Ingestion

For most of us the body is the instrument with which we get things done. We spend time and energy doing things: energy is used to rearrange the world we inhabit. But the body is not just an instrument for use, it is also, and I suspect primarily, like the man says, a palace for the crownéd truth to dwell in. The body receives the world and the energy of the world, and then resonates with the world and truly reflects the world – a part of Nature – natural. So when I see that red hibiscus I can either register and label or I can receive it into my body; and I don't mean to receive the experience – another sensation to store in my memory, I mean to receive the actual essence of the flower – to open up and let it find the room in the palace of my body where it naturally wishes to reside and abide. Then in each of the multitude of rooms in this palace there trembles a different essence, and I do truly carry the world in me and with me. This attitude to living is all heart, and because of this and because I am taking the physical world into my physical body, the breathing is all important – as much as anything I breathe the world in and I smell the world – I smell that red as much as see it. Not surprisingly, the more civilized we have become – the more molded by convention and filled with business – the more vestigial the olfactory sense has become.

There are some nice little clips on Youtube of Cheng Man-ching teaching.

The Art of Peace is the principle of nonresistance. Because it is nonresistant, it is victorious from the beginning. Those with evil intentions or contentious thoughts are instantly vanquished. The Art of Peace is invincible because it contends with nothing.

Morihei Ueshiba, The Art of Peace

Spirit

Spirit makes the yin separate from the yang, and spirit brings them swirling together again: the energy of proliferation and the energy of unification. So, if I move my hand and keep it soft and relaxed it stays the same – just moves in space. But if I work my hand with a little spirit then suddenly it has a front and a back, a left and a right, a top and a bottom, four fingers and a thumb, three joints within each finger, etc. and each part is invested with an independent spirit, and when these parts work together and work each other then the hand undergoes transformation as it works – it constantly changes shape and size. Not only this – the spirited writhing of my hand and its parts infects the rest of my body which then demands to join the party and similarly twist and turn. The same when I watch a dancer dance or a child play with a gentle joyful spirit – my body sympathetically stirs into similar activity: spirit communicates, which doesn't mean that it tells me things, it means that it makes me join in. As is usually the case, words convey information or establish distinctions and heirarchies – their presence indicates that natural communication has already ceased.

The importance of radical consistency for an artist: to refuse to mark out an aesthetic territory which is then colonised, but to move confidently on, to create structures, large and small, for continued experiment.

Robert Sheppard

Impeccability – firmness of spirit – the unwobbling pivot.

Day after day train your heart out.

Morihei Ueshiba

Spirit never complains.

Learning and teaching should not stand on opposite banks and just watch the river flow by; instead, they should embark together on a journey down the water. Through an active, reciprocal exchange, teaching can strengthen learning how to learn.

Loris Malaguzzi

Breathing

In yoga they say that when the out-breath is thorough then the in-breath takes care of itself. Most of us, I have found, hold onto a little of our stale air – don't deflate fully on the out-breath – and use this residual internal pressure to keep a semblance of good posture and attentiveness. Holding onto air is holding onto tension, and holding onto tension is holding onto false image, allowing us to live largely in our head. For the Tai Chi student there are two problems with this: firstly the retained air blocks the passage through you into the Earth, compromising your root and (therefore) your ability to connect to anything, and secondly your spirit – the part of you that should be responsible for good posture and attentiveness – is encouraged to slumber. The problem for everyone is that this retained stale air becomes the foundation upon which internal strength is built, giving that strength a core of weakness, disconnectedness and self-interest. We should build on essence, and this will happen only if we can relinquish on each out-breath – surrender ourselves and start the in-breath afresh and renewed.

Posture

The relative disposition of the various parts of something; especially the position and carriage of the limbs and the body as a whole; attitude, pose.
A particular pose adopted by an animal or bird, interpreted as a signal of a specific pattern of behaviour.
A state of being; a condition or state of affairs; a condition of armed readiness.
A mental or spiritual attitude or condition.

from New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

Find stillness in the movement, and then movement in that stillness. This will be natural movement.

Learn to yearn for criticism. A positive and consuming attitude to all feedback will propel you through life, and make life the transforming process it should be.

If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.

from Faith-Mind

An in-depth and thorough look at this remarkable text is here.

No blame, no things;
no arising, no mind.

Mind

The natural place in the head for the mind – its throne – is atop the spinal column, pretty much mid-brain. This is the place a healthy mind will always return to: a mind whose normal state is calm and peaceful. Because it is a place of rest and repose – a place that requires peace and brings peace – it is without sensation – without striking feature, other than that peace; much like the eye of a storm. So we cannot intend or concentrate the mind there and expect it to relax, instead we relax it and let it gradually begin to settle there, which it will, in time. The best practice I have found is to simply turn the head from side to side, becoming aware of the movement, and then becoming aware of the vertical axis within the head about which it turns – an extension of the spine upwards. The mind will settle on this line – the still point within the movement – with the awareness. We never relax by trying. Instead we gradually become aware of the situation and the details of the situation. The relaxation we are after is not a lifeless slump but the natural state that becomes revealed when we fill with awareness.

Life & Sensitivity

Sensitivity is fineness of feeling, and it is a wonderful thing. Problems arise when we have opinions about what we feel. Those opinions disconnect us from reality and plunge us into a fantasy world of duality: a self-contained and terrible distortion of reality. We should dwell in the world rather than in our sensing of the world, and the only way to do this is by yielding to reality, which means letting it fill us to overflowing – yield to our passions – and spewing it forth – as a tree yields fruit – simultaneously and together. My being alive is then a process of transforming the world around me. This is as good a definition of life as I can muster.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

Mark Twain