Practice is time well spent.

Roundness is containment, and in taiji everything is contained and everything is container: body, mind, form, practice (time). Containment is neutralization, and hence yielding. So, practice contains and neutralizes laziness in a way that laziness cannot contain practice. By containing activity, spirit is reabsorbed into the core. This is discipline, which becomes power, without which there is no progress.

In spiritual training breakthrough is often marked by illness (injury) - a washout of strength, making it impossible for you to resist the impending changes.

The freedom we desire, more than anything, is freedom from anxiety. This is true for every human being. Most of us go about achieving such freedom by designing a life for ourselves that is relatively stress free, that is, we endeavor to avoid anxiety and it's occasion. This could be called the material approach to the problem of suffering. The spiritual approach, on the other hand, realizes that avoidance is inherently wrong: anything avoided now will catch up with me later, at a time when my mind and energy are less able to cope with it. But equally wrong is a passive attitude to anxiety: dealing with anxiety by not caring less, by detaching from occasion. Instead we need a transformative attitude: one which engages heartfully with the occasion, and believes, wholeheartedly, in the power of heart to melt through constrictions and disconnexions. This is supremely active – always forwards – and also extremely difficult to sustain. But, alas, this is the work, ever and forever at hand.

faith is a proclamation that enacts life

…scraps of an ancient voice in me not mine…

To repeat is to repeat not what you did, but what you failed to do – the missed opportunities.

Don't affect lightness by withholding the body, and don't feign heaviness by deadening the mind.

The arms are loose ropes, hanging from sunk shoulders, thrown up and out by vigorous turning, a turning that gathers power into the root so that the empty leg can extend, reaching out for new territory, which is immediately and voraciously claimed. This is how we move through life: borrowing footholds and gathering power.

a freedom that does not evade responsibility but which constitutes it

"The possible pales to lucidity next to the felt turbulence of the critical."

Learning taiji is like building a house: painstaking and laborious. There comes a point though when that house is ready to be lived in, an activity completely different from the building.

"We are a we. But not because we keep company. But because our boundaries flow in and through one another."

If I'm not prepared to learn, particularly from my own mistakes, then there is no hope.

Stop worrying and start to live.

…love is understood as that act of spiritual daring that attempts to eviscerate the old self in order that something new might come into being…

We are two abysses – a well staring at the sky.