A fellow student/practitioner who is a highly ranked karate expert, asked my teacher some questions regarding transformations into the study and practice of the traditional Internal Systems of Chinese Martial Arts.  A correspondence ensued that I would like to share with you, since I find it to be of value and very informative:

“The way I was taught Tai Chi, you don’t dwell on flow and chi and so forth when learning the routines.  You concentrate on making each posture correctly in terms of body alignments, timing and positioning.  If this sounds external, it is.  We first work to make the outward structure exactly correct.  And you are doing that pretty well.  When I said previously that I would make a few corrections if we were face to face, I meant primarily corrections to form.
 
Chinese Internal martial arts develop in three stages:  First, correct external form.  Second, correct internal energy and flow.  Third, it transforms into shen, or spirit.  Many people think it’s all about chi and never get the form right.  This is like trying to push water through a kinked hose.  You really have to be in front of a competent teacher to get all the alignments right (”get the kinks out of the hose”).  A couple of rules to follow, once you are exactly copying correct form, are to 1) Try to relax everything that doesn’t need to be tense.  This means that you consciously, over a long time, learn to feel the tension in your body and release it if you don’t need it to make the posture.  2)  If one thing moves, everything moves.  This means that you develop exact timing, and that every movement involves your entire body;  you never just move an arm or a leg, for instance.
 
The transformation from the first stage (external form) to the second stage (energy and flow) happens when you practice very correct form while consciously working on relaxing everything that doesn’t need to be tense and moving everything when anything moves.  You become aware of your energy moving, and this eventually becomes the driving force of your practice:  you feel it from the inside out, and the energy inside drives the external body.  It’s kind of like a water balloon, with the internal pressure of the water altering the external shape of the balloon as you apply different pressures to it.  The water pressure is the energy, or chi, the balloon itself is your external body, and your hands changing the shape of the balloon is your mind.
 
Martially, if you develop this, all of your technique is unified and never segmented, as is usually the case with hard styles.  When you hit somebody, the force comes from the floor and is routed out through your hand through correct alignments and timing and lack of extra tensions that would break up the power waveform.  You get out of your own way and let the energy come out.
 
So, there it is in theory.  Working with somebody who knows how to do all this can quickly help you to reach good results.  Frankly, it’s almost impossible to develop this without somebody showing you how. I hope this helps!”

My Shorin Ryu Karate and T’ai Chi Ch’uan teacher is William C. Duncan, who currently resides in North Carolina. He is an 8th Degree Black Belt in Shorin Ryu Karate and is a 5th Generation Master Instructor of Yang Ch’eng-fu T’ai Chi Ch’uan, Sun Lu Tang Hsing-I and Pa Kua Ch’uan. 

Master Duncan is also an accomplished author and has received rave reviews for his last novel, a fictional work, based on a notorious Hispanic Gang that rules the drug trade flowing into our country.  I’d highly recommend getting a copy of his book: “Six-Gun Two-Step” and enjoying it’s super-charged story line, while learning about the methods of modern drug gangs in the process.  I couldn’t put it down!