Event: come out
Invent: come upon
Advent: come toward
Convent: come together
Prevent: come before
Solvent: come apart

Events of togetherness. This, Taiji promises, and, when open, delivers. Without, there is no progress, no egress from self.

Ever shaken the hand of a murderer? No? You'd be surprised. We bourgeois have little idea what goes on beneath the glamorous surface we gleefully glide over.

It's when thrust into situations we can't plan, control or foresee that we find ourselves at our best, our most true. Even if we fail miserably.

softened in the waters of doubt

All my life I keep starting over again, beginning at the beginning…

I have been very fortunate in the quality and extent of my education, Taiji and otherwise. If anything I have been overloaded. Hence my lack of enthusiasm for other disciplines, especially qigong and mindfulness, both of which are presently ultra-popular. I think what distinguishes the Taiji I was taught, and what makes it, in my book (in my life), so much better than the aforementioned disciplines, is that it is all about relating to others, what my teacher called yielding, putting the Other first and thereby cutting through the self. It is not easy, and no one promised it would be.

Traditionally in Taiji, beginners learn about relaxation, intermediates about power, and advanceds spirit. Once you get beyond that it's simply a matter of growing old gracefully.

Next time you feel like complaining, instead just shut up and put up. That way you will be neither reinforcing negativity nor wasting energy on things of no importance.

a poetics of obligation

Coiled like a serpent within the settled time of the present there stirs the unsettled and unsettling time which is out of joint, which disjoins the world, which prevents the closure of the world, which the metaphysical-theological imagination confuses with the eternal or other worldly.

Bear in mind that 'Goodbye' is a contraction of 'God Bless You.' I never once heard my teacher utter a careless Goodbye. It was always an emphatic, heartfelt 'God Bless!'

Give and receive blessings: heart-energy.

When I touch the Other, the Other touches me. When I am in the world, the world is in me. At our best we are porous and there is no interior. The Internal, the soul, the spirit, are not inside me, I do not possess them. If anything they possess me.

During meditation the spine behaves like an antenna, collecting and sending messages who knows where. Meditator as mediator.

we must make ourselves adverbs

The internal monologue, the noisy chattering mind, arises because the self is not satisfied with where it is, with what it has.