Blog
Most people are first drawn to Taoist internal arts because something about the practices feels exciting or mysterious. They hear about energy cultivation, spiritual awakening, and immortality, and are curious, if not positively determined, to achieve such states. That curiosity and desire are good....
This begins a new series of reflections on what it means to be a cultivator, a sincere practitioner of Taoist and Buddhist philosophy, meditation, Taijiquan, and Qigong. Each article will explore the inner realities of practice, the living transmission of our lineage, and the art of integrating cult...
Chuang Tzu Verses
#3
The great Tao cannot be named. It is rooted in not knowing. This is called Inner radiance
Take from it, it is never depleted … It is the inexhaustible treasury
#6
The master is not trapped in opposites. Their this is also a that.
They see that life becomes death and death becomes li...
When I think about Stuart and everything we went through with him in his illness and death, what keeps coming up for me is the image of the lotus and the mud.
All our lives, we’re trained to look at the lotus in people—their greatness, their strength, their shining moments. We want to see them at t...
The world is always changing—and so it is that a person from another country, some 5,470 miles away between Hamburg and Phoenix, can find a teacher who touches him deeply.
In 1993, through a friend, I was introduced to Chen Family Taijiquan and began training with Jan Silberstorff in Hamburg. Along...
My Taoism teacher, Stuart Olson, recently passed away. The Sanctuary of Tao wrote a tribute to him. I wanted to write one as well.
I first encountered Stuart during the 2019 Qigong Global Summit, an online event that no longer exists. Stuart gave a talk about Taoism. In it, he described it as an
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Dear friends,
Since Stuart’s passing, many of you have been wondering: What will happen to the Sanctuary of Tao?
The good news is that this is exactly why the Sanctuary of Tao was created: to preserve the teachings Stuart sought to transmit so they could live on beyond him. None of us expected tha...
Stuart Alve Olson—beloved Taoist teacher, translator, author, and lifelong practitioner—passed peacefully from cancer on August 14, 2025, in Phoenix, Arizona, surrounded by the love and care of his closest students and caretakers, Patrick Gross and Suzanne Nosko. Even through all he endured, his att...
I met Stuart in 1992—more than thirty years ago. Like a lot of people, I wanted to learn Tai Chi. I had started studying with Jim Lodal, a student of Master Liang’s and Stuart’s in Duluth, MN.
Jim told me that Stuart, newly married to Lian Hua and with his son Lee, on the way, had just moved back t...
When someone like Stuart, who devoted his life to the Taoist arts of vitality, passes in his 75th year, it can raise questions. How could a teacher of health and longevity die “relatively young”?
Stuart himself would have wanted us to look at this openly, without denial. For him, life as it is was ...
“Hold on to being and keep to non-being” is an important verse in the Tao De Jing. The meaning is quite complex and can apply to various situations. But to help illustrate one of the meanings I will tell you an old story about a monk and a female benefactor.
There was once an old woman who took car...
