T'ai Chi Workshop in Blackrock Community Centre this Saturday Long Form 10.30 -11.30 Short Form and Partner Work 11.30 - 1.30 Beginners Lesson 1-2.30

Just for now relax, tell yourself you have all the time in the world.

Go on, allow yourself to really feel that that you have all the time in the world
( just foe now ) . . . .

Take a few (at least 3) long deep breaths with your eyes closed and really really feel them . . .

Now feel the presence of your whole body and all the feelings and emotions in your body. . . . .

While you are feeling your body and all the feelings and emotions in your body allow yourself to feel the space around your body. . . .

The space to the ceiling above your body. . .

The space to the floor below your body . . .

The space to the wall in front. . .

The space to the wall behind your body . . .

An the space to the sides of your body. . .

Now can you imagine feeling the presence of your whole body and and all the feelings and emotions in your body while you are also feeling the space in and around your body . . .

Again just for a few moments close your eyes and just feel that sense of your body and all the spaces in and around your body . . .

Notice how you feel right now, more relaxed I hope, ready and open to practice your Tai Chi (below) or just to move on with your day in a more open way.

The above exercise is adapted from Dr Fehmi's Open Focus exercises.

T'ai Chi Workshop in Blackrock Community Centre this Saturday Long Form 10.30 -11.30 Short Form and Partner Work 11.30 - 1.30 Beginners Lesson 1-2.30

LESSON 1 AND 2 for the Monday Morning Class

                 " He just fluttered into the sky,

            Attracting those who had forgotten their wings;

          provoking, challenging those who had forgotten their

              sky, their freedom. Then he disappears into the

           faraway sky, into the blueness, leaving no footprints

              but leaving a tremendous urge to go to those 

                  dimensions where you are no more.

            The new man is ready to be born within you. . .

                it just needs a little more witnessing.

                       Witnessing is nourishment

                         to the Buddha in you.

                                   Osho

Love is not blind; it simply enables one to see things others fail to see.

- William Blake -

Short form Lesson 3, Ward off right

LESSONS 1,2 and 3 Together



The mind is all that you have experienced, all you have gone through, all that is already dead - the mind is the dead part of your being. It is the past the dead hovering over the living. It does not allow you to be here, it does not allow you to be present. It is like a cloud surrounding you it does not allow you to see through it, your vision is not clear it is distorted.

Let this cloud disappear. Let yourself be left with no answers, no conclusions, no philosophies, no religions. Remain open, just open; remain vulnerable, and the truth can happen in you. To be vulnerable is to be intelligent. To know that through the mind you miss reality is to be intelligent. To know that through no-mind the door opens is to be intelligent.

Osho

                   Practice

              Come into your body

           Let go of your thinking mind

               And you will notice

                  Peace has come

                   Joy has come

               Even bliss has come

                     Unbidden 

Mini Form form lesson 1 for Monday morning class

Just watch yourself and you will not find a single self in you but many selves. You are multi-psychic, you have many minds, and each one is fighting with the other minds.

There is great competition inside you, a continual quarrel. And in that quarrel, in that conflict, you are dissipating energy; and when you dissipate energy in constant civil war you lose the zest for life. You lose every possibility of being ecstatic, you lose joy.

William Blake is right when he says," Energy is delight."

Yes, energy is delight, and the greater your energy, the greater your delight. It is energy that becomes delight; overflowing energy is delight, overflowing energy becomes celebration. When energy is dancing in you, in unison, in deep harmony, in rhythm and flow, you become a blessing to the world.

Osho

Pain

Pain is part of growth. And remember, whenever something hurts, something inside you is repressed. So rather than trying to avoid the pain, move into it. Let it hurt like hell. Let it hurt totally so the wound is opened completely. Once it is opened completely, it starts healing. If you avoid the spaces when you feel pain, they will remain inside you and you will come across them again and again.
- Osho

Single Whip Part 1 and 2

What dwells in the head of the blind person is the light. Should we say in his head, or in his heart ? Or perhaps even in his eyes ? What difference does it make ? The light is neither within or without, but encompasses the whole being and wipes out the barriers we have created out of habit. The light is here ! That is the only certainty.
Jacques Lusseyran ( from Against the Pollution of the I )

I agree with Jacques Lusseyran the light is within and without and our work is to clear the barriers that prevent us from experiencing it fully. To allow ourselves to relax into the light and trust it to dissolve our blocks. To breathe more softly, easily, and feel the light (love) that surrounds and permeates us at all times.

Mini Form for the Blackrock class

And all is light in this blindness, and what is more, this manifest luminosity contains a magnificent lesson. Since my childhood I have been impressed with a phenomenon of surprising clarity. The light I saw changed with my inner condition.
Partly it depended on my physical condition, for instance fatigue, restfulness, tension, or relaxation. Such changes however, were relatively rare. The true changes depended on the state of my soul.
When I was sad, when I was afraid, all shades became dark and all forms indistinct. When I was joyous and attentive , all pictures become light. Anger, remorse, plunged everything into darkness. A magnanimous resolution, a courageous decision, radiated a beam of light. By and by I learned to understand that love meant seeing and that hate meant night.
Jacques Lusseyran ( from Against the Pollution of the I )

Miracles

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of
the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night
with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer
forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so
quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with
the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—
the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?

by Walt Whitman

    Seeing hearing feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me

       is a miracle.

    Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch  or

      am touch'd from

        . . .

   I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four and,

      each moment then,

   In the faces of men and women I see God and in my own 

     face in the glass . . .

                Walt Whitman

Lesson 2 of the Short Form : Ward off left

When we make music we don't do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition.
If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best.
Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey.
When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point.
And exactly the same thing is true in meditation (T'ai Chi) .
Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.

- Alan Watts ( in Commuting to Inner Peace )

Life is Baeutiful

Do you remember the name of your kindergarden teacher? I do, mine. Her name was Mrs White. And I remember thinking she must be some older relation of Walt Disney's Snow White, because she had the same bright blue eyes, short dark hair, red lips and fair skin.

I don't remember much about what we learned in her class, but my mother once told me that we used to write a lot. And I would bring back what I wrote and she would look at it and see there were so many mistakes. But no red corrections. And always a star. Sometimes even a Good! scrawled in that would make my heart soar with happiness. But it worried my mother, so one day when she went in to meet Mrs White for one of those Parent-Teacher meetings, she asked her why she never corrected my mistakes. Why she never red-pencilled in the right spellings of words or pointed out grammatical errors.



And my mother says Mrs White said-The children are just beginning to get excited about using words, about forming sentences. I don't want to dampen that enthusiasm with red ink. Spelling and grammar can wait. The wonder of words won't... And maybe she didn't say it Exactly like that. It was a long time ago. And what my mother gave me was the gist of what she could remember. The rest I added in. Because I grew up learning to use words with loving confidence like that.

And it occurs to me that if Mrs White had used her red pen more precisely I probably wouldn't be telling you about this now. Which is kind of obvious but also kind of not. I look back now and think she must have been a rather extraordinary teacher- to exercise such red-pen-restraint. To allow the joy, wonder and excitement of expression flower- however faultily- like that. Because to bloom is better than not to bloom. And a bud once nipped never opens. May we all be so kind...
I used to misspell beautiful a lot. Never could quite remember that the e went before the a. It exasperated my teacher in high school no end. If I was going to employ the word with such lavishness she figured the least I could do was spell it right. Eventually the e's and a's settled into their right places of their own accord. Am glad I didn't wait on them though. Pretty is easier to spell but it doesn't hold as much as you mean sometimes.

And thanks to Mrs White I had no qualms about writing what I meant even if couldn't quite spell it out. Because Life isn't Pretty. It's Baeutiful.

Unfortunately I can't credit the author as this is anonymous but wanted to share it because I love the sentiments.


Left side lesson for Sara.

Single Whip Part 1 and Short form to Single whip (part 1)

                 For this joy is close to you, 

                 it is in you !

                 None of you has a spirit so heavy,

                 nor an intelligence so feeble,

                 none of you is so far from God

                 not to be able to find this joy in Him.

                               Meister Eckhart



              " Man is nourished by the invisible.

               Man is nourished  by that which is beyond the personal.

               He dies from preferring their opposites."

                                     Jacques Lusseyran.

 

"I was driving to work, with a feeling of calm and my mind open to the senses occurring around me when I had a life changing experience. I suddenly knew Who I was. The duality disappeared and and I became. I became everything around me, the air, the trees, the slip road, just everything."

When we have awakening experiences such as the above a big shift in identity occurs.
Through making contact with a deeper part of ourselves, the spiritual essence of our being we become aware that this is really who we are.

The daily practice of T'ai Chi has awakened me to that deep place within which is untouched by outside events, which is constant and doesn't take offence. The practice allows us to know ourselves beyond name and form. Allows us to dance more lightly in this form. To laugh more deeply at life's follies.

Attention Preparation Beginning

Here is the first posture for the new beginners class in Davis College.
Welcome to T'ai chi