Seeking a Peak Experience?

Let me share with you the amazing peak
experience I had in 1995, immediately after I  finished teaching an
Inner Sexual Alchemy (Lesser Kan & Li) retreat in Sedona,
Arizona. The next year, in 1996, we moved Healing Tao Retreats to the
New York Catskills. In 2007 we moved down to the Blue Ridge Mountains,
to a 5000 acre private center called Heavenly Mountain.

It was a hot, sunny afternoon, the July air was bone dry in the
Sedona desert. The sky was a deep blue dome overhead. My peak
experience happened immediately after the retreat was over.  I went to
my adobe casita (hut) and lay down on my bed, feeling pleasantly
exhausted from the powerful group cauldron we had opened up during the
retreat. Let me first share a little about the build-up to this peak.

We had used alchemical meditation to open a deep portal to the
pre-natal (Early Heaven) realms within our individual dantian (located
in the belly center). It seems the large group of people doing this all
at once had attracted a heavy stream of “hungry ghosts” seeking
completion.

During the retreat I saw hundreds of these beings. They are from the
low astral, ancestral fragments of local residents, trapped close to
the physical plane with no idea of where to go. You sometimes encounter
them in nightmares. They are harmless and cannot affect your dense
physical reality. They showed up at our retreat because they felt
attracted to the clear light portal we had opened up within us. It
offers them a path to complete themselves and end their wandering
existance more quickly.

One woman with strong third eye sensitivity left the retreat early,
saying that the amount of “spooks” and the transformational intensity
was just too much for her. She wasn’t able to let these harmless
images move through her lower dantian portal, the Gate of the
Mysterious Female. For Taoists, this gate is the most direct route back
to the primordial clear light source in humans. Instead they were
flooding her upper dantian/3rd eye, which is not well grounded in many
psychics. And so it was clouding her mind functioning.

In fact these astral beings are harmless, although our fear
sometimes uses them to scare ourselves into giving them have power over
us. They are mostly the “po” souls (lung spirits) of humans that died a
violent or unexpected death. The part of them that was still attached
to the earth chose to remain after death. Part of the alchemical Taoist
work is to compassionately help these ancestral soul fragments achieve
completion and move on.

This is the background I was coming out of prior to my peak experience. 

 I lay relaxing on my bed in the casita, feeling totally open and
vulnerable from having “cooked” all week. Recall the deep blue sky
overhead, without a cloud in sight. Suddenly there was suddenly a sharp
CRACK! that exploded right outside my door. It was so loud and sudden
that my body literally jumped up two feet off the bed and then fell
back down. I was in a state of shock, as my psychically open state had
let the explosion penetrate very deep into my body.

My shock gave way to anger. The only explanation I could offer for
such a loud explosion so close was that an air force jet had broken the
sound barrier while flying low overhead. I began to imagine that I had
been unfairly violated. Some jet pilot, maybe showing off, had zoomed
past the sound barrier and shattered my peace and quiet,and ruined the
serene fruits of my week of meditation.  In my growing fury, I began
planning my complaint to the Air Force, plotting even to put media
pressure on them.

Then a friend began excitedly knocking on my door. “Michael! Did you see that?” He opened the door.

“A lightning bolt came out of the clear blue sky and struck the ground, right outside your door!” he exclaimed.

 I was dumbstruck. The God of Thunder & Lightning had just
delivered a most auspicious omen to me. I realized in a flash it was
intended to signal to me that the Heavens approved of my opening this
path with my first alchemy summer retreat. It is part of the Lesser Kan
& Li formula that a bolt of thunder may be heard internally when
the hun (liver/wood) spirit seeds its energy into the cauldron in the
lower dantian. This is part of the energy of spiritual  rebirth. The
lightning outside my door was also probably designed to clear out
lingering patterns of anger in my liver, which obviously had come to
the surface.

I later did research and discovered it is possible for electrical
lightning to appear out of a clear sky. But the fact it was attracted
to strike in front of my doorway was what was significant.

That lightning bolt has always stayed with me, a peak experience of
Nature’s power to communicate with me individually. It is now one of my
many permanent peak connections to the elemental powers of Nature. Here
it took the form of  the Thunder Path revealed. Some traditions hold
you need to have such a communication with each of the five elements to
complete your initiation into the full alchemical power of
transformation. Even though lightning is itself is a form of fire, it
is associated  with the wood elemnt, and east/spring/thunder and new
beginnings.

———————————————————

Jade Goddess Dining Pavilion at Heavenly Mountain, where much transformation happens at summer retreats….

Now I am not suggesting that if you attend the retreat(s) of your
choice this summer, that bolts of lightning will chase you all the way
home. But the changes you feel internally may well be that powerful.

Anyway, I encourage you, in this Year of the Ox, to consider
cultivating a New Reality. You can do it all alone, but it helps to
have a guide, and to practice with the right people in the right place,
at the right time.

Now is the right time to commit to your next level of
transformation. Remember, stocks rise and fall, fear and greed go
through their cycles, recessions and booms come and go. But your
transformational path of evolution is really a one way trip, the
continuous unfolding of your true source. Once it begins, it continues
on its own spontaneously, subject only to your resistance. It will
outlive the economic cycles of our time, which is just an expression of
our collective need to transform the field in which we all live.

But if you wallow in that social fear of a deep recession, instead
of transforming the fear into individual power, you may find yourself
swept away by the waves of mass emotion. The masses are holding the
group resistance, and if you identify with the mass resistance and
confusion, you unconsciously internalize it. It gets even harder to
find your own path.

I continue to find amazing support and peak experiencs in the groups
that meet every summer. The prices are reasonable – often half of what
others charge for a week’s retreat. And we have extended payment plans
and work-study programs for the cash strapped.

Just by putting down a $100. deposit you hold your space and affirm your committment to self-transformation.

Plus its nice to immediately get the Free bonus of David Twicken’s
e-Book on Feng Shui for Modern Spaces (130 page book, worth $20.).
David is revealing the secrets of Qimen Dunjia (Taoist directionology)
and how to combine it with feng shui, astrology, and qigong to create
abundance in your life. If you are really concerned about money, take
his course, offered for the first time, and start creating abundance.

 Or take one of the many fantastic courses in Taoist energetic
self-cultivation. Mantak Chia ikicks off the summer by going into one
of his favorite topics, Healing with Planetary Spirits. Tai Chi courses
range from short Yang 13 movement form with Marie Favorito  to long Wu
and Chen styles with Tina Zhang, who also has a fabulous women’s qigong
retreat. Frank Allen offers three amazing Bagua circle-walking walking
retreats.

Marie Favorito tests the “root” of prospective Healing Tao instructors in Iron Shirt postures.

Karin Sorvik is back with deep organ massage (Chi Nei Tsang) and
dream practice combined with Star Cultivation. Minke de Vos is a
wonderful teacher of Taoist Sexual Yoga.

I have my internal alchemy series of One Cloud’s formulas, beginning
with Medical and Spiritual Qigong Fundamentals (healing sounds, inner
smile, rooting, and the Orbit). There are so many other jewels, it is
hard to choose from them. 

Consider Madame Wang Yan’s Natural Weight Loss and Medical Qigong
course where people routinely ” breathe fat away” to the tune of 6 to
10 pounds in one week – and continue losing weight after they get home.
Read the authentic testimonials on he rpage.

There is Zhongxian Wu’s “Calligraphy as Qigong Healing Art” that
brings out the hidden artist in many. Or Robert Peng’s Qigong Healing
Intensive where the energy frequently triggers peak frequencies of
folks. If you want the latest in Energy Psychology and Energy Medicine,
Judith Poole is a great coach, and helps you customize your personal
self-healing process.

I invite you to take a few minutes and browse through this amazing collection of teachers and retreats.

Even if you don’t sign up, just reading about them will expand your
imagination of what is possible. That imagination is the ultimate key
to personal transformation and spiritual rebirth. Once you can
re-imagine yourself, you’ve tapped into the power of the Life Force to
cultivate a New Reality. The Ox Year will support you to leap over the
fence of your old boundaries with their embedded fears and resistance.

The homepage to explore this all is:

www.HealingTaoRetreats.com

2009 Retreats – Register Online Here

Summer Bookstore has one of the best collections of Tao books, DVDs, and cool Tao T-Shirts around.

For three different photo pages, please enjoy:

http://www.healingtaoretreats.com/retreatphotoindex.html

Mantak Chia leads Tai Chi in the One Cloud Sanctuary at Heavenly Mountain, which will be re-opened this summer.