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How I Came to the Aaahh

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The 3 main practices
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The simple people and the young-old wise elephant

The Osharam
(The paradoxical ecological being and communication artist)

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The Aaahh, click-5

In an attempt to further explain this rather unique approach, we offer the following words for your understanding:
In these extremely materialistic and individualistic times, we plaster over difficult issues until they erupt. It is vital for us to learn to negotiate hard-to-tackle personal behaviours and speculative/abstract ways of thinking. These block or trivialize the personal interactions and community life that exist on an unspoken, and fluid, emotional level.
People have been conditioned to use 'normal' language as a means to cover their "ego". For example: By only talking about or discussing issues, we are given a feeling of achieving control over our often 'unresolved' situations. Unfortunately, this process only serves to empower and sustain an unbalanced ego.

The Aaahh is an educational approach that can start from childhood, whereby behaviour and manners are naturally picked up from each other, without the need of an overemphasized intellect.

Authentic, yet apparently irrational, non-linear spontaneous expressions help to release blockages "en mass" and greatly enhance social interactions. We are primarily interested in the 'word-free' negotiation and transaction of meaning and the feeling in a situation. In such an exchange, the sole use of normal language communications is not effective enough to reach and sustain a level of meaningful bonding.

Working through our individualistic emotions and going deeper into those communal ones, which cannot be articulated with our normal language, is very liberating and uniting. With the help of these and other more structured Aaahh practices, we can work with our ego, playfully as well as more seriously. We learn to be compassionate and also the love of ourselves, and others, in more than just one way. This, in itself, can often be more effective than the use of words.

The founders of the Aaahh lay great importance on our 'sense of cohesive community', which according to them, is for us 'Westerners', our "higher self" , that is - our communal self.

In the Aaahh context, there are three gradations of community.

• The first level is for people who prefer to live very communally.
  
  
• The second level is for those who like to be less communally intense.

• The third is for those who, although wanting to live independently, do not want to be isolated, and still wish to retain a sense of community.

Basically, the Aaahh is a rather decentralized association of people intending to live, to various degrees, a certain way of life .

In this approach, the 2 main pathways leading to enhanced communication are:

a) The dynamic and the values emerging from the Aaahh practices and meditations. This forms the experiential psychology and philosophy of the Aaahh and can be explored or studied, if one is intellectually inclined.

b) A primarily nonverbal and tacit understanding/feeling of the community spirit which can be "picked-up" intuitively, if one is ready and willing to do so.

A number of practices of this approach open us up to a great verity or truth of our imbalances. To penetrate to these, we first simulate or exaggerate them until they are reduced to a size that can be effectively handled in a group culture. From the "accepted" viewpoint of "normality" this kind of psychotherapy may appear as somewhat "mad". However, we feel that only with a level of enacted madness can we penetrate our psychological "armor", but to coming to such a realization requires honesty. When this happens, others feel likewise and this realization can become "contagious".

This communication, when we feel so, allows us to know very little, intellectually. Look at a flower, and become the flower. See a playing child and become that child. For this, we do not need words, only maybe an exclamation such as "Aaahh", or other exclamation sounds. In similar ways, we can find a place in my and my friends 'imaginative reality '. Be in the wonder and the unknown, maybe even remember things which occurred before we were born. The Aaahh educates us to become emotionally "naked" and natural and relate from the heart. Here, very few normal articulate words may be necessary to "connect" meaningfully. Our articulate language will then reflect that, and 'words' and 'no words' will not have to be opposites.

The Aaahh communication approach teaches us ways by which we can put aside words, even the most beautiful words, and of course the words you have just been reading! We can go, when we need, into a mode of forgetting everything and just rest in the "here and now" , in the wonder of seeing the world without thought. When we, in the Aaahh, come out from such a 'rest', we have new tools to sort out the words/language/information that can either help or hinder our journey.

The main tool is the community culture we have helped to bring up and see grow. This is an ongoing work of love. According to this approach, anything that can help somebody has its place in this vast and yet small world of ours. We trust that this also applies to the Aaahh approach.

I hope you have been able to put aside, or see through, all the many words used, and instead, feel the childlike simplicity of the Aaahh and see that the clear little Aaahh blue sky is very much a part of the world's much bigger blue sky.

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