Valley residents Richard and Nancy Browne are teaching tai chi out of their Fayston home through early September. The classes guide students through a series of 13 slow, expansive movements developed by Yang Chengfu – one of the best-known teachers of Yang-style tai chi, who helped developed the art into its modern form.
The Brownes have been practicing tai chi together for nearly 50 years. In 2005, they bought land in Fayston and built a home, splitting their time between Miami, Florida, and The Valley.
Richard Browne grew up in New York City and later worked as a respiratory therapist at the New York University (NYU) Medical Center. He was walking home from work one night when he stopped in a park and saw someone practicing a series of slow movements. He got curious about what it was. About a month later, a tenant in the apartment complex where Browne lived invited neighbors to watch him do a demonstration of tai chi, and Browne realized it was the same practice he had seen in the park.
‘PERSEVERANCE AND DEDICATION’
Browne enrolled in his neighbor’s course and stuck with it. “It takes perseverance, and dedication, and homework,” he said, “but it was the greatest joy of my life. From that first day I started, I changed.”
That was 1973. Soon after, Browne quit his job at NYU Medical Center and joined a spiritual group in New Jersey, then joined another group based on a farm in Pennsylvania. He was practicing tai chi for about a year when he was invited to teach a class on it in Denver, Colorado. The teaching stint led to him working as a bodyguard for a spiritual leader and his family, traveling around with them for three years. At that time, Browne met his wife Nancy – “a very holy woman,” he said.
Browne opened a tai chi school in Denver and began studying informally with a local practitioner of acupuncture and other forms of bodywork. The idea that she taught, that “a health problem was never with your body – it was how you were using your mind” resonated deeply with him, he said. That practitioner eventually married the Brownes in Denver.
‘FOUND YOUR NEXT TEACHER’
In the late 1970s, Nancy was on a trip in Miami, Florida, when she got an acupuncture treatment from a practitioner named Richard Zukowski. “Nancy came back and told me, ‘I found your next teacher,’” Browne said. Browne flew to Miami and realized she was right. He spent two years studying with Zukowksi, who trained under Tomezo Hoshino – a Japanese-born Argentinian who developed the massage and movement-based practice known as Hoshino Therapy.
Browne described it as an advanced form of Shiatsu, where students learned to “develop their hands, and develop their feeling.”
In the early 1980s, Browne registered as an acupuncturist in Florida before the state started regulating it as a profession. He later passed state exams, then began the process of opening a school, which later became the Acupuncture and Massage College in Miami. He recalled a student who initially approached him in his office with a $1,000 check, telling Browne that she wanted to either spend it on acupuncture education with him, or on a car. Browne said he took the payment and began teaching her immediately, starting with a lesson about the lung channel.
“My goal from the beginning,” he said, “was to train 100 people in order to know what I know, and if I did that, maybe five or 10 of them would go out and treat people. That’s how this knowledge gets spread.”
TAKING TIME WITH PATIENTS
His student cohorts treated 100 patients in the college’s teaching clinic each week, while Browne treated about 10 a day in his private clinic. He learned that a critical part of successful treatment was taking time with patients, and treating them compassionately. He said that if a patient showed up without an appointment, he would still see them. “If someone goes through the effort of leaving their house and coming to my clinic, I’m not going to reject them.”
Browne also got interested in homeopathy early on, after a treatment was successful in clearing up some warts on his hand. He later invited homeopaths to teach courses at his college, which he ran for 31 years before selling in 2014 and retiring.
HOMEOPATHY
Homeopathy is a therapy developed by 18th- and19th-century German physician Samuel Hahnemann in which the body’s healing response is stimulated by administering diluted substances that mimic a persons’ symptoms. Browne described it as a search for substances of the same frequency or character as the unwell person, and “it takes a lot of work to find the right substance,” he added.
“The key to all remedies is how it changes the person’s mind,” Browne said. “If it just changes the physical condition that was bad, it’s OK, but it wasn’t the right remedy. The right remedy will change the heart and mind too.”
With acupuncture, he said, “It’s not just about the needles. It’s allowing you to look at reality, look at what you’re hiding from, or what’s suffocating you, then bringing that out and understanding it – how you feel about it, how the world feels about it. And then, you can breathe.”
Whether with acupuncture, tai chi, or other embodied therapies – “there’s more to all this than meets the eye,” he said.
Tai chi classes with the Brownes take place on Saturdays from 9 to 10 a.m. and Mondays from 6 to 7 p.m. Those interested can contact Richard at 786-877-7470.
