but what is
    appropriate
            what symbol best
           expresses
              this
              which
        relations
          centre, the possibility of dividing
              kinds of elements

Photo: David Tremayne

Wade all life
backward to its
source which
runs too far
ahead.

Lorine Niedecker

Beyond

Getting to the top of the mountain is easy, it's leaping off the top that's difficult.

John Kells

This reminds me of something Garrison Keillor said on Desert Island Discs a few years ago - that the most important thing in life is to go beyond where your talent will take you. For that you need a lifetime of single-minded application, immense hard-work and above all grace.

What is the nature
                   of quintessence?
Since there is no answer,
                          the question
must be poetical.
                  Yet when Aristotle writes,
"A spirit
          in the body of the seed
whose nature answereth
                       in proportion
to the element of the stars,"
                              I could touch that
with a fingertip
                 and be content.

Can wit sigh,
              "Ah, how lovely that is!"?
(that was my inbreath,
                       not my logic)
and have a tear
                in its eye for it?

Out of the way,
                wit!
I am within a breath
                      of affinity
and yearn
          for long distances.

Come out, my lamb,
                   my mystery.
This spirit
            you can trust.

Carl Rakosi

The Man

Fair Ladies in the new venue.

Photo: David Tremayne

When my kids saw this they wanted to know how I jumped so high - they didn't realise it had anything to do with JK.

Humour

What allows the energy you work with, gather and create a life of its own is humour. Humour is a lightness that admits of other possibilities. Combine that admission with hearty connectedness and those possibilities become incorporated into a body teeming and seething with life. If humour is maintained then those incorporated possibilities – each one a thread of energy if you like – remain in some way distinct – do not agglutinate into one amorphous mass – and there quickly comes a point where the combined intensity and complexity of these interacting threads develops into what feels like awareness.

Humour is not taking things, especially the self, seriously. It confounds the logical, rational, linear mind, which always struggles to force your movements into some preconceived template, with an element of play which revels in the surprises inherent in the unfolding of creative and natural processes. In a way humour is the most valuable possession you have because it allows you to put up with anything, not with resignation but with a smile – a mood and energy that is always opening and searching not for comfort and ease but for those threads that can be brought into the whole to transform it into a vehicle capable of thrusting you to the next level; humour finds fuel everywhere. Humour also admits that sneaking feeling that you are getting it wrong – that your efforts to do and to make are coming from a part of you – your conditioning – foreign to your essential nature. Humour is a natural and gentle way of applying shocks to your conditioning – unsettling it and loosening its iron grip sufficiently for your essential nature to momentarily peek through. This essential nature, so used to being plastered over, pushed into the background and over-ridden by the bullying conditioned and conditional mind, has a completely different relationship with reality than that mind: soft, playful, interactive, ringing with laughter – imagine children at play – but it needs years of gentle coaxing and encouragement before it will venture forth and take the lead in your life. Scars don't heal overnight. Humour – the touch of lightness that refuses to linger for too long and never repeats itself (jokes are rarely funny second time round). Your conditioning needs repetition to survive and it uses up most of your vital energy in the process of constantly reviewing and recounting its domain – imagine the lonely miser pointlessly counting his money each evening before he can sleep. Your conditioning is telling you the same joke over and over and because you don't realise it's a joke you listen and approve. Humour is the only effective way to cut through this – because it is so gentle its blade is very keen.

The fire consumes—
but not itself.

Ted Enslin

Attack

Tai Chi versus Heartwork is belly versus heart. They are not really antagonistic or in competition, but the two poles of one big organ of connectedness and power. My teacher always stressed this: that if your posture is correct then your energy naturally gathers in the lower dandien – belly – and with time and sincere practice slowly grows up to fill and open the heart. This is his own experience and is something he insists on in his best students. The emphasis of our work shifted from belly to heart when my teacher realised that one's personal power – centred in the belly – is always limited unless one learns to connect through the heart with other energies pretty much on a constant and permanent basis. Such connexions allow one to tap into these energies and coordinate them with one's own into a far more engulfing and far reaching vehicle for transformation. This smacks maybe of manipulation and I suppose it could be but our approach is a natural one – it happens by itself, obeying the agenda of some higher aspect of the living teaching – the same natural consequence of our discipline, devotion and softness that allows the energy we gather and develop, as well as the energies we connect to, their own awareness.

The anatomy or dynamic or a Tai Chi posture is, simply put, an opening and entering, a connecting, a swallowing, a gathering or marshalling, and an expression – attack – explosive or otherwise. The opening, entering, connecting and swallowing would be the yield, and the gathering and expression would be the attack. The yield itself, if it is to be effective, is a small attack (the entering) followed by a yield, and the attack is a small yield (the gathering) followed by an attack; every component, if it has any power, derives that power from the dual nature of the component and the tension or interaction in that duality. This shows that no matter how connected you are, how large and inclusive your heart is, your actions, in the final analysis, come from you and you alone – they are your imposition on the world – your attempt to make a difference, and this final act of power comes from the belly. The heart is the organ that allows you to reach out and connect and gather. This energy or information or knowledge or awareness is then passed to the belly – the gut – where it is transformed into an expression of you – your statement. This is a difficult one for us humble, soft Tai Chi students to get our minds around – that eventually you have to stop pussy-footing around and actually attack with all you have. It's what the Irish tramp did to me on Friday – he just threw his energy out, willy-nilly, regardless of whether he connected. It is the ultimate act of courage – the big naked leap into the unknown – and if we think of courage as heart but also guts then we can see that it requires all we have.

       abstract things
                 end
                 a
               formal cosmos
    so much like the
               now
              across the
               circulation
          of the kidneys

Softness, energy & awareness

One of the reasons (maybe the most important reason) softness is so vital to what we do is that it allows the energy we develop and connect to its own awareness. Softness means a complete lack of imposed design. Very different from ch'i kung where the mind directs and gathers the energy. When you work softly – without the mind interfering – then your energy becomes a gentle probe of your awareness and it has a life, if not its own then at least of a higher energetic aspect of your being. Not only this but also the energy your softness attracts into your being from the world at large is itself an awareness of aspects of that world. This awareness – a sort of knowledge – is subtle in the extreme and requires such a light and gentle touch that the only way to approach it is through softness. Any attempts to grasp it or mold it or even use it and the signature of awareness will be shattered and the energy will just be energy. Energy as such is not that interesting. It is always the quality – the tinge of uniqueness – that makes energy more than just the ability to do work. What makes a person interesting and worthwhile is not the amount of energy they have, but how open they are and how honest they are in the sense of not trying to plaster a persona – a mask or image – onto their energy but allowing it to vibrate with all aspects of their experience and ancestry.

A few days ago I was walking up Camden Road towards Holloway – up the hill with 4 litres of soya milk in my knapsack to get a little exercise. As I approached the bus-stop at Brecknock Road I noticed two drunken tramps sitting on the bus-shelter bench – both probably in their late 50's. As I passed, one of them raised his can of Tennants and hailed me with a strong Irish accent – just a friendly greeting. With that greeting I received such a blast of good Irish energy that for an instant I was immersed and I felt I was in Ireland. It was quite an overwhelming experience. Is all I could do in return was smile and wave politely. I told my teacher about it and he said, “Just think how absolutely generous that man was. He gave you a gift of energy.” What made the experience so powerful and complete was that the energy that man gave me had such a rich signature – it vibrated with every aspect of his history and formative environment, and was therefore capable of creating the world from which it came in me. Magic indeed.

The baby looked toward me
and I was born -
to sound, light
lift, life
beyond my life

She wiggles her toe
I grow
I go to school to her
and she to me
and to Bonnie

Lorine Niedecker

Body as one unit

It behoves a teacher to find some way of indicating clues, and it behoves the serious student to find a correct method/teacher and be open to learning despite the strong chains of conditioning and the extreme suffering he must embrace to let this conditioning go.
It is the call of the old way - the conditioning that has made the person what he is, the world what it is, the reality what it purports to be - that is the comfort and inspiration for the average person.
Other peoples troubles are not his business providing they do not interfere with his peace of mind.
But the connectedness of all things and events inherent in the natural process insists that all troubles from any direction are shared.
One man's suffering has to be taken on board by all others.
At the beginning stage one interacts with companions, with beloved family members, then with one's teacher and spiritual companions.
But connectedness within families is often perverted, broken and lacking in the truth of the natural process.
Clarity is besmirched, purity is soiled, and there is a general sharing of self-interest which is not essentially connectedness but conditional disconnectedness.
For people like this each party sets up boundaries and rules and more or less abides by rules set up by others so that a semblance of harmony may prevail.
But this semblance is essentially untrue as evidenced by the effect of this untruth - suffering within family groups, within individuals, or within/between larger groups, even nations.
How to burst through the welter of conditions and conditioning to reach a harmony which does not immediately call or cry for congratulation or even description?
The method here is to somehow come to oneness within one's physical structure as a way of beginning the process.
We begin with the matter of the waist which requires endless practice to knit the upper and lower body together as we move upright in the world.

John Kells

Notice that Cheng Man-ching is even single-weighted whilst seated (just put one foot & hand forward and you're effectively single-weighted). Dr Chi is the gormless tall one and TT Liang is to his right. Anyone know who the others are?

Thanks to Mark for sending me this picture.

But to break loose again -
the finger length
                  flame
following
          underground
the source of roots -
suddenly
         whirls up
catches in the high trees
a crown fire
             rising
with the wind.

Ted Enslin

Touch

When a poet writes – creates – she's at her very best – settled, connected and inspired enough to write about more than what is immediately apparent. She enters the imagination. This is not a self-made world of imaginings and idle make-believe (although I love that term) but the world of energy. Feelings, nuances, subtleties, glimmers, intuitings – all the product of the interaction between her energy and other energies – when another energy inhabits her space as her energy inhabits its. This is the realm of touch – what my teacher calls the miracle of touch – skin on skin – energy on energy – the great sustainer and nourisher. It is perhaps the most important thing in life – affection – something in you seeping and melting in equal measure so that boundaries really do disappear and those blending fringes – where one becomes the other – the place of magic and transformation – bleed into your entirety. This is what I feel when I work with my teacher. There is no part of him that isn't me, but equally there is no part of him that isn't touched – affected and infected – by any other impinging on his energy for whatever reason. This makes for an immense richness, especially since he actively keeps alive all memories – his past is as present to him as what happens now – as, in a very real way, is his future. It is the only way to effectively yield – to be total in your awareness and be in the event before it happens, or to have the event in you. We are all meeting places of so much and the aim of Heartwork is to awaken that muchness so that our essential nature, which tinges and rings through all of it, knows its vital place in the world and gradually develops the strength and confidence to enter more thoroughly that world through the skin and hearts of other energy beings. Everything is an energy being, including the air you breathe and the water you drink, and the thing in you that actively improves the energy of that being we call respect. Without it there is no yielding, no communication, only force and oppression.

That at night
the fire
         sinks
               down
is rescued
           only
by the morning log
in nick of time
                to
renew itself
             go out
through radiance
the high intention
glowing/
         /in fruition.

Ted Enslin

Awareness

My teacher's most important discovery – the one on which all others hinge – is that the heart is centre, not belly or brain. When the heart is open and foremost then it is not possible to be selfish or self-centred. An open heart naturally reaches out and connects, and its only concern is to feed those connexions – self-concerns evaporate – they are simply not part of a heart-centred existence. Neither is a noisy mind – when the mind chats to itself the heart closes, it's as simple as that. The endless chatter is the essence of selfishness, of drawing in and putting oneself first. The best way to break this most debilitating and difficult of habits is to become more generous with one's heart – put it first instead. The biggest fear for any martial artist is being caught unawares or flinching. Unawares simply means asleep – day-dreaming – and flinching is a fear response that quickly draws in one's connecting threads and closes the heart in self-protection. Not only is the heart the centre of connexion and compassion, it is also the centre of awareness. It's obvious really that the more open and active the heart, the more threads of connexion you will have reaching into the world and hence the greater your awareness of that world. Awareness is an active listening – active yielding – and has little to do with knowledge, especially knowledge that has been learned, either through the medium of language or otherwise. An intensely aware person has an air of innocence and is overwhelmed with feelings of awe and wonder – their awareness gives them power but also makes them vulnerable in the extreme – about as far from the well-educated expert as you can get. I'm spending a lot of time in the hell of London's public transport system at present and it's interesting to observe those around me – often closer than I would normally want. The ones I admire and learn most from are the ones with the courage to remain open. It's easy to spot them because they glow. They are usually either female or children and they are often rather meek and mild – unassuming. They are the real fighters, not the swaggering up-front young men full of attitude and fear. They have to fight all the time the endless barrage and onslaught from their environment constantly coercing them to conform and close off. For me they are the beacons of hope – fellow travellers.

Being Natural

How hard one has to labor at it.
There are explanations,
                      of course,
and confessions
but that is not what is meant.

The way is lost,
the character is gone.

Carl Rakosi