intuitiveflow

For a long while there was only the pain. Well almost. It did not leave me day and night. It went closer to the skin and became stronger and harder to take. I thought it would go away in a day, two days, three.. but it stayed for three or four weeks. Today I had a two hours break. For three nights I could not sleep. During two of these nights I drew these drawings on my little hand-held computer at night. I keep it near bed. As you can see, the pain got different. It was not any more concentrated in specific places. It was everywhere between the knees and the soles, all over the skin. Yes, specifically stronger where it always was, but almost as strong everywhere else, where it has not been before at all. It became a mood, an atmosphere, an overwhelming-throbbing-and-moving-in-unexpected-waves condition.

Maybe these drawings do not look like pain at all any more, but like confusion, or like a cloud, a colorful cloud sometimes.

During this time I took one session of Access Bars, which left me totally exhausted. The Bars are spots on the head that you touch lightly and release energy from mental formations that block your freedom. Then I took an eight hours class in doing these Access Bars. I got two new clients too. It is a miracle that I could even do sessions without enough sleep. Five minutes into the sessions I start feeling energized and sharp, as if I am in wonderland. Then, when people leave, there is nothing that I want more than to have some sleep.

Several times I draw in watercolor early in the morning or earlier, when it is still night and every time the drawing tells me that I am OK, that I am developing, that all is good.

So I decided to show you the little pain drawings that are different from all the pain drawings from the past. There is almost no composition in them. There are eight in the first night and four in the second night, but I’ll only show a few. And then, one of the morning watercolors and its going-in-with-words. Take this as a report from the road, where I do not yet know where I am, I do not see where I am going, but in spite of the strong and unbearable pain, somehow everything is OK. I can’t walk, I can’t sleep, I can’t sit and yet I do all these, shaking uncontrollably again and again. Somehow it feels right. Not from the point of view of guilt and having to be punished. This feeling has almost completely gone by now.

It does feel all right. I know it is alright.

Pain

Pain

Pain

Pain

Pain in two feet

Pain

Pain

Now comes a morning watercolor from November 25^th.

Lines are getting rounder

And the words:

I loved this mysterious blue

It was all ease and flow

For the four years old of me

I could not have enough of it

I was old and dark not long before

And suddenly I was a baby and a child

When blood came after me

I started flowing underground

But look

Light is everywhere already

And the lines are becoming rounder.

This is the first drawing.

The wounded farmer

The mountain of resistance (that we saw in the previous posting) has become the farmer, walking away from his fields. He has a jacket and a bag and has one leg. The other one is cut off. His fields have become his shadow. He has a wing that is heavy. The wing is connected to his fields. If he wants to flap his wing, he will have to flap all his fields with it, which is very hard to do. His horizon is sadness and lack. He is trying to walk away from his past, but the past sticks to him.

When I drew this I did not realize that I drew a person. I just did one line at a time, listening to suggestions from within, being dedicated to fulfilling my sense of beauty’s instructions.

The next drawing got me closer to the person.

Anger

I found tremendous anger. Colors change on the surface like the color of some octopuses when they are in danger, or about to attack.

Dark parts are parts that have become dead. The only thing that moves is anger, fury, clenched teeth, hostility. And now that I look at it I can feel the resistance too, as if it is saying: I am not moving from here.

But there is life in the hair. The hair shows some imagination. If it was a therapy session and the patient was immersed in sadness and anger, I might have suggested going into the hair, to give the patient some feeling of being alive. But I know that already and I am on my way to see in what way the resistance will change, if I just see it closely, again and again.

I drew once more.

Sad

There is softening. The anger turns to tired sadness. Remnants of beautiful colors appear and move through everything, as if saying: Look at what was lost. The figure, which suddenly looks like a bee, is bent as if it carries a heavy burden and there is a threat in the air, above the figure’s head. There is painful feeling in the chest. Gloom. Depression. Being a bee brings to my mind the way the bee has to die after she stings.

Maybe suddenly he starts to have these questions: What am I here to do? Why did I come here? I am sick and dying.

Some vigor remained in the lower parts, in the groin and in one thigh. Maybe it is the bees memory of the power she had in stinging. And there is a weak leg.

There is still some feeling of being stubborn, but the figure does not seem to be energetic enough to move far from where he is. Maybe he is destined to be on a slow, permanent pilgrimage? Maybe he will die? I find that many trips into the depths of our emotions and imagination reach death. Usually we are afraid of getting there, and quickly turn around to escape. But if we go all the way and agree to experience death, we discover freedom right behind it.

Here is the next one.

Trauma and the way nature goes on

The world is split into two parts. On the right is violence, blood, rain and soaked earth. On the left there is something like a bird on a bough. And there is green, maybe cultivated green, living in these two worlds. When trauma happens, nature continues to be alive and beautiful as if nothing happened. This seems to be a split for us, because we do not feel calm and natural while having trauma. We cannot understand how nature can be so peaceful.  What is interesting is that the figure has disappeared. Now there is only seeing. Maybe there is a teaching in it. The universe is always teaching. Maybe it says: The solution is here. Look at the natural world. Be natural. Be who you are. All the troubles start when you deny yourself the natural state of being who you are. Or maybe it says: What has just happened to you is natural, just as the bird, standing on a bough is. Everything happens because of the laws of the universe and everything is just as perfect. As such it is peaceful and harmonious too, even though it is hard for you to perceive the peace and harmony in it, because your mind refuses to accept it.

And then comes the next drawing:

Flowering

All is plants now.

They grow healthily, spread seeds, make colors, live fully.

Who made them?

In whose mind where they created?

For what witness do they show their full life force?

Do you see anybody?

 And now I can stop, because I know that the next one will be an empty page.

I do a drawing.

A mountain of resistance

I listen to an interview with Sandra Anne Taylor. (Look her up on the web)

What I hear makes sense to me. There is a place to put a question in, like in a chat box. She will answer some of the questions that will be put to her.

I write. I know she will answer me. “Why does the pain not leave me, in spite of doing so much healing work on it?”

I am the third person whose question is being answered.

She connects with my energy, she says. She sees that I am a farmer in some previous life. I have a vineyard. She sees a cart, full of grapes, rolling out of control and crushing my foot. From that point on, in that life, I can’t work and my life is miserable till the end.

Go into meditation, she says. Imagine that you see that cart rolling. This time, escape it and be safe. Go through that life again and make it a really good life. Reach an old age and be satisfied. In this way you will change the memories that you keep. Then there is more to do, and it will come on a CD that I’ll send you for free. In it you’ll find how to make your cells open to change back to their original way of being.

All of this is a wonderful gift.

The next morning I look at the drawing and write down a few lines:

Strong and delicate

A warm living mountain in the middle

A broken stone ground turning into trees

Hot giraffe clouds stretching their necks into thin air

Trees of another kind

All elements seem to go clockwise around the mountain but the mountain does not move.

The mountain is like many people, standing together, with a common cause.

Unified front. Facing left.

 It is not a poem. Just a collection of lines.

Suddenly I know: It is resistance. Everything moves but this collection of bodies or the mountain refuses to move.

Two questions appear now:

1. What is this resisting? It seems to be looking left toward outside of the paper. Can I go to the left of the paper and see what is there?

2. What does it protect?

Then I suddenly know: It is that cart, rolling fast and out of control, coming straight from the left and about to hit who I was in that life.

It is all stuff of the past, but amazingly the resistance is still alive today. It still experiences the danger, the horror of being hit and the pain that was caused and ruined a life. There is a refusal in me to let this experience go. This is what happens after traumas. The fear that it will happen again stays. Then, what we fear comes to us. This is how the universe works. Lester Levenson used to say: “Fear it – appear it”

The three purple lines on the left stand between the mountain and what is coming from outside. They shake with fear. Is this fear the reason for my pain?

Since everything is clear now and the only thing to relate to is the feeling of refusing to let go of the horror, I decide to draw the resistance again and again and see how it changes, and what it will change into. This is how I deeply listen to it.

Will my pain leave now, as soon as I release this feeling of refusal to let go of the fear?

There were five drawings of this feeling that I made that day. I will present them in the next entry.

Thought bubbles

I watch thought bubbles

And water waves

Over

Green land.

I watch holding clay

In my mind’s hands

Thinking into being

Clouds over the mountains

Relaxed and flowing.

It is the late evening of the first day in November.

Before I go to bed I draw the pain.

Pain before bedtime

It is a night with many waking hours. The pain just does not respond to all my tricks and I do not fall asleep. I meditate so as to get into a state where the body relaxes completely. At least there will be some rest for the body. When the pain is so strong The body convulses. The thighs contract, the buttocks contracts, the area of the stomach contracts, the chest contracts and there is a push of energy up, that is blocked at the base of the throat. Who is doing it? Is it the body, naturally, not wanting to have this pain? Is it I, employing old, historical responses to not wanting pain? The nervous system quivers with no control, the legs shake. A lot is going on with the body and the mind, even thought there are hardly any words in the mind.

I start paying attention to one of the tensions and it calms down. I move to the next and this one calms down too. After I calm the whole body I leave the pain alone and sink into spaciousness. This is when I usually fall asleep. But this night I don’t. So I do the whole process again. Then again. I don’t know how many times. I am tired, but I do not feel bad. In fact I feel empowered. At 4:30 I am too awake. I go to the kitchen and make myself a cup of Ginger tea.

At 5 I do this drawing.

Connecting or disconnecting?

The paper is some rare French paper, which is sized heavily, and therefore does not absorb the water but let the pools stay wet until they dry as they are and all the pigments remain on the surface. Also, because the paper does not absorb the water and is quite textured, the lined become “eaten”, as if the space ate in tiny bites into the lines. This makes for “hungry” lines.

I lay the drawing on the table in front of me, still wet, and write what I observe.

The fire is underneath

Then there is space

Then comes a troubled collection of lines

That maybe is in the process

Of straightening out

Connecting with pieces on the left and the right

Or maybe disconnecting from them

To resolve itself

From being a bunch of conflicted forms

To become a feather in space

And then space itself.

Then I write in green what comes to me to say about every line.

The fire is underneath—this is the pain

Then there is space—created by observation

Then comes a troubled collection of lines—the embattled thought patterns of: Why? Don’t want it; it is too strong; I can learn to accept it; etc…

That maybe is in the process

Of straightening out– simplifying

Connecting with pieces on the left and the right—being a part of a bigger chain of connected events, enabling the deepening understanding of its origin.

Or maybe disconnecting from them—by living in the moment

To resolve itself—in the field of awareness

From being a bunch of conflicted forms

To become a feather in space—less overpowering, observable in peace

And then space itself.—to perfection, to freedom of choice.

Then I go to bed again, and after some periods of short sleep among long periods of shaking and tensing, followed by giving attention to all the tense places, all the painful places and to what is not the body but is.

At 6:40 I do another drawing of the pain.

Pain before breakfast

And another one, where, after delineating where the pain is (the green marker lines with red in them), I start to play:

Playing with pain

Old as time

I am shaking and am twisted from the pain (says the red)

I am so strong and overwhelming that I need to say the same thing several times. (says the red)

I include contrasting colors to show that there are many aspects of me. (Says the whole picture)

There is even a light aspect of me.

There is death aspect of me and eternity.

There is beauty aspect of me.

It feels I am as old as time itself.

Thinking about it: Since there is no time there must be no pain.

If I go to the state in which I experience no time, there will be no pain in it.

Pain is like a comet moving in space. It is like the beginning of life, when gases and dust traveled through space

and collided with other bodies of gas and dust to create a planet

with heat inside, water on the surface,

and don’t forget the air

and the sun.

This was done at 4:30 in the morning. Later this night I understood what it means to love what is hard to love. As I was lying in bed, expecting the pain to subside enough so that I could fall asleep, the pain did not subside. I imagined myself going into the body and looking at the place where the pain is. I saw that place like an underground dark river, where buildings stood on stilts in the river. But the stilts were broken and their bottom parts were missing. so nothing held the buildings from the bottom side, but the buildings were connected to the top  of the cave and to the walls, so they did not fall. The columns were black, as if they were burned, and everything was dead. This is what I saw as the place where the pain was. How can you love a place like this? I brought my hands to that inner scene and took the whole thing in my arms, then brought it to my heart and hugged it. It was dead.

I knew that if I hold it like this long enough something in it will start coming back to life. I saw many faces, some frightening, I saw people jumping from a burning building, I saw many other sights as I was holding that thing to my heart. And then it started to change into trees, the water became pleasant, there was light somewhere deep inside. Then there were fires. The columns burned. At one time the whole thing just disappeared and there was nothing to hold, but I kept holding it to my heart. Every now and then the scene would return to the way it started. I kept holding it. I did it for hours. If I fell asleep for a few minutes, I started again as soon as I woke up from the pain.

Then I knew. Many times I wondered, and you saw it in the text: What does the pain want to teach me? I did not know. Was it that I had some unresolved programs in my subconscious, that I had to find and release? I found those and released them, and I still had the pain. No, it was not this. It was something simpler, but deeper. The pain came to teach me how to love more than I could love before. There are two aspects to this pain. One is that there is someone who suffers from it, and you can say also that there are specific places in the body that suffer from the pain. These are easy to love, unless you have a program that believes that you have to be punished and suffer for whatever reason. The other aspect of this pain is something nasty. There is something about it that is dark and angry. As if this thing has been neglected so much that it died to you. It would not speak to you, but just stay there and hurt all the time. It is like a very bad person in a group of normal people. Someone who will spoil everything and be so obnoxious that nobody will ever want to even touch him. This is the one I had to learn to love this night.

I got an opportunity to buy the whole Sedona Method, made of three courses, with many CD’s for a very low price. I can use the Pay Pal account to pay for the first installment of three, really very possible, installments. And it is very alluring. It is a chance to have the complete course at home cheaply. Then, all you have to do is work with the CD’s every day. Every day you listen to one of them and follow with your release. It is easy to do. You feel better every day. I am allured. More than that: I long for the feel of Lester Levenson, the founder of this method. I saw him in my dream with uncanny clarity and felt so much love I have never felt before. I’d love to be with his teaching.

I think I’ll be able to release everything that still stays with me, then I’ll be free of it, money will come, success will come, everything that is good and wonderful will come.

Something stops me from going ahead and buying the program. I have in front of me the drawing I made yesterday.

Misleading beauty

It is a beautiful drawing for me. I decide to go-in-with-words. The beauty in this case seems to be misleading suddenly. With words I find attachment and obsession.

The writing tells me I am in front of a happy stream, going through colorful landscape and reminds me I am on fire with my pain. The stream is right there. It is easy to follow, but all I can think of is escaping to something soft. But that soft thing is actually a wall, a hard to climb wall. What a waste of energy, the words say. This is unexpected.

I decide to go on and do another drawing, to continue the process. I ask Int (that’s my name for intuition): What? What should I learn or do?

I do the drawing.

Crying out

The new going-in-with-words tells me that I am putting a lot of energy in the unreal, that will leave me in the pool of earthly love, from which I’ll cry out to the sky, to find the land of creation.

I do another one. What? What do you want to tell me? What should I know?

Inside there is a stream

The going-in-with-words say:

Inside of all this craving and speeding and pursuing there is a steady, peaceful stream, inside of which you feel loved. This is the real. Stay with this, where you feel loved and loving. It is impossible to know where it is going. With the other things the destination is known.

This can be your clue to what is real and what is not. If you know where it’s going, it is not real. This stream does not tell you where it is going, but living in it is meaningful now, all the time, for eternity.

I know at this point that it does not make sense to do another drawing now. The next one would be an empty page, or something that is impossible to draw. I came again to a good state through this technique. This technique is the cat’s pajamas. I know that the Sedona Method is a fantastic method. It has helped many, many people to reach peace and stability. I love it. But I love my method more. Not because it is mine, but because of this:

If you want to develop, with any method, you have to do it every day. You really have to do it all the time. I learned the release technique (Which is also the Lester Levenson method, taught by Larry Crane who is another student of his) and practiced it for three years. I went to retreats several times a year. I never felt at home with it. I like Hale’s approach, The Sedona Method, more, but I know that even with his way, doing it every day, doing it all the time, does not feel as right to me, as doing my own method. I already do my method every day. Some days I do it more intensively and some days less. But I don’t think there was even one day in which I did not do it, for the last two years or more. Before the last two years, I have been doing it all my adult life, mostly with less intensity and depth. Lately I see that it brings me to peace and happiness again and again, from any state. I do three or four drawings and I am there, with the wise view, speaking like a spiritual teacher. (This is a funny way to say that suddenly I know things I did not know before and I find the circumstances to give them to others.)

It is a scary thing for me to stick to my own method alone, to let go of other methods which are good. I know they are good. But this is what I am called to do. Thinking won’t help here. My heart tells me to go on with mine. And you can say it is not even mine. It is me. I just have to go on being me and evolving as me. And it is easy to see that there is no self in it. If anything, it goes independent of the self. It is a stream of becoming, and I do not even know where it is going. I only know that I feel right being in it. Or being it.

There is even a clear advantage to my method over the Sedona Method. When you release through drawing and going-in-with-words you come much closer to the richness of the feeling that you experience and as a result, the release is more complete. The release happens because of a full acceptance.

And there is a disadvantage. You need to have with you a pad and something to draw with at all times. When you go through life and suddenly something happens that requires some work of release, you have to have these with you. This is how I live. I always have a small drawing pad, something to draw with and something to write on. Nevertheless, there are times when you just can’t stop everything and do a drawing. In these times, you have to have some other method to work with and my preferred one is meditation, or going to a deeper state, because I do not like to use words if they are not art. Being aware immediately of anything that arises in me as I walk in the street, as I am in the middle of talking with another human being, as I am watching a movie or an art object, etc, is the key. If I am aware of everything that arises in me in the moment that it arises, and if I immediately give this energy space to live its life, if I allow myself to be able to feel and experience just every single thing that arises in me without trying to stop it and without wanting it to go away, then my life becomes a constant releasing, without the release technique.

The problem with this is that just releasing everything that arises from within is not enough, because there are so many things to release. The things to release are many, because there are a few basic underlying structures of understanding that create a multitude of variations of themselves, using different issues. As long as these underlying structures are active, they will always create new derivatives. If you release an underlying structure of understanding, you actually release every single specific issue that resulted from that same structure.

Lester came up with the way to be effective by relating every emotion to one of the origins of all the emotions, like wanting to be loved, wanting to be safe and wanting to control. So when you catch an emotion moving in your being, the first thing that you do, is asking yourself: Is this wanting love, wanting control or wanting to be safe? And after you find the answer, you release the experience that you have in your body. In this way you end up dealing with the underlying structures, and your releasing becomes much more effective. This is very wise.

There is a solution for this aspect in my method too, and it is even more natural. The way we catch emotions in the artwork is that we see structures in the composition that don’t work. There are conflicted structures, non-supportive structure, separation structures, etc. These structures are the issues that we release. They may have specific features that belong to a derivative issue, but as we release that specific issue, we also release its structure, which has to do with its core shape. In this way we end up releasing core issues all the time. When you use this method for doing therapy, this is one of the features that makes the therapy go fast. Not only that specific issue is being lessened but many other aspects of life change at the same time.

Another thing to compare is the speed of doing the release and the ease. You can say that in the Sedona Method and in the Release Technique, releasing is as fast as asking a question and saying yes. This is no doubt fast and easy. In my method you need to make a drawing, you need to collect words and make a poem or a story and then you still need to decipher what was said. It is a lot more than just asking a question and saying yes. But because the release in my way is so detailed and thorough, it is more effective than with just asking and answering, and you need to do less number of repetitions, working on the same issues. This, in fact, was one of the main reasons for me to leave the Release Technique and start using my own work. I did not feel as much release in the Release Technique as I felt was happening through my method. There is another reason, as you will see soon.

So as I see it now, the bottom line is that everybody has to find what works best for him or her. My work is dedicated to those, for whom working with art is more appealing than working with asking and answering or any other method, and because of it these people will use it all the time with more ease.

I forgot one of the main reasons for me to use my method. It is the beauty. I was told in my meditation that it did not make any sense for me to do anything in this life, which is not the most beautiful that I can. I don’t want to do anything other than that.

And of course there are other methods. Many of the methods that are being used by many people, have come to us as established paths that have been used throughout history and have track records of success. The Sedona Method and the Release technique already have track records too. My approach is new. The only person who can testify about its power is I. The people who came to work with me and benefitted, can say some good things too, as you can find in the testimonial page of my website . I have many more testimonials that I have not put there yet.  I do not have an impressive line of supporters who will swear by this method, but I have a few. I only know that for me this is the best way to become free, and I still need to prove it even to myself. I am still in a kind of a shock, realizing that the method I have come up with, or was gifted with, is that good.

Being who I am

I decide today to do a third part. I love doing it too much to stop now. I do not even have to have a subject or a direction. I do not need to deal with a specific issue. It is just the way I live, the way I communicate with my intuition or higher self, and it is what I love doing more than anything else. I am not going anywhere, and not aiming at any achievement. It is just the way I live.

I basically gave up on figuring out my life and place my trust in intuition. All my life I looked for some major thing to do, as the core of my doing in the world, that will be a project of deepening with no end. Something that will use all my gifts to the fullest and that will be a sharing at the same time. Something that I do because I love doing it more than anything else, and that I give openly, just as it is. This is being me for all. Or being in the state of receiving and giving constantly. Or, as I wrote somewhere before, being in the state of managing love and wisdom.

Of course I don’t know what will happen in part three and I do not promise anything, except for being who I am. Can anything be better than that?

This continues posting #72. It is 5 in the morning. I want to know how intuition sees my life now. I feel fear and awe at the same time, or so it seems. It is almost overwhelming. I feel I could use some help. I go to the watercolor box, to speak with intuition. What will intuition show me?

Here is the drawing:

I start writing what the different shapes say, in this order:

The brown

The dark blue

The light green

The light blue

The ochre

Then I look at the whole

Then words just continue to come

I’m strong

In spite of a cut

Between me and my root.

A part of me is lost,

Spilling out into the air

What was meant to be love

Is lost.

I am confused

I change directions

I start again close to the root

But I am disconnected as well

I almost fall

I am blind

This is the point right after closing the gate of receiving  the love-stream

Or deviating from its original direction.

I feel some new freshness

Some new growth

I know I had to begin at the root

And I try to go there.

Maybe I’ll start anew

From the beginning?

But the drive to go up is strong

Not as normal growth

But as what I see others do

What I am taught by teachers

What I feel as wanting.

I grow beautifully, even without food

And without a connection to the ground

I grow from air, like Spanish Moss

I still can grow

As long as I listen to who-I-am

This drawing is my lifeline.

And there is always a sense of lacking power

And I try always to go back

Maybe I’ll catch some earth and root

But I continue to grow

Airy, disappearing into light

Crying for lack of power

But tasting the eternal.

The whole picture: 

It is a cumbersome growth

But it is growth

I feel the love now

Both to the universe and myself

I see I am one

I know I need to be practical

And use all the power given to me.

Every point is the beginning

I can connect to my earth always:

It is intuition.

I can always invent as becoming and gifting

I can always open up the receiving doors

For others and the universe to love me through.

Any point is the good point,

The place I always wanted to be,

The beginning of all,

The origination

And the receiving and giving of all.

Calm down, Giora

Say thanks to the universe

Say yes to all that comes to you

And was waiting for you to receive.

Accept all this endless love.

Say, I’m sorry I did not open up to you

All these years.

Say: You are sweet.

Say: It is all deserved.

It is all the gift of being open to all directions.

Bask in the light.

It is all light.

And thoughts keep coming:

Awe is not fear

But it feels close to it

Just as excitement is not fear

But feels close to it.

It does not matter any more

What had happened

And how my thoughts became twisted.

What matters now is to follow

The law of receiving and expanding/extending,

Being an open miracle

Into which love comes

And from which love is given.

Love and wisdom

Express themselves in the unit of life

As the management

Of love and wisdom.

And if you look at this plant

Which shows history here,

Know that every point on it

Is where love and wisdom was given,

Love and wisdom was lived

And love and wisdom was given from.

All is love and wisdom

All the time.

Therefore in healing

The most important thing is to learn

To receive again,

To learn to taste love and wisdom

In our intuition,

To allow ourselves to be the creation process

Of who-we-are,

Whereby we gift

The universe, its people and all its living things.

And there is one more interesting thing about this drawing. Remember the second drawing of the first part of this blog? The name was: Not a good leg to stand on. This last drawing resembles that second drawing. We end here as we started long ago. All that we did, did not take us away from where we were. Only the point of view changed.

This feels like the end of part two. I’ll dedicate myself now to finish the book about the method and publish it. Maybe there will be part three of this blog and maybe not. I don’t know.

The book’s name will most probably be: Intuitive Flow in Art Therapy, and the sub-headline: The easiest and most beautiful way to heal and grow.

My teacher said

My teacher of meditation told us to never meditate after sex. Wait for an hour at least or more, he said.

On the other hand when you start to understand what happens in meditation and see that while meditating, you release habits of thought that block you from seeing the truth and when you stop, the habits come back, you realize that the only way you are going to benefit, is by being in meditation all the time, no matter what you do, and of course, this includes sex. Also the essence of meditation, and the feature that makes it possible to benefit from it, is that meditation does not judge anything, but is open to experience everything. You learn to be in a state in which you can do this. Eventually it becomes the way you live always.

At first I took my teacher’s advice, but later I started thinking. Why does he say so?

Today I believe that his reason has to do more with culture than with the truth. In the culture of Chinese Buddhism, sex is considered to be an impediment to purity of purpose, when it comes to spirituality. It belongs to the passions of the body. It belongs to duality and attachment. If you are a householder and have a wife, you have to have sex and it is OK in these circumstances. But you hinder your development. It is good at some point, maybe when you are somewhat older, to stop having sex and devote yourself to spiritual practice. Then you will make use of all your energy for the purpose of evolving.

But this is just an opinion and it does not harmonize with many other things that Chinese Buddhist meditation promotes, like cleaning the house with awareness, cooking with awareness, meditating through everything that you do. All these things belong to duality and attachment. But sex is a stronger attachment, you may say, or the dedicated Buddhist meditator may say. It is true. We have been made this way. But every single appearance and thing in the universe is saturated with the same oneness. Every energy is so too. The energy and the activity of having sex are not different. And there are other paths to enlightenment that do not look down at both the body and sex.

By the way, even Chinese Buddhism acknowledges some householder-enlightened masters, like Vimalakirty, who had a wife and a daughter. A whole sutra is dedicated to him and he is very highly regarded in this tradition. But when it comes to practice, he is not the example to follow.

In Theta Healing there is the teaching about the fifth plane, where spiritual teachers reside. The residents of this plane are known to be opinionated. Being a teacher does not free you from having opinions. Of course it is very beneficial to study with a teacher, when you need one, but if you want only the truth, go directly to the endless. This is what they teach. When I learned a bit of Theta Healing and we, the students, were working on each other, just as my partner was trying to follow clues all the way to a core issue of mine, our teacher walked by and told her: In his case, his pain has to do with a fifth plane opinion.

This night, when my pain woke me up, it came to me to masturbate. I did, and stayed in meditation all trough it. When I came, I started to feel fear creeping in. It was a strange fear. It was mixed with something else that looked like awe. I decided to respect the fear or the mixture that it was and stay with it as a witness, meaning, continue to meditate. The feeling was very strong and after a while I felt I needed some help, so I got up and went to my table to do a drawing. I wanted to see what intuition would see and say. What it saw and said will come in the next posting.

I do keep your interest alive, don’t I?

And I do endlessly love my Chinese Buddhist teacher, the late Sheng-yen. If not for him, I would not be the way I am today. I am sure he sees me as a naughty student, who follows his heart, and therefore, even his naughtiness is lovely.

When I once told him what I did not accept about his teaching, he said that every teacher wants his students to be better than him. But I only want to be who I am, which for me means, to be in the state of becoming.