Rick Barrett

Please allow me to dispense with the usual blather and just tell you what I consider important.

I live and work (primarily) in New York City, straddling the Borough of Parks (Staten Island) and Manhattan (mostly Greenwich Village). I teach t’ai chi ch’uan, ch’i gung, xingyiquan, and push hands in NYC and in seminars all over the country. I have been teaching for over twenty years.

Equally important to me is my energy healing practice. Under the umbrella of Polarity Therapy, I integrate craniosacral balancing, myofascial restructuring, Biosonic Repatterning, trance work, and integral life mentoring.

The internal martial arts support my healing practice and vice versa. Grandmaster William C. C. Chen (www.wmccchen.com) is my t’ai chi ch’uan teacher (although I have benefitted greatly from the generosity of many other wonderful instructors). From Master Fukui Yang (www.xinyiwuguan.com) I have learned xingyiquan, yiquan, luoxuanzhang, and xinhuizhang. John Beaulieu (www.biosonics.com) has been my primary influence in energy healing, and I was very fortunate to study intensively with him for several years.

My passion is to contribute to the evolution of consciousness (personal and global) on this planet in whatever way I can. I seek to empower all individuals who seek my help to better help themselves through body/mind/spirit integration. Each student and each client has his/her own unique assets and needs which must be recognized to fully engage the next step of their journey. My job is to see and understand each person and provide the necessary tools.

The challenge we humans face in the years to come is to raise the vibration of our dialogue with each other to open us all to more intelligent choices. To do this, I believe we must accelerate our evolution from a fear-based to a love-based consciousness. We are at a critical point in this process and an essential (and often overlooked) element is a physical transformation that allows us to transcend the fear-response of our own nervous systems. To this end I have been promoting a “Love-based Martial Art”—one that allows us to increase our personal power and sense of well-being by opening to love.

Early prototypes of this approach were demonstrated when I competed in push hands tournaments. I was in my late 40’s at the time, but felt pretty vigorous. I won national championships in 1996, 97, and 98 as a middleweight. When I felt confident in my own weight class, I competed also as a superheavyweight. My opponents were usually much bigger, younger, stronger, and fitter than I was, but I was still able to win national championships in 1997 and 1998 against opponents 100 pounds bigger than me. My goal was not just to rack up titles, but to test t’ai chi’s core principles against superior strength.

My biggest discovery from competitions was that when I engaged my opponent in a loving, open-hearted way, rather than as just an obstacle to my goal, that I was empowered in ways I couldn’t have predicted. It has taken me most of ten years to translate these lessons to a language I can share with others.

An important part of the evolution of consciousness we are undergoing is developing language and practices that support the changes. They must be empirically based and repeatable, and must honor the traditional wisdom as well as more recent developments.

This is what I try to do in my writing, seminars, classes, and healing sessions.

Rick Barrett is a senior tai chi student of Grandmaster William C. C. Chen. He also studies Chen Style tai chi and Xingyiquan with Master Yang Fukui. He teaches workshops around the country and has written a number of articles on tai chi, push hands, and tournaments for Inside Kung Fu and Tai Chi Magazine. He is author of Taijiquan: Through the Western Gate.

As a push hands competitor, Rick dominated his weight division for several years. He was middleweight national champion in 96, 97, and 98. He was also the US Kuoshu Champion in the unlimited division in 97 and 98.

Since retiring from tournament competition, Rick has been active as a forms judge and push hands referee, including recent service at the US Wushu Union Nationals and the AAU Nationals.

Rick practices polarity therapy in NYC.