Posts by Heather

September 21st 2022  One of the difficulties with many concepts like “healing” is the fuzziness of the term itself.  Some people think of it as a spiritual thing.  My pastor certainly does; then again, he ought to.  Others regard the term as applying principally to recovery from stress or trauma.  Still others refer simply to…

21 June 2022 If you haven’t heard me say “There are no secrets in tai chi,” it’s not because I’ve never said it in class.  It’s true.  There aren’t any – at least in Yang style.  Everything there is to know about it is widely available, sitting right there waiting for you to lay hold…

“My Sifu has said, when asked, that our best “apparatus” for training is our training partner’s arms, legs, head and torso. He asks us to consider how much money it would cost to build a training dummy as unpredictable and obnoxious as the average T’ai Chi student.”– Frank Chai 1 June 2022 The inspiration for…

12 May 2022 Tai chi as a traditional martial art is similar in many ways to every other martial art.  We use the energy in an opponent’s action against him – this is no different than jujitsu or aikido.  We have blocks, punches and kicks – so do hapkido, karate, xingyi quan and the Shaolin…

1 April 2022 As you all know, what we do in class takes a predictable form: This is pretty much like every class everywhere.  What I’d like to address in today’s post is what parts of the class I think the students ought to have some choice in, now and in the future. The first…

24 February 2022 Yesterday during class, I was honored by a visit from a fellow teacher here at the studio.  He came in and followed along with the last half of the class.  After class he asked me a question, and a valuable one, which I think deserves a better answer than I gave him. …

9 February 2022 You don’t get any awards for winning “Stump the Grandmaster.”  What you get is embarrassment, an awkward shrug, and (hopefully) the inspiration to find the answer – or the route to it – for yourself. I know this because this is exactly what happened when I asked Grandmaster Yang Jun a question…

Questions January 2022 New Years symbolizes optimism, potential, hope and expectations.  It’s my hope that 2022 will be a year of growth and enrichment for all my students. I’ve said before that my goal as a tai chi teacher is to get my students to a point where they need a better teacher than I…

16 December 2021 No one needs to be told how to breathe.  It’s automatic.  What I didn’t know before a week or two ago, however, is that humans are one of very few creatures who can override our automatic breathing and control it consciously.  I don’t know why this is so and if anyone else…

21 November 2021 “If my opponent does not move, I do not move.  The instant he moves, I am already there.”EXPOSITIONS OF INSIGHTS INTO THE PRACTICE OF THE THIRTEEN POSTURESby Wu Yu-hsiang In his book “The Martial Arts Teacher – a Practical Path for a Noble Way,” author Jonathan Bluestein advises that the teacher should…