The Vital Force Archive

Lucille Porter, at 80 and with a history of lower back trouble, describes going to her T'ai Chi Chih class despite stiffness and pain, and finding her back fine within minutes.

Benita Goldstein asked her new class of retired teachers in Brooklyn Heights what they felt after practice, and heard that sciatica pain had vanished and a hard school day had lifted.

Benita Goldstein, a three-year practitioner, describes arriving at her first teacher intensive weighed down by fear, falling ill on the second night, then waking the next morning to returning health and joy.

Beverly Weil's poem watches a bare tree rooted against a winter dawn sky, dances with it in flowing chi, and closes with thanks to Justin Stone for his life.

Diana Bahn recounts two falls, one crossing West 57th Street and one on the tennis court that strained her hamstring, and how acupuncture, physical therapy and a rebuilt daily practice brought Seijaku back within seven weeks.

Diana Bahn recalls the 15-minute mock presentation at her 2002 teacher training, where moving Passing Clouds with the audience steadied her nerves and showed her the clarity practice brings without effort.

Sister Francis A Kay writes from eleven years teaching T'ai Chi Chih in Zimbabwe, including at the Harare Hospice Bereavement Center amid cholera, AIDS and forced evacuations, before returning to the US for heart surgery.

After the 2004 St. Louis conference, Beverly Weil argues that the community's collective Chi mirrors each member's own, and asks whether responsibility is being shifted yin to yang, citing the Teachers Directory.

Beverly Weil's pyramid poem calls for trust in Prajna and the Intrinsic Force, urging surrender, stillness and alignment with the Eternal Light reflected where mountain meets sky.

Mary Stebbins, a museum educator, found that doing T'ai Chi Chih over her lunch hour changed how a restless boa constrictor behaved during her live animal demonstrations.

Ralph Garn thanks Sr. Antonia Cooper and Ed Altman after auditing the July teacher accreditation in Mahwah, recalling Ed's drawing of a human form with emphasis below the navel and an empty head.

Ralph Garn's pyramid poem holds a single moment as one small portion of forever, grasped temporarily in a camera's shutter and never to be the same again.

Sister Francis A. Kay fell six steps from a cabin ladder during a Kentucky retreat, fracturing a thoracic vertebra, and found the joyous movements more healing than her prescribed therapeutic exercises.

Ralph Garn's pyramid poem traces an inner chamber where right and left intertwine, Yang feeds Yin, and a cyclone of energy showers down until stillness brings buried cobwebs into the healing sun.

Ralph Garn warns that teachers producing their own T'ai Chi Chih videos risk passing on movements that drift from what Justin and Steve teach, and urges correction at teacher training, renewals and the source tapes.

Mary Stebbins steps away from a hectic morning to practise in a light snow on her lunch break, moving from awkward uncertainty into tingling, flow and a sense of becoming a dancer of light.

Mary Stebbins, three classes into T'ai Chi Chih with Ralph Garn, camped alone in a snowstorm on Morgan Hill and practiced on a sun-dried platform beside a rushing stream, weeping with joy.

Ray Watson describes teaching Mary, a woman in her seventies paralyzed on her left side, who heard him on Batavia talk radio and, combining TCC with visualization and self-hypnosis, regained feeling and began standing.

Ralph Garn's pyramid poem asks where attention sits in the body, tracking it from below to the brow and upward in a climb that floats alone toward transcendence.

Ralph Garn's post-conference notes on teacher camaraderie, Justin Stone's revised Seijaku, and the hard/soft, holding fast and letting go rhythm he took home with him.

Ralph Garn's pyramid poem builds from "Open-hearted Surrender" through wanting not and lacking no-thing to a closing line of being at one in peace.

Ralph Garn remembers his teacher Rahshelle-Lei O'Culmain, who died February 7 at a hospice in Oahu after years of caring for family members with cancer and facing her own.

Ralph Garn of Syracuse reports that after the teachers' conference, chi vibrations grew strong in his left hand during Rocking Motion and later in both hands during Daughter in the Valley and Push Pull.

Ralph Garn noticed a Mona Lisa smile on his own face during morning Seijaku, a change from years of grunting through practice that his class noticed as smoother movement.