Stick with it
T’ai Chi Chih is a mindfulness-moving meditation practice that’s easy to learn. The series of 19 movements and one pose helps circulate the Vital Energy, the Chi. Practitioners experience peace, improved health, and many more benefits. Our free monthly e-newsletter offers inspiration between issues of the TCC quarterly journal, The Vital Force, in which teachers and students tell stories about ways they’ve benefited from the practice.
… TCC is not just a beneficial exercise. – Justin F. Stone, TCC Originator
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From the recent issue of The Vital Force:
Breathe: “The blissful Chi enwraps me and swirls within like a golden honeyed stream…. TCC is a life-long practice that goes deeper and deeper and higher and higher. There are stages, and we can get stuck, deluded, or rusty, yet we keep moving. Our hearts will open, our wills will engage, and we will keep surmounting challenges softly yet strongly, as water wears down boulders…. Notice when/if we’re holding our breath. Notice where the attention is at any given moment. Come back home to the tan t’ien and the heart… Happiness is inside awaiting recognition… Stay loose, focused, soft, and gentle. Let hardness, control, and distractions fall away.” – CS, Johnstown, CO
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Editor’s Note: Learn more from TCC teachers with more than 25 years of experience in the November issue of The Vital Force.
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Remember: “Daily practice is the key to everything. We practice to know, bodily, the unity of life. We practice to awaken our intuition. We practice to open ourselves consciously to the influx of the cosmic Chi, to become one with it, to radiate it, to un-limit ourselves and drop the thousand and one worldly concerns. We practice remembering the beauty and grace of life and also inquire into life’s meaning trans-verbally. We practice to breathe without bother, to let go and flow, and to embrace the world vibrationally.” – RB, California
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Discover: “There’s a subtle distinction in TCC between doing and feeling. It’s a mistake to consider these opposites or to ignore the distinction altogether. Doing is a matter of direction and control. Feeling is an active conversation between my body and my practice. These two must work in concert — the doing softens and perhaps becomes a little nudge to remind me to abandon my habit energies. The feeling part becomes active, vibrant, and engaged, and nothing like what I thought. (See what I did there?).” – LS, Fort Collins, CO
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Persist: TCC is not just a beneficial exercise… If the one practicing persists, however, the deeper levels — the Essence of TCC, if you will — begin to dawn on the practitioner and it is realized that TCC is unique in design and that one begins to sense, and flow with, the great Cosmic Rhythm… Words play no part, nor do concepts. The Prana (Chi) knows well enough what to do without an intellectual road map. All the practitioner has to do is enjoy it and reap the benefits of renewed Life Force. – Justin F. Stone
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Subscribe to The Vital Force. Our quarterly journal offers engaging stories, hints, and insights from TCC teachers and students. We also highlight wisdom by, and photos rarely seen of, originator Justin Stone.