Dealing with trauma is often more traumatic than the trauma itself, but without it one cannot live a real life.

If you concentrate on qi you will be weak
If you concentrate on spirit you will be strong

This is a famous Taiji adage. My teacher pointed out once that when they say qi (ch'i) they actually mean anything that isn't spirit. So, if you use mind expanding drugs to open up consciousness, which a lot of students seem to do nowadays, be aware that this must go hand in hand with disciplined daily practice on and with spirit otherwise it'll end up weakening you. There's little point in having knowledge you don't have the means to either engage or internalise.

"All young artists must go through a discipline so incessant and grueling that only genuine talent can supply the energy to drive through it and the ambition to emerge from it a master and not a plodder."

We all know that if you give a child more than they deserve then not only do they fail to appreciate what they get but they also quickly develop an overweening sense of entitlement. The same is true of students.

"Repetition and imitation are the beginning of art; they are what we call practice."

If you don't agree with what the teacher says then stop. Either stop your shitty opinionated mind or stop wasting his time and find someone else to pester.

The feeling of perfect completeness that you feel/felt with the teaching/teacher is what motivates and fuels the continuing practice. Each session an opportunity to touch that perfection, to evoke the spirit of the teaching/teacher and keep it alive, without which you know you'd be a mere shadow living a shadow life. It's the very least you/we can do.

Glow quietly yet lambently. Believe in your own light, above all. This is our selflessness – our poverty – to glow for the world rather than for self-aggrandizement.

"Art is always the replacement of indifference by attention."

The educated, liberal middle-class: a placcid ovine herd of self-satisfied mediocrities.

Spirit plus consciousness is what Blake called the Imagination. It is what this work is working towards, though most of us probably don't see it as such. The ability to embody your beliefs, the courage to live your own life and vision, but not selfishly, not for self alone, but to further the Image of Man; to aspire and to inspire; inspire aspiration in others. To teach, basically.

"We conquer knowledge by forced marches, learning more and more as we continually press on. Wisdom, on the other hand, is the unhurried expanding organic health of the powerful and well-knit imagination, and it depends on a combination of practice and relaxation."

If there is just one simple instruction to repeat to yourself regularly through the day then I suggest: Heart Up.

Early in life we make a command decision to take on board a whole array of tensions that force our perceptions to conform to those of the herd we find ourselves amidst. Learning to belong to a family, a society. This is what is known as selling your soul to the devil. Spiritual work is then any attempt to locate and relax these tensions so that vision broadens and heightens, and we start to see what God intended.

"A real miracle is an imaginative effort which meets with an imaginative response."

The lengths we go to to wreck our spine, and our chances of salvation, just to construct a lair in the chest for the self. When the spine is erect and healthy there is no reflective ego as such, no place to go to mull things over, only communication – body with Earth (other bodies), spirit with God (other spirits).

Just enough to bring a little grey into an otherwise gaudy existence.