The Vital Force Archive

Rick Davis likens life's transitions, from pandemic isolation to the death of a loved one, to the weight shift, arguing that firm footing and real permanence are found inwardly.

Rick Davis argues that the 19 movements need nothing added to them, and that stillness of mind comes from yielding the intellect to the form rather than overthinking or embellishing it.

Rick Davis finds time in the subtle pressure against the soles of the feet, arguing that each weight shift, settling and return marks one moment from the next during pandemic uncertainty.

Rick Davis writes during the pandemic and civil unrest, finding emotional footing in the Bubbling Spring at the soles of the feet during Rocking Motion, Justin Stone's noonday shadow image, and the 13th century mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg.

Rick Davis wakes with chest pain and a whisper of fear, then finds during the next evening's neighborhood walk that his grounded weight shift has turned walking into moving devotion and gratitude.

Rev. Richard Davis uses his daughter's mispronounced "cumpf-ter-full" to show how uncorrected habits linger, then argues that counting repetitions traps awareness in the head instead of in the moving, grounded body.

Rev. Rick Davis traces an early bad habit of leaving weight in the yang leg and rushing to the next movement, and links completing the shift to living attentively in the present rather than in the past or in worry.

Rick Davis, a retirement community chaplain, draws on the Lotus Sutra and Psalm 23 to argue that seated T'ai Chi Chih offers people confined to wheelchairs by aging and illness a renewed experience of chi and inner vastness.

Larry Kowalski, a 74-year-old retired Catholic priest who calls himself unathletic and self-conscious, describes three classes where slow demonstration, weekly review and tactful corrections left him relieved rather than taxed.

Sr. Mary Ann Cirillo describes meeting a Tulsa woman at the Regis University conference and connecting religious communities in New Jersey, St. Louis and Denver with T'ai Chi Chih teachers.

Rev. John J. Barbour recounts preparing for Teacher Accreditation in Alameda by first attending the June 1990 Intensive at Happy Valley Conference Center, closing with a poem dedicated to Steve Ridley.