Miss Li said she was going to begin by being bold: she was very pleased to have so many students who were creative professionals: an engineer, a medical doctor, an artist, a PhD scholar, and felt sure she was passing on genuine, pure Tai Ji. Not that she would claim to be the only one in the West who was doing that.
She sees her role as a teacher as being like the star in the Nativity story. That is, it is necessary to guide the Wise Men so far, but the closer they get to their goal the more they have to use their own judgement. The star can point them in the right direction, but they have to find the Baby Jesus themselves. Or, to take another example, she is providing the technology and, if she is a good teacher, she will make sure it is well-oiled and maintained, but how that technology is used is up to us. We have to "fill in" the basic structure ourselves, and we have to "practise in sincerity and truth". If we begin to be sloppy and think we know it all, then the form will degenerate and mannerisms will creep in. This is what happened in China itself, and why there grew up so many distinct and competing forms when in reality there is probably only one underlying pure form.
The Tai Ji Classics were often written in verse so as to be more easily remembered, but the same thing can happen with words as with the form: over time people began to lose the original sense, to get sloppy, to mistake meanings and pursue the wrong images, so that a lot of rubbish was spoken and written. The other job of a good teacher is to sort out what is valuable from all this heritage, for it would be equally wrong to say it is all rubbish as to say it is all true.
Then she talked for a while about the qi that she is most concerned with in Tai Ji, what she said they used to call a "secret" in the Chinese way of teaching. This was one of the things her teacher had passed on to her. It is now known that the earth is not flat but, even if untrue in the big universe, we are still a universe in ourselves and it is still the case that in the movements of the body it makes sense to think of combining "a flat earth and a round sky". The "round sky" is the way all the hand/arm movements are circular, the "flat earth" is the floor we move on as our feet land flat on the ground. To make this "flat earth" stronger in our practice: after pressing the foot down heel first, press down from the shoulder to the hip, press down from the hip to the knee, press down from the knee to the centre of the foot, and then remember that you have ten fingers and ten toes, not by thinking but by sensing. Young people should have very stable legs, with no shaking: the stability comes from the qi in the legs, but if you are tired or tense, or not living well you will naturally wobble more and have less qi.
Another of her teacher's sayings was that you stand "loose but strong". That is, the strength in the legs is not from tension: the legs are loose, but the shoulders/back/torso are strong. We do not say "relaxed" because relaxation implies tension, just as if you say you want peace, that very concept in itself implies war. So the body is neither tense nor relaxed, but loose and yet strong. This was one saying of his that she did not at the time understand; she remembered it but only later, after much practice, could she find a meaning for it.
A similar story is the one about seeing an old man practising in the park suddenly stop in the middle of the form. On asking why he had stopped, she was told that he was too hot in the belly! At the time she didn't believe it, but more recently has begun to experience this herself, particularly when practising on an empty stomach; practising when the stomach is full doesn't seem to produce so much heat.
Often you may feel that something is emerging and then it disappears again. Trying to find it and keep it will not help: just go on practising and let it emerge in time. Like religion/Daoism, scrabbling around frantically will only make things more obscure.
