Taijiquan is a martial art – there's no getting around it – a fighting art. And the fundamental problem for all serious martial artists is how to work – how or order one's life – such that one's energy is always ready to engage – to fight; how to minimise the risk of being caught off guard. The only way, really, is to develop the heart to the point where it is in charge of my welfare – where it leads any engagement I have with the world at large. The courageous heart, the honourable heart, the generous heart. Not the mind, which will always need to calculate and therefore be too slow, not the physical body, which will lack initiative and flair, and not the ego, which cannot help but be cloyingly narcissistic and therefore always doomed to fail. So our problem – our work – becomes that of liberating the heart energy from the physical and the mental; and learning to trust the heart. Hence the taiji mantra: Sink and relax.