Reside in your wound.

Taiji investigates the difference between a light touch and a soft touch. Dr Chi was light, John Kells was soft.

Our bourgeois life of utter privilege robs us of spirit.

Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.

When I teach I simply endeavour to create an event of togetherness. Then we all learn something.

Look into any face and you will see joy and you will see pain. This is the way of things. The Tao.

The Internal is an invisible component, always present but withdrawing from inspection. A wary but inquisitive fox. Always at least one step ahead. Or behind.

Practice spirited tasks. A Run. A Form. A Salutation.

Fighting spirit – spirit at its purest and most intense – is roused and developed  by living dangerously.

Art alone makes life possible – this is how radically I should like to formulate it. I would say that without art man is inconceivable in physiological terms. Even the act of peeling a potato can be an artistic act if it is consciously done.

It must be clear that the human is principally a spiritual being.

Self-harm is a desire for an intensity we have become immured from – an intensity of body and spirit that bypasses the mind.

Lightness springing from gravitas, softness from consolidation, and a humbleness dripping with confidence in something other than self.

When you’re absorbed in a creative project, somehow everything around you takes on the hue of its problematic.

The teacher's job is not to motivate but to correct.

Muck in there.

People don't die anymore, they just fizzle out.

The curse of human beings is forgetfulness. But it's also what enables them to shrug off the past, like water off a ducks back, and go on.

The good student is so out of necessity. Deeply damaged, bereft of a part that would make sense of the rest, they have been searching for wholeness for as long as they remember. It's as though someone long ago robbed them of their centre, their core, their happiness, so they use the work to build a new centre, an artificial one because they know nothing of natural, being ever out of joint. They willingly do the work – they must – it's either that pain or the pain of living death – though some are more obsessive than others.

Love isn't something we dole out to a lucky few when it suits, love is a way of life – a practice.

Of noble mien.

Return is the movement of the Tao 
Yielding is the function of the Tao

Spirit by its very nature is unreasonable and revolutionary.

Oppression, compression, repression, suppression, depression.

Expression.

Snake Boxing. The Form is a snake. Spine a snake. Time too. A thread of continuity. Mind continuous.

This is analogous to what the sociologist Mark Granovetter calls ‘the strength of weak ties’, meaning that the most transformative events in our lives tend to be opened up by casual friends or fringe acquaintances, even though the strongest emotional and financial support generally comes from those closest to us.

Depression is simply morbidity. Or more specifically, the obsessive repetition of patterns that should have died long ago. In this regard most of modern life is depressive.

The deeper you fall the higher you'll rise assuming the rubber doesn't snap.

It's difficult to overestimate just how much the spine needs to extend in order to come out of one's shell and share one's true beauty with the world.

The heart of man 
Is a fork in the road

Self a mere surface effect we work tirelessly to pierce to get to a ground beneath – the ground of spirit. Existence prior to life – stillness before movement – the fact of my body. It requires a cold detached mind content only with nothing. An unmoved and unmoving numbness.

The successful metaphor occurs only when the reader is sincerely deployed in living it.

By the time someone dies nowadays, there have been so many medical interventions that the actual death comes as something of an anticlimax and lacks power. Family may be in attendance but the angels have long since scarpered – moved on to more pressing matters. Spirit is all about timing.

Our whole landscape and environment is fraught with the anxiety of choice.

Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst 
Das Rettende auch. 

But where danger is, grows 
The Rescue also. 

—Friedrich Hölderlin

in the breathturn of acting lies a stillness

Remember the story of Jesus' first visit to the Temple in Jerusalem? He was disgusted to see the House of God as market place, lost his cool and went on the rampage, upsetting stalls and attacking vendors. He expunged vulgar mercantilism. And this is what he does for you when you ask him nicely – he enters your heart and quietens your mind.

Given the massive levels of over-consumption in the West, it can be stated as fact that those who do most to help the environment are those who make the brave decision not to have children.

Energy is always available – ready to hand – if only I have the presence of mind to ask nicely.

Sarcrum os (sacred bone) – is source of spirit. Heart is seat of spirit. Head is house or temple of spirit into which we should venture only on special occasions – when humble and ready to listen.

renew the world by rescuing the earth from oblivion

Familiarity breeds contempt. We work to reverse this.

Ethics precedes everything including being. Ethics is the nature – the quality – of being. Not a matter of mind or thinking (oneself superior) but of heart and soul. When you stand upright what the world receives is an ethical stance – a challenge to rise and an invitation to meet. This is not only you in relation to others but each thing in relation to its neighbours.

Fear of God. The feeling of omnipresence, an inescapable awareness of every shitty thought passing through this shitty mind; waiting, patiently, for me to relax and rest in Him rather than cower and grumble in my own squalor.

Prayer is simply an appeal for help to be a better person. My very stance should be an act of prayer. My Form should certainly be.

To undergo an experience with something – be it a thing, a person, or a god – means that this something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms and transforms us.

Strain – push, stretch, refine – transform.

The sublimation of sexual energy : the essence of all meaningful work.

A bitter pill (principle). Become – embody – astringency.

In everything pertaining to Nourishing Life, one should listen much but incorporate the essential, look wide but choose the best. One cannot rely on one's bias to a single practice. Moreover, the danger is that those who devote themselves to one of these practices trust only their discipline of choice. Those who know the arts of the Mysterious Woman and the Pure Woman say that one can transcend the world only through the arts of the bedchamber. Those who are expert in breathing say that one can extend the number of years only through circulation of breath. Those who know the methods for bending and stretching say that one can avoid aging only through daoyin. Those who know the methods based on herbs and plants say that one can surpass any limit only through medicines and pills. When the study of the Dao does not bear fruit, it is because of biases like these.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast; 
Man never is, but always to be blest.

Cinnabar field (dantien). Cinnabar – mercury sulphide – about the only viable mineral of mercury – a beautiful rich red, vermillion – and sometimes, in sufficient concentration, drips native mercury. Imagine.

knowledge always cuts things down to size or turns them into caricatures through some sort of oversimplification

The deeper one goes the more dismal the terrain – the more forbidding the loneliness. This is why one's reserve or reservoir – one's inner spring – must be well-stocked.

But in you, from 
birth, 
foamed the other spring

The secret of life is its springiness – its ability to return energy when pressed.

listen your way in

Being is not presence. Being is time, or a certain quality of time that one enters into only with the Other – when your togetherness sets up a certain resistance which stimulates grace. It only need last a moment, but it's everything.

andante … the tempo of a passionate and slow spirit

Slowly one finds peace. And then all hell breaks loose.

realise & surpass

Thousands of years of human history are inside me, and I'm feeling the sign of the imprint.

For me, what lends a person significance, what makes me value their company, is not their looks or wealth, their achievements or experience, their knowledge, wisdom, education or cordiality but their ability to simply and quietly be – their inner silence. And the word that always comes to mind to describe such authentic being is IMMENSE – immeasurable.

Carpe diem. The wit to seize the moment.