$150/month for 12 months (or $1500 if paying up front, saving $300).

If you purchased the Before Heaven Program separately, then the monthly payments will be $125/month or $1200 paying in full (saving $300).

The cost is non-refundable, unless there is some unforeseen circumstance.

The reasons for this policy are:

1. Due to the rarity of the teachings that Stuart offered and the lifetime of effort that he put into learning and cultivating these teachings, we need to ensure that anyone who has access to them, even for a limited period of time, supports the Sanctuary of Tao and its work. 

2. We believe this policy will help you to follow through with the commitment you’re making to yourself when you sign up.

It’s easy to sign up for things and then fall off the wagon and want to quit.

Making a commitment financially will give you incentive to follow-through on the intention you had when you signed up. And we believe these practices and teachings will be highly beneficial to you, so we want to support you in that positive intention.

• Access to the twelve talks by Stuart
• Recording of the live group classes that took place over one year.
• Pre-recorded lessons for each posture, including the entire Before Heaven Program’s worth of videos
• Lifetime access to the recordings

After you register we'll send you the login information for you to sign in to the portal. 

You can access the portal via your computer or also through the Kajabi app, which you can download to your device. 

The course was taught by Stuart Alve Olson and his Da Shi Xiong (Senior Student), Patrick Gross.

Stuart practiced Taijiquan, Qigong, and Kung Fu for more than 40 years. 

He was an award-winning author and translator of over 40 books about Taijiquan, Taoism, and related topics.

Stuart learned Taijiquan from many notable teachers, but primarily from the late Taiji Master T.T. Liang.  

Master Liang studied with 15 great masters in the Golden Age (the 1950s) of Taiji in Taiwan. Master Liang spent his life learning, living, and cultivating these teachings.

Stuart lived long-term with Master T.T. Liang, studying and teaching with him full-time, and became a lineage holder under Master Liang.

Stuart taught thousands of people Taiji all over the world. And people have traveled from all over the world to learn from him. 

Patrick Gross is a co-founder of the Sanctuary of Tao and the co-author of “Tai Chi Changes: 64-Posture Taijiquan Form Based on the I Ching” along with Stuart. 

Patrick started learning Taijiquan from Stuart in 1992 and has taught and worked with him ever since. He carries on Stuart's goal to preserve and present these teachings through the Sanctuary of Tao.

In 2000, Patrick became a lineage holder when Stuart named him his Da Shi Xiong. 

This is not a teacher certification program.

However, this course is a part of laying the groundwork for becoming a lineage holder and teacher of Taijiquan.

This program is one of the foundational courses of the Taijiquan Master's program that Stuart and Patrick were developing.

Becoming certified to teach from the Sanctuary of Tao is not a matter of how many courses you complete. It will be based on Patrick’s assessment of your mastery of the teachings in the course. So while there are no guarantees, these courses are part of the path to becoming certified to teach Taijiquan under Master Liang's lineage. 

Doing Taijiquan, especially along with the Qigong version of the postures, can help you live longer in good health by:

• Increasing blood circulation.
• Increasing oxygen levels in the body.
• Developing warmth that gets into the muscles, sinews, and into the bone marrow. Replenished bone marrow is the basis for good health.
• Getting more blood and warmth to the extremities.
• Getting more blood to the brain.
• Improving your sleep. 
• Improving your strength, flexibility, balance, and cardiovascular health.
• Strengthening your bones.
• Strengthening your immune system.
• Improving energy levels.
• Preventing, reversing, or reducing the symptoms of many age-related diseases, such as Diabetes, Osteoporosis, COPD, Arthritis, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and more. 

Applying the principles of Taiji in your daily practice helps you release tension and anxiety and flow with life better. It helps with:

• Reducing stress, anxiety, and improve mood and mental health 
• Improving cognitive functioning

It does this because:

• Moving slowly with the breath is calming. When you move calmly, you’ll receive the benefits of calmness.

• Taiji is meditation in motion, but instead of sitting, you’re moving.

• Taiji is also Taoist philosophy in motion. Through these practices, you’re instilling these ideas inside yourself, which can help you experience more ease in your life.

• The ability for you to sense, feel, and relax with things in life. Learning to get rid of tension is invaluable for each of us to be healthy and get through this world well.

• Taijiquan is a spiritual path that can lead to states of pure tranquility.

Mastering Taijiquan can help you protect yourself so you feel safe and confident in real-world self-defense situations:

• It helps you feel playful in the event of an attack. You’ll treat it more like play, you stay relaxed, you’re having fun. It's hard to defeat someone who's having fun.
• It makes you feel strong, like you can react to things in a much more sensitive and efficient, expedient way.
• Your whole body feels light and nimble and moves as one unit with the breath.
• You react without thinking, spontaneously, but you react correctly.
• You feel like a musician playing a masterpiece, where their fingers do the work for them, in Taiji your arms start to float and move of their own accord, you don’t have to do anything.
• You’re like water, imagine trying to fight water.
• You know how to use the physics of Taiji to take away people’s center.
• You know how to maneuver yourself so you’re not going to get hurt, so there’s no reason to fear anyone.
• As you get older, studies show that doing Taiji helps you to fall down less. Even if you do fall, you learn how to fall well, you don't have tension, so it doesn’t hurt you.

Stuart addressed this question really well in a recent talk, check out what he said here:

Why learning Taiji doesn't have to be complex

His answer to this question, which you'll hear in this clip, is that even if you don’t learn to do the postures perfectly, you’ll still get the benefits from doing Taiji the best you can.

Just learning about and applying the principles to even one posture will bring incredible benefits to your life. 

You'll start with weekly recorded lessons of Patrick and Stuart, where they will introduce you to one or two postures in each class. 

They make it fun and approachable to learn. They help you focus on what's most important for you at each stage in the learning process so you don't get overwhelmed. 

In between these lessons, you'll go through the instructional videos for the postures. Each instructional video is around five minutes long.

The practice videos and Qigong guided practices are designed to make it easy for you to just hit play, follow-along, and practice each posture. Each practice video is about five minutes long. 

As you do this, you'll be ingraining the correct movements into your body without having to study or concentrate too hard. Your body will learn it, and it will become a part of you. 

So you can learn and practice your Taijiquan for as long as you want, or as little as 5 minutes a day.  

Learning Taiji in private lessons or a group class can actually be exhausting. Unless you're a kinesthetic learner, it can be physically and mentally taxing to learn how to move your body in a particular way for a full hour or even a full half hour at a time. 

This course breaks it down into more manageable chunks and puts the control in your hands over the amount of time you want to spend and the intensity of each lesson.

And it's up to you what type of lesson you want to do that day—whether learning, practicing, doing the Qigong form of the posture, or a combination. 

If you prefer to learn by doing, you can follow along as best you can with the practice videos first. Then you can go back later to watch the instructions and fill in the details.

This course was designed to make it easy and enjoyable for you to learn Taijiquan, without watering it down or making it just light and fluffy movements with no basis in the physics or theory of Taijiquan.

No matter what form of Taijiquan you practice, you're going to be able to take this information and make your existing form even better.

In every Asian spiritual tradition there's a high value on the "beginner's mind." That's what this course is about. It's about going back with fresh eyes to see what you may not have seen before. 

This course will help you fill in any gaps and deepen your understanding of any form of Taiji you do. 

You can use this course to:

Refine your postures:
The details of the postures you'll learn in this course will be applicable to the same or related postures of other forms. These details help you master the physics of Taiji, which are what make Taijiquan work in self-defense.

So this continual refinement of your postures will help strengthen your foundation in Taiji, allowing you to reach greater advancement and mastery than you would without this kind of training.

Most people don't have the opportunity to get the details of their posture corrected and refined over the years by their teacher, like Stuart and Patrick have had.

Both of them have gotten this because they each lived and taught with their teacher over a long period of time.

If you're not in that situation, getting years of corrections from a teacher would be very expensive.

Even if you have had that, this gives you the opportunity to develop  even higher precision in your Taijiquan by studying and practicing the nuances on your own, without having to rely on a teacher.

This course also teaches you Master Liang's Boong-Da half beats, which you won't find anywhere else.

The half-beats refine your movements even further and help you to develop Song energy, or relaxed-alertness, as they teach you to release the tension within each count.

Learn and apply Taijiquan theory and principles to your practice:

Much of what Stuart taught here on the theories and principles of Taijiquan, he had never shared before.

These are things he learned from Master Liang and other Taijiquan Masters who've long since passed. 

Also, as a Chinese translator with specialization in old Chinese and Taoist terminology, Stuart studied Taijiquan texts in Chinese for decades.

He also had the incredible opportunity to discuss these texts with his Chinese teachers and gain insights firsthand from them on these concepts.

With their guidance, as well as on his own, he applied these theories and principles to his practice of Taijiquan. This is what allowed him to attain the level of mastery he had in Taiji.

The level of understanding of these theories and principles that Stuart had, along with his understanding of how to apply them to your Taiji practice is incredibly rare.

Stuart also had a unique ability to explain things so that you can easily grasp and integrate these concepts into your practice in a way that truly helps you advance in your mastery of Taijiquan. 

Build Qi through the Qigong practice version of the postures:
No matter what level you are at, these guided practices will help you develop far greater Qi than you can by practicing your form alone. 

Even if you've been doing some of the postures already as Qigong on your own, this program has turned every posture into a Qigong practice, so you can use the Qigong to deepen your mastery of each posture. 

There's also a Qigong version of each 16-posture section of the entire form, which is an advanced Qigong practice that will help you rapidly and powerfully develop and mobilize your Qi. 

There are benefits and drawbacks to learning Taiji online versus learning in person.

The benefits are:
1. You’ll learn Taiji from Stuart Alve Olson, the highest caliber of teacher, no matter where you are in the world. 

2. In this training, Stuart oversaw every detail of what is being taught in the course to be sure it’s true to what he knew to be correct.

And throughout the course, Stuart teaches many details of the postures, principles, and applications that his long-time students have had to be around him for years to receive. 

3. The recordings are like having your own private Taiji teacher in your home, whenever you want.

In a group or private in-person lesson, you learn in class, and then you go home and have to practice from memory, possibly practicing it wrong and developing bad habits.

With this training, you have the correct information in front of you all the time, in an easy-to-use way.

4. Also, in a group class, you have to follow the pace of the class; you can’t slow it down and focus on a part you don’t understand until you get it.

And you can’t speed up and move onto the next posture whenever you’re ready. So you end up wasting time and money.

With this training, you can take exactly the amount of time you need for each lesson so you can get the most out of the course.

5. Some people can only digest so much information at one time before they start to glaze over.

So with this program, instead of trying to do all your learning in one or two long classes per week, you get to learn and practice for 5-15 minutes a day, and it’s much easier to focus for that long.

6. Others might like to learn and practice intensively for longer periods every day, but it would be very expensive to take a Taiji class every day of the week.

This program gives you practices to effectively train your Taiji and develop your internal energies (Qi, Jin, and Mind-Intent) that you can do for longer or shorter periods, more or less intensely each day. All the while, they keep you engaged and motivated as a class would. 

The downsides are:
1. You cannot get seen and corrected by a teacher the way you could in an in-person class.

2. You may learn some things slightly wrong because it’s not totally clear to you from the videos. 

3. You don’t get the same level of community and connection as you do in-person.

4. When you start doing two-person and self-defense applications, you’ll need to practice with another person, which the online program can’t provide the way an in-person class would. 

Despite these downsides
We still feel that you can become very good at Taijiquan from this program.

And for the reasons stated above, in many ways, you can get far better learning online through this program than you can from in-person learning.

Also, even if you don’t learn to do the postures perfectly, you’ll still get the benefits from doing Taiji the best you can.

Just learning about and applying the principles to even one posture will bring incredible benefits to your life. Here is a clip of Stuart talking about this: 

Why learning Taiji doesn't have to be complex

The ideal approach
The ideal is that you would take this course and then at some point travel to one of our Taiji retreats, like we held at the end of the live course, where you can get in-person feedback. 

Our entire Taijiquan Mastery Program will be designed to combine in-person intensive immersions with distance learning (via the recorded lessons and Zoom classes) in between. 

Even if you can’t travel every year or more, you can work with the online part of the course from home and then maybe come work with us in-person in the future.

Even with less frequent in-person work, we believe this combination will help your Taiji to become very good, and you'll advance toward mastery (depending on the effort you put in).

Another option
For those who are unable to travel or who can only travel every few years, please consider taking private classes online with Patrick.

This way, he can watch you individually and give you feedback that will help you improve your Taiji without having to travel. 

And finally

Even if taking this course purely online is all you do, by continuing to study the materials, and come to the classes*, we believe you can get what you need out of the course.

Like anything in life, you get what you put into it. But we want to support you to get the most out of your time and effort.

*Once you’ve taken the course, anytime we add to this course in the future, you can participate in the live Zoom classes for free. 

Yes, this course is ideal for anyone seeking to learn Taijiquan for any reason.