Twelve Metaphors to Help You Understand Taubman Technique on a Body Level
Training wheels 
Otto Ortmann observed that great pianists optimize timings of contraction and release among multiple muscle groups. In other words, they are well coordinated for playing the piano. Dorothy Taubman created a way of explaining how to create such optimization, and the technique that individual pianists come up with as a result of following her precepts gets called “Taubman technique.”
However, the body being more complicated than we can scarcely imagine, it is very tricky to convey to others how to coordinate their own bodies well--particularly in view of the argument that the upper body evolved to serve the hands and is implicated in practically all of their activities. (If you doubt this, consider that the forearm contains most of the muscles that operate your fingers. The evolutionary alternative, according to Frank R. Wilson, would have been for us to have enormous hands.) As Nicolai Bernstein pointed out, there is an almost infinite number of ways that your body could find to accomplish any musculoskeletal task (degrees of freedom theory), and people who more quickly devise the benefits of better technique from the existing lexicon of Taubman explanations typically already have a lot of good coordinations in place. There is quite a bit more explaining to do if a broader range of pianists is to be better served.
As you reach toward what Taubman technique promises but in the absence of the adequate explanations or sensitive teaching that would best help you, it is worth learning a skill in a “training wheel” context. For example, if your upper arms habitually tighten, often just asking them to relax doesn’t work. However, you can teach your body to loosen them at a specific moment during the cycles of playing. You could intentionally relax you upper arm upon landing your thumb on a key with the weight of the arm behind it. This is a good one for pianists not accustomed to putting their arm weight behind the thumb. With that weight, the signal between thumb landing and upper arm disengaging is not hard to create. In my own case, given where I came from as a pianist, working out this coordination helped me increase my awareness of what I was doing and solve a host of problems at once. I consequently found that students who had trouble with tightness in the upper arm and body also benefited from this particular "training wheel."
“Finishing” at the completion of a double rotation, or a series of singles, is also a good training wheel. Truth is, you always need to maximize the quality of your downs whether you are doing single or double rotations—but while you are still learning, you can’t possibly think about everything! Therefore, learning to finish well in the one situation is worth all the time you can spend on it, because then you will be able to generalize the skill.
Another good “training wheel” involves over- and under-shaping, should this be confusing for you. To get this idea to work intuitively as quickly as possible (very important in terms of keeping the upper arms loose), use the rule that you over-shape toward the thumb (meaning create an arc the descent of which finishes at the strike of the thumb) and under-shape toward the pinky (do the opposite). This will get you sooner into the all-important habit of moving your arms in comfortable curves rather than awkward straight lines, and other facets of the technique can pinch-hit for problems with white and black keys until you are ready to grasp the situations where exceptions to this rule are more appropriate.
"Training wheels" involve intense concentration on individual sensations, and a lot of repetition to help you store the necessary coordinations into muscle memory. Then, you'll be ready for that crazy ride through woodland terrain on your dirtbike!
The message behind the metaphor: Coordination demands for playing the piano well are intense, and everyone's body comes from a different place. Your very own body can gain appropriate understanding at discrete moments within the technique using "training wheels." Later, you can generalize the skills learned in whatever ways seem helpful.