Rather than stepping away from reality by thinking on the images we are presented of it, use the mind to gently coax the natural curiosity of your cells.

The Bourgeois Fallacy, Part 6:
The unknowable does not exist.

No root, no fruit.

"A good gardener's sharp-edged knife promotes the fruitfulness of the vine by thinning the clusters and by cutting off superfluous shoots."

Lose heart, lose all.

The Bourgeois Fallacy, Part 8:
Talking makes things better.

What this work forces me to face, day in day out, is the immense difficulty, if not impossibility, of change.

What is it that blocks my heart from doing what it aches to do: fill with love? Is it hatred, anger, fear, anxiety, an overactive mind, an inactive mind, depression, carelessness, apathy, selfishness? This should be the point of interest and research of every one of us: the question our meditation and Taiji should constantly address.

Romantic love is the mind's attempt to force meaning and permanence onto fleeting feeling. It is the mind doing what it always does: exercising self-importance and greed by reading significance into events that would be best left in the heart.

Freedom, the only freedom we really possess, is whether to embrace the pondering slowness of choice or reject it for the sake of a truly connected life. A connected life is one that operates so quickly that it cannot be considered, cannot be thought (about), only actively engaged and entered. Life is then not something that happens to me but something I do.

The awfulness of language is that it inevitably homogenises life by assuming that it can adequately express, explain, communicate all levels of experience. In fact so pervasive is language that any experience or perception that cannot be reduced to speech, cannot be spoken, is treated as trivial and disregarded. In this respect language and capital are the same, and it would have been impossible for capitalism to have developed without the smoothing out, the averaging, the reducing of language. This is the exact opposite of the heart, which holds dear and resonates with all those experiences that resist the vulgarisation of representation. We all have amazing experiences that shake our very being, only to pale considerably once we've told all and sundry about them. In fact we use language to reduce the power of life – to constantly bring us back to ourselves. Some things – heart events – are best left in the heart, though the head will try to steal anything it can put to its own advantage.

A book requires an active imagination, a screen a passive one. The powers that be love the new technology because it makes passive sheep of us all. It shocks me now that my students are far more conservative and less mindful than their parents and grandparents.

This morning, as we were strolling to her grandparents, my daughter explained to me that animals (by which she means cats and dogs) are better than humans because they don't think to themselves all the time. Wonderful how children naturally intuit the truth.

Movement in Taiji hopefully brings about an intensive (internal) transformation as well as an extensive (external) one. I move not to change my physical location/configuration but to effectuate an internal journey of change and becoming. This journey – effectively a series of intense feelings – is felt in the heart, and always threatens disequilibrium. The degree of intensity then depends upon my ability to stay sunk and sober whilst undergoing the intoxication of heart work. In time and with practice I develop both a centre, focused and dense, and an openness, expansive and embracing, that on their own would destroy me but together offer the perfect instrument for navigating a meaningful and inclusive course through the vagaries of life.

To what extent is every experience vicarious, mediated – censored by a mind not really my own? This used to be the question on all our lips. Now it doesn't worry us, as long as experience is safe and repeatable.

"The truth of experience is its power or capacity to extend beyond any actual image we have of it."

A mind that listens to everything but itself.