My teacher often said that he could only successfully teach Celts, by which he meant those with an instinctive feeling for spirit, with a little wildness and unpredictability.

He also said he could only teach poets, by which he meant those with an imagination (a feeling for energy) and with the ache to make that imagination a reality of some sort.

He also told me more than once that what held me back in Taiji (energy work) was my lack of a poetic imagination, basically an inability to feel energy, and since then my go-to reading matter has been poetry; and a little philosophy, which I read as poetry anyway.