16 April 2012
How do I relate to time? Am I conditioned by the past or beckoned by the future? Do I chose history or destiny? If I chose destiny then I must be acutely aware that something in the future is calling me to a life for which my past offers little preparation. But there are always clues - events still waiting to happen - invitations not yet accepted.
Taiji should be all-embracing. Each principle, cast as it is in language, must be drawn into the physical and energetic body through decades of toil. But also, the poetic and philosophic implications of each principle need to be thought and felt through to stimulate the heart-mind to reach out and touch the whole of creation. This is turning, and why turning is so important. If mind in dantien is point becoming line (vector spine) then turning is line becoming plane, a sweeping slicing plane; the whirling skirt of the dervish.
11 April 2012
There are two worlds: a world of energy and spirit, and a world of matter. The principle underlying the first is affirmation - a great big unconditional YES. It is a world of constant creating, where nothing is created because there is no time as such, only pure activity - a seething chaos. The world of matter is born from the world of energy when negativity appears, in the form of time and conditionality. "Yes but..." and "yes if..." set limits (give form) to creation, and things appear, endure and disappear. But these things, whether objects, feelings, sensations, ideas, thoughts, start to obstruct energy and spirit as soon as they come into being, and the world built of things draws a cloak of conditionality around itself and starts to deny energy and spirit. The best that things can hope to be are channels - conduits between the energetic and material worlds. And every thing is such a conduit - whilst it endures it vibrates and pours forth an affirmation from the world of energy, like a bell ringing with a cosmic Yes. Consider for example a flower: if I open to it as conduit it floods me with energy and I rise to the occasion, which is another way of saying that I join, if only momentarily, the world of energy. And this is the point here: things become energetic when they give rise to events, when they connect with other things and allow energy to flow.
What we are struggling with in taiji is not just to become two-way conduits – receptive to affirmation (yielding) and giving of affirmation (attacking), but instigators of events – the smiler, the one willing to leap across that gulf and make connexion. This of course requires a constant willingness to be positive, and a dogged determination to eradicate all negativity from the mind, so that the heart, which is where such events manifest, can remain open. But especially it requires the courage to seize the moment and strike, knowing full well that spirit can only ever leap into the unknown. And this is event – occasion invested with spirit.

