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.
Memory Care
T’ai Chi Chih is taught in assisted living residences, nursing homes and memory care units, often seated and simplified. Articles here come from teachers working with people living with Alzheimer’s and dementia, describing what the movements offer residents, staff and families.
Pat Huseby of Danville, California announces she will teach Alzheimer's patients at a new 48-bed Alzheimer's wing opening that spring, and asks other teachers with similar experience to contact her.
John Buffington, newly accredited at Carmel Retreat in Mahwah, describes practising at a forest waterfall with auditing teacher Ralph Garn and plans first classes at his mother's nursing home and his church.
John Buffington
Paarseppona, NJ
Christeen McLain-Horpedahl recounts teaching seated T'ai Chi Chih at Villa Maria Nursing Home in Fargo from 1985, her daughter Kathryn helping residents form circles, Gail Braaten's 12-week study, and two knee injuries healed without surgery.
Christeen McLain-Horpedahl
Fargo, ND
Richard Brier describes teaching Rocking Motion, Bird Flaps Its Wings and the basic stance to ten people in the early stages of Alzheimer's, and how the program director went home energized rather than exhausted.
Richard Brier
Mill Valley, CA
Nancy Kennedy, accredited in May 1995, practised TCC mentally through an hour-long MRI and the nurse's screen registered the change, then watched a nursing home patient with dementia and her own mother in Florida grow quiet during practice.
Carmen Brocklehurst recounts a shy beginner who doubted she could learn T'ai Chi Chih, then found six weeks in that the depression surrounding her mother's nursing home decline had lifted.
Carmen Brocklehurst
Albuquerque, NM
Sr. Antonia Cooper traces her teaching from a first class of two students in 1991 to a full spring calendar, including seated classes for chair-bound residents of St. Ann's Home in Jersey City.
Sr. Antonia Cooper
No. Plainfield, NJ
Barbara Peller counts up a year of senior classes that keep finding her: a seated half-hour group at an Alzheimer's day care, a college class grown from 12 to 31, Tribune coverage, and 130 students a week.
Chris McLain reports that she and instructor Colleen Heising are working with Dr. Alberto Pontillo of the Fargo Veterans Hospital on the first research study of T'ai Chi Chih and Alzheimer's.
Nancy Farnham's abstract for an AHAA Innovation of the Year award describes how a grant-funded T'ai Chi Chih program at a Fargo nursing home grew beyond its twelve targeted residents and calmed the 4:00 p.m. agitation hour.
Christeen H. Curran reports on teaching T'ai Chi Chih in Fargo, from a ten-week geriatric contract at Villa Maria Nursing Home to 250 nurses doing Bass Drum at a state convention.
Christeen H. Curran
Christeen M. Curran reports from Fargo that three of her students will be certified in Denver in June, and that the nursing home chain where she teaches wants a staff member accredited for all its homes.
Christeen M. Curran
Fargo, ND
Christeen Curran contracted to teach 20 hours at a Fargo nursing home, Mary Kim Candell moved from home classes to the Orinda Community Center, and Jean Williams filled Oklahoma City classes from one small newspaper ad.