Cultivating Stillness

Part III: The Burden and Grace of the Family Name When a practitioner is granted a practice name or formally received into a lineage, the mind instinctively reaches for metaphors of arrival. We are wired to treat formal recognition as a summit reached, a door locked...

Part II: Becoming The Practice and Live What You Have Learned In the early stages of cultivation, we rely heavily on scaffolding. We learn where to place our feet in a Taiji stance, trace the subtle pathways of the meridians in TCM, memorize classical passages of the...

Blue Heron Stillness offers formal courses in Taiji, Qigong, Meditation, Daoist Arts, TCM Basics, and Bagua. Some of my longest-tenured students have completed each of those subjects, including an I Ching Divination, and moved beyond "student" to become fellow...

We had been sitting in comfortable silence for about thirty minutes. At not even five feet tall, she was a peanut of a woman, resting quietly in her wheelchair while I towered beside her. Together, we watched with great amusement as squirrels chased each other up and...

We are conditioned to wait for the thunderclaps. The big promotions, the public recognitions, the moments where society finally turns its gaze toward us and nods in approval. Yesterday, I sat with a student of mine—a highly accomplished professional who has...

You know that whole idea of finding the "miraculous in the mundane"? It usually sounds so peaceful, doesn't it? You picture those slow, quiet mornings—the way steam curls off a fresh cup of tea, or how the late afternoon sun hits the floorboards just right. Maybe it's...