Taiji, like most bodywork with a vaguely spiritual bent, is all about releasing chronic tension. This seems an impossibility at the time – how let go of something that has been with you since you don't remember when? You need what my teacher called foresight – the ability to finely feel how it would be without that tension. This is what makes humans special – their strange ability to slip time and sense their future – their soul. And this is why my teacher hated Ram Dass's indulgence: Be Here Now. For him it wasn't a matter of rejecting past and future and living only in the present, but a matter of embracing the whole of time with the fullness of one's being.