Blog
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 ...
From www.science.org.au: “No one likes the thought of growing old. Despite our many human endeavors to escape or delay the process of aging, it seems to be an inevitable part of life.
But … why? Why do living things gradually fall apart when they grow older?
There is a word for it: senescence is t...
This overview provides some explanation and history on the Yellow Court Scripture so that students will have some idea of the goal for learning it. The reason for practicing these teachings is to become an immortal, so it is important to understand what immortality means to a Daoist.
In the term “I...
This may sound like a contrary statement at first, but devoting yourself to single-mindedness about meditation can be unwholesome. Such a mindset doesn’t take into account the world as a whole. Normally, we are in a state of thinking, “I want this but I don’t want that.” All day long we make decisio...
Sitting in meditation as done in Zuo Wang (Sitting and Forgetting) there’s 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...
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...
For a long time now I’ve been wanting to tell this Taoist story about a young girl who wanted to learn Taoist magic and become an immortaless. It really has good advice about self-cultivation of Taoism and goes like this:
In the province of Sichuan there was a very rich man, who had a young daughte...
Originating sometime during the Tang dynasty in Shanxi province, this story is about an elderly man who sold herbal medicines in the marketplace of his village. Since no one in the village knew his name, they just called him the Old Herb Seller.
Wang Yu, a rich man in the village, was reserved, kin...
During my last talk in the membership, I spoke a little on Wei Wu Wei, the Taoist idea of “active non-action,” or possibly better said, “active non-calculation.” However one wishes to translate this term, the concept of “doing nothing” always comes to mind, or as we might want to state it, “actively...
