The Teachings of Kwan and Hatamo

By following the five learning steps given below, we can move towards helping to create a more spiritually 'integrated' community experience, and being a part of it. This, in turn, will encourage a greater 'sense of belonging' for each of us.

1. A realization that my intellect and my ego can take me only so far. Exploring, experimenting and learning with others will take me that much further.

2. I need to become my own person in an ongoing community or group and learn how to contribute. This will help me to balance the left/right sides of my brain.

3. With the aid of a Helper and Facilitators, and interactions with other members of the group, I will become more aware of my issues and commit myself to working through them, in order of priority.

4. I will adopt practices and meditations suitable to my individual needs.

5. With the help of the personal and community tools of Aaahh practices and meditations, which become fully activated in an ongoing group framework, I will feel like a part of the community and contribute in creative ways towards its spirit.

How can the Aaahh be useful to me?

The Aaahh can be applied to any problems we encounter through our life experiences. With the help of personal and group practices and meditation, it will enhance and enrich our capacity to deal with issues in an ongoing and supportive group environment. According to this communication approach, any meditation technique or practice has to be able to sufficiently include and address the most vital need of resolving our relationship issues, especially concerning our family and friends.

We may understand or analyze our situation, but this may not, at all, be enough. We in the Aaahh, with adequate safeguards and accepted boundaries, are encouraged to express freely, using only a maximum of 3 articulate words, everything we feel at any time. As previously mentioned, in the Aaahh, we acknowledge and accept a certain kind of, shall we call it, 'imaginative silliness' and 'improvised artistic expressions'. This is a legitimate therapeutic tool, for release, as well as a first step for helping to emotionally restore personal and community balance. In this manner, we work through our emotional issues by acting out or dramatizing situatiions. In such emotional engagement, we can "let off steam" and address issues. We may also complement this practice with mindful meditations. All this, we believe, can become the foundation of an ongoing group or community framework that provides a safe and supportive environment. In the very personal (and often semi-conscious) detail of our interactions, can lie our strongest and most subtle communication blocks, as well as unifying spiritual feelings.

When we can, in the midst of ordinary communication, spontaneously and instinctively express ourselves, without using normal articulate language, we can experience a flow within ourselves, and in our relationships with others. Like this, we can bypass articulate fixations. Also, by such immediate action, we penetrate and shake up our linear reasoning and attitude. We start to negotiate with other members on this flexible, emotional, and flowing level, to negotiate any communication blockages that may have arisen. This kind of negotiation can be very helpful when strong conflicts loom. It will allow the parties involved in the communication to tune in, negotiate and naturally balance or enhance interactions with each other. In such a manner, we touch on mostly the subtle details felt, but not seen.

Through some of our practices, we are able to go from a full emotional engagement to total dissociation. This enables us to find a balance between these polarities with greater ease.

If issues can be worked out by discussing them, that's OK, as long as we don't continually regurgitate and repeat ourselves over and over again, going around in endless circles of talking about our talking (so to speak) or analyzing the situation in a clinical fashion, etc. As soon as this occurs, members are encouraged to switch into the free flowing Maba, spontaneously expressing their emotional 'acting out' of what is happening at that very moment. Here, we can see the Aaahh psychotherapy becomming fully functional and effective in our personal practices and group interactions.

Aaahh members, first on this rather personal and emotional level, learn to accept each other. However, there is also plenty of space to share spontaneous feelings of empathy and love for each other. These peak moments in communication, as you would expect, are quite apart from verbal expression, but are naturally expressed in non-verbal ways

click-1 | click-2 | click-3 | click-4 | click-5