Semantic satiation is when you’ve repeated a word many times and it loses its meaning and becomes just a sound, this can also happen with tai chi techniques.

You’re practising your form day after day, month after month and year after year, the form has become a moving meditation, suddenly that technique that you’ve done so many times feels wrong.

This is how when your mind and movement have gone from ‘absorption’ to ‘insight’, the conditions are right for these insights to arise. Your mind is receiving messages from the body to tell you ‘this isn’t right’ and that it needs further examination.

The classics advise ‘no collapses, protrusions or leaning’ and the body is aware that its structural integrity isn’t right, the spiralling flow is interrupted or the technique wouldn’t work in its current form. Often you need to power from deeper in the core to make it more efficient.

The longer and better you practice the more you can be taught by your own feelings using your aware, insightful and wise mind.