About our Lineage

The lineage of Internal Gardens begins with the late Grandmaster Jou Tsung Hwa. Born in China and later moving to Taiwan, Grandmaster Jou Tsung Hwa was a college professor of mathematics and author of over 30 math textbooks. At age 47, Grandmaster Jou was diagnosed with an enlarged heart and prolapsed stomach. Although doctors were able to stabilize his condition through medication, the medical community of that time had no cure.

Upon the suggestion of a friend, Jou took up the practice of tai chi chuan (taijiquan). Within only a few weeks he began to experience some small improvements, prompting him to continue the practice. After three years of steady practice, his prolapsed stomach reversed its condition, and within five years his heart shrank back to normal.

Jou Tsung Hwa moved to the US in the early 1970's to earn his American PhD in mathematics at Rutgers University, NJ. While on campus, Jou openly practiced tai chi. Curious students prompted him to teach the art on an informal level, which finally led to a teaching assignment from the university, teaching tai chi as part of the physical education program. As time went on, tai chi became a growing part of his life, eventually eclipsing math as his primary focus. As his interest in tai chi grew, so did his conviction that true tai chi, tai chi as practiced by the art's founders, had become a lost art.

Part of the reason was due to tai chi's complex history. To further complicate matters, the parts of the art that remained were incomplete, which led to a perpetuation of incorrect teaching. Finally, what few books on tai chi (taiji) were available at the time were woefully inadequate and taught little or nothing of tai chi's deep essence. As a college professor, he decided he could do something about the last problem. He began writing a college level textbook on tai chi. It took over 10 years to complete the project. Afterwards, he published the first edition of The Tao of Tai Chi Chuan. Today The Dao of Taijiquan is in its seventh edition with translations in six languages. Together with its companion books, The Tao of Meditation, and The Tao of the I-Ching, The Dao of Taijiquan is still considered by many to be THE definitive textbook on the art.

By 1984, Grandmaster Jou, completely gave his life over to the pursuit of tai chi mastery. Beginning in the late 70's, he founded an event called the "Zhang San Feng Festival," named for the legendary founder of tai chi. The Festival brought together professional martial artists from the fields of taijiquan, bagua and xingyi - collectively known as the internal arts - to give presentations and demonstrations for the martial arts community. By its height in 1998, it was drawing several hundred people from all over the world. At the same time in 1984, he purchased a 103-acre farm in Warwick, New York and named it the "Tai Chi Farm." There he began a school in a converted carriage house and taught tai chi.

Grandmaster Jou Tsung Hwa, Age 81

For the next 14 years Grandmaster Jou would teach tai chi at his Tai Chi Farm. During that period he began to radically alter the way in which he taught and practiced. He continued to refine the tai chi forms, adding back internal principles and modifying means of movement. By the late 1990's the changes he'd incorporated into the forms made them so radically different from what is practiced in the world today that they are sometimes referred to "Jou Tsung Hwa New Frame" to distinguish them from his earlier work. The irony is that Grandmaster Jou never considered his changes to be new or original. He felt it was more likely that he was simply "re-discovering" what had been lost from tai chi chuan (taijiquan) with the passage of time, simply bringing the classical forms closer to their original states.

Throughout the 1990's he maintained a steady practice with a minimum of 3-5 hours a day. In addition, he spent hours doing conditioning exercises even when taking long drives or watching occasional TV. He'd figure out ways to do development work wherever he could, from attending various lectures and demonstrations to standing on line at the supermarket. Over time, he gained a reputation for developing ways to practice tai chi in some form or other, nearly twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. In the final decade of his life, meditation also played an increasing role, to the point that it began to replace other activities, including sleep. Eventually he would sleep only an average of three hours a night, meditating the rest of the time. All this work bore fruit as he began to develop uncanny sparring and push hands abilities that drew spectators from all over the country. He could successfully spar with people less than half his age. He was also seemingly unbeatable in push hands, a pre-sparring exercise popular in the internal arts. In 1998 trajedy struck. At the height of his skill, health, martial and spiritual development, Grandmaster Jou Tsung Hwa, age 81, was killed in a tragic auto accident. His death was a shock to the tai chi community.

As the former apprentice to Grandmaster Jou Tsung Hwa, Shifu Loretta M. Wollering ensures that Internal Gardens School of Classical Taijiquan is dedicated to the preservation and continued promotion of Grandmaster Jou's teachings.

PLEASE NOTE: Shifu Loretta Wollering no longer receives any emails listed at TaiChiFarm.org

If you need to email her personally please do so here: lwollering@internalgardens.com