Tai chi should not be something you do because you want to be good at it, nor a superficial veneer that you assume for a few hours every week like some T-shirt with a fancy logo. It is simply another name for seeing yourself, your environment, and the inter-relationship of the two with greater clarity. If " I" do not know how "I" feel about t'ai chi, then the art remains something outside of me that is observed instead of digested. A Zen (the Japanese version of Chinese Ch'an Buddhism, which was a fusion of Indian Buddhist with Taoist thought) monk was asked if the Buddha nature was in everything, even in dung! He said yes. The Buddha nature (the Tao) is found in those who have digested something so that its substance becomes part of them. Seen this way, human by-products, whether dung or t'ai chi' skills, are part of the ongoing process of understanding your own nature and the nature of existence. Being aware of yourself and your environment and how they interact are central to the study of t'ai chi as a means of psychological and spiritual enlightenment. It is also central to self-defense: if I cannot recognize the danger in a situation or opponent, I cannot react to it; if I cannot respond swiftly and intuitively to a variety of attacks, I cannot hope to survive. There is another Zen parable about a scholar who was bragging to a monk about his great spiritual powers. The monk listened politely and then asked the braggart what he had noticed in the foyer when coming into the building. The scholar was unable to recall anything he'd seen but dismissed that as unimportant. The monk smiled and suggested that awareness, which did not extend to the mundane, was perhaps not as sublime as claimed. Self-knowledge is not a blind introspection but an exploration of yourself in relation to your environment and those you interact with. This is nowhere truer than when doing t'ai chi: you must be totally aware of how and why you are moving while being paradoxically uninvolved with the process. This is as true when doing form as when working with a partner.