Loss we
need to

cleave to
that which

we are
are still

to be

John Phillips

Peace

“The most valuable thing in the world is peace of mind.” JK

Only when you achieve peace of mind do you begin to touch energy and your potential. By energy here I mean the beginnings of things – the gentle compassionate space where “begin” “touch” “energy” and “potential” all mean pretty much the same thing. It is the space the heart wells into. It should be at least as big as the world you inhabit. In fact, internally it is that world. The struggle is to extend it. To begin this struggle you must first have acquired or located a seed or core of peace within from which to operate. This is the first stage. Before you can love others you must learn to love yourself – you must locate the real within in order to connect with the real in the other. This is love, in a sense, when your reality touches and stimulates another, extending and enriching it, and vice versa. Love brings peace – it wakens you to the internal.

Sacrifice means doing away with whatever interrupts or limits peace of mind (requires a high degree of honesty).
Suffering means bearing the consequences of the resulting connectedness (living the implications of that connectedness).

heart

                 who
               loved you
               clean
    & selflessly true
               just as I would

Peace

Revealed religion makes comfort, it doesn't make peace. JK

Peace comes from bravely facing what's there - doing what's right.
It requires sacrifice and suffering.
Sacrifice means giving up things you hold dear.
Suffering means bearing pain and distress.
These are not negative - they are the price of connexion - they are the confirmation.
Peace isn't something that comes after the sacrifice and the suffering, it's what you feel when you stop resisting.

Comfort is another word for avoidance.

Sacred Tree

Today the word "weird" means strange, unexplainable, odd. Something that is weird is beyond the scope of normal understanding. But in the ancient cultures of Europe, the word had a very different status. The original, archaic form meant in Anglo-Saxon "destiny", but also "power", or "magic" or "prophetic knowledge". "Wyrd" was still the "unexplainable", but the Unexplainable was the Sacred, the very grounding of existence, the force which underlay all of life. And one way in which it manifested was in trees, which were regarded as sacred by the peoples of ancient Europe.

Brian Bates

In Norse mythology, Yggdrasil ("The Terrible One's Horse"), also called the World Tree, is the giant ash tree that links and shelters all the worlds. Beneath the three roots the realms of Asgard, Jotunheim, and Niflheim are located. Three wells lie at its base: the Well of Wisdom (Mímisbrunnr), guarded by Mimir; the Well of Fate (Urdarbrunnr), guarded by the Norns; and the Hvergelmir (Roaring Kettle), the source of many rivers. Four deer run across the branches of the tree and eat the buds; they represent the four winds. There are other inhabitants of the tree, such as the squirrel Ratatosk ("swift teeth"), a notorious gossip, and Vidofnir ("tree snake"), the golden cock that perches on the topmost bough. The roots are gnawed upon by Nidhogg and other serpents. On the day of Ragnarok, the fire giant Surt will set the tree on fire.
Micha F. Lindemans

heart

      Each
       one
        has
    history
    repeating

The value of a great teacher is not in spurring work that looks like the teacher's but in fuelling a sense of purpose.
From starting at zero - catalogue to the Black Mountain College exhibition at the Arnolfini, Bristol

heart

    I shall not limit
    myself
   I shall not hesitate
      From
       the inside out:

No return

The most important qualities to possess (or be possessed by) are firstly the nagging feeling that the next stage/level is always pending (the inability to ignore what's staring you in the face), and secondly the courage to enter its world (which is unimaginably different to anything you have ever experienced) with no possibility of going back. The first of these is the rarest, and the most important. The second can be developed but I'm not sure the first can – you either have a feeling for the beyond or you don't. Both are aspects of heart. The first is the quality you have in common with your teacher – it is what brought you together and it is what makes your togetherness so rich and productive – a questing. The second is the quality your teacher hopes to help you develop and it isn't the usual courage. It is all about shedding some aspect of self in order to make yourself worthy of the next level, not leaping into the fray fully armed and ready for battle. To achieve this you need relaxation (to relax the grip you have on your present reality), the energy and passion to shake yourself loose of that reality (this is like an irritable fierceness), and then the humility and sense of wonder to enter the new world naked and pure, at least initially. My teacher has always said that the next level is the most difficult to achieve – closer to the bone – and that as you progress more attention, energy and heart needs to be put into your endeavours in order to achieve that elusive level. If you have the heart to devote your life to the work then, as you age, these levels approach with increasing regularity and with more and more subtly and immediacy until each successive moment of your living is an unfolding of a new world. This is the way reality actually is and it is force of habit that denies us it. When you meet someone who is so connected they have a deep relaxation – the feeling that nothing phases them – but also a childlike excitement at pretty much everything. A seeming paradox – they have managed to settle into a process that denies settlement – the natural process of constant becoming.

Skyhorse flies, gallops

 What's nice about the mythic is

    the only direction is the improbable

 and inside

        fleet-footed

               mane tossing



               we get quite certain

Alice Jones

Extreme Directions really is a beautiful book. I'd recommended to anyone serious with their Tai Chi, or the internal.

Hydration

Never let anything get on top of you.
Especially not the work.
Force it back with the ferocity of your smile.
Swell with fight.
Turgescence: stay hydrated.
Nothing meek or half-hearted about entering.
The work opens up more of you so you can advance better armed.
Live more fully and die more gloriously.

Structure

  metabolicS
        in The
        eveRybody is
         coUld ever be
         beCause
           The world
          sUccess the
          tRy
       so nEar
more flouriShing
 newly-painTed
     joy eaRth has no escape from
       leisUre if they
        spaCes of
  of humaniTy can be
          jUdgement
       infoRmation
    syllablE

  metabolicS
 newly-painTed
     joy eaRth has no escape from
       leisUre if they
         beCause
           The world
          jUdgement
       infoRmation
    syllablE

John Cage 1990

Something in Cage really understood the importance of the spine. I'm not sure he ever properly worked with that understanding though, other than producing beautiful poems with strong spines. It's the trouble with most creative people – they generally fail to see the implications of their genius – they don't realise that the devices that make their work strong and rich could make their life equally so if applied at the level of living; they refuse to develop power.

Stop Thinking

Thanks to Tim for sending me this link to an interesting article in today's Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1711859,00.html

I line my eyes with blue
initiation. A bird-thought sits inside my throat.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.

Aldous Huxley

True Friendship is like Water not like Honey

I remember the first beginners class I ever taught for JK, back in the old Wimpole Street premises, must have been 1987 or 88. I was a little nervous (not too nervous because I was already teaching at various night schools around London). After the first class of the first term, whilst the students were drinking tea and chatting enthusiastically John came in to ask me how it had gone. Very well I told him – everyone seemed to enjoy it, and one elderly gentleman in particular had told me that the class had been one of the most wonderful and revelatory experiences of his life. John looked around at the guy and then back to me and said, “We'll never see him again.” Sure enough, we never did.

John always used to say that if Tai Chi is for you then it should feel like a coming home – like you've done it before, a long long time ago, and you've been aching for it in the interim, and now you've rediscovered it you just have a simple feeling of recognition and relief. This is how it was for me, and I remember a student in one of the classes I taught at the Round Chapel in Hackney, his name was John, saying to me that when he watched me do Tai Chi he had the feeling I'd been doing it since before I was born. When someone says something like that to you, with no pretence (he was a young long distance truck driver), you know they are connected. He was also a martial artist and I must say that I've generally been very impressed by the martial artists I've taught. They have sobriety and composure, often know how to let their energy out, and know from experience that a highly respectful attitude towards the teacher and the teaching is the most efficient one for learning – they give more than average.

heart

       without a word
       interior
         half-
    whispers
      about goodwill

It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.
Albert Einstein

Words are the last barrier between me and a stranger. JK

Ours not to reason why
Ours but to do and die.
Alfred Lord Tennyson

Learning

We relax to settle into who we are – really who we are beneath the millennia of conditioning. It is quite a task – to undo all that and retrieve our essential nature in one lifetime. The trouble is we generally have no idea what we really are and we are usually the least qualified to say, although we may have inklings every so often. The teacher is the person in your life most qualified to give you such guidance. Their clarity and the fact that they have retrieved much of their essential nature means they can see, with relative ease, where you are coming from and where you are going. But more importantly they can see other possibilities – a wholly different world beneath your conditioned responses. And it does appear as a different world – quite apart from the one you are living. It is not just a different track or path, it is a wholly different everything – the philosophical foundations to the life the teacher sees for you – the reasons for living – are very different to your own, no matter how much sympathy and empathy you feel when in the teacher’s company. There is nothing quite so depressing for a teacher as telling a student something important which they clearly have no real idea about and then for them to say that they understand completely, or even worse, that they know it already. If your teacher gives you instruction then you don’t know, otherwise why would they bother telling you. If you really understand something then it will have found its way into every cell of your being – it is not just an idea in your head. It is always striking when you come across students of Tai Chi who have never done pushing hands. They may look expert but when you come to stand in front of them and put your hands on them they will be as inept as a beginner – often worse because they wont have the beginner’s humility or openness. The second most depressing thing for a teacher is telling a student something and being met by a total lack of understanding. If the teacher teaches something it is because the student is ready for that instruction, so being met by incredulity or stupidity just means quite an aggressive resistance is going on.

When you are with your teacher you have to assume that they are all knowing, not because they are but because it is the most efficient way of learning. Most of what you pick up from the teacher comes through osmosis rather than through cogitative reasoning. Osmosis happens on an energy level and a cellular or molecular level, so it can only happen if you open up and connect on those levels. When you are with your teacher you shouldn’t just be undergoing a struggle to comprehend, but a struggle to join and approve. Learning is as compassionate an act as teaching. The most important point I can make here, and it is crucial (I’ve met less than a handful of people in my life who understand it), is that joining and approving is not something you can turn on when you feel like it – you have to do it all the time – you must live like that – it must be the reason you live. Enter, join and become, or open, embrace and transform – the actions of the heart. We work to place these at our foundation. If they don’t seem to work, or you find you’re easily taken advantage of as a result then it’s because you haven’t taken them deep enough. The journey is the process of taking them deeper, and the deeper they go the less you seem to know, and the more fragile, vulnerable and incapable you feel. But this is just a reflection of your absolute courage – your refusal to close off at any point – your refusal to compromise.