I am currently finishing up three months of residing in Brooklyn, NY, ostensibly to PRACTICE. I'm here taking lessons and writing music as well as practicing, and of course going to see inspiring shows, supported by a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts - please support them politically whenever you get the chance - they are an amazing benefactor to Canadian musicians and artists. It's cooler to say Brooklyn than New York City now in the music community, as this is the centre - or I suppose centER - of an exploding music and arts scene.

Practice! Something that all tai chi and meditation practitioners (and musicians) seem to have to grapple with and a very challenging word for me personally. I like to joke that I wish I took up a "hobby" which would have had concrete projects or clear end goals, instead of tai chi and meditation, a second life's work (building model cars?). So I'm here, grappling with practice guilt, discipline, and personal time management skills, just as much as I'm grappling with the bass (should I be practicing right now instead of writing this blog?).

What is practice? At the Tai Chi and Meditation Centre (TCMC) we use the noun "The Practice" sometimes, as well as practice in its verb form - "remember to go home and practice your new moves".
I checked a couple of dictionary entries about practice, and they point to a couple of ideas -
From www.dictionary.com:
Noun: habitual or customary performance; operation: office practice.
Verb: to follow or observe habitually or customarily: to practice one's religion.
Verb: to perform or do habitually or usually: to practice a strict regimen.

- but there is something about my Mac's built in dictionary's definitions I like:

noun: the actual application or use of an idea, belief or method, as opposed to theories about such application or use.
verb: perform (an activity) or exercise (a skill) repeatedly or regularly in order to improve or maintain one's proficiency.

To me the notions of application and improvement go well with the internal martial arts, qigong and vipassana we study at the TCMC. Why engage in a habitual or customary performance (the tai chi form, meditation)? To me the goal is inquiry, the act of testing "the actual application or use" of what you are "practicing". This means taking the things you are learning home and examining them to see if you can find a personal connection or truth in them. "Examine" is the sometimes horrifying word that my bass teacher here uses to cut right to the core of something I have taken for granted for years, and have allowed to develop unconsciously. Examine means that the action in question must be systematically practiced in order to be able to gain full conscious control over it - performed "repeatedly or [and!] regularly in order to improve". To me, this applies exactly the same for the left hand playing arpeggios on bass as it does to the left hand doing ward-off in the tai chi form.

Practice, in terms of "actual application... as opposed to theories," means it isn't enough to go to class and be told how things are. It means going home and examining the things you have been taught, and finding out if they are true- whether or not they work for you, if you can make them your own (and if you can't, it gives you questions to bring back to the next class, so practice actually makes class better).

To me, "regularly" is an important word here. Since practice can be daunting, especially as you learn more things and wonder what you should be working on, I think it is important to build up a practice (the noun), that is something you do habitually/regularly so that you are constantly going back and examining these skills. In the context of tai chi and meditation, this means constantly examining yourself, as you are looking to bring the object of practice into consciousness. Practice as inquiry is a form of meditation (I wonder if vipassana meditation, as basically pure inquiry, might be seen as pure practice?). It's always the same moves in the form everyday (or same posture on the cushion), so what changes? What changes is YOU - your attitude, your perceptions of progress or lack thereof, the things that are preoccupying your mind and preventing you from focusing. The things we practice are a touchstone to our internal states, and in the case of tai chi and meditation, practicing is an opportunity to learn from our habits and reoccurring patterns of behaviour and thought, giving us the possibility of freedom or space from ourselves. I've found that going at regular practicing with a spirit of inquiry (I always find starting again after a long break seems arduous), makes practicing fun and exciting, and leads to revelations about both the objects of practice (tai chi, music) and the subject of practice - yourself! Of course, as we head further down the non-dual "Zen and the Art of Archery" route, the practicer and the practiced merge, the place we are all "practicing" to get to!

The spring is one of my favourite tai chi times of year, a chance to re-birth a practice that may have become a bit dormant in the winter (or constrained by the size of my living room). I'm looking forward to bumping into you all in a Toronto park this spring - Happy Practicing!

Prompted by the time of year and some recent conversations, I thought I might try to address the somewhat contentious issue of spirituality. What exactly do we mean when we say something is “Spiritual?” Is it paranormal, sacred, occult, or exclusively religious? Or is there another way to approach the subject?

Several years ago, I found a quote in one of Ken Wilber’s works that referred to spirituality as “one’s ultimate concern.” I responded almost instantly with affirmation when I read this, as it seemed to encompass the elements I also advocated. To my surprise, Wilber went on to introduce three complementary aspects of “ultimate concern”: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. These are not terms of his own; they are borrowed from the Greek philosopher Plato. Wilber does, however, give them a very interesting interpretation.

We respond to the Beautiful with awe and wonder. Scenes of natural splendour and artistic masterpieces suspend our thought, and cause us to pause, entranced. The Beautiful is not only our inner sense of what is aesthetically compelling, but also of what constitutes moral rectitude. Beauty of spirit, then, on a personal level, is a balanced, integrated and harmonious whole; an individual whose words and deeds reflect the distillation of wisdom, reverence, and compassion.

The True is our outer domain, and to me is best represented by science in its essential form. Mathematical and physical principles that help us make sense of our external environment are also part of the True nature of spirituality. Hence, at the deepest level, there is no schism between “art’ and “science”, or religion for that matter. These are simply different lenses through which we are able to look. I read recently of a math teacher who put Pythagoras’ theorem on his blackboard, then underneath it wrote the famous quote from John Keats’ poem “ Ode on a Grecian Urn:”
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"---that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
What a brilliant summation of the two perspectives! This teacher saw that the Truth of science and the Beauty of art are two aspects of the same thing, approached either from the outside or the inside.

As we are individual, so are we collective. No one denies that we are the results of the societies and environments that determine us, and conversely we can influence those collectives by words and deeds. The Good is who we are viewed from the collective. Everything from the tenets of social intercourse, to the systems we develop to ensure justice, to our engagement in social comity, to our economic and political systems all contribute to our sense of the collective Good. The extents to which our societies are inclusive, just, and peaceful are the measure of the degree to which they incorporate the elements of the Good.

Our practice at the Tai Chi and Meditation Centre is to pursue and refine these aspects of ourselves. The triumvirate of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful correspond to the Chinese “Three Treasures,” and address the summation of ourselves as individuals and as a collective. Martial arts develop our outer, corporal element- the True. Meditation and Qi Gong turn the focus more inward- the Beautiful. Finally, we commit ourselves to our practice in the company of other like-minded folk in order to establish a harmonious community- the Good. The historical Buddha proposed a very similar three-part discipline with his canon of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.

Spirit is both immanent and transcendent. Of the transcendent we will say little here. Of the immanent, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful are its manifestations. All admit of the possibility of a scale of values. All admit an endless progression of refinement toward the sublime. All are part of an attempt at a truly integrated view of spirituality.

Jeff Willis