What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking.
There is no end of things in the heart.

Ezra Pound

Connectedness & time

The average approach in Tai Chi is to develop energy and power through diligent practice and then put that energy and power to use, generally in the service of the person who wields it. In Heartwork we aim for a different approach. Through our work we empty of self to become better connected so that higher aspects of the teaching and the Natural Process can wield us and our connectedness in their service. The nature of this service is not our business. Our only concern is to develop clarity and purity so that we can be better instruments for use. Such qualities result from not resisting – from yielding. When you really enter yielding – as a way of life – a rule by which to live every moment – then so much passes through you that self cannot help but be washed away. Then every moment trembles and because you are in no way disconnected you tremble with it. Those congested and clotted with self you don't see – they pass you by – they are of a different reality – impinging only momentarily, whereas the selfless ones touch you lightly but deeply and this touch is forever – it is out of time. My teacher has always said that immortality is not living forever but managing to touch and live through those dimensions of reality for which time does not exist. One of these dimensions is that of connectedness. If you work on and with connectedness then the special connexions in your life don't wane with time or absence, they actually get stronger, so much so that eventually you are able to conjure and become the energy of that connexion. Those you have special connexions with are all your teachers – necessarily so because a special connexion generally means that you have something important to learn – some transmission that will allow you to travel further on your path of service.

    assuredly white
              beginning
               and the whole
              or life
         we must bring
               we use
               offensive and defensive
            energies
        the task we cannot avoid

Only by working with the Internal will your humanity – your touch – improve. John Kells

Becoming

It occurred to me last night, whilst meditating through insomnia, that becoming – our most active and vital of words – is the same as entering. When the teacher says something like, “Put your mind in the dan-tien,” what does it actually mean? It means that you make the dan-tien the centre of your reality and you allow yourself to become imbued with the mood of the dan-tien: you become the dan-tien. To become the dan-tien you must enter it, which means leaving the space you usually inhabit. Students always fail to appreciate just how total this leaving must be so we have a special word for it – abandonment. In a way it is the same as knowing you have no choice, or single-weightedness – knowing that you cannot effectively be in two places at once and that to do anything justice requires total commitment. Abandonment is an act of spirit – it comes from spirit and it thoroughly nourishes the spirit. To become you must first abandon and then enter. Becoming involves not just changing places but changing everything – shape, the way you behave, the way you think, the way you are. It is the act that conjures the between-energy – the spirit or life between. The most powerful becoming experience I have ever had was when my son (now 13) was born. In that moment I became a different person and I could clearly feel it happen. Suddenly the world was different. I was no longer the most important person in it. There was now a creature for whom I would, without a second thought, lay down my life. This wasn't nobility from me, it was natural, and it is a wonderful and probably the only measure of true commitment – are you prepared to die for it. In fact, are you dying for it every day. Death requires the ultimate act of abandon – a great leap with faculties gleaming but with nothing clinging to hold you back. Like my teacher's father said to me before he died a few days ago: “Steven, I'm really looking forward to it! I know it's going to be a peak experience!” He'll always be my measure of selflessness.

    it is only natural that
                       we should
      give priority to matters
                      formal beginning
                  prehistory
                        which drives him
                      from inside to
        manifest his spirit
                        knowledge of nature

Grace

The teacher can only ever really give you a skeleton which you then need to flesh out and enspirit. The flesh comes from the practice – the work – but the spirit comes from the inspiration, enthusiasm and life you bring to that work. It is quite a skill, acquired over time, to be able to bring just enough of your own spirit to the work to make it sing its own song rather than your song. It is all part of the process of refinement making your energy subtle, attractive and interesting – communicative and communicable – listening to what is there and encouraging what is there. The inspiration for us men is always the female. As I write this at quarter to eight in the morning I have two 16 year olds hovering around – a male who lives here and his guest – a (stunning) female friend. The difference between their energies is striking. Even though she has only just woken up she is far more awake and aware than he will probably ever be. And it is so clear to see that his only hope of ever reaching her heights (of salvation) is through intense and immense discipline – day by day chipping away at the uncarved block – refining and annealing. This is the real creative process – gradually turning yourself into what you can be. A teacher is vital because he/she is the person in your life who can see your potential, and then give you the means and encouragement to meet it. Is all you have to do is work hard and apply your intelligence and sensitivity to the riddles thrown up by the teaching – somehow get yourself on the right wavelength to able to hear what the teacher is saying. This means that for moments you need to have the spirit to become either the teacher or the teaching. Such spirit is grace – it comes from above. To receive grace you must be soft. In a sense this is what softness is – the quality that enables you to receive (grace) and thereby puts you in a state of grace – constantly communing with, and thereby becoming, what we call the divine. You then become far more than just you. You become a trembling confluence of many energies from many sources. You become immense, and intensely light. You touch everything.

AT THE PERIODONTIST'S

your swift touch to
my left
elicited quicksilver
shiver because      you
were working to
my right

Mairéad Byrne reads in Cork tomorrow.

(Dervilla emailed me to say Mairéad read for a short 20 minutes - every word wonderful.)

    it is a mythical
           state
               an
            unbroken
            subtle
            flow
               of
         a natural
               kind

If we still possessed the word 'is', there would be no need to write poems. George Oppen

Wot a fucking football match! I love the Italians. Spent the last 2 days heartworking with Roberto Fraquelli - an experience to be revered and savoured.

By the way, the promised 5 day retreat in County Kerry is not going to happen this year. I couldn't quite get my mind around it, what with moving back to London & not knowing what my weekly teaching duties here are going to be. Also I wasn't comfortable with the idea of retreating anywhere, especially to one of the most beautiful places on Earth, to do this stuff. I've always admired and had a fellow-feeling for the Celtic saints who would search out the most God-forsaken, malarial shit-hole they could find, and then live there meditating and praying and dying. Maybe Hackney next year?

Carlo has just been given a Jag. The beautiful get all the luck.

The picture is the view from my bed.

Garden by David Dixon.

I believe in technique as the test of a man's sincerity. Ezra Pound

Faith comes to one noiseless
and yet, keeps one exasperated

Eager to touch touch

A bird’s nest

Pam Rehm

Tai Chi

The graduated path of Tai Chi, as taught by my teacher during the Wimpole Street days (1970-1992):

1. 3 years learning to sink and relax (the various solo Forms plus oodles of Partner Work)
2. 3 years learning to become strong and let your energy out (Power Class)
3. 3 years learning lightness of spirit through the Dance of Vitality.

After that one was ready to begin.

I adhere to form as the bee obeys the geometry of the hive. Robert Duncan

Falling in love

Went with JK to the Gerda Geddes Memorial at The Place in Euston on Saturday. The three things I came away with that made the event worthwhile for me were, firstly, hearing and meeting Frank Woods who is writing a biography of GG – a softer man with a bigger heart you're unlikely to meet – he was the only speaker who held my attention (a gorgeous Scottish accent) and the only person in evidence who felt like a Tai Chi practitioner (that is, relaxed, sunk and open). Secondly, hearing in the film on GG, made by Norwegian TV, that GG's teacher in Hong Kong had told her to step gently (or was it tenderly?) so as not to hurt the ground (something all of us should envision – touch gently so as not to hurt the other), and thirdly hearing JK speaking to Harriett Devlin – GG's youngest daughter – and telling her that because he fell in love with Tai Chi he had no choice but to completely abandon himself to it. It's always interesting being out & about with JK and experiencing his exchanges with non-students (although Harriett was his student for a while back in the 1970's). He always manages to give them the essence of his whole teaching in a short sentence like this. Falling in love is a feeling of falling, or floating – the ground disappears – or rather all one's relationships (the one with the ground being the most obvious) are thrown into new focus by the intensity of the openness and connexion one feels with the beloved. I remember once walking back to Clapton from the Angel having seen a girl home, and I could swear that I did the whole walk without touching the ground. When in love one's actions and decisions tend not to result from thinking or consideration but are impelled by primal forces, foolish or otherwise – it doesn't matter. It is a world where there is no alternative to abandonment, or rather non-abandonment would mean a retreat out of the world of love and back into the grim flat reality of normal self-centred affairs. Hearing John talking to Harriett I realised that he left that meagre world for good when he started Tai Chi. He's been falling in love ever since.

Pushing Hands

Tai Chi is Pushing Hands, not the Form. Without Pushing Hands you get no real feedback, without feedback you have no progress, without progress you get a wallowing in self-satisfaction.

Ignorance

Ron Silliman, on his blog today, deplores ignorance in his students. Ignorance is never an excuse. It can just mean naivety or innocence but often it implies a lack of interest in much beyond oneself. The trouble with the Tai Chi world is that the teachers are generally as ignorant as the students – there is a culture of ignorance. By ignorance I don't really mean a lack of knowledge as such but the lack of valid and living energetic transmissions. If a student has received an energy transmission from a qualified master then to realise that transmission and be in some sort of fit state to pass it on would require that person to get really serious about their art – to the extent that they pretty much give up everything else to devote the rest of their life to it. Only by doing so will they develop it into more than what it is – it is the only way to truly contribute to the art and the living teaching. To tell the truth though, the only way a student would be in a fit state to receive such transmissions is if they have already plunged full time into the art. Thinking of myself (does one ever do anything else) it is really only since last September that I have received something really alive and essential from my teacher – the previous 21 years of Tai Chi and 46 years in total were what was required to gradually get myself into a fertile and stable state whereby my life is no longer really my own – it belongs to the teaching and the teacher. Not very fashionable I know but it is interesting.

    weak from too much
         or too little
          twilight shades
                    around 
                     the middle
                 and what
                    possibilities
                   for
                   making use

The closer the gaze gets to the ceiling
the more it entangles itself
in webs.

Vera Anserova (tr. Daniel Weissbort)