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.
September 1996
The September 1996 issue covers the San Diego Teachers Conference, with Susan Patterson on the Thursday night arrivals and Ilse Meyer on Sister Antonia’s Lichter Tanz candle passing. Steve Ridley admits he wrote the journal’s pseudonymous columns and argues that T’ai Chi Chih needs no formal organization. Justin Stone writes on holding fast and letting go.
Asked at the summer teacher conference why his movements differ from Justin's, Steve Ridley traces his training, his lower and slower stances, and his spiraling-down revision of Pulling Taffy Variation A.
Steve Ridley
Denver, CO
Justin Stone links T'ien t'ai and Zen use of holding fast and letting go to stopping the conceptualizing mind, recounting a Zen Master answering a Latvian woman's question about war by holding up five fingers.
Justin Stone
Twenty teachers, among them Justin Stone, Hope Ridley and Loretta Shiver, send short notes on the 1996 San Diego Teachers' Conference, praising Susan Patterson's committee, the group practices, Steve Ridley's breathing workshop and Sister Antonia's candlelight ceremony.
Carmen Brocklehurst uses the Japanese swordsman who was told hard work would double his training time to show how beginners' stiff shoulders loosen only when the chi is finally felt.
Two short pyramid poems from the conference: Doug Harned finds tides and trees in the food line, and Eugene L. Box greets morning meditation, group practice and unconditional love with gratitude.
Justin Stone describes breath as fire and traces how breathing slows as thought becomes one-pointed and then no-pointed, so that deep immersion requires consciously reconstructing one's surroundings afterward.
Justin Stone