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April 28, 2005
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April 28, 2005 |
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Tai
chi teacher Brad Fraley keeps on moving
Brad Fraley was a teenager when he first saw someone practicing the Eastern moving art called tai chi. He was mesmerized by the slow, graceful movements and knew that he had to learn how to do it. Thirty years later, Fraley has created a life with tai chi as its center. The owner of Stone River Tai Chi, Fraley makes his living teaching the art and sees each day as one more opportunity to practice. This Saturday, April 30, in honor of international World Tai Chi and Qigong Day, Fraley will offer a free class for anyone who wishes to learn tai chi. The class will take place from 10 to 11 a.m. outside the Antioch Theater building if the weather is good and in the Worman dance studio if bad weather prevails. Fraley has maintained his passion for tai chi for more than three decades because he keeps learning new things about it, he said. “Tai chi keeps evolving. Even after 30 years I’m still exploring what it means to be upright and to relax,” he said. Fraley said that tai chi provides him with “an ever greater deepening sense of ease in my own body, which changes how I connect with the rest of the world.” Tai chi is an ancient Eastern art of slow, fluid movements that bring together exercise, meditation and martial art, according to Fraley’s Web site, www.stone-rivertaichi.com. The art’s “unhurried movement and deep concentration create a state of relaxed alertness and impart a feeling of vitality coupled with tranquility. The movements have the look and feel of a great river, full and powerful, yet soft and yielding,” the Web site states. Over his many years of teaching, Fraley said, he has seen tai chi benefit his students in a number of ways, from helping their arthritis to easing hypertension. But he also knows that each person experiences the practice differently, and that he can’t predict what the outcomes will be. “One of the first things I learned as a teacher is that I’m not imparting to my students an experience like mine. Everyone comes to it in their own way,” he said. Fraley developed his interest in Eastern spirituality honestly. He spent part of his early childhood living in the Vale with his mother, Betty Fraley, a Quaker who developed a passion for Buddhism. She convinced a group of Buddhist monks to open a meditation center in the Vale, Brad Fraley said, and the monks would offer children in the Vale candy if they came to the center and sat still for 10 minutes. The children viewed the candy as especially magical because they could also eat the wrappers, which were made of rice paper, Fraley said. Fraley’s mother died when he was very young, and he went to Philadelphia to live with his father. But he came back to Yellow Springs when he was a teenager, attending Yellow Springs High School while living with the Jensen family in the Vale. He studied tai chi with Fred Wu at Antioch and, after graduating from high school, moved to San Francisco, where he lived for almost 15 years. In the Bay area, Fraley continued to study tai chi, attending an early morning class at Golden Gate Park. About 14 years ago, he came back to Yellow Springs for a visit, and he’s been here ever since. While he sometimes works as a gardener or landscaper to bring in extra money, he mainly makes his living teaching tai chi, and has taught at Antioch College, Antioch McGregor, Wittenberg, Clark State, the NCR Corporation and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, among other places. He teaches a regular Wednesday night class in Yellow Springs through his school, Stone River. Tai chi is based on only 37 movements, but it can take decades to learn the art well, Fraley said. He has already put in 30 years, and each day, he said, he deepens his tai chi experience with practice, which ranges from a half hour to several hours, and he’s still learning new things. “Each time I reach another level I learn something deeper about my body, something deeper about how I manifest myself in the world and become more relaxed,” he said.
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