Hardness comes from on high whereas softness seeps up from below.

This long process of disillusionment.

Watch a person enrapt with their screen, be it phone or computer or TV, and you will see their energy draining into it and nothing coming back but a flickery neurotic glow. The wrong sort of attention.

Sink & relax. This is how it starts. And how it continues. Everything we do happens in this field: the field of sinking, of gravity. Our first breakthrough is letting gravity into the body. The second is letting it into the mind.

History lives in and through our bodies right now, and in every moment.

Every artist knows the negative correlation between feeling good and being creative. True creativity requires a vulnerability and a loss of control that feels just this side of unbearable. What sustains it on that edge long enough for the work to get done is spirit. The absolute necessity of spirit.

Like an errant teenager, ever admonished to tidy their room.

Empty the mind. Then and only then can it fill with what it's meant to – wonder.

A noisy mind is an excuse not to listen to anything else.

An animal with this much internal conflict has never lived on this earth.

The realisation of the Higher Self. This our project. Realisation in the sense of a making real. What distinguishes the Higher Self is its noble silence; what distinguishes the lower self – the Ego – is its endless chatter, its neurotic noise. This is why spiritual work – work devoted to realising the Higher Self – is generally a matter of producing silence by dampening the Ego.

Embrace difference because without it nothing would change.

The first major discovery you make when you get into internal work is that you don't need mummy and daddy any longer. The second major discovery you make (almost as mind-blowing as the first) is that you don't need the self any more either. Now you can commence the work of their destruction. Spiritual work is always negative, always destructive.

Language justifies injustice.

life is not simply organism, but process, and thus movement

Becoming aware of what's always been there but I've been too preoccupied to notice.

The only thing really ours is the body so get to know and appreciate it. Dwell in it.

One of my teacher's oft-repeated sayings: The average person runs from one sensation to the next. 

For him life was a matter (a practice) of investing time with meaning (continuity and contiguity) through dedicated sacrificial work. 

Another of his sayings:  If there was an easier way I'd have found it.

The legs should connect me to the earth rather than keep me away from it.

The body is where we fear, hope, and react; where we constrict and release; and where we reflexively fight, flee, or freeze.

I have work to do and I am doing it and that is all that matters. Whether I am happy or enjoying myself or admired or accepted are of no consequence. Such concerns do not even register.

Let the work take you where it wants rather than you take it where you want.

Think of desire as an energy to be played – teased – rather than satisfied.

The work eventually enables us to appear from behind our self-image with dignity rather than shame.

Union with the Divine can only be explored through praxis due to the inability of the finite mind (and its tool, language) to comprehend or express the infinite.

Domestication is the problem. The general infantalization of humanity. The solution is not buying a pair of sandals and tramping through nature weekends but growing up. Unfortunately this doesn't happen as a matter of course any more – privilege has put pay to that – now we really have to apply ourselves and work on it.

exposed to the coming of grace

a harmonizing and assuaging counter-force

Take more risks 

Tenderize your will 

Develop a sense of humour 

Bleed more 

These are specific personal instructions I received at various times in my teacher's tutelage. None were elucidated. I was expected to go away and get on with it. I didn't consciously work on any, but each instruction nagged my mind (they still do) until I naturally found a way to work with them – my own solutions to their problematic.

Earth names the gravity and weight of existence.

The good student recognises in the teaching a lifeline – a slim chance not only for salvation but for life at a richer, deeper, more meaningful level. This is why we work like demons – we know it's a matter of life and death.

The cleverer we have become the more remote the mind from the body. Our work is to bridge that gap.

Students resist. That's what they do. But they also study, work, practice, and it's this that will save them.

Searching for something that cannot be found.

The basic function of a Master is ... to surprise us by uttering statements which run against our (and the Master’s own) hitherto doxa.

Practice changes everything.

Let the mind recede into the background. Only then will energy venture forth into the foreground.

Ego ruins a process by trying to control it. We endeavour to set up a process which swallows up the Ego. This needs time. Lots of time. 

Everything is connected, and the universe is a vast web of connexion. Versions of this are by now so often repeated as to be cliché. Yet the opposite is also true. Every thing is separate, discrete and distinct otherwise it wouldn't be a thing. And what is it that compels each thing to retreat and settle into its own solitude – its own being – so that it may simply radiate into the world? It is a quality I call nobility. This is what solo practice develops. Without a practice of solitude you have little of real value to give.

life has grown old

What distinguished my teacher's taiji from all other I have encountered is that it put spirit first. And yet it held no aggression or hardness – no rancour. His was a spirit distilled and refined a thousand fold. This is the value and necessity of practice. Each repetition a new distillation.

There is no better feeling than helping someone in real need, but there is no worse feeling than being taken advantage of by someone who is not.

More heart!  Intensify and empassion what you're doing by applying the rhythmic insistence of the heartbeat.

To live a life that revolves around the self – how sad!

Put your back into it!   Work from core and ground.

There comes a point in the work when you just get stuck. You hit a plateau from which you cannot for the life of you escape. What is required at this point is not more work, more of the same, but a change of heart. The work must start to come from a different place within you. Not from your old end-gaining ambitious self but from simple love – for work, for life, for being – from the heart.

Breathe!   Stop holding the breath and unify mind and body by consciously breathing.

Je ne sais quoi. It is the mysterious element – spirit – that we seek to stimulate, invite, welcome, admit, not in order to know it but because without it things are just a little dull. It is what turns an ordinary experience into an event – a thing to remember, retell and relive – a teaching. The teacher has the ability to generate such events but only when stimulated, so if you are beginning to find the teaching monotonous and predictable the chances are the teacher feels exactly the same way about you.

The stuff we really need to deal with we cannot see, not because it's hiding from us but because it's been staring us in the face so long.

gravity is the field of relations that keeps risked beings hanging in the balance

Don't buy into the supersessionist propaganda of the bourgeoisie. The universal assumption that civilised is better than both primitive and barbaric because it developed later. If anything the opposite it true: civilisation, and its insistence that what makes us human (special) is our mind, have taken us further and further from both our source of vitality – our body and our spirit – and any potential for lasting balance with the natural world.

Eat not for taste – immediate pleasure – but for balance. We must be wise enough to sense the future benefit of present right action because this is what makes it right.

Without a light touch I inevitably besmirch, and the world is as I make it rather than as it is.

Clearly distinguish full and empty.  This principle is key to the higher levels of Taiji. It acknowledges emptiness and absence as fully functional aspects of being just as much as fullness and presence. Without a full anchor the empty would evaporate and disappear, and without an empty aspect the full would never move.

Many of us become musicians in part because we feel out of step with the world.

Ego is block to energy. It's what stops you freely giving and freely receiving. It's what stops you being free. It's what stops you being.

Without that constant, insistent battering from the teacher – week in, week out – the work will always slip into what you want it to be rather than what it is. Eventually, though, you will get a taste for the flavour of truth, and then you are a master and no longer need the teacher so regularly.

The world of mind is basically sad.

How can one even pretend to have begun this lifetime's project of deconstruction without touch at its core? Touch changes everything because it disarms, and suddenly one is thrust into a world of feeling and sensuality and energy where the mind is a positive hindrance.

joy is nothing other than the feeling of reality

It is not enough to merely deconstruct the self, one must deconstruct the very foundations of one's existence. Not to destabilise life, necessarily, but to find its un-deconstructible essence hidden beneath the pretension.

It's those qualities the middle-class feel gives them a head start – wealth, privilege, education, niceness – that holds them back when it comes to spiritual work. At the foundation of real work is faith, loyalty, commitment and above all humility, qualities largely absent from the arsenal of those who live to pick and choose.

Working on the off chance.

to be aware of the beloved over his whole perceptible surface, as a swimmer is of the sea

Humility is a simple matter of embodiment: having the courage and good sense to reside in the body rather than the mind. Only then do we encounter the real.

Artificial intelligence. Is that a tautology or an oxymoron?

We cannot even imagine how to be humble.

Taiji becomes spiritual when you realise the enemy is your self.

A lifetime of meditation and all you have to show for yourself is peace and quiet.

through thick and thin

Root anchors but also feeds.

In my best moments I think "Life has passed me by" and I am content.

Rock the boat.

Lazy people always manage to convince themselves that work is unnecessary.

this great project of hermeneutic trouble-making

Ego is a parasite and the work is our medicine.

Striving for nobility with an irreverent sense of mischief.

An event questions experience. Practice aims to produce events as much as gather experience.

The incessant chatter in our heads drowns out the voice of God. Or, if that word offends, smothers the conscience – our inherent sense of justice – of what should be done. Without a conscience we forever confuse need and want.

The greatest distress: The distress of distresslessness.

sit down

shut  up

& listen

Unpractical philosophy: being rather than doing.

All excuses are pathetic, and all rationalisations are excuses.

Laziness and forgetfulness – the curses of mediocrity. Both an arrogance: I know best. The antidote – our well-worn imperative – Forget self and become one with the Dao.

Fall into the experience. Like falling into a lake.

If there is no higher authority than the self then there is no possibility of going beyond the self.

grounded in hiddenness

Be very quiet and very still and see what looms from the shadows.

A practical philosophy: doing and making rather than thinking and contemplating.

Just so.

It may sound strange but I can honestly say that after 37 years of rigorous (if not vigorous) practice, I am finally ready to start Taiji. Nearly forty years of groundwork. My teacher did warn me that it would take twenty five years, and given my stubborn stupidity and decided lack of talent, that easily inflates to what it is. Well, it seems persistence does pay off so don't give up!

Take someone who doesn’t keep score, who’s not looking to be richer, or afraid of losing, who has not the slightest interest even in his own personality: He’s free.

When we talk of spirit it has nothing to do with the spirit of philosophy or religion. Neither Hegelian Geist nor the Holy Spirit. It is Spirit of Vitality – the life force. Bergson had an inkling when he coined the term élan vital. The phrase that sticks in my mind is Duchamp's sparks of the desire-magneto.

Don't confuse spirit with will. They are neither similar nor opposite. They are incommensurable.

Free spirit. This is what we mean by freedom.

The human heart is happiest in worship.

How could I stop after all these years? It's what I do and what I am.

Fight for balance.

emptiness & luminosity

Every world is framed.

Like a moth endlessly encircling a flame.

what is held 

in common 

the pure land

the innocence of becoming

Do you love the principles enough to live them? Even if it means real sacrifice? Because this is what's required if you want to go all the way.

efforts to comprehend tend to shrink what they seek to know

With work (practice) comes insight. 

With more work comes breakthrough. 

With much more work comes consolidation.

From emptiness comes spirit to which it soon returns. It's the energy and material tagging along for the ride that linger.

Taiji, like most bodywork with a vaguely spiritual bent, is all about releasing chronic tension. This seems an impossibility at the time – how let go of something that has been with you since you don't remember when? You need what my teacher called foresight – the ability to finely feel how it would be without that tension. This is what makes humans special – their strange ability to slip time and sense their future – their soul. And this is why my teacher hated Ram Dass's indulgence: Be Here Now. For him it wasn't a matter of rejecting past and future and living only in the present, but a matter of embracing the whole of time with the fullness of one's being.

more a process than a thing

The classic process of improvement is almost always built on forward leaps and backslidings.

Meditation: an n-dimensional space emptied of all rancour.

Free of the voice in the head. This is how we interpret freedom. Then, and only then, are we in a position to listen to what that voice has been fearfully obliterating.

Burn your bridges. If there's an escape route, and push comes to shove, you'll take it. Hedging bets may be prudent but it's already lost the real game.

The ability to make and keep promises. The mark of a good student.

There is a touch whose teaching is the phenomenology of joy without reason.

When class is over and you are saying goodbye to teacher, all they wish to hear is, "Thank you, I shall go away and work on that." (A note of sincerity goes down well too.) The last thing they want to hear is how you feel.

a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own

Softness is not weakness. Softness is having the strength – trust and faith – to let yourself be vulnerable every moment of the day.

Throw caution to the wind.

names expose the namer more than they limn what's caught the eye

Abdominal breathing (contracting the belly on the outbreath) massages the sacrum and stimulates the craniosacral pump.

Every teacher presents a teaching, but a good teacher seduces students to take the teaching to heart.

What you accumulate weighs you down and holds you back.

Listen to the body – breathing, energy, presence – the way a mother listens to her newborn. A matter of instinct rather than choice.