When we talk of spirit it has nothing to do with the spirit of philosophy or religion. Neither Hegelian Geist nor the Holy Spirit. It is Spirit of Vitality – the life force. Bergson had an inkling when he coined the term élan vital. The phrase that sticks in my mind is Duchamp's sparks of the desire-magneto.

Don't confuse spirit with will. They are neither similar nor opposite. They are incommensurable.

Free spirit. This is what we mean by freedom.

The human heart is happiest in worship.

How could I stop after all these years? It's what I do and what I am.

Fight for balance.

emptiness & luminosity

Every world is framed.

Like a moth endlessly encircling a flame.

what is held 

in common 

the pure land

the innocence of becoming

Do you love the principles enough to live them? Even if it means real sacrifice? Because this is what's required if you want to go all the way.

efforts to comprehend tend to shrink what they seek to know

With work (practice) comes insight. 

With more work comes breakthrough. 

With much more work comes consolidation.

From emptiness comes spirit to which it soon returns. It's the energy and material tagging along for the ride that linger.

Taiji, like most bodywork with a vaguely spiritual bent, is all about releasing chronic tension. This seems an impossibility at the time – how let go of something that has been with you since you don't remember when? You need what my teacher called foresight – the ability to finely feel how it would be without that tension. This is what makes humans special – their strange ability to slip time and sense their future – their soul. And this is why my teacher hated Ram Dass's indulgence: Be Here Now. For him it wasn't a matter of rejecting past and future and living only in the present, but a matter of embracing the whole of time with the fullness of one's being.