Marshall Ho’o
My first Tai Chi was Master Marshall Ho’o. He ran a summer program in Colorado called the Aspen Academy of Martial Arts. The school taught 4 disciplines: Tai Chi, Kung Fu, Karate and Akido and Master Ho’o was the Tai Chi instructor. The school was located in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains between Snowmass and Aspen. I lived in a big tent by a fast running stream and worked around 5 hours a day to learn the Yang Style 108 movements. The twice per day classes were excellent and included some Qigong and Accupressure that I still use. The was in the summer of 1976 and it was a fantastic immersive introduction to Tai Chi.
Mater Ho’o was a student of Choy Hak Pang among many other martial artists, and also studied el cuchillo (Mexican knife fighting) in Guadalajara with a famous knife fighter named Santiago. He was a renowned doctor of Oriental Medicine, and taught Tai Chi mostly in California at Cal Arts and UCLA. Master Ho’o passed away in 1993.
Dr. & Grandmaster Tingsen Xu
In 1995, my family moved from Memphis to the Emory area of Atlanta, and I was very fortunate to discover that Dr. (and Grandmaster) Tingsen Xu taught Tai Chi on Saturday mornings in my neighborhood. With Dr. Xu (as he preferred to be called), I was able to renew my love of Tai Chi, and rediscover the 108 Forms as well as learn the Yang Simplified 24 Forms, and a wonderful, perfectly symmetrical brief Form which he called 10 Forms. He also taught me more than a little about Chinese culture. During my 10 years of study with Dr. Xu I was able to assist him with a study of the benefits of Tai Chi on Parkinson’s Disease patients, and with his undergraduate Tai Chi classes at Emory University.
Dr. Xu is renowned for his landmark study of the prevention of falling in the elderly, in which he discovered that the practice of Tai Chi would prevent falling more than 40% of the time, when compared to other modes of exercise. He was a great teacher and a great friend. He passed on in 2012, and I miss him still.
Master Chen, Yun Xiang Tseng
I met Master Chen, Yun Xiang Tseng, in 2002, and I immediately felt like he was the teacher I had been waiting for. Since then I have spent more than 750 hours studying various forms of Tai Chi, Qigong, Healing and Meditation with him. Master Chen has an amazing amount of knowledge, passed down through many generations of monks at Wudang Mountain, starting with the father of Tai Chi, Zhang San-Feng. He promotes healing without medicine, which I myself believe in. Master Chen is currently based in Colorado at Dao House retreat.
A childhood prodigy, Yun Xiang Tseng (Chen) was trained from the age of 6 on China’s sacred Wudang Mountain. He is a 25th generation Longmen (Dragon Gate) Taoist Priest charged with the mission to bring the ancient wisdom of Wudang Taoism to the west.
His teacher, Grandmaster Li Chen Yu, a Grandmaster of Qigong, lived to 130. Master Chen describes how she found him, “She found me when I was 6 and she was already 100 years old, in a vision and using I Ching. She had very specific information about who I was and the day I would be found. She sent Master Guo (who would become Chen’s Kung Fu master) from Wu Dang Mountain 1000 miles—by train, by foot over mountains, by boat—all during the Cultural Revolution, when priests must be in hiding or they could be killed. Master Li trained me from 6-16 years old, and how it is done in the temple is you live closely together. I washed her clothing, brushed her hair, cooked her food. She continually tested my virtue, training my mind, body and spirit so she could trust me and pass down the Longman lineage and its secrets of immortality, healing, religion and culture. Her wish for me was to preserve this lineage and pass it on in the western world and to find my successors here.