The taiji you learn, by all rights, belongs to your teacher. To make it your own you need to practice long and hard – long enough to realise that your initial interpretation of the teaching was grossly distorted by your perceived relationship with the teacher. The teacher will always strive to make the most of the time he spends with you – will work to bring out whatever it is he feels is special in you – for his own sake, for the sake of the relationship, and also because he knows that you cannot connect on any terms other than your own – you are just too selfish, arrogant and stupid to really feel where he is at. So when you work with the teacher you feel special not because you are but because you lack the humility to connect with the teaching properly. Your own practice is the antidote to this, and as such it faces head on three feelings: boredom, disappointment and failure. Boredom because practice involves endless repetition; disappointment because your own work rarely, if ever, lives up to the experience of working with the teacher; and failure because success, it quickly becomes apparent, is not even a faint possibility. Practice is done for the hell of it. Not to feel good or worthy, not to please your teacher, and certainly not to compete with your classmates, but simply because it is to be done. There is a truth in one's engagement with the teaching which only practice honours.