The Vital Force Archive

After 26 years of practice, Laurie Jacobi questions a rule she thought sacred and begins dropping her hands between movements, finding it releases wrist tension and helps ground excess energy.

Tina Wells devoted a class to resting longer between the 19 movements, and the group concluded that pausing lets chi settle, grounds the feet, and mirrors nature's cycles of activity and stillness.

Lisa Otero, who sought accreditation only to have people to practice with, describes returning to teaching in summer 2021 after COVID and argues that group practice requires everyone to sync up, like musicians following a conductor.

Caroline Guilott traces her years of practice from bursts of heat and tingling fingers to a game of hide and seek with the Chi, learned by releasing tension and grounding.

Christa Keller's prose poem, written out of her Seijaku practice, holds to the single moment, the breath of life, and moving through the perceived hardness of life with softness.

Rick Davis argues that the 19 movements need nothing added to them, and that stillness of mind comes from yielding the intellect to the form rather than overthinking or embellishing it.

After a question about Bird Flaps Its Wings arose in Sandy McAlister's Zoom teacher practice, Amy Tyksinski returns to Justin's written notes on flipping the wrists quickly while returning slowly.

Caroline Guilott likens attending Carmen's retreat to an artisan dipping a candle wick in hot wax again and again, each workshop adding a thin layer of understanding before teachers carry their light home to students.

Farrel Zeeman traces his practice from 30-minute morning sessions at the Big Sky Retreat in 2011 to an Albuquerque retreat, arguing that TCC is a form of prayer requiring the same stillness.

Asked at a Pennsylvania teacher accreditation how T'ai Chi Chih brings her joy, Kathleen McAllister recalls the angel card reading JOY that she wrote on her hand during her own accreditation week.

Carmen Brocklehurst recounts how a tape of Justin Stone's 1990 teacher conference talk, recorded without permission, was transcribed and made into the booklet Evolution Through Chi, now given free to new teachers.

Guy Kent uses an orchestra analogy to argue that teachers should play their own instrument but not rewrite the score, recalling Justin Stone dropping Circles within Circles and adding the jing.

Seven years after Justin Stone's death, Sheryl Adair catalogs what he left behind, from books and pyramid poetry to his refusal to charge teachers, and asks how teachers can keep his selflessness alive for students.

Told she must be a slow learner, Caroline Guilott answers with twenty years of the same 19 movements and one pose, a retreat with Carmen Brocklehurst, and the slow discovery of grounding in the soles of her feet.

Eliza Fulton recalls her surprise that TCC teachers face no continuing education requirement, and argues that Justin Stone gave teachers his example and their own inner teh instead of rules; with Pyramid Poems on silence.

Linda Braga welcomes new students with a mock travel brochure: a one-way ticket to the State of Serenity, payment accepted only as daily practice, baggage packed light, and insurance made of teachers, classes and retreats.

Lisa Stroyan, a teacher candidate in Northern Colorado, describes her teacher Marie's advice to make her movements smaller and ground longer, and how each correction turned out to require softening rather than more doing.

H.B. recounts being raped at sixteen, the back pain and involuntary muscle spasms that followed, and the class with instructor Sharon Sirkis where the Six Healing Sounds gave her back herself.

Carmen L. Brocklehurst recalls Justin Stone asking students "Did you feel that?" and telling of a professor too much in his head to learn the movements, arguing that analyzing produces jerky motion while feeling the Chi produces flow.

Sheryl Adair recounts eleven years of persistence at Temple Sinai, from an unanswered volunteer offer in 2004 to a women's retreat session, a home class, and finally a six-week series in the chapel.

Linda Jones recounts falling without warning, losing words to aphasia, and then a New Year's Eve brain scan that returned a diagnosis of global cerebral atrophy and coming dementia.

Marie Dotts traces how April Leffler's Prajna exercise at conference, a voluntary hospice layoff and unemployment insurance let her release habit energies and build her teaching practice.

Jeneth Rundle, a new teacher and stem cell donor for her brother dying of multiple myeloma, recounts the disabled veteran and her caregiving sister who walked into class and healed her.

Linda Braga recounts the 2011 virus that led to a suspected lung cancer diagnosis, and credits 25 years of TCC meditation for the serene mind she kept as scans, an oncologist and an unexplained shrinking mass followed.

Amy Tyksinski describes teaching T'ai Chi Chih as a high school PE option in Albuquerque, quoting students who moved from calling it ridiculous to writing a Plato paper in an hour.

Cynthia Winland describes meeting a relentlessly cynical fellow attendee at the Fall 2012 retreat, the family habit of "stink bombs" she left behind, and her dismay at squabbles over keeping the knees bent.

Larry Bloom, awake after a thunderstorm with his thoughts racing, describes redirecting attention to his breathing until "no thought" emerged, and credits three years of T'ai Chi Chih for the inner stillness he now calls home.

Carmen L. Brocklehurst examines why Justin Stone insisted he originated T'ai Chi Chih rather than created it, distinguishing the work of wisdom from intellect, cunning and the attachments that cling to them.

Amy Tyksinski responds to a senior practitioner who stopped lifting her front foot fully, arguing that the foot hinging to 45 degrees comes from the t'an t'ien and carries aliveness rather than tension.

April Leffler, diagnosed with Meniere's Disease, describes canceling classes and waking to a spinning room, and how dropping her attention to the soles of her feet loosens her white-knuckled grip on fear.