Seeking a Peak Experience? 25 Amazing Tao Retreats (sent to elist)

I sent this out almost two weeks ago, before heading to Brazil – where i had a peak experience and break through in the Sun Moon Alchemy formula…..now off to holland where hopefully we’ll have a mirror experience, north of the equator.

anyway, for those not on my elist…..
Michael

——————

Is it possible that some places improve the probability of one having a “peak” experience?

My experience, and many other Tao cultivators, confirms that being in the right place at the right time with the right group of people vastly improves the likelihood of your having a peak experience. What’s a peak experience? I define it as any dramatic shift or sudden new awareness in your energy body. It could take many forms, heightened physical sensations, a feeling one is expanding into new dimensions, a vision, or a revelation about yourself or the larger cosmos. Peak experiences tend to leave an indelible imprint in one’s memory, even if you cannot fully recreate the intensity of the original experience.

I’ve been organizing summer Tao retreats for 15 years, since 1995, the year after Mantak Chia moved back to Thailand. I had never organized a summer retreat before thqt, but a major driver in my motivation was because I had so many powerful peak experiences during the previous 12 years that Mantak had sponsored retreats in the USA. I had no idea if anybody would show up when I first started offering retreats.

I still have no idea who or how many folks will come to the spiritual party we throw every summer. But I do know that many people who come will have a peak experience, simply because they are with the right people, in the right place, at the right time. How do I know this?

All you have to do is sit in the dining hall and listen to the conversation…a lot of it is about peak experiences people had that DAY. A typical person may have only one peak experience per LIFETIME. They chase after it their whole life, hoping to recapture its magic. They don’t know it’s possible to cultivate the probability of having many such peak experiences. The peak itself is spontaneous, and cannot be commanded to happen. But you can cultivate the probability of it happening by cultivating your energy body through movement and meditation practices that are amplified in a group setting.

Let me share with you the amazing peak experience I had immediately after I had finished teaching an Inner Sexual Alchemy (Lesser Kan & Li) neidan and qigong retreat in 1995 in Sedona, Arizona…..

Contents:
» A Bolt of Peak Lightning
» 25 Amazing Tao Summer Retreats: Transform Your Life!
»
» Photos of Heavenly Mountain
A Bolt of Peak Lightning
Let me share with you the amazing peak experience I had immediately after I had finished teaching an Inner Sexual Alchemy (Lesser Kan & Li) neidan and qigong retreat in 1995 in Sedona, Arizona. We moved Healing Tao Retreats to the New York Catskills the next year, in 1996. In 2007 we mvoed 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 desert and the sky was a blue dome overhead.There was not the slightest hint of a csight. 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. We had opened a deep portal to the pre-natal (Early Heaven) realms within our individual dantian, and it had attracted a heavy stream of “hungry ghosts” seeking completion.

During the retreat I saw hundreds of these beings from the low astral, ancestral fragments trapped with no where to go.They showed up at our retreat because they felt attracted to the clear light portal we had opened up within us. 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 it move through her lower dantian portal, the Gate of the Mysterious Female, the most direct route back to the primordial 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, the po souls (lung spirits) of humans that died, the part of them that was still attached to the earth and so chose to remain after death. Part of the alchemical Taoist work is to resolve these ancestral fragments.

But this is just background, to let you know what I was coming out of. It was not the peak experience I want to share.

I lay relaxing on my bed in the casita, feeling totally open and vulnerable from having “cooked” all week. 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 open state had let the explosion penetrate very deep into my body and psyche.

My shock gave way to anger, as I began to image that I had been unfairly violated. 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 over my locaation. 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 to put some 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 the alchemical path with the summer retreats. 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. And the lightning in this case was also probably designed to clear out lingering patterns of anger in my liver, which it had so quickly evoked.

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 permanent connections to the elemental powers of Nature – the sponteaneous Thunder Path revealed. Even though lightning is itself is a form of fire, it is associated also with wood/east/spring/thunder. So it is with peak experiences: their intensity fades, but the memory is so deeply imprinted it never goes away.

The Jade Goddess Dining Pavilion is where a lot of transformation happens at summer retreats….

Now I am not suggesting that if you attend the retreats 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 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, 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 and astrology to create abundance in your life. If you are really concerned about money, take his course on abundance.

Or take one of the many fantastic courses in Taoist energetic self-cultivation, ranging from Tai Chi, Bagua circle-walking, deep organ massage (Chi Nei Tsang), sexual yoga, internal alchemy, dream practice, Taoist Yoga or Medical and Spiritual Qigong Fundamentals of healing sounds, inner smile, rooting, and the orbit. Mantak Chia is going into one of his favorite topics, Healing with Planetary Spirits.

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. Or 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 hits the peak frequencies of folks. If you want the latest in Energy Psychology and Energy Medicine, Judith Poole has the ticket for your self-healing.

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 and have leaped over the fence of your old boundaries with their embedded fears and resistance.

The homepage to explore this all is:

http://www.HealingTaoRetreats.com