Ruthlessness

If joy is the emotion that accompanies and encourages the freeing and opening of the heart then what is the emotion when the heart closes and bears in to finish a task? Ruthlessness, if that is indeed an emotion. Ruth is the noun from the verb to rue – to regret, and is usually taken as pity, distress or grief. So ruthless is the lack of these – no pity, no compassion, no feeling, no sentiment, but also no regret, no blame, no clinging attachment. There is a clean clarity to ruthlessness – it just gets the job done with no fuss and no concern, allowing you to pass uncluttered to the next. My teacher is always at pains to point out that the only real enemy for the student is themselves, especially those parts getting in the way of natural functioning. To tackle and fight these requires real ruthlessness because the one thing we are all generally in love with is ourselves, especially those parts keeping us the way we are – those parts we assume define us. The great master uses the Natural Process, not his self-image, as his reference. The Natural Process cannot really be felt or observed so in a way the great master is operating constantly in the dark – blind. The only thing he has to guide him is his heart which, through years of work, he has cleared and developed. The heart knows, much more than the mind, and yet for the average person the mind is constantly overriding it. The master doesn't let this happen – he has abandoned the internal dialogue in order to dwell permanently in the world of energy. To get to this state he has had to regularly apply the knife of ruthlessness to excise those aspects of self that reveal themselves, through the work, to be impeding his spiritual progress. When the heart is worked it will move on, into new relationships and out of old ones; this is the natural way. The ruthless warrior refuses to be fettered, but he also knows that any fetters are of his own making, so he doesn't have it in him to apportion blame.

Ruthlessness is the mood that immediately precedes the battle. It is a drawing in, a marshalling and gathering of energy so that you have something to explode with when the enemy is upon you. Your ruthlessness loads the spring, your abandon releases it. Breathing, or more accurately, reverse breathing.

Spine

A fascinating comment on the Spine post below which I quote here. It's reassuring to receive confirmation.

Interesting that this should be on your blog, because I am studying to be a chiropractor. I am learning the McTimoney style of chiropractic. This weekend, we were at college and learning the advanced adjustments for the coccyx and shoulder. One of the adjusments I made was on the coccyx of a fellow student, and aferwards his energy was completely changed. It was great to see. Another adjustment that was made on my shoulders also had an effect on the vertebra of my middle thoracic spine, this had an effect on me and opened up my heart more than it ever has been. I now actively want to know about every one I see. It's great. So similar to what you are talking about.
Rich

Engage the Heart

Discussing with John yesterday the phrase “Forget self and become one with the Tao” I pointed out that many artists and creative people forget self regularly in their work (they have to for the work to come alive), and yet they are often more selfish than average. John explained that it's not really forgetting self that is important but putting the other person first – you forget self by remembering the other, not by rousing your (creative) spirit. He has been stressing this a lot lately, partly I suspect because he knows that I live alone without intimate interactions, so there is a vital part of my humanity that doesn't get exercised.

John just visited me to say that he is not prepared to use the phrase “Forget self” again because he doesn't care to mention or acknowledge a negative (even two negatives together don't quite make a positive). I suggested “Remember the heart” as an alternative which he liked, so we picked up the dictionary to investigate the word remember, which means to bring into the mind, or call to mind, which isn't quite what we wanted. We tried other words but eventually, after over an hour of rooting through the big book, he decided that “Engage the heart” was nearly perfect.

John has always stressed to me that it is vital to have a deep feeling and love for words and the language, especially their history and origins. Stilling the thinking chattering talking mind is not a matter of denying the language but of passing through it to the time words first began to condense from the energetic environment. Passing into the world of energy is like going back in time, through your ancestry, or the lineage, or your primal dragon body. When John uses words well he sinks into the energetic space he is attempting to elucidate and waits for the words to congeal and make themselves present. They come as sounds as much as meanings. “Slake at nature's breeding edge.” Why the word slake which, as Gerrilyn has pointed out, implies slacken, which isn't what he meant at all? But if you say the phrase the sound means exactly – it sounds perfect: menacing and intense.

Elephant hawk moth on my curtain.

Spine

The heart precedes you. The struggle is to make this the fundamental fact of your life. The heart should naturally lead. If it doesn't then there may be a slight structural collapse in the spine – gravity (your own weight) may be getting you down. Run your hand up your spine from the coccyx to see if there are any kinks, any vertebrae that seem to protrude slightly more than others. There's usually at least one (round about mid-back on me) and if you gently press it in and feel how you'd have to be, energetically and emotionally, to have it correctly in line, then the heart will take a lift and the cloud of self concern will clear from your eyes. The spine should be supple and fluid. It is structured in such a way that movement naturally passes up and down it in waves – like a whip or snake (the snake within). Any kink or blockage will inhibit this natural flow and energy will not be able to pass properly from the sacrum to the heart – the heart will not be receiving the correct nourishment or impetus it should from the simple fact of your posture, your vertical alignment within the field of gravity, and your movements (breathing and wandering). We encourage the energy to rise into the heart by sinking each energy centre into the one beneath it – into its source of power. The sacrum should feel that it is beneath the feet, the heart in the sacrum and the mid-brain in the heart. Without these fundamental connexions your physical movements will lack power, your heart will lack impetus and the stamina to see through its many generous impulses, and the mind will run away with itself into completely artificial (imagined) realms that have no real bearing on anything.

Energy

Always struck after teaching just how important it is to have an excess of energy. Unless you are overflowing with the stuff your interactions will lack power and your living will lack meaning. When two people get together properly and begin to communicate, energy is offered up from each and pooled into the entity which is the togetherness. If enough energy is combined then that entity comes alive and takes each of you for an amazing ride. This is the way life is meant to be – the natural way – because that ride is itself a teaching – it'll show you things you need to see and experience in order to develop. It's like an aspect of grace – creating your own luck. Normal social interactions, especially here in England, lack any power – just small talk – all designed to pass social pleasantries from one insipid vessel to another, maintaining a polite distance which actually belies a complete lack of real interest, in fact a complete lack of real anything because to engage with reality requires energy – lots of it. No intensity, no danger – no life. Without enough energy to be truly generous you are not only denuded but also denatured – you cannot function naturally. You have to try to get used to seeing yourself not as a physical lump containing mind and feelings, but as energy – lots of it – bursting to express itself through work to change your world – yourself and those you interact with. Even if you feel tired and not particularly energetic try not to let the way you feel get you (your energy) down. The heart – the part of you that offers up your energy – must be light. The worst thing of all is a heavy heart. When the heart is truly light then energy leaps up and out of the upper sternum (just below the sternal notch), passing upwards into your face, flooding your nostrils and eyes with a honeyed scent and rose coloured hue, changing the way you see the world – you start to see energy and heart by virtue of the fact that such has flooded your senses. The tragedy of most lives is that people lack energy and vitality because they are using it all to keep the world just the way they are conditioned to believe it should be. The life we live is not our own. It is inherited. The teacher reveals the stultifying and enervating effects of living this inherited life and offers a new energizing approach, and still students refuse to listen. The Tai Chi class is not the place you go to learn new postures and techniques, to then go away and practice in the same way you do everything else – badly – but a place of transformation and growth. The energy created within the class by the willing and open hearted engagement of all participants, coordinated and led by the teacher, is sacred and needs to be treated as such. To go away and use it incorrectly is a sin. It is offering you a challenge – “Use me to become me.” This is probably the most difficult riddle you will ever have to wrestle with, and no amount of thinking will solve it. You must just practice with the same open hearted willing that you offered the class. You must allow your own work to seduce you the way the class always does. And you must develop strategies to enable you to give your best energy to your Tai Chi, the most sensible one being to make sure you get enough sleep and then practice immediately upon rising in the morning. Then you will start to dwell in the positive space where energy naturally accumulates and gathers.

Poem

When I am feeling depressed and anxious sullen
all you have to do is take your clothes off
and all is wiped away revealing life's tenderness
that we are flesh and breathe and are near us
as you are really as you are I become as I
really am alive and knowing vaguely what is
and what is important to me above the intrusions
of incident and accidental relationships
which have nothing to do with my life

when I am in your presence I feel life is strong
and will defeat all its enemies and all of mine
and all of yours and yours in you and mine in me
sick logic and feeble reasoning are cured
by the perfect symmetry of your arms and legs
spread out making an eternal circle together
creating a golden pillar beside the Atlantic
the faint line of hair dividing your torso
gives my mind rest and emotions their release
into the infinite air where since once we are
together we always will be in this life come what may

Frank O'Hara

Energy of Soul

A consequence of aligning sensitivity to an active heart rather than feelings is that it precedes you, like your heart, scouting the terrain and ferreting out potential interest. It is always obvious when someone with a good heart enters your presence because that is precisely what they do – their heart warmly and carefully enters your being, well before you are physically close enough to shake hands or engage in battle. Putting the other first is our technique not just for forgetting self, but for getting our energy out there – working (for others). Our solo work – the moving meditation – settles and cleanses, eradicating needy insecurities and developing connexion with our sources of power: the earth and the heavens, ancestry and lineage, and our energy, spirit, heart and soul, so that when the time comes we can give unconditionally and be that pillar of strength and support our world requires. The student must realize that internal progress at Tai Chi is wholly dependent on selfless giving – being more concerned for the other's progress than your own – the bodhisattva vow – and this concern must be genuine – must come from the heart – otherwise it may as well not be there. The solo work and the teaching fine tune your motivation – realign your gaze to what my teacher calls perfection's soul, perfection being that idealized but very real space where everything is softly and beautifully connected and alive – the space where connected and alive mean exactly the same thing. The soul of this perfection is simply the mysterious source of such power – a spring from which we may all drink if we so wish. Continuing progress will only take place if the student's energies are increasingly focusing in on this source, and away from elsewhere. This doesn't mean that the student needs to devote more and more time to Tai Chi. In fact if they have the heart they will find the soul of perfection in whatever they do and may never have to aimlessly wave their arms around again. However, years of instruction and hard work are required before the student can honestly and selflessly (are these two words equivalent?) connect to this source because the social ethos of survival equals self-gain completely works against it. It is very difficult to truly appreciate and understand that perfection's soul – the source of everything including your own immortality – is your life's work and meaning. The quality of the work you do is dependent on the quality of the energy you put into it. Try energy of soul.

Draw me home to yielding ways.
John Kells

The student needs two qualities really. Heart and guts. The heart to see what needs to be done and the guts to endure and digest the work.

Heartful effort's endless enterprise.
John Kells

For You

New York’s lovely weather hurts my forehead
here where clean snow is sitting, wetly
round my ears, as hand-in-glove and
head-to-head with Joe, I go reeling
up First Avenue to Klein’s. Christmas
is sexy there. We feel soft sweaters
and plump rumpled skirts we’d like to try.
It was gloomy being broke today, and baffled
in love: Love, why do you always take my heart away?
But then the soft snow came sweetly falling down
and head in the clouds, feet soaked in mush
I rushed hatless into the white and shining air,
thankful to find release in heaven’s care.

Ted Berrigan

Sensitivity

The job at hand is to make the heart supremely active rather than receptive. If it is just receptive then feelings will crash in and constantly knock the sensitive student off balance. I've known such students crippled by their sensitivity. In our work sensitivity is considered a useful tool – an aspect of talent – but not a vital prerequisite because it can be developed. The good student is the one who feels the truth of what the teacher says so deeply that they practice all the time. This feeling has nothing to do with sensitivity – it is instead a matter of heart and destiny.

In my experience, sensitive people are often highly tuned to their own feelings but oblivious to those of others. It often belies a selfishness – an insensitivity to others. My teacher has had numerous students with sensitive powers – clairvoyants etc and he said that generally their powers were real and often considerable, but the mistake they made was in thinking that what they felt was all that was there. They weren't stimulated and amazed by the magic and mystery of what lay before them but by their own feelings. Sensitivity often becomes yet another self-obsession. To try and make sense of what you feel is the wrong approach because it doesn't really matter – who cares? When in front of another person what is more important to you – what you feel of them, or them – the actual person. There is a big difference. It's the use you put yourself to that matters and for that you need heart.

To feel the suffering of others is considered a high human quality (in fact all animals do it – they just don't make a song and dance about it). My teacher told me once of a Tibetan teacher of his who had been meditating regularly with a great master in Tibet before the Chinese invasion. On one occasion a dog outside let out a terrific yelp because a child had thrown a rock at it. The master moved slightly and the dog stopped crying. A large bruise then gradually began to appear on the master's body. His compassion had simply taken the injury from the dog and he had borne it himself. Not only could he feel suffering, he also had the personal power to do something about it – his heart was able to leap out and swallow, and it was so well trained that it did so automatically.

The model we always come back to in our work is that of yielding. How do you survive the onslaught of energy impinging and impressing on you all the time? This energy could be the intense suffering of a poor animal in your presence or it could be a deadly attack from your arch enemy, for us there is no difference – it is all energy, and life is too short to train adequately for any more than one eventuality. We have to have a single response that works for everything. That response is to leap out with the heart, join (connect) and transform. The heart is beautifully appropriate and has its own rules and morality which have nothing to do with those of society or the mind. If you manage to let go sufficiently for the heart to be free in its actions then the transformation it undergoes and initiates will be enough to both manage the situation and in some sense to initiate the next. At no point do we have time or inclination to observe and judge what is happening. We are too embroiled, too involved, too interested, too active to register whether that energy is from a dying child or from an aggressive drunken lout. In fact we only really begin to have problems with sensitivity when the mind starts to register what it is that we actually feel. This use of the mind should only kick in after the event is well over, when it may be useful in distilling a principle or insight from the occasion that can be incorporated into the work. This is itself a process of transformation – having the heart and intelligence to use your experiences and in that use to change them into an aspect of the work. A bit like sitting down to write a poem about an intense experience you've had and in the process generating an even more intense experience – the poem.

Ghost

When talking to myself,
I take a tone I’ve learned
 
from you – not of boyish charm,
but probing and severe –
 
to say, some things are clear
and some withdrawn from sight.
 
A cyclist is only such
while seated on a bike,
 
a sleeper while asleep.
These forms are only forms
 
fulfilled, as you are now
no more than this – a tone.

Devin Johnston

Emotions

Emotions and moods can be utilized in the work to train the heart to connect and focus. For example the emotion that accompanies the freeing and opening out of your energy by heart (your own or others) is joy. So, to free your energy simply induce a feeling of joy – be joyful. It's the difference between being a victim of your moods & feelings or the master of them. Think of it as putting on a new costume (the word induce is related to the Latin induere which means to put on clothes). Of course to change the way you feel (are) just like that isn't so easy, especially if for whatever reason you're riddled with worry or anger or doubt (fear). What it requires firstly is the realization that most of what you appear to be is not the real you at all. The real you is the essential sparkle deep down (in the heart) that appears in glints and glimmers regularly but fitfully. When you're working well and correctly this sparkle ignites and informs your energy which flows unimpeded through and into whatever you are doing. Everything else (thoughts, ideas, opinions, habits, assumptions, etc.), which we lump together in the term self, tend to constrain or redirect this process. The self always thinks it knows best. The hegemony of self. It's like a strict parent directing a child – over-riding the child's heart with alien and unnatural impositions. Eventually, the child's heart becomes so plastered over that she loses touch with it and becomes instead her conditioning, or her resentful reaction to it. The job of the teacher is to break through this shell and reconnect the student to their heart. It is the most difficult job on earth, for both the teacher and the student. The problem is that the cultural environment we have created for ourselves is generally of the self and conspires in every way possible (especially through distraction and over-stimulation of the mind and senses) to prevent our heart succeeding in its revolutionary overthrow of its overbearing oppressor, even to the point of convincing the heart that it should naturally take second place to the ego. The outcome of this is that a stupendous effort is required to even begin to burst through. Courage. Cor (heart) and rage. The word gives a clear indication of the intensity and fury with which the student must redirect their energies, and where that energy must come from, if they wish to realize their humanity.

Emotional strength is the attaining of some degree of mastery over them. Not letting them run away with themselves or with you (indulgence), understanding how they layer, transform and oscillate (yin/yang – realizing that they are all in essence the same – just intensity of feeling – and so readily transformable), and putting them to use for you in the work. They are essential because without them you are not operating from heart. The heart feels – deeply. It laughs, it weeps. It can be gentle or fierce. It can love and it can hate. But above all it is vulnerable. It is very easy to knock and hurt an open heart. In a way you could say that this is the problem with the human race – that so much seeming success is attendant upon a closed, hard and even empty heart. The only healthy way around this is to train as a warrior – to always head into the fray with no possibility of retreat. When forwards is natural to you then your heart is safe and you will eventually accumulate enough energy and power to slip through heart to deeper realms. The training begins with encouraging heart, which is naturally unselfish and connective, to leap into the activity. To do things with heart. Forgetting self. For this joy is essential.

Remember the tortures of learning Tai Chi? I also recall my teacher telling me that the real torture starts after you've learnt it. How to make it meaningful? Work with others as often as possible and let the partner work and the solo work bounce off each other.

Slake at nature's breeding edge.
John Kells

Touch

Every particle of you should ache to touch and be touched.
John Kells

There's real teaching in that sentence. A liquid touch. Imagine every cell in you is reaching out to touch whatever it is you're connecting to. Touch is the key to becoming softer. Without it you'll have sensitivity but not the experience that is and becomes softness.