The taiji practitioner acts as double agent. On the one hand she strives to bring chaotic systems into equilibrium and on the other she works to disequilibrate stable systems. Miraculously, taiji relaxation achieves both. A system is chaotic because it is agitated, over-stimulated, anxious, and relaxation will dissipate that excess energy and allow the system to settle. A system is stable generally because it has hardened with habit and fear – it has become chronically tense, locking out change and the agents of change – those inevitable destabilizing forces internal and external to every system. Relaxation simply releases those forces and allows change to take place. And hence every healthy system will tend to swing one way AND the other, and equilibrium, ever tenuous and evasive, that is, dynamic, is achieved, or at least approached, by allowing stabilizing and destabilizing tendencies to operate together. This is what makes taiji so endlessly difficult – as soon as I manage to bring some order and understanding to a system, it changes into something else because the taiji has activated and given permission to those ever present agents of change.