One of my main aikido instructors, Sensei William Smith OBE, used to say,”There’s no real pleasure without commitment”. As a young and somewhat wild young man that made little sense to me, but these days it does on several levels: from my primary romantic relationship, to my embodied practices, to my work which flows from them. It is also important to recognise when the heart turns away. Having been deeply committed to corporate embodied work for eight years I now find myself leaning away from this side of things, and while I won’t give it up when the conditions are right and compromises minimal, I have become tired of serving greed, enabling humans to be pushed in inhuman ways, and my work being mostly available to those on the dominant side of the inequality divide. Where power does not tolerate truth being spoken I have no place. I have also recently returned from the wonderful Budhafield festival where consumerism shows another shape – that of the modern-day spiritual supermarket. Buddhafield is merely a more condensed version of the modern circus/marketplace for personal growth of which I am a part. On the one hand it is truly amazing to for the first time in human history to have access to so much cross-cultural wealth of practices, and on the other it can lead to lack of commitment and a shallow customer attitude. I see this play out in myself and workshop participants, and the ego, conditioned by a world gone mad for power and gold, hijacks real practice for its own ends. Read more here