Natural Way T'ai Chi: The Lost Lam Rim Tapes (T'ai Chi Study Notes)

From the early 1990s until 2009, Alan Peck led a series of T’ai Chi retreats at the Lam Rim Buddhist Centres in Wales and Bristol. These retreats, sometimes held three or four times a year, offered rare and deeply informed teachings of T’ai Chi rooted in both internal cultivation and Buddhist practice. The author attended most of these retreats and, recognising their significance, recorded most of the sessions until 2009.The recordings were of very poor quality. Alan’s softly spoken voice was often obscured by background noise, fragmented conversations, clatter and laughter. Although hundreds of hours of audio were recorded, they remained largely unusable and untouched for two decades. It was only with major advances in AI technology from 2022 onwards—particularly speech-to-text systems and large language models—that this material could finally be recovered.Using these tools, the author was able to transform hours of near-unintelligible recordings into coherent, readable text. While the resulting material is necessarily a synthesis of the words spoken by Alan rather than a verbatim transcript, it faithfully captures the essence, clarity, and spirit of Alan Peck’s teaching. The author notes that, when reading the text, Alan’s voice and spirit are vividly present.Faced with hundreds of pages of overlapping material, the author chose not to present the work chronologically. Instead, the book follows the framework Alan himself emphasised: the Three Treasures of jing, qi, and shen, together with, supporting exercises, and instruction relevant across these three levels, reflecting the depth and completeness of the original teachings.Throughout the book, Alan Peck’s Buddhist practice and his emphasis on refining qi, yi, xin, and shen through T’ai Chi are evident. At a time when authentic internal teaching of this kind is still rare, this work serves both as a preservation of an important lineage and as a practical, insightful resource for serious students of T’ai Chi and internal cultivation. Read more