5 Secrets for Living a Purposeful Life

And so we bid farewell to the the spirit of the moment with this final climatic episode. On the eve of the monks departure, I discover a dusty, tea-stained document left on my desk: 5 Secrets for Living a Purposeful Life. This, I have recorded as an audio file.
Little remains now but to leave his words to settle, like wind blown snow flakes on an empty landscape. As I look around the quiet training halls of the temple, there is little evidence of his presence, other than Yak prints in the snow. 
I even find myself questioning the very existence of the Bean Curd Boxer. Was it all just a figment of our collective imagination, a projection of our collective hunger? A poignant reminder to simply Leave Things Alone? 
Who knows? Who can tell these days in this time of transition and dust, what is real and what is fake, what is substantial and what is imaginary . We must all make of it all, as we will.

SECRETS
As for the notion of secrets - are these really secrets? I'm not so sure. People talk a lot in the internal arts about secrets from within the inner-circles, family styles, private transmissions. They are referring to special techniques passed down in the dusty corners of training halls between masters and select students -  sworn under a swirling cloud of incense or kneeling alongside a miniature gifted zen garden  - secrets that are blood bonds, secrets that  were meant to be kept hidden.
This manuscript belongs to another history. These are the secrets that hide in plain site -  revealing only what is uncarved, the simple, the obvious, the overlooked. 

WHAT TO MAKE OF IT ALL?
Ultimately, what you or I make of this document is not important. Left here in the spirit of transparency it is no more than a passing farewell from a  man and his obsession with tea, as he prepares to leave behind The World of Dust. 

And so I fulfil my part. I give you the Top 5 Tips for Living a Purposeful Life amidst the fakery of the 21st century - given here not in exchange for an email address nor a Paypal donation - but as something to laugh at, to prod, to share or to step over, depending on your point of view and style of walking.  As the mOnk would often remind me, we were meant to play with them, not study. 

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5 Secrets for Living a Purposeful Life

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Secret No 1: Remove Borders

Do not obsess over styles, Forms, names, borders, currencies, accents or allegiances. The arts depend on such artificial perimeters about as much as Donald Trump depends on a dictionary before tweeting.

• Exchange your nouns for adverbs.
• Build conversations not lists, bridges not walls.
• Always speak of and in the present.

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Secret No 2: Put Away your Toys 

• Try to stay grounded in the 21st century, resist the urge to float back to the 17th.
• Don’t dress up. Forget uniforms and haircuts. Put to one side the paraphernalia, the trophies the toys, the awards  - they amount to little more than the robes of the Yellow Emperor.
• Drop the outer layers and let the art reveal itself anew.
• Let it express itself as who you are, where you are and the people you live amongst.
• Wear your clothes, not those of your great-grandfathers or those of Kwai Chang Caine.
• Speak in the language of your students, not in the dialect or tongue of another time and place.
• Drop the jargon and the mystification  -  and watch how an art will happily and completely learn to express itself with relevance and style once more in a world that has forgotten such values.

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​Secret No 3: Comic books are fine...but have their place.

• Avoid saying things that are downright silly. Unless of course that is your intention for silliness too has a role to play. 
• Resist making unverifiable claims about What an art can do. We suffer already from the inherited vagueness of its language, avoid adding to this by talking of woo woo, kryptonite and of superheroes. Unless of course it's Deadpool -  then you have my permission to say what you will.
• Deadpool aside, such claims give the art an unsubstantial reputation on par with voodoo and astral projection and slots it into the same level of study  as a trip to Disney world.

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​Secret No 4: Let it go

• ​On the subject of Tai Chi as a martial art:
• Just let it go.
• Forget all the martial versus health nonsense.
• It's all about the relevance of its applications, whether you choose to focus on the fist or the open hand. The strike or the caress.
• There is no one interpretation, unless you insist  on it, and Im afraid by doing so you miss the point - or all the heavenly glory - as someone far more qualified than I once said.

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​Secret No 5:Do Good

• ​Do good.
• It’s not difficult to to slag someone off - especially from afar. It’s easier to hold a grudge than to forgive. And there it begins  - the black hole of negativity that is fostered without thought.
• Instead, choose another route. Go out each and every day and do a little good in the world.
• Speak to the person who serves you in a cafe or bar, a supermarket or on a train. and speak with gratitude, for it is an increasingly rare commodity.
• Smile at those who scowl.
• Give more than you take.
• Talk to strangers, despite what your parents told you. And in so doing reconnect with what is real and present and not sold to you under the guise of a timeline notification.
• In these simple actions rediscover the value of inter-action and the power of living with openness and humility each moment of each day.
• In such small actions all arts aspire.

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So is that it?

So it seems that is that.
I was left with a dusty and coffee stained document laying on my desk this morning, with the telltale warmed teapot left to one side. 
Subtitled: Ways of living for the 21st century - it occurs to me that it may speak of the obvious, but - at the same time, I feel it is a message that still resonates. When the lines between neighbours are clear one day, but intentionally blurred the next, it is a time of concern.  Where yesterday we resided in Oceania, today it is, surprise surprise, Eurasia.  
As I now peer outside the window of the Temple, I can still see the tell-tale Yak tracks in the snow,  but I am not sad  - for he leaves in his wake an abundant and fertile crop upon which you may  harvest. An inner temple of goodies….

Looking around the teapot temple I can see he has been a busy mOnk this last year.  He has produced 4 online courses - he released all his books from the stranglehold of Amazon and distributed them to all digital platforms - iBooks, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Gumroad, and to libraries everywhere - he wrote another book or two - recorded 3 audiobooks - organised a summer of free classes in Devon England, Celebrated World Tai Chi Day with the excellent people from Central Tai Chi in Birmingham - and completed this series of 10 podcasts -

And - at the same time managed….. well, that’s a story for another time.
So if you’ve missed anything, then go back to Soundcloud, or browse the deeper levels of this site at your leisure.
Finally, the monk wants me to thank you for your time, your energy and your support over the last decade and says he will hopefully catch up with everyone again in a dust free dimension somewhere, sipping tea and watching as everything gets done by itself. ​

For context, best visit the home of the mOnk:  ​https://www.teapotmonk.com/