The Vital Force Archive

Marie Dotts treats alignment as the key to downward chi flow, recounting her own breakthrough with a resistant right hip and leading conference participants through an alignment exercise and weight shift checks.

Carmen L. Brocklehurst calls Joyous Breath the Grandmother/Grandfather of Seijaku, reviews its audible breath and cupped palms, explains why Justin kept Seijaku an oral tradition, and adds pyramid poems from her April 2017 retreat.

Bobbie Anderson returned to her first teacher conference since her husband Andy's death, where a dragonfly, old friends' condolences and seated TCC sessions led her back to teaching.

Holly Trenary's poem traces a life of fourteen moves, exhaustion and anger carried alone, then the grounded, Seijaku-relaxed confidence and gratitude she found through T'ai Chi Chih.

Donna Deffenbaugh recounts the olive green drawstring pants and velveteen shoes that once got her into the zone, and her teacher's blunt verdict on their too-big black replacements.

In a transcribed lecture, Justin Stone explains that muscular tension contracts the meridian channels and blocks chi, citing the soft tongue, water wearing rock and bending bamboo.

Justin Stone traces the step from bare attention to heightened awareness, describing habit energies and tendencies as self-imposed slavery, the Turiya state, and the need to empty the cup.

Amy Tyksinski cautions against turning the hands forward before the backward weight shift completes in Rocking Motion and Push Pull, locating continuity instead in the t'an t'ien's expansion and contraction.

Dora Wiemann breaks the forward and back weight shift into three repeated words for new students, bend, shift the weight, set the foot out, with hands resting on the t'an t'ien.

Hannah Hedrick, after 30 years of teaching, sets aside movement corrections in her two nursing home classes, watching stroke and Alzheimer's residents brighten as they move any limb they can.

Darlene Karasik reports from a conference breakout session on seated practice, explaining how sitz-bone weight shifts, elbow training and delayed hand movements teach students to move from the t'an t'ien.

Pat Finstad names five constants she reviews at the start of every class: the soft rounded hand shape, shoulders down, head up, vertical spine, and elbows always pointing down.

Daniel Pienciak breaks down how he teaches the hip swivel, starting with a full lateral weight shift and waist turn, then the pelvic tilt, the elliptical path, and why men and women may feel it differently.

Nancy Daniel falls asleep on the train home from the Philadelphia Flower Show, wakes heading the wrong way, and does two full practices on an icy, unsheltered platform.

Donna McElhose lays out the wall, flashlight, partner-touch and hip-rotation exercises she uses to prepare students for the T'ai Chi side step, then details foot angle and holding the t'an t'ien wind-up through the step.

Nancy Daniel practised T'ai Chi Chih behind a screen during a layover in Charlotte, and a gate attendant who had just absorbed a passenger's tirade credited the calm she felt to that energy.

Eleven men in the Folsom Prison class, from George R. to Tyrone J., describe feeling the Chi, finding groundedness amid rage and stress, and teacher Sandy closes with her own teacher's memorial.

Nancy Johnson's rhyming invitation to her Tuesday 10:00 class walks through the movements in order, from Rocking Motion to Passing Clouds, promising tingling fingers, released tension and calmer feelings.

Julie Heryert reports that donated industrial fans have transformed the sweltering Folsom chapel class, which now has 33 students and a waiting list, and describes meeting ARC founder Scott Budnick.

April Leffler recounts how she consulted the t'an t'ien before agreeing to host the 2018 conference, how Kathleen McAllister became co-host, and how a Zen painter's DVD supplied the theme.

Lisa Stroyan accepted Julie Heryet's conference invitation and visited the T'ai Chi Chih class at Folsom Prison, walking through the cellblock to a chapel circle where inmates met her with kindness rather than the defensiveness she expected.

Kathleen McAllister previews Philadelphia ahead of the 2018 Teacher Conference, pointing visitors toward Independence Hall, Valley Forge, the Mutter Museum, Longwood Gardens, cheese steaks and the hop-on Big Bus tour.

Sharon Sirkis collects two classroom moments: a college student's evaluation calling T'ai Chi Chih "very peaceful and weirdly healing," and a rainy day spent flipping fluorescent switches like an eye doctor.

Daniel Pienciak describes the stillness that arrives when grounding in palms-down position and in the fleeting pause at the end of each weight shift, where the pelvis fully releases weight into the feet.

Sharon Sirkis answers the 2018 conference theme by describing the worry that comes from analyzing instead of trusting, then retells the Zen "empty your cup" story she used when teaching karate.

Pam Towne recounts starting a gratitude journal after hearing Justin Stone quote Paul Reps, and lists the physical, mental and emotional changes she credits to years of T'ai Chi Chih practice.