Below is an excerpt from a longer interview found here of the now sadly deceased Mike Martello, I think it sums up my attitude to teaching and learning exactly:

Wang approaches his students as training partners. All he wants to do is practice and by practicing he gets better. So by building and growing together we foster this intense dynamic of teacher and student, where really there is no teacher or student, everyone is the teacher and the student. Wang Laoshi is the first to tell anyone that he is just a student practicing, and will be forever. I have never seen the man tell someone how to do something, he is there showing them how to do something! It is inspirational to get tossed around by an 80 year old man with this outlook on training.

Once you start teaching people there is a real danger that fear can start to creep in, fear of looking bad in front of your students, fear that you won't live up to their expectations of you. I go out of my way to break that illusion as much as I can, I have a certain level of knowledge and skill otherwise I wouldn't feel I have the right to be teaching, but I'm forever going to be a student and because of that I'm always trying to push myself, to try out new ideas, be honest with my failings and most importantly sometimes cock things up. I'm sure that I've lost some students because I don't try to cultivate an air of mystique, but any teacher that does that is lying to his students and more importantly lying to themselves.

When you first start Tai-Chi you'll often go through the form stopping at each move while the teacher goes around the class adjusting your posture or moving your arms and legs. Each new move has an often strange name, fist under elbow, step back to repulse Monkey or snake creeps down and as you progress you can spend ages adjusting your posture so the arm feels just right or the leg has just enough weight before you move onto the next move.

This is fine right at the beginning when you are suddenly finding your arms and legs are not as co-ordinated as you thought they where and you're struggling to mimic the shape your teacher is making. However as the form unfolds it is important not to get too attached to end shape of each movement because in reality it is the transition between the moves that is important. Each move is an expression of that transition, not a culmination, as soon as one move becomes manifest it flows away into the next move and the next and the next like a wave forming and breaking in an ocean.

The names are anchors, points of reference, to give form to The Form, however we are ultimately aiming to use that form as a stepping stone towards formlessness, where we the structure of movement becomes so integrated and natural it appears seamless.

This concept is also applicable to Tai-Chi as a whole. It is good to have a goal, something to motivate us and give structure (form) to our practice, however if we concentrate totally on that end result, say learning The Form or becoming a master, and keep looking forward at this thing on the horizon then we are completely missing the process of getting there, the process where we are actually doing all the learning and having all the experience.

I'm always very reticent when it comes to talking about chi in terms of Tai-Chi, the question sometimes comes up and my answers are usally deliberately vague, the reason for this is two fold.

Firstly Chi is a much abused word in the west, it has been misappropriated by all manner of people and used and abused totally out of context. This means that many people already have a muddled conception of Chi in their minds that would distort any explanation I could give. Secondly the word is much used and abused in it's native China, it's meaning has evolved and changed over the years and it's used, often with completely different meanings, in disciplines as far apart as faith healing and martial arts.

On the other hand (and this is where those preconceptions have the potential to come into play) I do not dismiss it outright. Tai-Chi players of the past were often pragmatic and down to earth people and yet the writings of Tai-Chi are full of references to chi, it is my belief and experience that when they talk of say 'sinking the chi to dan-tien' or 'threading the chi through the body' they are talking about real bodily and mental sensations using terminology familiar to their time it is us looking at their teachings out of context and through the distorted lense of history that heap mystical and magical meaning on to them.

When I was a child and I watched my Dad drive a car I marveled at how he new when to change gear, I remember asking him on numerous occasions how he could do this amazing feat. "You can just feel when" is all he'd say.

Now I could imagine what it was like to be able to feel when the gears needed to change, I could form a detailed picture in my mind of what it must be like to have this mystical 'feeling' and how I'd 'just know', but of course when I actually learnt how to drive I found it was nothing like I'd how I'd imagined it to be and actually is now something I could do with my eyes closed (not that I've obviously ever tried, being in a moving car and all). Chi is something like that we have to leave our expectations and ideas behind and just practice, eventually the meaning will become apparent and you'll know when you get it, but I can grantee it will be nothing like what you imagine it's going to be.         

One of the Yoga teachers I've trained with over the years, Peter Blackaby, uses the term 'finding the edge' when talking about postures. This is a important concept to grasp when talking about the learning of any skill, but is especially important when we talk about a physical one.

The edge in question is that thin grey area in practice where we are just pushing the limit of our comfort zone but we haven't gone so far as to lose the integrity of what we are practicing, so we are learning our limit and pushing it but we are not overextending our capabilities and damaging ourselves physically.

However the problem most of us have is that firstly we don't know where the edge is and secondly we wouldn't notice it if it came and bit us on the backside. Even if we think Cartesian Dualism is an Eastern European heavy metal band we have grown up in a culture saturated in its concepts. Here the mind is king and the communication between it and the body is one way, we are so used to telling the body what to do that it will go out of it's way to accommodate our commands without regard for its own safety.

So the first task is to start listening, listening to the messages that your muscles are sending, often noticing their stiffness and unresponsive nature for the first time, and gradually forming a mental picture through the feedback of the movement as to which parts of the body are helping, which are hindering and which are just plain not there.

This is why Tai-Chi and Yoga can seem very slow at the start, we take everything down to very small integrated movements and we gradually build from the bottom up, making sure our movements are built on foundations of stone and not sand. Gradually increasing speed, adding complexity and upping intensity until we can still feel the same bodily unity while moving quickly that we can when performing the most basic exercise.

This is why in my classes I try to emphasize the underlying principles and not just learning the rote moves of the form, pretty hand waving is nothing but pretty hand waving if you don't gradually build an understanding with firm foundations. Our practice is the gradual process of finding the edge of the each movement and incrementally pushing it back.