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.

more a process than a thing

The classic process of improvement is almost always built on forward leaps and backslidings.

Meditation: an n-dimensional space emptied of all rancour.

Free of the voice in the head. This is how we interpret freedom. Then, and only then, are we in a position to listen to what that voice has been fearfully obliterating.

Burn your bridges. If there's an escape route, and push comes to shove, you'll take it. Hedging bets may be prudent but it's already lost the real game.

The ability to make and keep promises. The mark of a good student.

There is a touch whose teaching is the phenomenology of joy without reason.

When class is over and you are saying goodbye to teacher, all they wish to hear is, "Thank you, I shall go away and work on that." (A note of sincerity goes down well too.) The last thing they want to hear is how you feel.

a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own

Softness is not weakness. Softness is having the strength – trust and faith – to let yourself be vulnerable every moment of the day.

Throw caution to the wind.

names expose the namer more than they limn what's caught the eye

Abdominal breathing (contracting the belly on the outbreath) massages the sacrum and stimulates the craniosacral pump.

Every teacher presents a teaching, but a good teacher seduces students to take the teaching to heart.

What you accumulate weighs you down and holds you back.

Listen to the body – breathing, energy, presence – the way a mother listens to her newborn. A matter of instinct rather than choice.