Thinking, done well, is the mind travelling at great speed along creative lines of discovery. It has nothing to do with language – that comes later, when we try to voice thought, if only to ourselves. The struggle is to keep these lines extending, because as their energy inevitably dwindles, they start to spiral around themselves – collapsing onto the last landmark (significant insight) upon which of course a world can be built but at the cost of the relative death of real thinking and real life. Once thinking has settled on a way of ordering itself it enters a consolidatory process of repetition – habitually thinking the same old thoughts. The average person builds their world around second-hand thought – those of parents, teachers, peers, culture. Spiritual teaching is all about breaking free of received patterns. In taichi we achieve this by working with strange concepts such as yielding, central equilibrium, natural movement, energy, spirit, and by endeavoring to lodge thinking firmly in the body – to feel the connexion between mind and body – how thoughts change the body. This is our ethics.