"What allows the energy you work with, gather and create a life of its
own is humour. Humour is a lightness that admits of other possibilities.
Combine that admission with hearty connectedness and those
possibilities become incorporated into a body teeming and seething with
life. If humour is maintained then those incorporated possibilities –
each one a thread of energy if you like – remain in some way distinct –
do not agglutinate into one amorphous mass – and there quickly comes a
point where the combined intensity and complexity of these interacting
threads develops into what feels like awareness.
Humour is not
taking things, especially the self, seriously. It confounds the logical,
rational, linear mind, which always struggles to force your movements
into some preconceived template, with an element of play which revels in
the surprises inherent in the unfolding of creative and natural
processes. In a way humour is the most valuable possession you have
because it allows you to put up with anything, not with resignation but
with a smile – a mood and energy that is always opening and searching
not for comfort and ease but for those threads that can be brought into
the whole to transform it into a vehicle capable of thrusting you to the
next level; humour finds fuel everywhere. Humour also admits that
sneaking feeling that you are getting it wrong – that your efforts to do
and to make are coming from a part of you – your conditioning – foreign
to your essential nature. Humour is a natural and gentle way of
applying shocks to your conditioning – unsettling it and loosening its
iron grip sufficiently for your essential nature to momentarily peek
through. This essential nature, so used to being plastered over, pushed
into the background and over-ridden by the bullying conditioned and
conditional mind, has a completely different relationship with reality
than that mind: soft, playful, interactive, ringing with laughter –
imagine children at play – but it needs years of gentle coaxing and
encouragement before it will venture forth and take the lead in your
life. Scars don't heal overnight. Humour – the touch of lightness that
refuses to linger for too long and never repeats itself (jokes are
rarely funny second time round). Your conditioning needs repetition to
survive and it uses up most of your vital energy in the process of
constantly reviewing and recounting its domain – imagine the lonely
miser pointlessly counting his money each evening before he can sleep.
Your conditioning is telling you the same joke over and over and because
you don't realise it's a joke you listen and approve. Humour is the
only effective way to cut through this – because it is so gentle its
blade is very keen."
- Steven Moore, 6/11/06, Tai Chi Heartwork
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