The Vital Force Archive

Anita Vestal closes out the 2007 to 2010 Student Reaction Questionnaire, reporting that 610 surveys from eleven teachers showed significant gains in energy, sleep, focus, balance and stress response, with creativity the sole exception.

Donna Dittmer, 73, took up T'ai Chi Chih after serious surgery left her with problematic breathing, and felt the energy in the first movements her class learned with Bev Chandley.

Diana Daffner recalls her husband Richard using Pulling Taffy's Perpetual Motion to stay warm during their subzero 1991 Bemidji teacher training, and their fifteen years of sunset beach practice in Florida.

Holly Sanders offers a short New Year meditation drawn from Pulling Taffy Variation #3, Perpetual Motion, equating letting go with surrender, forgiveness, acceptance and love, and asking for Grace.

Anita Vestal offers the prayer of gratitude she repeats for the oil-threatened Gulf of Mexico, and describes counting her nine repetitions by shifting her glance from one tall tree to the next.

Susan Quinn describes returning from a Zen sesshin where she used the 3:00pm body practice period to move through T'ai Chi Chih outdoors among ancient oaks, balancing sitting stillness with gentle doing.

Dale Buchanan recounts running a TCC studio in Great Falls, Virginia, leaving teaching for health club management, then losing his job in Boca Raton and rebuilding classes through a website and Facebook.

Anita Vestal describes the TCC Student Reaction Questionnaire, a 12-question survey given at first and last classes, with 298 returns analyzed by SPSS showing higher positive ratings and lower pain.

Carol Glinski recounts a class where a mother arrived with her two young children after her sitter cancelled, and the restless pair ended up still, hugging the teacher goodbye.

Carol Glinski's notes from her first conference since accreditation, collecting advice from Justin and Steve on teaching flow before mechanics, leaving ego aside, and living in cosmic rhythm.

Carol Glinski answers the pull to submit something to the Journal with a run of limericks about her daily practice, her packed classes, and her refusal to be solemn about chi.

Carol Glinski describes the 300-year-old oak the pavement divides around in her Jacksonville neighborhood, and the evening walk when she stopped to embrace it and felt both its rooted strength and its vulnerability to acid rain.

David J. Belz writes to Justin from Fort Myers about a massage therapist student with whom he scanned for heat radiating from blocked chi, inches from the body, after practice.

Diana Daffner, writing from Sarasota, asks how it is that no two practice sessions ever feel the same, and how gratitude has no end when effort has no beginning.

David Belz writes from Fort Myers about his accreditation week in Bemidji with Steve Ridley, the group chi field, his fear of not graduating, and the five presentations he scheduled on returning home.

In a letter to Jean Katus after a Naples workshop, David Belz reported a blood pressure reading of 110/78, down 20 points, and an electric surge of energy while practising Push Pull.