[Sheldon FMember]

Hi Blake, wow there is a lot to explore in that thread. Thank you. It is nice to have a specific recommendation that I can trust in regards to yoga practices or teachers that are good… I had suspected yoga practices might help but there are just too many different yoga books and teachers out there that I had no idea what would be worth my time. Amazing how tightening the perineum like you said immediately caused the feeling of energy moving UP the spine, when normally for me I can only feel it moving DOWN.

And to Mathew Immergut: I’ve started reading “In an Unspoken Voice” about somatic experiencing and it seems very interesting so far. Although I doubt I will be able to find a therapist who does this where I live. But maybe I can apply the concepts on my own and get some positive changes…

Thanks all!

[Sheldon FMember]

Thanks Mathew I will check that out.

[Sheldon FMember]

Hi Darlene,

I have plans to start working with a psychotherapist, inspired by Jack Kornfield’s A Path With Heart, when I return home. I presume this would be the best way to deal with a trauma release?

It would be hard for me to describe my general muscle tone, as it is both relaxed and tense, depending on the body part and time. If I bring mindfulness to the body I can always find tensions and contractions to release, but I think that’s pretty normal. Doing Goenka body scanning practices there are persistent “blind spots” on most of my head and face which behave very wierdly when attention is directed in that way. I have spent quite a lot of time using body scanning attention to penetrate and release those blind spots, which feels nice but doesn’t seem very productive because within a few minutes or hours the tensions and blindspots return. My intuition is that this physical head and face wierdness is in some way related to duality and is partly how my mind creates the impression of a doer or perceiver. This is partially because during my early meditation practice I was working intensely with no self teachings and eventually attained a state where there was absolutely no sense of a self and the instant I entered this state a huge amount of tension released, basically the entire right side of my face and head, which I had not even known was tense. My whole face looked completely different. But this state only lasted about an hour and wasn’t actually very nice anyways…

One thing that I have increasingly become aware of is my fear of other people, and fear in general. I am very high functioning and most people who know me would not be able to detect this, but there is definitely a deep fear underlying almost everything I do. At one point during this last retreat, while I was trying to push through the convulsions by noting no-self in every sensation, a very strong terror arose, with the story of there being some demon very close that wanted to kill me… but I was in noting mode and noted all this objectively and it did not cause any problem, but it was still remarkably strong deep fear, so maybe there is something there. Some childhood trauma that needs to be dealt with in a different way than just noting?

Thanks for your quick reply…

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