the only thing to fear is conformity

Our minds are trained at an early age to differentiate and discriminate, and that kills flow and process. Through the work we retrain the mind to integrate and see movement and connexion everywhere.

I am in the world the way the eye is in its visual field.

spirit & libido

without them you may as well be dead

if you wish to live an excessively long life then don't grow up

above us only sky

A life shunning the superficial attractions of society and ego, and delving into depths of mind and soul. Lonely but meant to be.

Ego-centeredness is not individuality at all.

The good student is deeply traumatised. So much so that any healing and rehabilitation is out of the question. Yet it is precisely their heart's ache for healing (wholeness) that draws them to the teaching. Once found, they recognise immediately that this is their one and only chance, and they begin to work as though possessed. A matter of heart, not head.

there is no better image for pure mind than a clear blue sky : an open aetheric expanse unsullied by content

returning home and finding nothing but ghosts

opinions make a barricade to protect the ego

An open mind is a prerequisite to an open heart.

freedom in exile – free of ego – the only freedom

possessed & obsessed

getting to the bottom of things

meditation: sinking into deep time; sinking into deep mind; sinking deep

Morning and afternoon are clasped together
And North and South are an intrinsic couple
And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers
That walk away as one in the greenest body.

meditation: head-time in heart-space

becoming creature

moving ever netherward

practice is an acquired taste but with patience and perseverance it eventually becomes the only thing you want to do

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

when I settle into a rooted posture then that posture naturally projects my spirit up and out

living on a whim

the eternal return   (about the only thing that is eternal)

when I loosen my hips they widen with a wave of relaxation (energy) that naturally returns and gathers in the dantien

Maybe our loss is the miracle.

thinking to oneself is a way of rejecting the world – it is violent and offensive

from cogito to respiro

to wake up to energy we MUST forget self

meditation: shifting attention from the thinking mind to the breathing body

Above the tree line there are sky blue butterflies.

every natural thing is breathing – in a process of exchange and communication

becoming tabula rasa

don't shit on the shrine

meditation: become the breathing, become the breath, of aire and angels, a cloud of gnats

Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.

meditation: emptying mind of its contents in order to experience pure mind – the void

the Real is that which we cannot control

technology protects us from reality, from the Real

Before you can abandon self you must come to the Earth-shattering realisation that life is not about you but about connexion. Once you are convinced of this your mind and body will naturally relax.

you always know when you are being mindful, and you never know when you’re not

A great teaching, when practised assiduously over a lifetime, will take you on an unexpected journey: out of self and into the Void.

ego is a technological construction

in order to think we have to get tense in a way that robs us of intimacy

The problem with intelligence is that it sees more than most and then assumes that's all there is to see. This its arrogance.

Initially, I attracted some criticism, but you just have to accept it, drink some cold water and get on with your life.

our sense of self crushes the heart – kills anything tender

becoming feral

thinking divests life of spirit
practice invests life with spirit

Our heads are full of many voices: prejudices, fears, conditioning, culture, conscience, opinions. Best ignore them all and activate the heart.

neque cogito neque sum

gentle spirit is poetic and erotic – it is what sensualises the world

mind as continuum

the work is radical and revolutionary – all about rooting and returning – the return to root

What's difficult about Taiji is that it demands change. A change of body: stronger, more supple, more relaxed; but also, and more radically, a change of mind: less indulgent, noisy and slack, and more empty, ruthless and incisive.

The path ends in the age-old, leads to a deep immanence, to an everyday world of ‘men and women, young and old, pan and kettle, cat and spoon’.

life without poetry is not worth living so develop a heart that sees poetry everywhere

keep the home fires burning

ego is a surface effect – meditate and slip beneath

Connecting to nature doesn't mean pleasant trips in the countryside. It means cutting through the ego to find your own nature.

free of the complicity between anthropos and theos

first and foremost be in the world cheerfully rather than critically – always encouraging, always enheartening

nothing beats good honest hard work

divest the world of its depression with your ready smile

Internal work doesn't accrue knowledge, expertise or power. It simply empties of self.

Leave symmetry to the cemetery.

the bourgeoisie: healthy bodies, weak spirits, noxious minds

let things take your breath away

meditation: opening out to time & space rather than closing into self

alight with light & lightness

it's as close as we ever get to the Real – to pure spirit

Slip out of darkness, it is time.

ego makes copies of things and those copies can be very convincing but they are never real

assume that everything the teacher says has pedagogical function

if not you'll find yourself picking & choosing

cheerful enough to notice what rises

if you can't feel energy it's because your mind is blocking it

sink shoulders
elbows heavy
loosen hips
concentrate spirit

everything depends upon how the vertebrae stack

technology, from language on, largely serves to disconnect us from natural process

good posture naturally praises god
a clear channel between earth and heaven

Teacher's job is to awaken your spirit. If that means upsetting your tender bourgeois sensibilities then so be it.

Miss one day of practice and it takes three days to make up the loss.

There is no more natural process than prayer. This is why we find it so difficult to countenance. We are further from nature than we have ever been.

you either feel it or you don't

in our game scepticism (the inability to believe without proof) holds you back

I have a Canadian friend with a terminally ill mother who sent me a message a week ago: "On Tuesday at 18:30 my mother is exercising her right to die with dignity." Even time of death is now potentially under our control.

While deep time has reduced our lives to insignificant spans it has also given us totems to usher us back towards an expansive eternity.

the only choice really is whether to be a worker or a wanker – practice hard or please yourself

working against the odds – this requires spirit

with practice we honour the teaching and the dao
without practice we show disrespect

Control freaks don't make for soft soulful people, and nowadays we godless bourgeoisie are nothing if not control freaks.

The sky wanted / a misty sip from me

Aim for excellence. Aim to excel, not your peers or your competitors necessarily but yourself. This will always require spirit, unless you cheat.

spirit leads down a choiceless path

only when you throw yourself into the beckoning arms of fate do you escape the limitations of a fearful mind

Before my time, my teacher had a couple of Tibetan meditation masters. He asked them once if they understood yin and yang. The geshe said of course he did because he had read about it in the books. My teacher told me that that was the point where he lost faith in Tibetan Buddhism. The Dao cannot be understood with the mind, and certainly not by reading about it. It must instead be entered into by stopping the mind and feeling it with the body and particularly in the heart. To know Dao you must become energy.

from the clandestine to the intimate

a designed life, a life with free choice at every turn, a life which reflects my beautiful ego and little else, that, for me, would be a fate worse than death

a life with love of god (adoration – what I call spirit) at its core

the modern mind casts a pall

Reality is inaccessible to intelligence, to the thinking mind. Only a faithful heart gets close.

Reticence is a kind of shade, the foliage around a sacred grove.

what we know protects us from what we don't (want to) know

channel ardour rather than suppress it

the self, subject, ego is a disconnected (self-contained) bubble, operated by a lonely, frightened mind

Don't think that scientists investigate reality. They investigate models of reality.

True knowledge is not attained by thinking. It is what you are; it is what you become.

in order to think to ourselves we must first cut off from the world

this our violence – we have no idea how much that hurts, all round

teacher makes it possible but you do the work

spirit will rise when you're put on the spot

without spirit it is impossible to be (in) the present moment – you'll always be behind the time, if only by a fraction

It may seem that we came to sit together almost as an accident, but it was the innumerable efforts of our own direct ancestors, their seeking of the way, which is our own inner dynamic, which brought us to the practice.

if you want spirit in your life, you're gonna have to make sacrifices

there's no two ways about it

special affects

Our worlds are so packed with lifeless man-made objects that we no longer have the ability to hear natural things talking to us. So next time you amble down a tree-lined boulevard, feel each tree you pass gently but insistently tugging at you. Only when you wake up to the natural world pulling at you – attracting your attention – will you develop your own natural attraction.

The first principle of true teaching is that nothing can be taught.

I've been teaching now for 35 years, and it's finally dawned on me that there is no such thing as a tense body. It is the mind that is tense. The mind is our own worst enemy. It poisons everything it touches, including our own body. This is why the most pressing task for all of us is to relax the mind. A relaxed mind is quiet, soft, connected, compassionate – and above all, listening. And it's touch is always healing.

practice creates a climate of hope

the internal cannot be spoken, except through poetry

happiness is not self-satisfaction
happiness is spirit about to take the plunge

We face such a big task, so naturally we sit down for a while.

meditation: feeling the different minds – headmind, heartmind, bodymind, spiritmind

your practice is a laboratory

becoming hunter – a hunter of/with spirit

I fell in love with poetry at school. The English teacher would sometimes give us a handout at the end of class containing a short poem. Our task was to write something about it for homework. When I got home from school I would read the poem through, and panic would immediately set in because I really didn't have a clue. Like my daughter says when I read her poetry: Dad, it's just random words! But, with repeated reading, maybe with rests between, meaning would slowly reveal itself, and eventually I would understand the poem. Not fully, by any means, but enough to be able to write something intelligent about it. But as the year went on I realised that I loved the poem much more before I had unpacked it, before I had robbed it of mystery with my clever dissecting mind.

a lonely predator of the adoration

the teacher's main job is not to teach but to awaken your spirit

spirit then becomes your teacher – the only reliable guide along the way

meditation: mind quiet, spirit smouldering

meditation: the easiest thing in the world to do

Talking (including talking to oneself) induces tension. Relaxed people say the barest minimum. Language misrepresents. I am anxious that I will not succeed to say what I want to say, partly because I lack facility with language and partly because I'm not sure that I actually know what I want to say. Plus I am anxious that I will be misunderstood or not believed.

It’s a rite of passage, to move past the pain.

we talk to ourselves (in our heads) because we are lonely, and we are lonely because we have forgotten how to connect to the natural world

a way of working that re-enchants the world – poetry

the teacher confounds expectations – that's their job

Whenever I get feedback on what I write here, which is very rare, what becomes clear is that people have misunderstood what I am trying to say. Partly because they read selectively, partly because my vocabulary doesn't correspond to theirs, and partly because we inhabit very different worlds. We use language to communicate difficult ideas across unbridgeable chasms, and it's never successful. We'd be better off talking about the weather.

once upon a time is always this moment

feelings are for the other
emotions are for ourselves