My teacher was always adamant that practice is not primarily the place for working out technical problems, but simply an arena of and for work – the passing of time doing taiji. So my struggle is always to not evaluate in the process of working, otherwise I am never in the process but outside it, judging. The practice of taiji is an exercise in justice without judgment – in doing what needs to be done without having decided or known what needs to be done. Again, this paradox arises from judgment requiring the imperiousness of stillness and justice being a refusal to refuse flux and change.
03 October 2014
When I stand still, the most stable stance – the one that best supports and maintains that stillness – is a double-weighted one. But when I move: walk, run, dance, etc. it is those instants of single-weightedness that generate and renew the movement. Always in motion, search out tension – the need to freeze in order to observe, use and profit by the world. The clash between you and world, between inside and outside, is not primarily perceptive or sensory but motile: the world moves you, and you move the world.
Interesting that, according to my dictionary, which admittedly isn't the best, the first recorded use of the word relax to mean "become less tense" dates from 1935 – nervous tension must be a modern phenomenon. And also interesting that implicit in the word relax is the belief that the relaxed state has been experienced before – it is a state the word requests you return to.
02 October 2014
Generally we seek stability in order to push certain forces – especially gravity – into the background, so that we can indulge in excess – live a life that exceeds subsistence – the absolutely necessary – and starts to contribute to culture, if only minimally. In taji, on the other hand, we seek a special kind of stability – central equilibrium – which foregrounds gravity as cleanser and creator – an in-system event-trigger – of all we are and all we can, could and should be.
The warrior's verity or certitude, the only thing he knows for sure, is that by embracing death, by entering the fray convinced that he is already dead, he increases his chances of both success and survival. The spirit is only truly free when it faces and embraces death. A final irony that works its way into every encounter.
As I practice taiji I endeavor to become so embroiled in its twists and turns that the Form is pushed into the background where it belongs, and spirit comes to the fore – into the fire. The temptation, of course, is to concentrate on formal and technical trivialities – the disease of the inveterately intermediate student. The function of practice is to go beyond technical problems, not to indulge them.
Things have value only if they take me out of myself. This value is, of course, invested by me in my impeccable engagement with reality. An engagement that insists upon reaching beyond the mind and into heart, beyond language and into true feeling, beyond ideas and ideals and into things in and for themselves.
The secret, if there is one, is simply confidence, the confidence to act. Without this I do not live in real time – I'm always too late – and there is no feedback, neither positive nor negative, and so no guidance to my progress, no wisdom in my life. As teachers we must be so careful not to say No to our students all the time. Not to batter them with our knowledge and expertise – our ego. Instead we must be constantly (re)inventing ways to stimulate and encourage their talent and spirit so that they develop the confidence to find out for themselves, the confidence to embark upon the proverbial voyage of discovery. This is the greatest gift to bestow.