"I feel my body defending itself against me."

The difference between joy and depression, between what my teacher called enheartenment and disheartenment, is that between connexion and disconnexion, touch and separation, freeflow and stagnation, communion and selfhood. It's all in the mind – the heartmind – the mood. A matter of spirit.

a vertical severity

"It's that wonderful old-fashioned idea that others come first and you come second. This was the whole ethic by which I was brought up. Others matter more than you do, so don't fuss, dear; get on with it."

Gravity: what comes down must go up.
Grace: what goes up must come down.
Or is it the other way round?

Here, the religious obsess on the word of God, and the nonreligious on their own word – opinion. Much better the former.

"The visionary has two sciences, the science of wrath and the science of pity: the former the explosion of energy, the latter its fruit and incorporation."

Gravity bears down through body, and thymos (life) gushes up, distributed by waist (core strength & turning moment), pooling at heart. A trigger of compassion, vulnerability, hope, and heart opens upward in affective (so effective) prayer. Grace, the answer to prayer, then befalls and blesses. At our best, we are simply machines – transducers – converting gravity to grace.

What kills the body? Vision, eventually. What kills the spirit? Lack of vision. Which one do you want to go first?

We make a world to keep reality out.

"The real lover is the man who can thrill you by kissing your forehead."

It is not enough to have a quiet mind – a self-satisfied mind is quiet. The mind must be empty.

The fundamental fact of us all – more fundamental than the air we breathe, the food we eat – is gravity: the fact that we are fashioned from matter, and so are tugged at by heavy objects, in particular the Earth. The gravitational field of the Earth pulls us directly downward upon its surface, and this surface – the ground – kicks up into us, equal and opposite to gravity itself. We call this upward force thymos because, if the spine is strong, healthy and erect, a steady stream of energy flows up through the body to gather naturally in the thymus gland in the upper chest. In its simplest form Taiji is a sequence of movements designed to distribute this thymic energy through the upper body and into the Other, using mainly turning actions from the core (belly/lumbar spine).

"Don't stop when you're tired; stop when you're done."

Spirit is intensely awake and internally gathered.

Our vision is not so much in what we see but in how we move.

Quietening the mind is difficult enough, though it comes in time, with practice. But emptying the mind, where on earth does one start on that? Issues have to be worked through so that they can be let go, otherwise they'll keep coming back.