dishevelment and distraction have become an art form

Find a tree, stand or sit beside it and meditate. Feel it helping your heavy energy down into the earth and your light energy up into the heart, head and beyond, energies that usually cling together in fear and disquiet. (If no tree then use a wall – zazen and the wall.) Trees are the best teachers.

Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?

 

The mind's disease is that it cannot quieten down. In taiji we have discovered that the mind is only noisy and neurotic when we lose our conscious connexion with the ground. So in each lesson and each practice session we re-establish an intimate awareness of that connexion through legs and feet, and, as if by magic, the mind settles and quietens, if only a little.

If prospective students do not feel the value, let alone the necessity, of gentle pushing hands then they don't have the heart for taiji.

The mind looks for physical stability so that it can go walkabout, so that it can think to itself about absent or imaginary things. Nothing entertains it more than itself. It is the archetypal narcissist. Our work struggles to bring the mind back to the body by setting it the task of finding and equilibrating the energies in each situation it finds itself in.

A niggling suspicion that there's more than meets the eye.

And wild desire 

Falls like black lightning.

A heart forever aching, forever breaking.

Consciousness is a filter – inevitably picking and choosing. This is why we reach beyond it, with a yearning, hopeful heart. Softness is a dream in every ache to become a better soul.

It seems blatantly obvious to me that the more populous we become as a species, the less individual intensity (freedom) we each possess. The planet simply isn't large enough for seven thousand million magical spirit creatures.

We are all weanlings.

This penchant for individual happiness is slack and infantile.

A sparkle of authenticity rather than an image projected.

a practice of reintegrating ourselves into the ontological tissue

When the mind is subdued and held inside the body then the energy opens out into the unimaginable. But when the mind is outside looking on, giving the body orders, then the energy just follows the dictates of that mind.

A spirit so open it constantly derails the mind.