The story of "Mastering your mind and coming to your senses"
How I learned to feel safe in my own skin.
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A participant in a men’s program recently asked me how to learn to feel safe in his body, after hearing me share my story.
I discovered my body aged 36. I found out my body had it's own conscious awareness. It could make choices on it's own. It had wisdom and knowledge that hitherto had been completely inaccessible to me.
Up to that point, my body had been this vehicle that I used to transport my mind and intellect from point A to point B.
As a scientist and innovator I had been successful at using my mind and intellect to solve problems and find new ways of doing things. I still remember the moment around 20 years ago. Sitting in my office at the Leiden Observatory, 23:43 on a Sunday night, studying simulations of the whole universe run on Sarah, a supercomputer and realising that some of the assumptions in my text books about the properties of the largest structures in the universe had been wrong. And I might be one of only a few people on the world who actually understood this. To this day I am grateful for that moment of transcendental bliss that my mind offered me.
In other area's my mind and intellect turned out to be less than a masterful guide. Especially in the area's of human relations, both intimate and professional, it turned out that mere intellect, good intentions and effort was not sufficient to maintain these relationships or to ensure my own wellbeing.
It was during my first Buddhistic workshop that a combination of intense pressure point interventions, meditation training and being part of a group that collectively and individually was willing to step into a new, unknown and at times very uncomfortable future that I learned to relax enough to start to actually feel my body. Under the pressure point intervention I learned to release the continuous control that i had unconsciously adapted over my life time and started to allow the feelings of my body to freely guide my actions.
My body started to move of its own volition and this movement was associated with ever increasing levels of pleasure. An unexpected and mind-blowing experience for the uber-rationalist that I had been.
In this journey I would like to share with you some of the practices, theories and tools that I was taught and discovered over te years.
Acknowledging that knowledge can only become wisdom through experience, I will not just bluntly dump all this knowledge on you.
On the contrary.
I would like to invite you to a game. A game where you can discover whether the things you believe you want, and the things you actually do align.
A game where you will have to put effort into gaining knowledge so it can become embodied wisdom.
Be it through increasing your Health, Wealth or the quality of your (sexual) relationships.
Are you game?
(leave your name and email adress in the comments or send them to contact@heijligers.com)
