Happy People Are Down At The Beach
Once upon a time, a small but select group of people, perhaps we were thirty, perhaps a little fewer, gathered on a Cycladic island in early June for the first day of a week-long training with a spiritual teacher who was truly one of a kind. We were joyful for the opportunity, and hopeful for some meaningful support, especially in view of a fifteen-year economic, psychological, and values-based collective crisis that had just emerged. Early summer, mid-week, the island was at its very best; not too many people, clean beaches, sun that didn’t bite, food insanely fresh, rooms wrapped in quiet. In the late afternoons we wandered through fields that were saying farewell to spring’s green for the golden hues of the summer sun. At night we gazed at constellations…
No hope, more life
The most effective way I’ve found, even to this day, to regain some of my self-confidence and self-mastery lies in the experiential understanding of my disempowering emotions. The psycho-emotional erosion they have inflicted on my psyche manifests clearly somewhere in the body, and the moment of therapeutic re-experiencing is a surgical process designed to occur precisely without the soothing power of anesthesia. I feel different parts of my body ache intensely; usually the liver, in severe cases the centre of the chest (heart and lungs), but statistically most often it’s the back, right behind the thorax (heart, shoulder blades) that gets triggered. In extreme moments, I spontaneously whisper, “I feel frozen.” Exactly that. I am completely frozen, incapable of understanding what is happening without awareness of what it’s about. This…