As my Master says :

     " Inquire until there is no one left to inquire."



       The habits of the mind are very hard to break, 

       and so it must be continued.

       You have been ignorant for years, 

       so when you know the Truth

       you must stay as such for some time.

       What else is important ?

       You have to be very strong. 

       Question the mind unceasingly.

       Decide to never return to stupidness.



         Once you are in silence 

         stay as Silence.

                       Papaji

The secret to a long and healthy life is to be stress-free. Be grateful for everything you have, stay away from people who are negative, stay smiling and keep running. --

Fauja Singh, 100-yr-old Marathoner

You can check him out on youtube.

                   Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. 



                   Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.



                     - Samuel Beckett

Here is this weeks lesson for beginners classes.

Introductory Form from Heartworker on Vimeo.

Here is a story from the Sufi tradition.

Shiek Nasrudin had a farm in the middle of the desert. Tired of travelling long distance to get water every day, he asked God to provide him with a source close to home.

When God heard his request he sent an angel to Nasrudin who said, " God would like you to dig a well. If you do you will have will have all the water you will
ever need." Then the angel left.

Forty years later when the angel came to bring Nasrudin to heaven, she asked him about his well. " God deceived me he exclaimed. I dug one hundred wells each fifty feet deep and I never found water." With that the angel replied " If you had dug one well one hundred feet deep instead of a hundred fifty feet deep you would have found all the water you ever needed."

In tai chi as in all methods the most important thing is to stick to your practice.
Your daily practice will develop discipline, and to me discipline means becoming a disciple to your higher self. It means to love your true nature enough to spend time each day to deepen that most fundamental relationship in your life.

When I was a child my mother was constantly reminding me to count my blessings. My mother didn't have a very easy life. She lost her mother when she was five and a few years later a stepmother whom she also loved dearly.

She became a widow at forty five, my father was fun loving and care free , not the type to have insurance policies so she was left with three children and no income.

My brother was studying for the priesthood at the time and offered to take time out and work to support us until my sister and I were finished school. She wouldn't hear of it. " You do God's work and God will look after me " she said.

And so God did look after her, we lived near the university and she took in students during the term, she cooked and cared for them as if they were part of our family and many of them told us that, that was just how they felt.

She worked so hard and yet was always ready for a laugh, a trip to town with Auntie Peg, or a show in the opera house, sometimes I'd come home from school and there would be a note on the table, "Gone to a funeral with Charlie Brown please cook the tea for the boys." (Now not many people would regard a funeral as a day out but this is Ireland and a funeral except a tragic one is not always a sad affair. It's often a time to meet old friends and catch up and Mum loved that).

She always had her priorities right when it came to having fun. My brother was a missioner and Mum took every opportunity to visit him, if it was a case of new windows or a trip away, there was no choice, her bag would be packed and off she would go, counting her blessings and telling us how lucky she was to have such a full interesting life.

She is dead twenty years now and more and more I am realizing her courage and wisdom.

Lately I'm taking her advice on counting my blessings and have started to write them down each morning and again before I go to sleep. It proving to be a wonderful way to realize how lucky I am to have such a full interesting life.

Br.David SeindlRast a Benedictine monk now in his eighties says that as a teenager in Austria during the Nazi occupation he had never expected to reach the age of twenty.

Food wes scarce, his family often lived on little more than soup made from weeds and he was sure he'd be drafted and killed in combat.He remained happy despite all the dangers and difficulties, because against the backdrop of impending death,he had seen life as the gift it was.

That deep sense of appreciation has never left him. To Br.David greatfulness means experiencing ' great fullness,' feeling full in every moment, appreciating exactly what is. He says 'happiness is not what makes us gratefull; it is gratefullness that makes us happy.'

Here is an example of Br. David's exercises for increasing feelings of gratefulness in life. Each day he picks a 'theme for the day' to focus on. If it's water, for example,every time he washes his hands, waters the plants or brushes his teeth, he notices and appreciates the water and uses it as a reminder to be present in the moment in pure gratefulness.

Gratefulness.org is his website.