Probably the hardest thing to deal with when we are in any new situation is our expectation. You run into it in many forms in Tai-Chi, when you first start a class there's your expectation of what a class will be and how a teacher should act, if you stay with it long enough to begin to teach there is the expectation of what your students should be doing and how you are teaching them and finally, the worst one of all, there's the expectations you have of yourself.

The thing is none of these expectations will ever play out in reality exactly how you think they should, because at the end of the day they are just stories in our heads, stories about the reality of our experience not the experience itself. This is why we can tie ourselves in knots trying to make the world match the one in our heads, because we've essentially got it the wrong way around, we are trying to make reality fit our ideas when really we should make our ideas fit our reality.

This is not to say we shouldn't have goals or aims, goals and aims are good. They give us a focus, they make us channel our energy into something constructive instead of letting it dissipate in too many directions. However before we can set ourselves a realistic and achievable goal we have to have a realistic and non judgemental idea of our starting position.

In Tai-Chi there are four main 'energies' that we deal with, Ting-Jing or listening energy, Dong Jing or understanding energy, Hua Jing or neutralizing energy and Fa Jing or emitting energy.

Of the four energies the first two are the ones appropriate here. Ting-Jing could also be translated as sensitivity, it is not listening with the ears but rather developing a keen kenisthological sense of our own body/mind and how they operate as a unit. It is trained in Tai-Chi first in solo exercises and The Form and then expanded in partner exercises, as the Tai-Chi maxim goes 'first understand yourself and then understand others'. You first learn to listen to your own movements and responses and then extend that sensitivity outwards to understand anothers movement and responses, looking inward to learn how to look outward.

From Ting-Jing comes Dong-Jing or understanding, once you can listen you begin to understand and the more you understand the more you can listen. This understanding however must be 'rooted' in concrete experience and trial and error, and this leads us back to the beginning of the article, we can never have understanding if we do not have listening. Our expectations, our hopes and dreams can never be realistically achievable if they are not grounded in shifting nature of our lives.