The Vital Force Archive

Ann Rutherford quotes Justin Stone's Photo Textbook and Heightened Awareness on enlightenment experienced in the body, then asks fellow teachers whether they tell students the deeper meaning of the Cosmic Consciousness Pose.

JJ Johnson, a self-described novice, describes feeling chi flow like honey from the fingertips, carrying it between movements, and noticing a slight finger flutter at the yin-to-yang weight shift.

Ann Rutherford opens a new column with three postcard-style letters to Justin Stone, asking colleagues whether they feel grounding in the palms during closing positions, whether standing up and pointing fingertips down disrupts Chi, and whether fingers flutter.

Guy Kent recounts Justin cutting short his accreditation presentation for comparing TCC to "T'ai Chi in the park," a lunch about stock charts and guilt, Saturday teisho readings, and Justin's tears over a critic who renamed the movements.

KG recalls Justin Stone quietly pushing her photography career forward: buying a print he did not want, sending her to find a Belgian fine-art book publisher, and posing for the Photo Text.

Caroline Guilott recalls skipping into the room to greet Justin in Albuquerque, and describes how words about the movements can trap a practitioner while attention to the t'an t'ien, the weight shift and softness opens the practice.

Karen Silva recalls Justin Stone demonstrating grounding in Basic Pulling Taffy, the pulling hand crossing diagonally to end parallel to the ground, an explanation she still uses in her classes.

Laurie Jacobi recalls first seeing Justin Stone playing 1940s jazz at a grand piano, and the conference where he corrected her for not moving low enough before learning of her back pain.

Lisa Otero recalls meeting Justin Stone through her aunt Carmen Brocklehurst, her initial disappointment that he seemed a conventional businessman, and the lessons on death and attachment absorbed over pancake house dinners.

Dora Wiemann recalls Saturday evening meditation and Teisho at Justin Stone's house, where he answered his own question about why they gathered, and Judy Hendricks describes learning from his DVDs and CDs.

Susan Kenney remembers Clifford, a student of 44 who traveled by skateboard, called out the movements while stooping to read them off the page, and lived in a monastery-like studio apartment.

Maya Campana Caudill writes that she and her husband, in their late 70s and early 80s, still lead free twice-weekly T'ai Chi Chih and Qigong practice in the park for about 16 people.

Dora Wiemann's beginner class sank into moving meditation during Daughter on the Mountaintop and stayed there through Daughter in the Valley, emerging only when Carry the Ball to the Side's instructions intervened.

Lisa M. Otero, a yoga instructor, recounts how studying the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and the Bhagavad Gita after Justin Stone's death revealed the Raja Yoga roots behind his seemingly obscure teachings.

Justin Stone recounts four encounters: Suzuki Roshi offering a hot bath and the line "The moon gives light, too," a student's question about reincarnation answered with a tree, Lynette Wooliver and the Sachertorte, and Swami Ramdas in court.

Justin Stone's introduction to Heightened Awareness, newly back in print, argues that wisdom is already within us, using the Indian pearl story and Dogen's half dipper of water to make the point.

Aphorisms from Justin Stone on contraction and expansion, the unhappiness he observed among the monied people of the financial world, and the need to balance Yin and Yang or face trouble.

Two dozen Pyramid Poems from practitioners including Mary Stine, Bonnie Cundiff, Maggie Smith and Ann Hampton, each thanking Justin Stone for T'ai Chi Chih and the flowing chi it brought them.

A selection of Justin Stone's aphorisms on security and impermanence, doing your best now, money and karma, chasing your shadow, and gratitude as the antidote to self-pity.

Packing Good Karma Publishing catalogs for a conference, Carmen L. Brocklehurst realized the catalogs serve the students waiting for Justin Stone's materials, and argues his DVDs convey a purity words cannot.

Sheryl Adair returns from visiting a friend facing another round of chemotherapy, and a Mark Nepo line about thinking sends her back to her daily T'ai Chi Chih; five Pyramid Poems follow.

More than twenty Pyramid Poems by students and teachers, including Caroline Guilott, Dora Derzon and Nancy Frost, honor Justin Stone a year after his death, alongside captions for two new Good Karma Publishing CDs.

Maxime Wan recalls meeting Justin Stone in Edmonton in 1989, staying with him in Pacific Grove and Albuquerque, and being called out in 2006 after three years practicing Falun Gong instead of TCC.

Judy Hendricks marks the first anniversary of Justin Stone's death with a joyful teacher-led practice in Albuquerque, lunch at India Palace, a Ruth Fuller Sasaki quote, and a dream invitation into oneness.

Sky Young-Wick admits he avoided Justin Stone out of fear of his blunt feedback, then describes sensing his presence during practices in Kansas City, including one his student Jack felt too.

Aphorisms from Justin Stone on giving instead of worrying, the Life Force bursting from bare rock, Hakuin's enlightenment, the lavender skies of Kyoto, and why each death is also a birth.

Judy Hendricks recalls Justin Stone through his books and paintings, from his answer to a schoolboy's question about Daughter on the Mountaintop to his advice to meditate every day.

Jerry Granok recalls the five-day meditation retreat Justin Stone led at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in April 1993, from the nail-free Japanese guesthouse to the cliff paths above the Pacific.

Justin Stone's collected aphorisms on wind and rain being neither good nor bad, Hakuin's enlightenment, the one Energy moving through worm and bird and tree, and death as another birth.

Linda Braga recalls a five-day meditation retreat Justin Stone led at Green Gulch Farm nineteen years ago, when the zendo proved so cold he ended the first sitting early.