30 April 2019


The journey goes both ways.
Knowledge helps us manipulate the external. But for the Taoist, knowledge drives them deeper into the Internal.

The story of Plato's cave is still rooted in external dualism (either/or): either stay imprisoned and deluded within, or venture out into reality. For the Taoist, forays out of the cave allow them to also delve deeper into the gloom of their prison. Reality is neither presentable nor representable, not to the eyes anyway. Reality starts within.
the interminable problem 
of how not to cheat

29 April 2019

Practice and you'll progress. It's as simple as that. There is no other way. Practice is the shortcut.
To an islander what is the sea for but to go to?

The teacher shows a better way.

28 April 2019

Knowledge expands horizons. Now meditate on it and see how it also drives you deeper into your core.
As far as I can tell, there is a moment in one's twenties or thirties when destiny appears as clear as day, and one grasps it wholeheartedly. But then, in moments of weakness, one pulls back and proceeds to live a lesser, safer life.
Sinking into one foot undermines the other. Hence stepping.

27 April 2019

Everyone can dance but it's passion and drive that make you a dancer.

Be still and cool in thine own mind and spirit.
Mind directs the insubstantial rather than thinking the substantial.
self-examination   thanksgiving   humility
Never quite sure if it's mind directing energy or energy directing mind.
Whatever empties naturally fills with energy.

Cultivate a relaxed limber body, a light rising spirit and presence of mind. Above all, be happy.
Happy:
  • delighted, pleased, or glad;
  • characterized by or indicative of pleasure, contentment, or joy;
  • favored by fortune – fortunate or lucky;
  • apt or felicitous.
The only hope for surcease, the only possibility of stability, is to establish an Island of Peace within one’s own soul.
Each centre, each technique, each secret has its own spirit, a spirit which needs to be awakened. In the context of the work, this is achieved by insistent, obsessive, repetitive practice, until the dragon rises from slumber and into trance.

26 April 2019

the training has a quality of never being finished

Generosity is a consequence of being rather than giving as such. Of being centered and content – dwelling – in that part destined to always remain concealed from the world – your inner sanctum. If you can dwell there, in the very depths of your internal being, then wherever you are will resonate and throb with significance and spirit.
Around you the bunched soil; 
above you the empty sky— 
it is sufficient that every pore 
should take a little of their meaning.
Tip of tongue on roof of mouth. Gentle support for a relaxing jaw. Pooling energy in upper dantien.

where danger grows, grace grows too

25 April 2019

no dishonour, no lying, no wanton offence and no giving up

Reality happens when we lose control.
an abundant spirit and a resonant voice
Pilgrims of the Internal.

Consider a musician the calibre of a Nigel Kennedy – his effortless virtuosity and flamboyant spontaneity. Now imagine the rigour, precision and dedication he must put into his practice to pull off such a show. What the performer practices is the opposite of what he performs. This is why practice is so important. Without it you have no anchor and so nothing of value to give.
You begin with the possibilities of the material.

My daughter has a beautiful antique Japanese silk kimono, which I recently found creased and crumpled in her wardrobe. The creases seemed indelible so I threaded a broom handle through the sleeves and hung it from a hook on the wall. Slowly, over weeks, the creases fell away and now it looks fit to wear.

This, in these weak agnostic times, is the difficult principle in Taiji: feeling the head suspended from above and allowing the body to hang, as though from a coat-hanger, and relax. Posture drops from above as well as rising from below, otherwise it lacks poise.
Humans are so dazzled by objectivity and machination that beings are already withdrawing from them; and withdrawing even more are being and its truth.
Taiji – the Supreme Ultimate – the fundamental Taoist principle of generation and creation – is the separation and interplay of yin and yang. When yin and yang perfectly combine we get emptiness or Wuji. When they cling to each other we get chronic tension: a frozen shoulder, clenched jaw, stagnation, depression, fear – a frozen moment overstaying its welcome. Such conditions we heal with movement: movement of the parts with respect to each other but then also movement within the parts. The latter is more difficult and requires relaxation, energy and imagination.
The master appears relaxed because he has internalised his tension. Outside patient and sweet, inside ruthless and cunning.
Mediocrity as status symbol.

24 April 2019

Beware a whole life avoiding the issue.
The work, simply put: yield to force rather than resist or avoid.
Relaxation in Taiji is always associated with sinking. Sinking because our tendency is to rise into doing, machination, plans; as though we ache for freedom from Earth's sluggish clamp and claim, which, of course, we do. But when we sink, where do we sink from? Not from aspiration, but from home – origin and source – of spirit: above, sky, Heaven, cosmos, God. And this our Taoist heritage, our pendulum truth: we spring from Earth and we drop from Heaven. The work a reconciliation.

23 April 2019

Stop resisting gravity and avoiding God.
                               By day
the passers-by, who are not
pilgrims, stare through the rain’s
bars, seeing me as prisoner
of the one view, I who
have been made free
by the tide’s pendulum truth
that the heart that is low now
will be at the full tomorrow.

Once the work is heartily acknowledged as the most important part of life then progress is assured.
a seeker in time for that which is beyond time
Once the art is mastered it's a matter of constantly rejecting that mastery in order to move on, hopefully to find teaching everywhere.

22 April 2019

Ego is not only unnatural, it is against nature.

21 April 2019

Actually my ideal piece of sculpture is a road.

this ever-absent but hauntingly present presence of God
The meaning we wait for is in the waiting.

Each time I work nowadays (practice, teach) I rediscover the same secret: the heart aches to lift up to the firmament in wonder, reverence and adoration. This the missing ingredient that enables it all to fall into place. In Taiji it is usually expressed as 'head suspended from above' but it's more than that, as Dr Chi discovered. It's a matter of and for the heart. A leap of faith we should be making each and every moment.

20 April 2019

Heart in the right place.
a nonentity with a destination

           h e a r t
           h e a r t h
             e a r t h

Think dantien as hearth and home, a campfire around which the world gathers.
When something is learnt by heart it goes so deep that it no longer requires mind to recall – it has become part of you, as though harboured in every cell. My teacher would say it now resides in one's energy.
Move Heaven and Earth.
The resurrection to me is metaphor: an attempt to convey an experience of a kind of new life, an eruption of the deity into ordinary life, a lifting up of ordinary life to a higher level.

19 April 2019

Set your heart on it, whatever it is.

speak of the peace to be found in solitude
God left us with two jobs: look after his beautiful creation, and find our way back to him. Looks like we've totally messed up.
When you watch a group of children playing together you see that each possesses a unique quality that not only determines how they see the world but determines the quality and contents of the world they see.
Our monsters and demons safely held at bay, and soon-to-be extinct. We gloat at their powerlessness.
I write poetry because it is part of my piety.

During meditation the body connects below, the spirit connects above, and the spine stretches taut allowing the heart to sing.
In Taiji appearances are always deceptive.
Neither subject nor object, agent nor patient, active nor passive, but somewhere between. A middle ground. A middle voice. Central Equilibrium.

18 April 2019

No such thing as a straight line in Taiji. Everything returns.
I try to believe like I believed when I was five … when my heart told me everything I needed to know.

an age that is completely questionless about everything
Rather than consumer, be consumed. By passion, wildness, enthusiasm, intensity. All or nothing.
Imagine a moment – a vision – so long and drawn out it lasts a lifetime.
Turning into the leg (left into left) pumps energy up from the ground into a relaxed upper body where it engages the opponent. The ensuing turn in the opposite direction then yields their energy into the other leg.
an age of infinite wants stemming from the concealed plight of a lack of a sense of plight

Why God? Because the heart just loves to worship. Nothing to do with the mind knowing or believing. All to do with the heart loving and adoring.

17 April 2019

The first stage of Taiji is getting your bum in. Sitting down into the supporting leg. It allows the body to relax down and the spirit to relax up.
During meditation one withdraws from doing and experiencing, and sinks into something more originary – being.
Slip through the veils of thought and feeling and simply dwell.
Relax into cheer.

15 April 2019


One comes to a religionless God, a different God, a God that led Carl Jung, when asked in a TV interview if he believed in God, to answer, "I don’t need to believe, I know."

As for those who will some day grasp this, they do not need "my" attempt, for they must have paved their own way to it. They must be able to think what is attempted here in such a manner that they believe it comes to them from afar and is nevertheless what is most proper to them, to which they are appropriated as ones who are needed and who therefore have neither the desire nor the opportunity to focus on "themselves."
Dwell contentedly in stillness. Become a human being.

Humble means porous. Everything flows easily through you. No blockage. No self getting in the way.

14 April 2019

The only way to burrow through ego is with humility. A humility which consumes you.

13 April 2019


Learn to dance, so when you get to heaven the angels know what to do with you.
Faith is not giving yourself a choice.
Hope is work – giving yourself a chance.
Love is giving yourself to God.
Contraction, expansion. Inhale, exhale. The engine of the universe; on all scales.
We think we enrich our children's lives by giving them freedom of choice at every opportunity but really we just introduce anxiety at a much too tender age. Bad parenting.

O Holy Spirit 
descend plentifully 

into my heart. 
Enlighten the dark 

corners of this 
neglected dwelling 

and scatter there 
Thy cheerful beams.

12 April 2019


Burn your bridges. It's totally foolhardy but the only way.
To sing is to pray twice.
I used to think the strongest word in life was Yes, but now I'm convinced it is No.
A real master doesn't teach you stuff, he just wakes you up and infects you with interest, an interest that compels you to practice.
The work is a journey – the journey home.

Meditation teaches to sit proud, with humbleness. Pride is thymus, activated by core muscles driving down into the cushion to maintain upright posture; spine an arrow pointing both down and up. Humbleness is the chin dropping/dipping into thymic energy (neck stretching, eyes cast downward) and siphoning along the smile of the jaw into the brain stem, then around the back of the cranium to the crown (headtop), where it lifts to heaven. This our ever renewing circuit.
beings brought 
into constancy 

through the downgoing of those who 

ground the truth 
of being
The problem, for a Taiji master, with seated meditation, is its double-weightedness, or rather its lack of single-weightedness, its lack of humour. In Taiji we still sit (sit still), but upon a foot instead of a cushion. And if the leg is relaxed (as relaxed as it can be: that is, elastic) then the leg, simply by being happy, pumps energy into the posture. This energy then expresses itself in the upper body as shapes and moods, urges and playfulness – motion and emotion. This the humour – the light and lightness – of the Natural Process.
Only work if you want to. In other words, become an expert – a past master – at changing your mind/mood. Because one must work. Work is hope.
You must let it take its time.

11 April 2019


On a park bench, watching a lovely little running class – punters being taught about correct posture and technique for jogging. But, interestingly, not one mention of the heart, of spirit, or of God. If you consider these – spirit animating the heart which strives to lift in joy to God – then not only does the technique lighten and largely take care of itself, but the running becomes a beautiful form of fulsome prayer.
Measureless is the richness of the turning relation of being to the Dasein it appropriates, incalculable the fullness of the appropriation.
Feel the ground beneath the foot, become aware of it, make friends with it, have a relationship. In Taiji our relationships are always friendly. Like a boxing match where two fighters ferociously try to kill each other until one of them wins, then they're hugging and smiling like old pals. In Taiji we are always already at the end. Post event.
The call to prayer. A call to the event of prayer. This the constant invitation.
The most common form of fascism is ignorance.

10 April 2019


The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
We are spoilt children – spoilt by abuse or indulgence – refusing to grow up into authenticity.
When the Desert Fathers reduced themselves with austerity, penitence and mortification, it was to arrive at a mindset capable of looking dispassionately into their own minds. If we look at our own minds then it's ego looking at ego, a situation doomed to failure since the ego always sees what it wants to see.

09 April 2019

Embedded in the word poise is the idea that when a system is well-balanced it becomes lighter and maybe begins to float, levitate, rise to God.
Scoundrels are always sociable.

…only the deep inner motion, only the heart's indescribable emotion…
The three p's: posture, poise, poetry. The work, in a sense, is an investigation of their relationship and mutual dependence. And I love the fact that, in physics, a poise (symbol P) is a unit of viscosity. Again, our resistance.
The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
In Taiji we endeavour to remember the things we usually forget (the body, especially those poor beasts of burden the legs, balance, posture, heart, quiet, softness, lightness, respect, etc) and forget those things we usually remember (ourselves, worries, opinions, preferences, desires, etc).
Nearness to the last god is reticence

Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.
Stepping in Taiji is always fraught, though it appears not so. Lifting the leg, then extending it to its new position, requires tension in the hips to hold it all together, which means, despite the best intentions, your energy rises a little. So, on placing the foot the first thing to do is relax back into the weighted leg, the one you're moving from, then visualize the pathway through the arch of the legs that your weight needs to travel to get to the other foot, and either throw your body with the weighted leg or pull your body with the leg that has just stepped, along that pathway. There should be the sense that the journey from one foot to the other has come from one sudden explosion of effort which has been stretched into duration. Leap from foot to foot, but drag it out. This our resistance.
On me your voice falls as they say love should, 
Like an enormous yes.

08 April 2019

Science fiction stories, about artificial intelligence inhabiting robots which break away from humanity and take over the world, are meant to be warning premonitions of a foreboding and forbidding future, but really they are about our own past. We are the androids with the man-made minds who broke away from the natural and took over the world – a world we threaten to destroy.
How could cheerfulness stream through us if we wanted to shun sadness?

Get a grip. This the colloquial way of saying Mind in dantien.
The teacher had a life before he learnt the art he teaches. That life brought him to the art. It also taught him vital lessons which enabled him to excel at the art he now teaches. These lessons he probably will not be able to teach. He probably doesn't even know that he embodies them. And yet they are crucial for learning the art. This is the predicament of the good student. She must be able to look beyond the art and see what the teacher has from before, and try her best to catch it.

07 April 2019

What does it mean to Nature for us to live in our heads, to destroy the world for our happiness?
An egoless mind is one which refuses to withdraw from the world in order to cohere around a sense of individual self. When you encounter one it takes your breath away because they are both present in themselves and present to you at the same time. So present they overflow their own being and into you.
The thing that cowardice fears most is decision. 

Because decision eradicates choice.

A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized prayer is listening.
When you touch someone and listen to their energy then you notice that as soon as they start to say something they get tense. Words are always in lieu of a hug.
Meditation is time before words. Because words don't describe reality. Words define a world which replaces reality.
Roughly speaking, it takes about a thousand hours of practice to get through the beginner's stage – to have the work begin to settle into your bones – and about ten thousand hours to achieve mastery, where you have largely been consumed by the work. If you practice on average an hour a day then mastery takes about thirty years.
Our great contribution to the exploration of the human psyche, the total investigation of self as center, has now reached the end of plausibility, of possibility.

It is not the path which is the difficulty; rather, it is the difficulty which is the path.
The last time my teacher saw my Taiji Form he complimented me on how fine it was, and then added: But you need to bleed more. What Bruce Lee famously called emotional content.

06 April 2019

Commitment, resistance, solitude and love. These the four qualities that Heidegger says are required for "spiritual superiority." But why resistance? Well, firstly one needs to resist the forces of conformity in one's world (in Taiji we recommend yielding rather than blatant force – say Yes then do No). And secondly, it is only possible to spin a continuous thread of concentrated time when there is some resistance, actual or imaginary, to one's passage through time. This is the thread that must be clung to if one's bleeding (endless remembering) is to have power beyond the intermittent.
The dedication, discipline and courage to remain open; bleeding continuously into time.
The truth is not a crystal that can be slipped into one's pocket, but an endless current into which one falls headlong.

05 April 2019


Saving grace
It doesn't matter what you do. What matters is how you do it. We suggest you try to do it right rather than wrong. And remember that what's right for you now depends entirely on your level; it will change drastically as you progress.
Catch a dragon by the tail and never let go.

04 April 2019

Human beings have lost the ability to coalesce in a conclusion. Nowadays they just fizzle out. They don't die, they just stop breathing.
the essence of being, in its trembling, will determine the structure of the work

03 April 2019


To head toward a star—this only.
If we felt the pain we inflict upon our world as intensely as does that world then our spiritual progress would we ensured. This is empathy – immediate feedback – which, of course, not everyone possesses, so, in its absence, until it develops, try respect.
The goal of this work (inner peace, enlightenment, spiritual integrity, excellence) is actually our natural state and is already there, in situ, deep beneath all the shit we've layered on top of it. So, the work is peeling back those layers and casting them off, one by one, once and for all. And this is what's difficult, this sacrificial aspect, because our stupid selfish culture tells us that we are entitled to a little of everything; that we, as free individuals, express best our individual sovereignty by picking and choosing. When it comes to spiritual work nothing could be further from the truth.
The perfect student comes to the teacher and says: Give me one simple exercise I can spend the rest of my life practising. Each subsequent lesson is then a simple correction; a new image to hold in the heart.
to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth

commitment, resistance, solitude and love
Anything worth learning can't be taught.
If, at the end of the day, you can, in all honesty, say you made the world a better place – you helped, just a little – then it's been worthwhile. And this is prayer. Not necessarily thanking God, explicitly, but reviewing and rededicating your day.
Only a god can save us.
Ultimately, you can only teach someone who loves you.

The poet it is who, looking to the sky, sees in its manifestness the self-concealment of the unknown god, bidding the unknown to come to man to help him dwell.
The work, this life, does not mean happiness, or even contentment. It just means that you're able to help a person with their soul. And that is deeply satisfying.

The work we do keeps the teaching alive – fresh and generative.

02 April 2019

A world full of lost souls.

01 April 2019

What unites opposites is the rift, the pain of the threshold that joins.

By the time we reach adulthood we are all experts at getting our own way. This is what being middle-class and bourgeois is all about – self-satisfaction. So, when a student protests that they lack the time or the self-discipline to practice then I know they are deceiving not only me but themselves – playing the pathetic victim for a little sympathy.
Only when practice becomes all consuming do you become what you're meant to be rather than what you want to be.

We are all great meditators, and we practice all the time. The trouble is, our mantra is Me me me.
The best way to give back to Nature is to become natural.