Cultivating Stillness

The mornings in the northern Berkshires have dipped into the upper twenties. Frost now coats the remaining grass, and the vibrant, fiery canopy of autumn has dropped, leaving bare branches silhouetted against the pale sky. Over the last few days, I have been out in...

Part IV:  The Path Toward Becoming Radically Ordinary There is a profound temptation, after years of rigorous cultivation and the assumption of a lineage name, to expect the culmination of the path to look extraordinary. We are conditioned to believe that spiritual...

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...