Taiji has been a major part of my life and Journey since I began as a student of Luke Shepherd back in 2004. I consider it one of the great 'spiritual flukes' of my life that by a sequence of impossible-to-arrange happenstances I found myself to his classes. Things would have been completely different had I tried a different teacher, of that I am certain. What I want to get across here, however, is not Taiji as he taught me, nor how his teachers taught him. Rather I want to explain my understanding, so that it is somewhere others can see it. I cannot claim to be any kind of master, rather I am just a student with a decade or two of experience and at best an intermediate in the development of my actual practice. But as always I long to understand what things are under the hood, how things work, and various potential rational explanations for what things are and why they are the way that they are.