1. Gia-fu Feng was a prominent translator of classical Chinese Taoist philosophical texts, founder of an intentional community called Stillpoint, and leader of classes, workshops, and retreats in the United States and abroad based on his own unique synthesis of tai chi, Taoism, and other Asian contemplative and healing practices with the Human Potential Movement, Gestalt therapy, and encounter groups.
Gia-Fu Feng's father was a banker who rose to prominence with the Ta-Ching Government Bank, then co-founded and served as president of the Bank of China in Shanghai.
Gia-Fu Feng was educated at private boarding schools, and received tutoring at home in Chinese classics and English.
Gia-Fu Feng's family practiced traditional Chinese religion, observing all twenty-four annual festivals, for example traveling from Shanghai to visit their ancestors' tombs in Yuyao, Zhejiang Province, during the Qingming Festival.
Gia-Fu Feng showed great aptitude and made a quite a lot of money from involvement in some of the murkier transactions, as was common in wartime China.
Gia-Fu Feng lived in and managed a villa that hosted many prominent Chinese and foreign visitors, where he met Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, General Claire Chennault, US Vice President Henry A Wallace, and Lady Mountbatten, among others, and successfully navigated a difficult political environment.
Gia-Fu Feng was in charge of arranging dance parties at the villa for American soldiers.
Gia-Fu Feng once commented that he had become a millionaire three times in his life, giving his money away each time.
Gia-Fu Feng found himself accepted and drawn to that community, and became interested in many aspects of Quaker thought.
Gia-Fu Feng visited the Macedonia Cooperative Community of pacifists in Habersham County, Georgia, followed by a long stay doing farm work at Koinonia Farm, an interracial Christian community in Sumter County, Georgia focused on civil rights.
Gia-Fu Feng then travelled to Orcas Island near Seattle for seminars on civil rights and international harmony sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization, and briefly lived at a commune in Tuolumne County, California, before traveling on to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he soon found his way to the heart of the San Francisco Renaissance.
Gia-Fu Feng shared much wine and many long philosophical conversations there with another fellow seeker, Jack Kerouac, who introduced him to many leading lights of the Beat Generation.
In 1956 Gia-Fu Feng co-founded East-West House, an intentional community in San Francisco, with a group from the Academy led by Ananda Claude Dalenberg, all moving on because Alan Watts was leaving the school.
Dalenberg later recalled that during this time Gia-Fu Feng maintained his involvement with the local Quaker community and further developed his interest in "old Chinese religion".
In 1962 Gia-Fu Feng became one of the first staff members at Esalen Institute, as "the accountant, keeper of the baths, and resident Chinese mystic".
Gia-Fu Feng led morning tai chi classes there, and those became the foundation for the bodywork portion of Esalen's three-part curriculum as it matured, the other two being Gestalt therapy and encounter groups.
Gia-Fu Feng later trained in shiatsu in Japan and begin offering that at Esalen as well.
In 1963 at the first Gestalt therapy workshop there, Gia-Fu Feng volunteered to be the first to take the "hot seat" in front of the group.
Gia-Fu Feng developed great respect for Gestalt therapy creator Fritz Perls, who became a fixture at Esalen beginning in 1964, and maintained that respect as well as a sympathetic tolerance regardless of how the always irascible Perls treated him and others.
Gia-Fu Feng was there for the earliest encounter groups at Esalen, on leadership training in group dynamics.
Gia-Fu Feng now believed that psychotherapy was key to helping Westerners understand Eastern thought.
Gia-Fu Feng was particularly struck by Fritz Perls' statement at the start of every Gestalt therapy group that the goal of his fierce leadership was a "sudden awakening" for participants.
Gia-Fu Feng said that was in essence a Zen-like "satori" realization, and Gia-Fu Feng developed his own techniques based on Gestalt therapy and encounter to help people get past their "hang-ups" and get on with natural living like the Taoist sages of old.
Gia-Fu Feng learned some postures well enough to lead a class when Feng was absent, and joined in his next project.
Gia-Fu Feng was encouraged by books published over the previous two years by other Esalen figures: Fritz Perl's In and Out of the Garbage Pail, and massage guru Bernard Gunther's Sense Relaxation: Below Your Mind.
The sequence was the 24-movement simplified form developed from the movements of Yang-style tai chi by a Chinese government-appointed committee in 1956, and in his introduction to this chapter Gia-Fu Feng referenced a 1961 official Beijing publication.
Gia-Fu Feng knew the full "108 postures" of the Yang-style long form, but he had found that the simplified form best met the needs of most of his students, who were usually at Esalen for only a short while.
Gia-Fu Feng taught Anne some of the postures just before each photograph was taken.
Gia-Fu Feng realized that in comparison Feng was an "instant master" without the same depth of training, but she remained appreciative of his playing the tai chi master role in a "very Puckish, buccaneer manner" as he used tai chi to express his background and his cross-cultural truths, and she believed he drew on traditional training from his past.
Gia-Fu Feng never claimed to be a "master" of anything or anyone.
Gia-Fu Feng hated that term, and strongly denied he was a tai chi master, a Taoist master, or any other kind of master, even as his Tai Chi Camps became popular in the United States and abroad over the next dozen years.
Gia-Fu Feng was invited to visit Stillpoint by a friend in 1970, and decided to stay.
Gia-Fu Feng met Kent Gay in California while she was attending the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology in Menlo Park.
Gia-Fu Feng had since moved back to her home state and co-authored a series of Vermont cookbooks with her mother, Louise Andrews Kent.
In 1977 Gia-Fu Feng purchased property near Wetmore, Colorado and moved Stillpoint to that bucolic rural setting.
Gia-Fu Feng began leading "Tai Chi Camps" organized by his students, where he taught tai chi, qigong, acupressure, Chinese healing, Chinese calligraphy, and I Ching, and led group therapy sessions, first in the United States, and then starting in 1974 overseas.
In 1975 Gia-Fu Feng made his only return trip to China, where he visited his family and discovered they had suffered greatly under Maoist campaigns, especially the Cultural Revolution.
Gia-Fu Feng continued to facilitate cooperation and personal breakthroughs with his fierce techniques based on Gestalt therapy and encounter, blended with Taoism and other traditional Asian thought.
In 1983 Gia-Fu Feng married Sue Bailey in a ceremony at Stillpoint surrounded by the community and many columbine flowers, led by a friend certified as a minister of the Universal Life Church.
Gia-Fu Feng settled into a quieter life focused on a more serious, less "groovy" translation of the I Ching, as well as a translation of the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine, and writing his memoirs.
Gia-Fu Feng stopped traveling and reorganized his living arrangements at Stillpoint to accommodate growing weakness.
Gia-Fu Feng consulted with Western medical doctors, but for the most part focused on Eastern and natural health therapies.
Gia-Fu Feng named his friend Margaret Susan Wilson as his executor and willed his estate to her including his share of the Wetmore property.
Susan, as she was known, was a civil rights attorney and a graduate of the California Institute of Integral Studies, the school formerly known as the American Academy of Asian Studies where Gia-Fu Feng had studied with Alan Watts.
On June 12,1985, after leading a group session on translation of the I Ching, Gia-fu Feng quietly passed away while reclining in his wife's arms.
Gia-Fu Feng was buried four days later at Stillpoint in a funeral ceremony attended by three of his sisters along with friends, neighbors, and the Stillpoint community.
Gia-Fu Feng did not want the Stillpoint community to continue after his death, to prevent any veneration of him as founder of any kind of spiritual lineage.