Cheng Hsin Nijmegen school voor Zen, Tai Chi Chuan & Martial Arts

05/03/2025

Het nieuwe boek van Peter Ralston is uit! De titel spreekt voor zich... Tijdens het Holland Camp komende zomer is dit ook het onderwerp van een zesdaagse workshop! Zie link in eerste commentaar.

• Provides contemplative practices and exercises to help you recognize how you cause your own suffering • Explores the dynamics of the mind and how it sets the stage for distress • Explains how mental states of suffering are created and how to control your mind to stop those thought patterns.....

25/02/2025

09/02/2025

You’ve probably heard of, and have likely experienced, times when mind and action, intent and outcome, came together in a sublime way. Consider the baseball player at bat, who, in the middle of a swing knows that this one will be a home run—and this is confirmed as the bat cracks the ball with that perfect sound. Consider the boxer, who, against all odds, wills himself to beat an unbeatable opponent by doing all the right things in each moment throughout the fight. When a gymnast like Nadia Comăneci flies through a routine, bringing in the first perfect 10, there is no room for thought or doubt or anything but the immediate perfection of movement.

I’m sure you have experienced skill doing certain tasks, and know that when you are good at something there is a “feeling” you produce that is inherent in the action that will make it work out. Now, imagine that instead of finding this feeling through lots of repetition, you search for and create it through sensing what it is by applying concentration and insight. Also imagine you can create other feeling-states and impulses in relation to whatever is needed at the time. Clearly, controlling the mind and being wed to appropriate feeling-impulses are necessary for mastery to unfold.

- From The Art of Mastery

05/02/2025

This is not to suggest that merely willing something to come to pass will make it happen, or that positive thinking is in any way enough. It does, however, suggest that you can develop a new ability, generating a feeling-intent that serves to bring about your desired outcome. Such an ability requires a new kind of intelligence that is inclusive and insightful—founded on a great deal of experiential training and learning— where you can leap past pedestrian thought processes and instead sense what state or impulse needs to be created, without it being based on past patterns, the need to figure it out, or your personal concerns.

The idea of “willing” the outcome to come about as if by magic, albeit through committed action, is both unconventional and conventional. Its conventionality can be found in the idea that stubborn determination is enough to make something happen, or the idea that wishful thinking will bring something about, or the idea that some outcome is destined or deserved, and in other such notions. None of these are what I’m recommending nor are they useful. What’s being recommended is actually unconventional.

- From The Art of Mastery

25/01/2025