I find the term “no effort” misleading so I wrote this….

In my opinion one arrives at “no effort “when one arrives at mastery.  One surly has to practice with skilful means, using positive discrimination, questioning, whole hearted listening, feeling, thinking about and doing as if you are the only one who can teach you (skilful means). This takes effort. Various types of effort are surly required.

Also learning Tai Chi is only a set of habits which are at first alien to our normal habit.  So we try to change and adopt the new natural set of habits, which means our motor skills, muscles, senses and nervous system needs re-training, just like anything new one chooses to learn.

10,000 hours are required to master a subject, this is effort, and maybe we could reduce this amount of hours to 8000 by applying our intelligence (skilful means).

Gradually Tai Chi dawns on us and we begin to adopt our new habits and reduce our old ones, but how do we maintain? – Through skilful means (skilful effort, which now is proper skilful concentration).

When a professional footballer performs a fantastic piece of skill without thinking, this is because he has put the practice in by himself when nobody is around; he has put effort into learning balance, ball control, motor skills and awareness.

So let’s immerse ourselves in the learning process and enjoy the method of discovery which is required for any subject, try not to waste our time with anti-effort and accept this process!  Upon mastery we use skilful concentration, which is “no effort”.