Today's creation.

London Tai Chi Workshops 26-27 May

I'm teaching in South London on Sunday 27 May. All welcome.

Mark Raudva is doing the Saturday — highly recommended.

For more details hit Caroline's Great River Blog.

I am in London from 26 May to 4 June.

I will be available for private instruction if anyone wants it.

Nature

What I was trying to say in the Poetry posting below is that Nature is a plethora of possibility and that we choose our own path through this richness. The first chapter of the Tao Te Ching states that if your mind is full of success or failure then that is what will be realised – you'll either succeed or fail, but if your mind is empty then magic and miracle are allowed to fill the soft space you have created and take you beyond your imaginings and into your destiny. The problem is always how to create the empty mind. An empty mind is not a quiet mind. It is possible, through will, to quieten a hard mind full of opinion and conditioning. An empty mind is a natural one – one free of pressures – thoughts, ideas, opinions, habits, fears – that tend, through the illusion of free will, to draw a constrained and conditioned future to you. In a way the secret of life is to let your energy out as fully and as creatively as possible. What stops us from doing this is the mind – its workings are constantly creating a world of our own making – either a comfortable one or an uncomfortable one, an exciting one or a boring one, a happy one or an unhappy one. When the mind stops working in this dualistic expectant way then we have freedom – energetic interaction – in the sense that we constantly realise a little of all possibilities – or many of them – we travel forwards on a front rather than a line. The empty mind is bright and full of spirit so that it and your energy can dance, flit, from possibility to possibility and even between possibilities, and live a swirling richness that admits, accepts and creates a fullness that belies analysis or observation. When you come into contact with someone that lives like this then their very existence and presence is an act of compassion. They naturally share their richness. It is as though they lay down a carpet all around and beneath you that accepts and nourishes everything you are and do. They do not judge, or advise, or attempt to manipulate in any way. How can they? That would be using their constraining narrowing mind which no longer exists for them. Instead they are simply intensely present and intensely open, so open that they reveal other possibilities to you, ones your own tension has been preventing you from creating for yourself. They heal as a matter of course.

Another way of saying this is that compared to Nature there is a real paucity to the human mind and its creations, and that the purpose of softness is to remove the mind (and eventually the body as well) as much as possible so that Nature can come in and, if you like, take over for us.

Mount Sodom from the Dead Sea road. It amazes me that the Christian tourists here spend their time visiting Jerusalem, Galilee, etc. If instead they spent a few days alone in the desert then they would really begin to appreciate where Jesus was coming from.

It is the energy of the connexion that shows us the way forward.

Your heart is luminous

Dylan Thomas

Poetry

A soft space is a creative space. For example, if I offer as a possibility the statement "The ground beneath your feet is a living entity, and not just a hard surface on which to purchase" and you bring this into an accepting internal soft space then the statement, through you, will change from being a possibility to being an actuality: softness will allow the statement to inspire your energy to that of an entity with such a relationship to the earth. This is life as communication. Even a ridiculous statement such as "I am a tiger" or even "I am dead" can be actualized by yielding. If the possibilities are endless then so is reality's richness.

Softness

A soft space is one that admits a plethora of possibilty: a listening space. A hard space is one predetermined – one that admits few possibilities – one ruled by law – the letter of the law indeed – forcing things into moulds. Hard spaces are often open in the sense that they expand and receive, but are always closed in the sense that they don't allow the objects and processes that enter them to be as they truly are: they listen but on their own terms and with their own agenda: heavy-handed (it always comes down to touch). It is crucially important, if you want your taichi to nourish your soul the way it can do and wants to, to invite it into a soft space each time you engage with it. This is the function of ritual: to set a mood that allows magic and miracle to enter the occasion. A good teacher is one that communicates well in the sense of bringing their soft space into the hearts of their students and inspiring them to open to possibilities they could neither have fathomed nor imagined alone, rather than one well able to transmit techniques. The tendency of soft spaces is to furl in on themselves – to effectively close up – simply because they are so overwhelming: they admit an onslaught, and the soft participant needs increasing resources of courage and energy to cope. Teaching is then an opportunity for the soft space the teacher carries to open up not only for the students but also for himself. One needs constant reminders of what one knows because one knows only softness and this is in one's energy and not one's mind, and this softness needs constant expression otherwise it becomes, or remains, a frightened child never venturing beyond its own nurturing.

Felt deeply, poems like all things have the possibilities of elements whose isotopes are yet to be found.

Louis Zukofsky

Foundation

Mind in dantien.

It always boils down to this. Only then do we touch nature because only then is the mind where it naturally should be. Relaxation. Being willing to take and give things as they are. Nothing special. We become another natural object, planted and implanted, and what is around us and within us naturally reveals itself. If the mind is anywhere else then we begin to impose and project, and our world loses richness – it shrinks into what we think it is. The heart only fully opens from this foundation: it requires the ground to flow up through us, not esoterically but naturally. Natural just means relaxed – without thought or will.

in poverty
    knowing nobody
water flowing in
    from all sides

Frank Samperi

Among all the patients in the second half of my life — that is to say, over thirty-five years — there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. None of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook. This of course has nothing whatever to do with a particular creed or membership of a church.

Karl Jung

Mind

When the mind relaxes into its natural state – that of the inclusive loving embrace – then everything falls into place.

Rooting

Your real root is not with the ground but with your essential nature, and more importantly the connexion that essential nature has with the divine – an aspect we call destiny. To begin with in Tai Chi we root into the earth because the process of developing that root through courageous relaxation is the best model available for the beginning of the process of rooting into what deeply thrusts from our inner recesses. If we remain obsessed with the earth though, our work starts to go around in circles and ultimately lacks soul, spirit and compassion. We must be constantly vigilant for what it is that thrusts us into the next stage – the next world indeed – the one where everything we have gained seems to have no function or purpose, other than our capacity for the unknown.

Galaxy M106

Stepping Stones

Always be suspicious of and somewhat dissatisfied with the world you are gaining mastery of. Each world is full of entities happy and content, or unhappy and discontent, it makes no real difference, trapped by the illusion of existence. They have, if you like, abandoned destiny for life (and death): engaged with the living now rather than knitting and tightening into the divine. Gaining mastery is gaining understanding and energy. Together these give you power – the power to leap out of the confines of the world that gave them to you and into a new world commanded by different rules and containing different energies – different terms of engagement. In this new world your power has little purchase and needs to be abandoned – washed out – so that new more appropriate power can take its place.

Fear

The big pitfall with spiritual work is viewing the spiritual and the mundane as conflicting opposites. How do we open our hearts and embrace both in such a way that the fullness and sheer quality of the life lived overshadows either alone. Ultimately it is all a simple matter of love and embrace. Because ultimately it is not what we become that matters but what we give – to what extent do we assist others to become. A monastic life of devotional meditation and prayer will be more attractive to someone who has acute sensitivities and past traumas that make a normal mundane life, with its coarseness and vitality, unbearable. Such a monastic life is as much a retreat from the responsibility of facing up to life as it is a spiritual calling. We cannot face God if we can't face ourselves because they are fundamentally one and the same. The problem of avoidance is everywhere and it very quickly becomes ingrained. Then big upheavals are necessary to wrench the ego apart and start living courageously again. And courage means with fear – facing fear and not running away from it by creating a comfortable life where it never rears its ugly head. As my teacher once said to me – Fear is the best friend you'll ever have.

Ward-Off

The spiritual comes into play as soon as we agree to give more than our due and receive more than our lot. Giving of love, and receiving of responsibility. Two-way traffic. In other words, as soon as we recognise and accept our primary roles as the great communicators of the universe. Tai Chi becomes a spiritual exercise as soon as the student begins to understand and enter the world of Ward-Off. Such a tender posture of emanating embraces. It swells and it contains. It is irresistible and irrepressible, and if ever there is a homecoming then it is into this king of postures. Tai Chi then becomes an ever deepening journey into ward-off which expands into new domains and dimensions – of our humanity and our divinity – as we mature and develop.

And remember that ward-off is as much in the legs/groin as it is in the arms/heart.