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.
Veterans
T’ai Chi Chih has been shared with veterans and military service members, including those living with post-traumatic stress. These articles include teachers’ accounts of classes for military communities, reports from healing and holistic nursing settings, and students’ descriptions of how the practice meets the challenges they carry.
May Swanson recounts eight years of donated teaching at The Wellness Community in Phoenix and the Veterans Hospital, including a dying student who sat through class and felt the energy.
May Swanson
Phoenix, AZ
David Stone credits a morning practice with getting him through a painful couples counseling session where he disclosed troubling secrets, and thanks his teacher Steve Marsh for support after Iraq and entering a recovery program.
David Stone
Portland, Oregon
James Hecker recounts being expelled from the Knights of the Altar for asking questions, his Wisconsin farm boyhood, and the Navy corps schooling and Special Forces assignment that followed.
James K. Hecker, incarcerated 17 years at Soledad, San Quentin and Old Folsom and formerly a Navy medic, answers the questions he is asked most, and describes practising on a lockdown tier until racial tension broke.
James K. Hecker
A remembrance of Ken Ridley, the San Mateo man in a wheelchair who supported his wife Hope and son Steve from the sidelines at Practice in the Park, honored with a Japanese Maple planted in Central Park.
A tribute to Leona B. Dees, who taught T'ai Chi Chih at the Albuquerque center and two senior centers, staffed the center as a volunteer, and built an early TCC website with her husband Marion.
Norma Schaumann adds T'ai Chi Chih to a prenatal childbirth course, Christeen McCurran's mother teaches her first class to her sisters in Norway, and Pam Towne reports on the Denver teacher training and the $600 she was paid by a Long Beach computer company.