Awareness is presence of spirit. Mind and spirit are two states in the one continuum we call energy.

Suspended in time and space between the in-breath and the out-breath.

Everything all right? Then play the devil. Something not right? Then play the angel. An ever shifting play for balance.

Happiness happens. Or not.

Food makes my mind sluggish.

Life is one long expiration punctuated by about half a billion gasps for air.

Behaviour is only natural when in situ. But one is only true when out of milieu, out of the box, away from any cultural support for ego. Or, to put it another way, when confronted by the Other.

Simple courtesy.

Every situation is an opportunity for prayer. No excuses. And what do I mean by prayer? A simple awareness and confidence in the draw of spirit upward through the body.

We fall out of time precisely because we are permanently capturing it.

Before you get too cozy (lazy), look for the opposite.

Nothing half-hearted.

Real listening bypasses the conscious mind and plugs directly into body and spirit. And for good reason; in situations of immediate danger, it's the spirit that will save you, not your ability for rational thought.

The teacher ostensibly teaches techniques but really teaches spirit. This requires an intensity bordering on the violent, and an intimacy bordering on the invasive. Dangerous.

Work is making love, and vice versa. When they're done right.

Life is good when you live from your root.

Imagine you're teaching a class in which the students are less than enthusiastic (they've heard it all before). However, amongst them there is one, probably a relative beginner, who is all ears – fascinated and excited by everything you're saying and doing. Well, very quickly you will lose interest in the crowd (it's only natural) and will start directing your attention, and therefore the lesson, to the eager beaver. And maybe (just maybe) you'll find yourself going beyond the bounds of what you thought you knew. The listening student stimulates the teacher to teach. The listener stimulates the world, especially the natural world, to reveal its wonders. Everything needs a stimulus, if not a stimulant. It is our responsibility, our obligation to life and to God, to be stimulating – enthusiastic.

The most prized virtue of the good student is Beginner's Mind. The ability to abandon to the process of continual beginning. Renewal. The Eternal Return. The feeling (which never changes) that you've barely scratched the surface.

Awareness requires a rupture with the world we take for granted.

In our attempts to rise above the law of vitality, we have devitalized.

Only the dead can grant us legitimacy. Left to ourselves we are all bastards.

The fact that we insistently and consistently get bogged down for so long is testament to the strength and stubbornness of the mind. Its refusal to detach itself from the things of the world and rise into spirit.

roiled by a turbulent heart

Spirit in Taiji has little to do with what the philosophers call Spirit, which is more like a refined cultural artifact or a high aspect of mind or a theoretical essence of humanity. For us spirit is pure vitality – fighting spirit – the life force; a power that makes all the parts cohere and work together in gestalt. Esprit de corps.

a tree’s lifeworld burrows below its understory and floats above its crown

You know how animals sense oncoming earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and the like, and sensibly scarper? Well I suspect that modern depression, which seems to touch in some way most of us nowadays, is actually a similar feeling that we have for the ominous and unknown future our species and planet faces. The difference being that we have nowhere to run.

Outside pacific (peaceful, becalmed), inside atlantic (like a mountain, bearing the weight of the world). This is what standing qigong develops, especially Holding the Golden Urn.

My teacher was an unusual person. Highly intelligent, uncannily soft, with terrific fighting spirit. Three qualities rarely found together. It made for a potent though volatile mix.

A tangible presence in a lingering present.

It's always considered great misfortune to die before your time. However, it's also the height of vulgarity to overstay your welcome.

When my son was a little boy we once walked past a pub in Camden. Max stopped, peered inside and then announced:
"Dad, when I'm older, I'm going to drink beer, smoke cigarettes and eat meat!"
"That's fine Max," I replied, "when you leave home you can do whatever you want."
I sensed a moment of panic, after which he said:
"Oh no dad, I'm always going to live with mummy!"


We want to change, at least in theory, but we also want that change on our own terms – we want to be designers of our own destinies. But this misses the point of change. Real change changes everything; if you change then you're different on all levels. Superficial change (what I call a change of scenery or rearranging the furniture) is actually a way of alleviating the pressure for real change. It allows you to appear to change, and yet remain exactly the same.

Root develops by coupling sinking and turning with spirit.

Promising, commitment and fidelity are genuinely temporal practices. They bind the future by continuing the present into the future and linking the two, thus creating a stabilizing temporal continuity.

The problem with religion is that so often God gets lost in the trappings.

Sinking, on its own, does not develop a root. Your own mass is not enough to get through the legs and into the ground. But just imagine you had to spring up from the ground suddenly: the explosive thrust down required. That is the proverbial 'tiger ready to pounce': the spirit required for a root. Because a root is as spiritual as it is physical.

Good teaching always contradicts itself. This is because no system is ever complete.

Whenever pressed for an explanation, is all I know is, that's not it.

Learning to see in the dark. Nyctophilia. Feeling your way around.

Contrary, as a matter of principle.

I was never more alive or alone.

Ego and energy are mutually exclusive. Bending the legs introduces energy. The student rarely feels this. So this the work: developing a feeling for energy.

Gainsay totalitarian normality.

When filled with love for God, in other words, love of God, then we become natural as a tree or a brook or a bird. If they can believe then it's the least we can do.

If there were no edges then there'd be nothing to soften.

To live each moment with heartfelt gratitude. This is the real meaning of gravity. The impulse, which lifts the heart, also drives down into the legs. Like a bird sinking to take flight.

Hidden from sight. Occult.

A commitment neither to self nor to other, but to the fissure.

They who know the truth are not equal to those who love it, and they who love it are not equal to those who delight in it.

The Return is the Movement of Tao.

The weight of lightness.

What attracted us to spiritual work in the first place was its otherworldly, pure simplicity. We then spent much of a lifetime trying to complicate, elaborate and generally mess it up, only to then, toward the end, come back to that beautiful simplicity. It's impossible for others to imagine or appreciate what we've been through in the meantime.

When you perform in public, you sense that by playing with the length of the silences you can carry the audience with you.

Being-free for death.

Practice sustains belief. Without it, things wilt. Until, that time, we're overwhelmed by evidence.

Thus spirit, by its very nature, is critique.

Practice is time you make something of.

Freedom, in Taiji, is the ability to let your energy out.

Fascism is any rule of force.

I never practice a new piece less than six months, but for big ones I need at least five years.

Depression is the inevitable result of living in a Fool's Paradise.

Modern life seems to be all about the avoidance of pain. Yet when I was a kid, one learnt quite early on that pain and difficulty aren't so bad – not as bad as one feared anyway – and that, indeed, only by facing them did one grow.

Depression is the inevitable result of the Death of God.

I feel a special connection between praying and playing.

The teacher connects you to spirit. Then you're free.

The trouble with the spotlight we call intelligence is that it's impossible to turn it back on itself. This is why, if you desire to make any significant headway in this game, you must find a teacher – someone you can trust to overrule you on all counts. Then it's simply a matter of doing as your told until the day they tell you you've qualified.

Practice what you preach, in order to become, at some projected point in time, what you preach. We never get there, of course, – the work is always asymptotic. But such is life: the marriage of the real (practice) and the ideal (preaching).

Become a lover. Lover of wisdom, of God, of life.

Maybe it's something to do with the weather.

The same old Form, yet each time it's different. Concentrate on the same and you'll get bored and depressed; concentrate on the different and you'll stay young and fresh.

At the end of the day, two things will save you: work and laughter. And these should go together: the yin and the yang of life. Without work you'll have no substance, no gravity, no depth, and without laughter, no lightness, no softness, no joy.

Forget self and become one with the Tao. 

I still haven't found a better way to sum up this project called life.

Over time, the Taiji Form proves to be the best friend a fellow could ask for.

I had no natural gift for this clear quiet, as I soon discovered, for my mind is abnormally restless; and I was seldom delighted by that sudden luminous definition of form which makes one understand almost in spite of oneself that one is not merely imagining. I therefore invented a new process. I had found that after evocation my sleep became at moments full of light and form, all that I had failed to find while awake; and I elaborated a symbolism of natural objects that I might give myself dreams during sleep, or rather visions, for they had none of the confusion of dreams, by laying upon my pillow or beside my bed certain flowers or leaves. Even to-day, after twenty years, the exaltations and the messages that came to me from bits of hawthorn or some other plant seem of all moments of my life the happiest and the wisest.

Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild.

Life, as it unfolds, is revealed to be one long prayer of adoration, each giving expression in her own unique way. What else could it be?

Make or break. This is what modern life largely denies us – the opportunity to die trying.

Life is the experience of time.

relinquish the supremacy of the eye

Reality eludes all representation, all imagining. It cannot be known, cannot be thought. It can only be joined, by becoming, real.

So what's in it for me? The one question that ruins everything.

A simplicity that dawns at the moment of death.

excuse me while I kiss the sky

Truth always a function and matter of scale. Functions and matters. The place where difference and sameness equilibrate.

Life is simply obeying the imperative to do your (and no one else's) thing.

There's an energy comes through each person that must, must get heard. For them, it's the only thing that guarantees success for the project of which they, individually, are an insignificant, though vital, part. Like the incessant, pathetic wriggling of the nematode. We're no different.

using the whole of one's body to instruct the spirit

The sad, empty cynicism of the intellect. Nothing but a smart-ass. Always missing the point.

I am no longer myself but the part of a life beyond myself.

Reside in your nature. Then you'll have the presence – the finality – of an animal.

What we know is only the beginning to what there is, and a pretty poor beginning at that.

When the dantien is strong (deep, dense, dark – grave) then the head can swim and the heart will bloom.

We are, literally, losing touch.

The ego's ally, the thinking mind, must ceaselessly chatter away to itself otherwise the ego would dissolve. When people object But it is natural for the mind to think! they couldn't be further from the truth. Thinking, in its incessant manifestation, couldn't be more unnatural.

A civilized society is one that never requires fighting spirit – the inner animal.

The closer one gets to something real, the less inclined one is to teach it.

Teaching an internal art is about planting seeds. Learning an internal art is about tending those seeds: warming the frigid ground with faith and hope, watering with practice.

The teacher struggles to transform the student into someone he’d choose to spend time with.

I feel something came out from silence. Something very peaceful. Something that makes me calm and gives me courage. So I want to share that feeling. It’s something like a miracle.