My Daoist Journey: Alan Dougall and Friends
This is part 5 of a multipart series.
I have a bit of a dilemma in these reflections on my growth and experiences as a Daoist. On the one hand, it’s essential for me to present a narrative that makes for interesting reading for my audience. On the other hand, I hope to honor every qigong instructor that I’ve had over the years. There were a lot of instructors that I studied with at Brookline Tai Chi, and I don’t necessarily have an interesting story or compelling narrative to tell about each one of them. As a compromise, I’m going to give each one of them a sentence or two, and then move on to the most important teacher to me at Brookline Tai Chi after Bill Ryan. To be clear, even if I mention people only briefly, I hold each of them in genuine respect and gratitude.
As I mentioned in the post on Bill Ryan, Bill had recruited two junior instructors some time in the mid to late nineties. I studied with each of them a bit in those days, but I don’t recall either of their names. They were both young and thin and blonde, and the woman spoke with an Irish lilt. Neither of them were around for very long, and there were soon two new instructors at the school. Oliver Wilson is a great teacher and a good friend. I mostly studied Dragon Tiger Qigong with him, and probably a little of the Wu Style Tai Chi Short Form as well. He currently teaches qigong and meditation at Opening to Health in Tucson, Arizona. The other teacher was Kate Komidar, who still teaches with Bill at Toward Harmony Tai Chi & Qigong in Northampton, Massachusetts. (She goes by Kathryn now, but I always knew her as Kate.) I studied Energy Gates Qigong with her, as well as the short form, and breathing meditation.
I studied Energy Gates for a while in the Dan Kleiman at Brookline Tai Chi in the early two-thousands. We had been friends and students together before he became an instructor. He used to have a podcast and a blog on taiqi and qigong, and has since gone on to focus on his career in software engineering. I also studied bagua zhang a bit in the early 2000s with Bill and Melinda Franceschini, who still teaches qigong, and is on the faculty of the Mindfulness Studies program at Leslie University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And there was one cheery, muscular Asian man that I studied push hands and the short form with. I can’t for the life of me remember his name! Sorry about that chap!
Once again, I apologize to both my readers and my teachers for the laundry list. At least it’s over and done with now. I don’t think I’ve overlooked anybody here, but if I have, I am so sorry! Most importantly, I’d like to share my deep gratitude, and well wishes, to all my former qigong instructors. Thanks!
And then there is Alan. Alan Dougall is one of Bruce’s earliest students in the West, and was an instructor with Bill at Brookline Tai Chi since the very beginning, teaching both the long and short forms of Wu Style Tai Chi. The course sequence for tai chi started with six months of level one, where students learn the short form from end to end, followed by six months of level two, where students would refine their short form. The track split here, with two six month sequences in the short form: principles and details. Principles was focused on the internal aspects of the form, and details was about further refining and perfecting the movements of the form. In the early days, Bill taught levels one and two, and the principles course, and Alan taught the details course. As the school gained assistant instructors, Bill relinquished some of the teaching duties of the earlier courses to them.
All of this short form work was prerequisite to the long form classes. These classes were 90 minutes long, while most other classes at the school were an hour. The sequence was a year each for levels one, two, and three. Where the short form takes about 5 minutes to complete, the long form takes about 20 to 25 minutes. Some of its movements are more challenging than any of the material found in the short form. Bruce originally mastered the long form while studying with Liu Hung Chieh in Beijing. He created the short form himself, as he realized that people in the West would probably not have the time, patience, or level of commitment necessary to learn the long form.
I probably went through the short form details sequence with Alan twice, and when I returned to Brookline Tai Chi in the 2000’s, I set out to learn the long form as well. I went through the year-long sequence of the long form level one with Alan, learning the form to its completion. I think I started level two, but never really got that far in it.
Alan is a quiet, gentle man with a quirky sense of humor, and a keen appreciation to detail. His classes were quite different from Bill’s, where most of the focus was on the specific positions and movements of every part of the body through the moves of the form, down to each individual joint. Alan has a beautiful and amazingly precise tai chi form, both long and short. As far as I know, he is the only instructor around that actively teaches the Wu Style long form. He’s been teaching it for many decades, and is still doing so at Brookline Tai Chi today.
I practiced the long form for a few years, but eventually forgot it, and went back to practicing the short form instead. Because it takes at least 20 minutes to do from end to end, it takes a lot of commitment to practice it enough to keep the entire sequence in your body memory. I’ve done the short form many thousands of times, and it would be pretty much impossible for me to forget at this point. But I only learned the long form at an introductory level, and I’ve probably only done the complete for a few hundred times, so it wasn’t that hard for me to start forgetting what came next. I do hope to learn the form again some time. I have a wonderful DVD of Alan performing the long form, once in a front view and once from the back. (I think it’s out of print, but if you are interested, I can make you a copy and send on a royalty to Brookline Tai Chi.) With the appropriate commitment on my part, I’m fairly sure I can relearn the form from the DVD. Or perhaps I can convince Mary Christianson to start up a long form class. She is in my area, and demonstrates a beautiful long form here on YouTube.
Most of the short form is drawn from the earlier sections of the long form. The long form progresses, slowly and gently building up energetically as you go. You get a lot more out of performing the long form once than performing the short form repeatedly for the same amount of time. I consider myself blessed for having the opportunity to learn this form with Alan. It’s really a special thing that he’s been teaching it continuously over all these years. Taiqi1 is not something you learn from a book. It can only be passed down by direct transmission from teacher to dedicated student. This makes continuity more tenuous than, say, a written tradition, and faithful instructors in arts such as these are essential to keeping the tradition alive.
I am so grateful to Alan for teaching this special art to me and so many other students. He is such a sweet man. If you are in the Boston area, I highly recommend you go to Brookline Tai Chi and take a course or two there. I would also like to say thank you once again to all my other teachers at Brookline Tai Chi. Thank you Oliver! Thanks Kathryn! Thank you Dan and Melinda! I can’t think of much of anything more valuable to the world than helping people heal themselves and grow spiritually by teaching these arts.
You may notice some inconsistency in these posts, where I sometimes spell the term as “taiqi”, following the pinyin, and I sometimes use the older, perhaps more common “tai chi”. There’s a reason for this. I have chosen to consistently follow pinyin when presenting Chinese words in my English text. This is more or less conventional in our times, with the exception of a few words that entered the English lexicon a long time back, such as kung fu (gung fu in pinyin) and Tao (Dao in pinyin). However, Bruce seems to consistently use “tai chi”, so when I am referring to the specific practice of Wu Style Tai Chi, I defer to the spelling he uses.