The Vital Force Archive
Forty years of The Vital Force (1985-2025), the journal of the T’ai Chi Chih community. Search for a word, a teacher, a movement or a place, or browse by category and topic.
March 1997
The March 1997 issue opens with Justin Stone counting the Abidhamma’s sixty-odd joyous states and announcing Chi Enhancement, a method he will teach at the summer conference. Timothy Stuetz previews the July 25-27 teachers’ gathering, Ed Altman uses the Buddha’s parable of the raft to argue against altering the movements, and Richard Brier teaches Rocking Motion to people in early Alzheimer’s.
R. Taggart's account of Sandy McAlister and Lois Mahaney appearing on Transitions, a local senior-issues TV program, where six students from Casa Sandoval Retirement Community performed ten minutes of seated TCC on air.
Adria Neumann's pyramid poem names T'ai Chi Chih as swirling silent strength, bubbling springs beneath the feet, and inner music waking joy's pervasive response.
Carmen Brocklehurst links a feel-good movie's many winners to Zen master Dogen pouring half a ladle back into the stream, drawing the principle that what we acknowledge is ours forever.
Carmen Brocklehurst
Albuquerque, NM
Torie Fiore describes the Divine Unity that encompassed ALL before the Beginning, and the sacred moments when judgments are suspended and one feels united with all of life.
Torie Fiore
Phoenix, AZ
Readers including Jan Martindale, Beverly McFarland, Timothy Stuetz and Hope Ridley thank the Vital Force staff for their balanced coverage of a difficult season and honor Steve Ridley after his resignation.
Paula Favorito passes along a Suburban Town News notice for a T'ai Chi Chih course at Holy Name Hospital, where a typo promises twenty simple non-marital movements.
A profile of teacher candidate Sue Inteman, a student of Marjorie Peltier who uses T'ai Chi Chih in recovering from left facial paralysis and presented research on TCC and stress reduction to Hospice of Wake County.
A tribute to Leona B. Dees, who taught T'ai Chi Chih at the Albuquerque center and two senior centers, staffed the center as a volunteer, and built an early TCC website with her husband Marion.
Jean Katus of Ft. Yates sent in a local program guide photo of Madagascar's sifaka lemur, whose two-legged locomotion and playful habits look remarkably like a TCC movement.
A state-by-state roundup: seated TCC on local TV at Casa Sandoval, Marianne Merritt's classes for California prison staff and inmates, a University of Cincinnati research grant, hospital wellness and community college classes, and an April Seijaku retreat.
R. Taggart and Liz Salada report on the City of Hayward naming Lois Mahaney a STAR volunteer in October 1996, cataloguing her work as longtime Vital Force editor, Resource Correspondent, Teachers' Directory compiler and host of Sunday Practice in the Park.
Justin Stone recounts his first day and night in the Himalayas: a missed meeting at Hardwar, a boy dancing in the rain atop a bullock cart, a tiger warning in the forest, and a Holy man led away after unsupervised Kundalini practice.
Marianne Merritt's brief, fragmentary note from Galt sets inmates living their mindfulness alongside prison staff living T'ai Chi Chih, insisting the line between We and They is "Not Two."
Marianne Merritt
Galt, CA