On the Road in Search of the Tai Chi Revolution
Still Learning to Balance Qi
Nobody gets out of here alive, of course, but we want to live our best life, with as much of our faculties as we can preserve, over time.
The New Harmonic Convergence
On Saturday, April 27, people from all around the planet will meet to meditate and practice mind-body exercises, seeking health, peace and community. Organizers say the activities expand across six continents, more than 80 nations and hundreds of cities. This does not include the individuals at home who will answer the 10 a.m. local-time call…
The Word Is Out
I wish to thank all the readers who’ve followed my trek to explore the Taoist martial and healing arts, whimsically set against the backdrop of a long-ago literary search for cosmic Truth, Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. Connecting the two was a vision I conjured up seven years ago, launching this blog with a Kickstarter campaign…
Band of Brothers and Sisters
For all the perils of the Internet and social media, they can be useful in building global communities, including among internal martial arts students and teachers. I owe much of my interest and growth in Tai Chi and qigong practice to connection with others online, and particularly through Facebook groups like The Kwoon, Tai Chi Connections…
Doctor Fung is In. Listen …
John K. Fung could be out of central casting to play the role of a principal character in my novel, The Return Trip, which will be available early next year. The fictional character is recalled as a young Kungfu fighter who mellows as a popular writer and, eventually, becomes an influential holistic wellness guru. The…
Qi to the Nth Power
Three years ago I set out on an eight-state odyssey to touch hands and pick the brains of gifted teachers of the internal martial arts, friends from social media I’ve characterized as New Dharma Bums. Meeting them and writing about my experiences was a prime objective, and deepening my understanding of taiji, qigong and Taoist…
Off the Road and into the Arena
We’re taking a little detour from our Dharma Bums journey to explore Taiji competition – how the ancient Chinese martial arts have been organized as modern sport in the United States. No, this isn’t “push hands,” the play form of Taiji fighting we’ve explored on this blog previously. I’m talking about the mastery and presentation…
Taiji Transformation
Four days of intense training with Adam Mizner gives new meaning to the idea of building a “taiji body,” my goal since a seven-state 2016 tour studying the internal martial art. The teachers I met along the way, whom I’ve likened to New Dharma Bums after the Jack Kerouac classic, showed me that, to fully…
Back to Real Life
Since our last discursion, practicing with a real-life master of Chen-style taiji, I’ve been having fun with the novel I envisioned at the outset of the New Dharma Bums project, and the evolving form of it. Discovering a world turning as I go is the most enjoyable part of writing, the invention of imagined story,…
A Chen Warrior Tells All
In this blog, we’ve examined Taiji mostly through the lens of Yang-style teaching, which is my primary experience and the most popular style in the United States. The slow and gentle movements of the Yang style are easily accessible to people of all ages for general health and balance. While it’s also a martial…
Finding Your Way
I’ve cast a wide net with these blogs, covering weekend seminars with Tai Chi and qigong masters, connecting in Florida with teachers and students of the virtual Kwoon community, and spending a month on the road visiting devotees of the Taoist martial arts in Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Arkansas. It’s been a…
Back to Jack
When last we pondered Jack Kerouac, we were contemplating a trip to the mountains of Colorado, and a school, Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, dedicated to extending the literature and spirit of the Beat Generation. Until recently, I was planning a return engagement, as a graduate student. But we are taking a…
The Tai Chi Body
Back home, recharging from my November journey to the Rocky Mountains and back, I am encouraged to build a Tai Chi body – a very different physical specimen than the one I’ve been inclined to build in the gym. Forget the weights. Stop flexing and relax. No six-pack abs required. Relax the breath into the…
Heal Thyself
All along the road in my search for the Tai Chi revolution I’ve found people who are eager to help me overcome physical weaknesses, ready with advice and helpful criticisms of my structure, postures and form. Some corrections have been repeated a few times over, by different teachers, suggesting that I have a ways to…
Practice Makes Perfect
I am bombarded with books and links and wisdom written down, sometimes only in Chinese, but with illustrations. Along my route in search of the New Dharma Bums, I am sifting through mountains of information, making a list of everything I must read. So much to learn. And, then, eventually I must practice. I started…
The Top of the Mountain
Ray Abeyta and Michael Paler are tough guys who survived the mean streets of El Paso, Texas, and Buffalo, New York, respectively. They learned to protect themselves with martial arts. Then they learned to dominate with Tai Chi. Ray is a Vietnam veteran from a family of boxers, and he reveled in martial arts contests…
The Contemplative Culture
Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, is at the nexus of the Beat’s literary “Dharma” adventure and the actual academic pursuit of Traditional Eastern Arts. When Tibetan Buddhist guru Trungpa Rinpoche founded the school in 1974, Beat poets and writers Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and William Burroughs came to teach, and Ginsberg and Anne Waldman founded…
The Real (Long) Yang
As I mentioned in previous blogs, my Tai Chi training came from a school founded by students of Professor Cheng Man-Ching, who had studied with celebrated Master Yang Chengfu in China and eventually simplified the Yang long form from 103 to 37 postures. After practicing this short form for 28 years, I am comfortable applying…
Hands Across the World
On the last Saturday of April each year, people all over the world come together for a graceful dance, flowing through Tai Chi and Qigong forms in a mass demonstration of good will and health. World Tai Chi and Qigong Day, founded in 1998, has spread to 80 countries, embraced by people of different beliefs,…
Qi at an Exhibition
When you walk into the Chinese Temple display at Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Art Museum you can literally feel its power, if you stop and breathe it in. Before you is a larger-than-life figure perched on the tree trunk from which it is carved – an enlightened Bodhisattva of the Buddhist tradition who resists nirvana to…
We Go to the Mountain
As promised, we are resuming the journey to the West, following the ardent steps of Jack Kerouac and his disaffected Beat Generation – still searching for our place in the cosmic order, dharma in the modern world. A new breed of “Dharma Bums” has risen in the United States around the Taoist martial arts, and…
‘New Journalism’ Hits the Road
Picking up on the thread about Neal Cassady with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and the evolution of the Beats with the hippy culture of the late 1960s, we have a detailed account left by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Wolfe caught up with the Pranksters in 1964 as they awaited…
The Professor
We interrupt this journey to present an important milestone recently produced by a Kickstarter campaign, a fine documentary film about the man who helped popularize Tai Chi Ch’uan in the United States. It began in the turbulent ‘60s when martial artists and hippies invaded a studio in New York’s Chinatown in equal parts, all interested…
The Round Trip
Neal Cassady was a magnetic character in Jack Kerouac’s books — a wild West antihero who was ultra-cool and ultra-hot, a walking contradiction. He was also an object of affection for many Beats and their followers, the model for the charismatic Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On The Road, and known as Cody Pomeray in his…
The Journey Continues
“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them. That only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” – Tao Te Ching The ancient Taoist wisdom as expressed by Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Sun Tzu and other Chinese philosophers contains an abundance of…
What I Bring to the Table
I think most of my Facebook friends who teach and study Tai Chi and Qigong don’t know what to make of me, and my search for the New Dharma Bums. In truth, I haven’t been very clear, since the journey has not yet taken shape. But my ultimate goal is to promote the Taoist martial…
Applied Wisdom
Picking up our previous thread, we were at a crossroads looking for the Way across America that tells the Tai Chi and Qigong story, at both the mastery and the mass levels. The road map is beginning to take shape, although we are still trying to summon the resources. We have a deadline. Meanwhile, my…
Finding Your Path
“The Dharma can’t be lost, nothing is lost on a well-worn path.” — Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums Dharma Bums is a relentlessly optimistic book, where enlightenment is there at the top of the mountain, just over the bend. The hard work it would take to get there was an unplanned byproduct of the journey, and…
Call of the Wild
Ah to be alive on a mid-September morn fording a stream barefoot, pants rolled up, holding boots, pack on, sunshine, ice in the shallows, northern rockies. Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes cold nose dripping singing inside creek music, heart music, smell of sun on gravel.…
The Backgrounders
Before setting out to cover the story of America’s evolving Tai Chi adventure, I am filling in information gaps in the history and philosophy of the Taoist martial arts, of which Tai Chi is one. I welcome any suggestions from fellow travelers, and those busy reading on the sidelines. I recommend building on a literary…
The Mind Is the Controller
“Good Tai Chi is rooted in the feet, develops in the legs, is directed by the waist, and is expressed through the fingers. … Tai Chi hinges entirely upon the player’s consciousness (yi) rather than upon his external muscular force (li). … all parts of the body must be threaded together, not allow the slightest…
The Journey Begins
It was the mid-1950s when Jack Kerouac hit the road and produced some early new journalism – reflections on a movement of Beats, Poets and Prophets who followed a trail to the West Coast, sometimes through Mexico, in search of higher knowledge, higher purpose, or just higher. He was in the middle of the action,…
Relax and Breathe: The Taoist Way
It was about 35 years ago when I first consulted the Oracle from the Chinese classic I Ching, tossing coins to construct a hexagram that would offer a vision of my future. Que sera sera. What shall I be? I was casting about for the next move in my journalism career, looking for an opportunity,…
Lessons from Sifu Rasmus
Additional video from our Frederick, Md., “Science of Elastic Force,” tai chi workshops, with Sifu Mark Rasmus, are now available for viewing on YouTube. As a prelude, check out my three-part series on the workshop in Tai Chi Revelations, Into the Mystic and The Body Electric. But the best presentation comes from Sifu Rasmus himself,…
The Body Electric
Most of the individual exercises during Sifu Mark Rasmus’s workshop, “The Science of Elastic Force,” involved giving our partners enough pressure to allow them to bounce us by absorbing that force and turning it back on us, and vice versa. We were encouraged to sense the “springs” in our elastic joints and connective tissue. And…
Tai Chi Revelations
I’ve practiced tai chi for 25 years, religiously pursuing an almost daily exercise to improve health, balance and mindfulness. It seems to be working within those parameters, but it may be too early to tell. Eventually, I will fall down and lose my mind. It’s just a matter of time, no matter how hard I…