Blog
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, weāre trained to look at the lotus in peopleātheir greatness, their strength, their shining moments. We want to see them at t...
The world is always changingāand 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
...
Dear friends,
Since Stuartās 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 Olsonābeloved Taoist teacher, translator, author, and lifelong practitionerāpassed 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 1992āmore 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 Liangās and Stuartās 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 ārelatively youngā?
Stuart himself would have wanted us to look at this openly, without denial. For him, life as it is was ...
In Taoism, life and death, or mortality and immortality, are one and the same. Mortality is immortality and immortality is mortality, just as life is death and death is life.
Taiji Symbol
In the Taiji (Yin-Yang) symbol it can be seen that death (the small dark circle) exists within life (the large...
Sitting in meditation as done in Zuo Wang (Sitting and Forgetting) thereās really little to depend upon. I think this is why most people acquire real doubts about practicing meditation. We can go to many types of workshops and seminars to learn various things that seem to have some aspect of a tangi...
This may sound like a contrary statement at first, but devoting yourself to single-mindedness about meditation can be unwholesome. Such a mindset doesnāt take into account the world as a whole. Normally, we are in a state of thinking, āI want this but I donāt want that.ā All day long we make decisio...
Translation Ā© 2023 by Stuart Alve Olson
These translations of theĀ Scripture on Tao and VirtueĀ by Lao Zi (é å¾· ē¶ č č å) include the rare commentary by Taoist Immortal Bai Yuchan (ē½ ē č¾, 1194ā1229 CE), more popularly called the Jade Toad Immortal. Bai Yuchan was the fifth patriarch of the Southern Sch...
