Aliveness Moving, Stillness Listening Meditation

I’ve been doing the meditation once a week for a while now. Friday’s seem to work best for me, shaking anything that has stirred or got stuck during the week and allowing me to be more fully rested at the weekends. I hadn’t realised how much energy and unexpressed emotion would build up in my body in just one week.
It’s extraordinary how different the meditation is each time, it’s as if an intelligence underneath everything else is listening and keying into a different message every time. But there is a consistent experience to a part of the mediation at the moment – in the jungle I am always surrounded by monsters, shadow creatures that lurk in the dark ready to get me.
I’ve always been afraid of the dark. As a little boy laying in bed at night, my mind would convince me there was something lurking behind me and my imagination was so strong it would convince me I needed to check. It would usually conjure a werewolf with saliva dripping from snarling teeth, ready to rip me to pieces. Even the hairs on the back of my neck would betray me into feeling its breath close to me. I still get this feeling now and sometimes if I’m on my own at night, I still have to check.
But in my Friday morning mediations I can’t check, I don’t allow myself. I have to leave the blindfold on. And this means I have to feel the terror. I have to feel the unexpressed emotions that created these shadows in the first place. The rage of being abandoned by my mother, the rage of being bullied and ostracised for over 10 years at school – not feeling accepted, loved or safe during any of that time.
The first few times this happened in the mediation I just screamed and screamed and screamed. But after the screaming stopped something wonderful happened – the werewolf transformed back into a little boy and for the first time ever, he actually allowed me to hold and soothe him. I have been trying to do this for years, but I couldn’t reach him.
This incessant checking and searching for safety, has allowed these shadows to rule me and very nearly destroy me and everything I hold dear. I created inner worlds and fantasies to hide from them, to do anything to protect myself from these shadows, but of course they just followed me into these inner worlds and turned them into terrifying places to be.
But these places are starting to fill with light. For the first time in my life I am able to soothe myself in a healthy way. My hands feel soft when I place them on my body and this softness spreads out from them, soothing my entire being.
I have been working on healing these shadows for over 15 years now, but nothing has allowed me to go as deep as the meditation and reach this kind of healing. I am so grateful to Joy and Tim and everything I am discovering in this Secret Garden. ~ Alaistair Howard-Dobson, Suffolk

...terror, starting in my pelvis & I could see myself running & running, the flight impulse just running riot in my body ... AND WHAT A RELIEF...to let the body express it & move it. Then feeling it integrating into the rest of me, relaxing, loving it all & finally the journey through all of 'me' finding new spaces in that & a deeper presence with more grounding through my pelvis ...I'm telling you this in the forum because I feel the importance & potential of this meditation is so vast. I've done many different active meditations and this is one of the BEST.
And the fact that we have the chance to practise it with & alongside the founder of it is an opportunity not to be missed.
And it is for all of us; we can deepen & intensify the experience for all of us in the circle if we do this meditation regularly.
And NOW is the only time to do it; we dont'have any other time. The indian mystic Osho, who i lived with for many years spoke daily on the importance of our totality in the search, in fact in everything; to get the urgency, we are facing life or a living death. Daily he stirred up our longing so that we would go that extra distance for ourselves until it became our whole life's focus, all the time stressing the profound depth of our sleep & unconsciousness...Joy can only do so much & we can only do so much while we are together in the circles, & for each day of the module we have a month where we are responsible do the work ourselves, alone. Had I not done it this morning, as I was tempted, i know that this moment of uncomfortableness would have just slipped back into the depths of my unconscious & the opportunity would have been lost, maybe forever. good to know that the meditation is there available for me to have a space of honesty and vulnerablity with myself and where I am, any time I need, even if I'm not yet ready to be that honest and vulnerable with others.Your words go deeply in and I hear different things in them each time, supporting whatever is arising...a new learning all the time. So much can be released and healed, made conscious and integrated through the body in a way that cannot happen through words. ~ Surahbhi McMellahn, Devon