Teacher Profiles
Andrew Heckert
In 1973 I began studying Tai Chi in Philadelphia with MaggieNewman, one of the six senior students of Cheng Man-ching’s school in Manhattan, the Shr-jung. I learned from her for five years.
In 1981 I began study with William Chen in New York City. For the next ten years I commuted to New York to attend classes in his school andtake private lessons.In the summers I attended the week long workshops in the Catskills given by his classmate Ben Lo of San Francisco.
In 1991 I became a student of Dr. Ping-sung Tao of Taiwan. I travelled to Manhattan, to Seattle, all over the country and to Germany to attend workshops with him, until his death in 2006.
For the past sixteen years, I have researched the application of the principles of Tai Chi to everyday movement, how to become more comfortable living in this body, and the secret of how it was that Dr. Tao, at the age of 88 and of very slight build, was able to easily defeat people twice his size and half his age in pushing-hands.
Laura Stone
Laura Stone has been practicing and teaching T'ai Chi Ch'uan for nearly 40 years. Her primary teacher is Grandmaster William C. C. Chen. Meditation, music, psychotherapy, yoga and other body-mind disciplines contribute to her unique style of teaching. From 2007 - 2009 she was on sabbatical with intensive Zen and Shambhala Buddhist practice at the core of her travels in the US and Canada.
aura founded The Studio (Deventer, The Netherlands) in 1996 where she teaches T’ai Chi Ch’uan and (classical) piano and gives coaching and therapy sessions.
Daan Hengst
Daan Hengst (born in 1940, Indonesia) started his martial arts training since 1964 with Western Boxing that gave him the opportunity to learn how to deal with aggressiveness while staying calm in difficult situations. Later ( in 1971 ) in order to extend his knowledge, Chinese boxing so called “Gong Fu” came across his path with different accents in training and using the body. The light-footed movements from western boxing for instance, got changed in more rooted stands. Pencak Silat , the Indonesian martial art (practised since 1980) was again different from the styles described above.
After years of training with different teachers and still training, on a regular basis, with Rob and Erich Völke (Netherlands) and Wee Kee Jin ( New Zealand) Daan has decided (1984) to focus on understanding the intentions and ideas of Taiji Chuan not only for martial arts applications but also for all kinds of (daily) movements (lifting, pushing, yielding …) and sports ( tennis, golf, bowling…).
In this way the basic Taiji principles as being relaxed, balanced, structured, can be practised daily and thus helps us to keep the body and mind healthy as long as possible…