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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
...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 ...
