Arising out of requests, this is a course to start your Sunday morning and, in case it has already lagged, restart your weekend. The course is confident of a prompt and successful start because of the requests, along with confirmations and payments of early registration, and if you’re reading about it here for the first time, here’s what the opportunity presents to you.

• More active exercise than, yet with the same principles as, The Form.
• Delightful interpersonal bonding and Tai Chi support, if not outright friendships, with these fine players of the art, over half of them beginning Sensing Hands their first time.
• Enhanced relaxation, flexibility, adroitness or nimbleness, strength, poise, enthusiasm, creativity, and sensitivity to others—beyond what you are likely to find with The Form.
• A sharply increased self=confidence in any potentially threatening physical situation or confrontation.
• A deeper love of The Form and of Tai Chi in general. 

Our site is Intent Yoga Center, with its fine atmosphere of calm and tranquility. Among the physical assets is a just-right carpeting of the entire floor. Check out other details in the Courses section. And freely call Ron, 360 825-3413 , or email him, ronald@foxinternet.net , for any questions or conversation.

The very word, News, suggests what I write will be new on this page and currently that plays in three areas. Let me tell you about them.

One is heading into the new year of 2008, where I am convinced we will be strongly encouraged to grow into the more and more intimate, unavoidable challenges of our personal, friends’ links, family, neighborhood, city, nation and world communities and realities. The fine thing about it is that, to my aspiring eye, we will be given what we need in order to come genuinely into that growth and then feel, think, say, do and fully satiate the parched needs waiting around us for our showers of participation.

Another area is Tai Chi and Yoga where, especially on the Winter Evening of 5 January—see below—I’ll be able to share, in our exercise hour and evening conversation, the revolutions in my convolutions that are changing Yoga into a much more comprehensive and applicable power in life and in the world, besides the new physical postures and posture sequences that feed its healing and strengthening leverage into all we do. And that are changing Tai Chi into the super physical coach of our fitness and psychological well-being I’ve always suspected it was—but now I have discovered specific resources with which to show, share and teach you!

The third of those three areas is probably not surprising at all, though you may want to know more about it, and it will be difficult to communicate that except in the fruits of action from my new attitude. It is the internal change I’ve had to traverse in order to make these changes in Tai Chi and Yoga. And, consequently in the richness of the courses I’ll be teaching this quarter and the freshness of how they’ll be taught—good news to you who have wished for more harmonization of some personal characteristics (like class promptness) with the arts that I teach.

To me, the best way to inaugurate, celebrate, integrate and actuate all this is, for starters, getting together on the Winter Evening, 6 p.m., Saturday, 5 January , two days before the first course begins on Monday. Since I’m providing the dinner, which’ll save you a potluck duty, I need to hear from you and yours to know how much dinner to prepare. Call 360 825-3413 or write ronald@foxinternet.net with the number in your party before noon on Thursday, 3 January , when I’ll go grocery shopping.

More than you may imagine, I’m looking forward to seeing you then. Otherwise, how about at the first meeting of the course you choose to take this quarter?

Welcome to Fall, 2007, of Tai Chi and Yoga. And this year, of poetry, too. For the first time, at Des Moines Activity Center, I will be offering a course on writing poetry; and I am eager to help anyone who wishes to learn about it. See Courses when that is ready shortly after this.

With a new development in Yoga, Salute to the Stars (happily introduced at the CannonBeach weekend in early August), and Salute to the Earth to be introduced at the Fall Evening September 15th, our Yoga studies will go a spiral further in three regular courses and one new one, called Yoga Workout. See Events now for Yoga: Day of Self-discovery and Courses soon after.

Tai Chi, of course, has also benefited from Cannon Beach with our seminar achievement together in Tai Chi and the Life You Always Wanted to Live bringing a very different way to teach this art—just forming in me now—carrying a promise of joy and progress I don’t believe we could even imagine before. I will be doing that in the fall courses and the Tai Chi Fall Weekend , a very low cost one in the Olympic Peninsula woods not very far from Sequim—a delightful place we have been before called Ramblewood starting Friday, 2 November.

With a shooting availability to be set up in September, I am planning to have the new DVD early in the Fall Quarter. The new arrangement to be scheduled, finally, very happily involves the sophistication we need for a split-screen product and all the other technology to go with it.

Hey, hey! We’ve scheduled a fall workshop by a new star (to us) in the Tai Chi sky, an accomplished master we might well consider nearly collegial to our own peerless William C. C. Chen. He is Zhang Yun from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—a decades-rich teacher and student of the late world famous Great Master Wang Peisheng. The dates set are 1-2 December [Saturday-Sunday] at the Center for Urban Horticulture in Seattle. So my next task is an item on the website and a leaflet with the details, coming up soon. In the meantime you may wish to check your calendar for that first weekend after Thanksgiving, chosen because it is a bit of a lull before December densities snowball their roll into the holidays.

For the many of us who yearned to go to Timberline Lodge last January and ran aground in disappointment because of a small shortfall in our turnout, I have the news you wish to hear: it’s set again for 25-27 January of 2008 , and with a lot more advance planning this time I think we’re going to make it. I could easily spend the rest of this writing describing the many features and wonders of a Winter Weekend at Timberline and I will give enough detail in the Winter news in early December so you can visualize it all. Those who were planning last January already know, but if you don’t I suggest you visit their website of timberlinelodge.com—be prepared for a shock of pleasure and awe—and also take in this next modest paragraph of comments.

It is widely considered to be the finest mountain and ski lodge in North America, situated near the summit of legendary Mt. Hood in Oregon. It has an outdoor heated hot tub and swimming pool that can be enjoyed in sunny to blizzard (especially blizzard!) weather. Our first night there, Friday, we’ll be taken by snow cat one mile above the lodge on the mountain to be dined and movie’d and Tai Chi’d in the famous Silcox Hut, really it is more like spending a night in a wilderness mansion before checking in at Timberline Saturday. Then Timberline . . . that lodge is not only the most stunning creation to seat itself on a snow-capped mountain, it is a temple of outdoor soul for which we’ll all be rosier and more potent people after Tai Chi-ing, roaming (including the glorious possibility of skiing and snowshoeing), dining and sleeping there. This early notice is also needed because the necessarily dear cost may need some advance budgeting and the spread of well over $50 in room price difference means an early sign-up can be a much more economic one. And if you go, especially with children under 11 staying there free, I can tell you it will be a personal and family souvenir of memory for the duration. Mark your calendar and get in touch for more details before December—I have prices now.

Some of you may remember one or both times we have had Tai Chi with music courses. One was, additionally, a study of music and its characteristics; the other ranged into a very wide selection, showing to us that any type or style of music can be experienced with the Tai Chi Form.

This is quite different, as the title phrase of musical partners suggests. To tell you, I have to say what I feel music is.

To me music is, very quietly and unobtrusively, the greatest and most powerful art. When its writer, performer is inspired and keeps the inspiration clear of personal touch-ups, it can take any of us straight into the Reality of all realities, where every human problem is like a dust mote overwhelmed in the radiance of that immensity. . . . Nothing else matters, and one comes back to problems afterwards with a new perspective.

The twelve musical pieces I’ve chosen, one for each session of the course, are that kind of music and so are true partners. After each one, any walls in and around one’s Tai Chi may fall for good. Just as important, I invite you to bring—for our playing—what are musical partners for you.

Since this course shares the room on Thursdays with Form Improvement, you could also do some good work on your Form and save a bundle by making an evening of it. It’s a $60 discount for anyone who takes both courses. If you want to talk, we have almost a month until it begins at 360 825-3413 or ronald@foxinternet.net . But register now for what may be quite popular, so you are sure of a place in the course.

Try reflecting with me on the words we use for our four seasons. One after the other.

By the way, you may have noticed I always capitalize the names of the seasons. I do, no matter how incorrect it’s said to be, because I’m certain there’s so much behind their normal, surface appearance that they deserve a proper noun—such as a person’s name.

Fall begins with what’s called a stop, the letter f. Stop because all the air coming through one’s mouth is stopped when you start to pronounce f, before the release at its end. There are several stops in English and, if you notice, they always create an emphasis when they’re pronounced fully. Generally, and as we can see in this word, it induces you to stop in that emphasis and then what follows is a soft trailing away with the a and lls going down in pitch like something falling. Doesn’t that express the season well, a sort of switching off (the abruptness of leaf color changes) like that stop’s emphasis and then the long falling ahead (several weeks of descending leaves)?

Winter has another stop, the letter t—but near the end of the word so that the action of Fall that’s now been winding down (It even has the same beginning spelling of win that gives the starting sound in the phrase, winding down!), climaxes in the last syllable’s very cutting sound of the stop like the cutting off of all the brightness of leaf life for months (that come the closest we know to mimicking death in things like the bear’s hibernation).

But only until the wonderful stop in Spring , where the p releases us from the long grip of Winter, springing forth in an inevitable rising tone humming with a pleasant nasal sound in the ending g. By the way, isn’t that why it’s such a good word to describe a mechanical spring, suggesting such action by its sound? With that amazing release and unfurling, like a flag revealing out of its folds the density of colors within, all progresses to the full majesty of life’s expression around the 21st of June.

And sure enough, Summer is accordingly distinguished among the four seasons because it has no stops! Just try saying the word, loitering a little on the consonants of s, m and r. To me the difference the word, Summer, has is the way the season is—a flow of light, of space, of color, of openness everywhere. Even between our indoor habitude and the door out, that’s often left open in Summer, there’s an ease of connection usually without even changes in garments. The evenings are long and idyllic, the mornings are long and idyllic, the afternoons are long and idyllic, and the nights are a velvet tranquility. Life is happy . . . leaf to flower, bush to tree, stream to lake, mountain to ocean shore.

Of all the portals to the spiritual origin of this magnificent cosmos—that origin of peace, harmony, vastitude, light, bliss, beauty, wisdom, power, love, life, infinity and eternity—Summer is the season most faithfully transparent to it. It shows the sureness of our core instincts when we turn to it like we do no other time of the year . . . ah, Summer . . .

In my experience you and your life will go better, more on the stroll of stress less ness, just by thinking of this and just by saying the word, Summer, to yourself at times. You’ll be in good company.

So it’s no accident that my best Tai Chi course schedule for learning—at a frequency of twice a week—is in a short 6 week span of Summer. Nor that the Tai Chi Summer Evening Week—with the rich opportunity of practicing and learning seven nights in a row with your teacher and other students—happens in the ripeness of August, a quintessential summer month. Nor that my most focused and succinct early morning Yoga course has its nifty 6 week run starting just a week after that celebrated beginning of Summer, the Fourth of July. Nor, finally, that one of the most important things I ever do, the Yoga Day of Self-discovery will finally be held during Summer’s last kisses on Sunday, 10 September. For all of these, I have infectious confidence that you will learn more easily, deeply, fully, and enjoyably than any other time of the year. Invest in the best thing of all, yourself, at the best time of all, and I’ll see you soon! At Courses or Events; contact at 360 825-3413 or ronald@foxinternet.net .

Generally what I said about the new characteristics of courses in January for the Winter Quarter continues into the Spring Quarter. The difference is one quarter of experience in teaching these new features of Tai Chi and Yoga, so that the back-bending changes in the Tai Chi Form and the Salute to the Moon in the Yoga sequence have had the benefit of about 12 sessions of feedback from students and from myself—with adjustments and refinements increasing their beauty, flow and potency and increasing their ease of learning for a student that begins them this quarter. My sense is that virtually all the students that pioneered these changes with me in the Winter Quarter will continue this Spring, providing a wonderful resource for those of you deciding to enter and join us.

Specifically, the Highline early morning Beginning Tai Chi courses, each of which meet twice a week on Monday and Wednesday, will feature the oral reading by Ron of Love of 7 Dolls over the 11 week expanse—begun in the mid-Fall quarter and repeated throughout the entire Winter Quarter, a small segment at each session—check Courses for registering details. The core of that novel is the heretofore unspoken core of Tai Chi, so it is an essential part of courses that have a schedule long enough—20 sessions—to easily accommodate it and still allow for learning the first part, once called 1A, of the Form. The Sensing Hands and Form Application (Self-Defense) course in Kent on Tuesday will fully change its time to 2:00-4:00 p.m. and place to All Arts Academy, with a wonderful addition to the student body that any of you could not help but enjoy. See Courses for the needed details. The Olympia Sensing Hands Beginning and Beginning Tai Chi will have slightly later times on Wednesday and be housed in a beautiful new daylight-flooded room only 3 minutes from the previous location. Those details, too, are in Courses. Finally, the Auburn Sensing Hands Workout at Wendy’s home has stabilized into an irresistible one-hour session and is eager for new students. Find the schedule details, her address and contact information in Courses, of course.

I don’t know how this looks to you, but very directly: these are not New Year resolutions and they are not accomplishments, either. So I’m not going on about anything. I’m just reporting what’s verging in me, like I said at the beginning, and probably like you I still have to clear out the rest of the old in my psychic pipeline with a healthy respect for the work involved in completing the change. But this is what is coming. And if this is what is becoming available to me, I know it is to you. That’s a big part of why I’m reporting.

Another way to say it, or ask it, is why did I even get into all this? Because I do feel our time, all of us who wish it, has come. And the verging I’ve mentioned in me is mainly how I’m noticing it. As was said so tellingly, “a rising tide lifts all boats”. Just brood a little over the recent weeks . . . I know part of that’s a discouraging sense of things, but that is always the other side of the early stages in a newly developing promise. Look through the discouraging stuff to the emerging promise—I tell you, it’s there for all of us.

I fervently, passionately, ardently wish that Tai Chi and Yoga—with all their extraordinary treasures for the living and developing of human life—be realized! Not just sampled, tried and dropped after a few weeks or so, not made a part-time goal that gets drowned in the density and intensity of everything else, but a living and growing, happy and powerful resource you can draw on. That’s why changes, so big I’m calling them sea changes, are showing up in my own repertoire— to make these tremendous resources of Tai Chi and Yoga enjoyably ours .

O. K., thumbnail specifics. Tai Chi. Its symbol, that circle with the teardrops and dots in the fat part of each teardrop inside it, means all the energies in the universe. And, in the human body, Tai Chi is said to exercise and develop all the muscles. But in the entire history of our Form, the Yang Style, William Chen confirmed to me what I suspected. It never stretches the front of the abdomen and the chest; it is only erect or bends forward, never backward. In the new Form it does, and more, starting in January.  If you’re wondering about a video on this, I’m in the midst of that project—a DVD with split screen to show two views at once, shot both from the front and from the back on successive run-throughs of the Form—and I hear from the technical people working with me that we will be able to shoot it in mid-January. In DVD the editing is not seen to be such a time-consuming process as it is in VHS, so we are optimistic that it will be out soon after that—well in time for use relatively early in the Winter Quarter courses. I’ll certainly eagerly let you know of delivery time, on the website and every other way!   Yoga . Like Tai Chi, Yoga has had, for a very long time in its history, a distinctly male bias, as seen in its core postures and pre-eminent series, the Salute to the Sun. It would take a lot of writing to explain the details of this. But briefly, by introducing what is entirely new for most of us, the Salute to the Moon, and other shifts in emphasis, that bias is going to fall and all of us, male and female, will experience the exhilaration of a more harmonious and powerful balance both physically and beyond. Fundamental change that will affect everything else like a smile across our entire life.

In Courses , any course you take this quarter will have these new features; easiest in beginning courses but O. K. in the others—especially if you’ve been actively practicing.