The Vital Force Archive

Mary Wichmann describes leading twelve widows of fallen servicemen in one hour of T'ai Chi Chih on a deck at Holbrook Farms Retreat, with minimal instruction and no goal beyond peace and joy.

Laurie Jacobi, quoting Waysun Liao and teacher trainer April Leffler on thinking, works out how to cage the monkey mind by turning attention to feeling the weight shift millimeter by millimeter.

After 26 years of practice, Laurie Jacobi questions a rule she thought sacred and begins dropping her hands between movements, finding it releases wrist tension and helps ground excess energy.

Mary Wichmann rereads years of notes from Justin Stone before the Albuquerque conference, recalling his congratulatory letters to new teachers, Turiya meditation at his home, Tuesday practice and "Second Breakfast."

Kay Rydeen presented "T'ai Chi Chih for Body, Mind, and Spirit" at a Minnesota occupational therapy conference, teaching two dozen OTs about weight shifts, softness, and joint range of motion.

Laurie Jacobi, unable to attend the 50th conference in person, recounts why her Journey of Signposts story felt daunting to tell, the shaking she experiences practising around others, and how her video reached a wider audience.

Mary Wichmann, who teaches just four one-hour classes a year for Survivors of the Fallen in Minnesota, questioned whether she belonged at the 50th anniversary conference in Albuquerque, then found connection and renewed interest in Seijaku.

Patty Stupca spent the month before the 50th Teacher Conference asking why she had signed up, then found an unnameable but positive shift through tears, conversations and hugs there.

Sue Bitney co-chaired the raffle and auction for the 50th anniversary conference in Albuquerque with Judy Trousdell, then tested positive for COVID and instead had a last conversation with her hospice patient.

Mary Strom recounts a Minnesota gathering for T'ai Chi Chih's 50th anniversary, where watching the leader's wrists during Around the Platter showed her the difference between softness and the collapse she long mistook for flexibility.

Anna Vaith, who once found writing pyramid poems as enjoyable as a dentist visit, describes how Carmen Brocklehurst's guidance at the summer teacher conference produced a poem she loved.

Warren Wolfe, sleepless in the hospital after knee-replacement surgery and plagued by muscle spasms, began doing T'ai Chi Chih mentally at 3 a.m., and describes the practice he has refined since.

Laurie Jacobi arrived at the 2023 teacher conference convinced 24 years of practice had taught her all there was to know about body mechanics, then came away with new refinements in Bird Flaps Its Wings, Around the Platter and the Six Healing Sounds.

Julie Schuster's class at Friendship Village of Bloomington spent weeks practicing a single chosen movement, and students recorded what came of it: Push Pull turning into a mantra, Six Healing Sounds cleansing breath, and Daughter on the Mountain Top easing anxiety at bedtime.

Laurie Jacobi recalls first seeing Justin Stone playing 1940s jazz at a grand piano, and the conference where he corrected her for not moving low enough before learning of her back pain.

Ivonne Begue se Benzo describes the weekly practice she began shadowing with the sisters of Assisi Heights in Minnesota, and how moving meditation lets her respond rather than react.

Nico Borneman likens a practitioner to a breaching whale who surrenders to fluidity, followed by pyramid poems from Lisa Stryoan, Terry Gay Puckett and KayRydeen on tanden, rain and rooting in Hawaiian sand.

Kris Jordahl, who began practising in 2020 and never met Justin Stone, counts 20 openings, groundings, pauses and closings, arguing the graceful conclusion is where energy settles.

Patty Stupca, inspired by Kay Rydeen's visual aid, walks readers through a word puzzle moving from DOG SHOWS to GOD SHOWS to GOOD SHOWS as four levels of TCC practice.

Patty Stupca asks what comes after regular T'ai Chi Chih and Seijaku practice brings peace, and answers that the goal is nothing: return to the present and find gratitude.

Patty Stupca reports the January Second Saturday discussion of seated practice, including Kay Rydeen's caution to rock from the sitz bones rather than the lower lumbar spine, and chair placement for unsteady students.

Sue Bitney said yes to teaching outdoors at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in September 2020, and when fifty students asked to learn every movement, she began walking them through all nineteen in a single thirty-minute session.

Laurie Jacobi led a class devoted entirely to Rocking Motion and foot awareness, then shares student Patricia Blakely's email describing how the stone-like neuropathy pain in her right foot vanished by class end.

Kay Rydeen describes "set induction," the teaching trick of opening a class with a prop or placard, from a French professor's bulging pockets to dimes taped on a cardboard foot outline.

Laurie Jacobi recounts how pandemic isolation in Minnesota opened a fruitful emptiness, drawing on Lao Tzu, Japanese flower arranging and the slowed transitions between movements, followed by readers' Pyramid Poems.

Sue Bitney describes the beginning class she started at a senior co-operative housing building during COVID, where a core of eight practise twice weekly and one man moving only one hand practises with them.

Laurie Jacobi takes a student's description of T'ai Chi Chih as a tool for transformation and applies it to her own foot placement, Push Pull and Passing Clouds, watching physical corrections change corresponding areas of her life.

Patty Stupca uses the Zen parable of the overflowing teacup to ask what expectations, shoulds and judgments students bring to practice, offering gratitude as what to fill the cup with instead.

Sue Bitney played Carmen's KNME interviews and Justin's instructional DVD for her senior students, who asked why no one had told them about softness, and moved more softly alongside him.

Sue Bitney draws on Justin Stone's writings about circulating and balancing the Chi to argue that practice heals the practitioner and the world, citing students' reflections at their final 2021 practice.