Row, Row, Row Your Boat

riskbuildaship

Last weekend was weekend number eight of this Taotraining that I am attending since two years.
I will not try to put into words what the content was of it.
What I will do is give an impression of how this impacted me with a few keywords.

The very idea in tao is that you can use the life force energy to clean up and keep your body and mind and energetic system healthy.

The main source of life energy is sexual energy.

We, in general, tend to use sexual energy to procreate and for the rest of the time have fun with it by wasting it out in the open.
This is called frontal side sexuality.
That is the right side for procreation.
But when you want to use the sexual energy for maintenance and improvement of your energy level, there is a way to do that: routing it not away from us via the front side, but backwards along the spine upwards.

The taotraining consists of ways to learn to do this.

This weekend a mechanism was explained: when you keep up the good work of containing the sexual energy in your system, there will happen a engorgement of life energy.
This surplus of energy leads by itself to healing of old traumas.
Yet, because of the fact that the healing of old traumas implies bringing back to memory this old traumas. This has to be so, in order to re-integrate the disconnection that happened when the original circumstance brought us in a state of helplessness that resulted in a form of dissociation like fight, flight and freeze, to mention just a few.

A often not as such recognized side effect of this coming up of old trauma related feelings of impotency is what is called cushioning: we were working on improving our life energy, we were doing great, we were feeling well and then we started to feel not so good and without much or any consciousness of it we fall back into old habits that we used to use as ways to feel better, or at least to not feel the pain, which in and of itself feels better than feeling the (threat of) the pain.

So, back to, to name a few to make sure you get the point: drinking, smoking, excessive eating, lots of chocolate, sugar, masturbating, watching porn, watching bad tv, watching a lot of screens in general and maybe a few things that only you know.

Then after  a while when we feel ‘better’ again, we pick up the training again. And so it goes.

Another thing that helped was the mentioning of what was called the ‘grijssluiertrauma’s’, the grey haze traumas: all those little traumas that kind of weave themselves into a gray haze. (I love this new word, it means something to me and it clears something up).

And last but not least there is this idea that when you want to change something in your behaviour, that this should not be done by will power but by a longing.
Somehow this it struck a chord in me: it kind of approved and made sense of the idea that there is a hierarchy  in longings. And that it is okay and wise to go for the highest longing, for the highest valued longing.

Longing has in a way a bad name in spiri-land: it is taken for egoistic and for an emotion that better is not been given in to.
From Buddhism I remember that the only longing that is okay is the longing for enlightenment.
In satsang land it is associated with ‘my will’ as opposed to ‘Thy Will be done’.
An in the tao weekend it was ‘approved’ as the vehicle to get to your destination.

On the premise of the ISVW where the training was taking place there is a building site and on the fencing around the construction site they had some quotes.

One of them is the one on top of this page, the one from Antoine de Saint-Exupery about motivating people. It kind of expresses my renewed appreciation for longing for the better.

Time to finish this spontaneous report.
I made a few drawings in between the sessions and they are also sponteneous.
I reproduce them here, for those who can read them or just for the fun of looking at what my markers, pencil, ballpoint  and colored pencils gave off on the paper this time: scan_20161212
scan_20161212-2
scan_20161212-3

I have mentioned the taotraining in three earlier blogs.
Two of them are in Dutch. The second one is also about a for me new word that was introduced by taotrainer Reinoud Eleveld: voorkantverwarring (frontal confusion), to which I made a drawing too.
Here are the earlier entries:
hansvandergugten.nl/?p=4195
hansvandergugten.nl/?p=4256
hansvandergugten.nl/?p=4556

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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