Alan Dougall, Senior Instructor

Certifications

Energy Gates Chi Gung - Level 2
Wu Style Tai Chi Short Form - Level 2
Gods Playing In The Clouds Chi Gung - Level 1
Heaven & Earth Chi Gung - Level 2
Wu Style Tai Chi Long Form - Level 2

Bio

Recently a student happened on Senior Instructor Alan Dougall while he was vacuuming BTC's entryway and was struck by the fluidity of his movements in the most mundane of tasks. "The movement comes totally from the tantien (an energy center in the lower belly)," Alan offered by way of explanation of the absence of stress.

Alan has been a tai chi practitioner for over 30 years, the last 20 of them in the Bruce Frantzis system. He started teaching at BTC with founder Bill Ryan when it was still located behind Whole Foods, and in the current location when it used to be an oriental carpet place "with funny little nail holes in the floor." Before that, he did some Korean style external martial arts, taught some Yang style tai chi, and was a proofreader of martial arts books. He took an M.A. in German Literature but didn’t follow up.

Alan discovered Bruce Frantzis in 1989 through reading an interview in a tai chi magazine when Frantzis first came to Boston and "realized his knowledge was incredible." Despite his longevity in the Frantzis system, he considers himself "a very junior Senior Instructor." The field is so vast, he says, that you can get very developed in one aspect but have others you’ve never looked at. "It’s good to feel like a dolt a lot because confusion is the first stage of learning."

In teaching -- Long Form, Short Form details, advanced Energy Gates and Gods chi gung -- he follows the principle of packing a lot in. "Seeding," he calls it. He aims to shake students out of complacency by giving a sense of the depth of the subject, even overwhelming them, while simultaneously building confidence through very specific details that they can "get." "The body brain gets it even when the cerebral brain is confused," he says. Since he was featured in BTC's Long Form video, shot some years ago, his own form has changed substantially. Surprisingly, he says, the video doesn't look that different from the outside, though his feelings of what is going on internally -- "the energetic mechanics" of pulsing, lengthening, twisting, feeling the four energies -- are totally different.

No one explains all these internal components of tai chi as well as Bruce Frantzis, he believes. "The system is so interconnected; because you’re working on the body in such an organized fashion, everything you do improves you."