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I have recently started doing a bit of the six healing sounds again after over a decade not being able to do much of any cultivation practices because of severe chi deviation issues. I am struck by how incredibly effective this practice is for me at making me emotionally balanced for a period of time after I do it, and at gradually releasing emotional trauma so that it is healed and gone forever. I am also struck by how it seems to never create any issues for me around retraumatisation or emotional overload. With many techniques aimed at trauma healing (such as TRE for example) and with practices that might occasionally release a lot of trauma such as meditation, it is often an issue that too much unprocessed emotions comes to the surface at the same time, people feel overwhelmed and for a while they feel much worse than before. I had several experiences of other practices bringing something to the surface and it felt really painful and like to much for me to handle at once. I then either had to practice equanimity intensively to get through it or use other techniques to manage or just suffer with it for days or weeks until it subsided by itself. With the healing sounds when something releases it never feels like too much at the same time. It also feels like when something releases it always releases in a way where it is already in the process of healing and moving from negative emotions to some more neutral or positive state where those emotions are resolved. In therapy and with other practices I have often gotten old stuff to the surface and it is just painful in the beginning. Just the same old stuff in its old painful form with no healing having started yet. I then have to work with the material in various ways to start to make it heal and move. That often eventually works but can be a difficult process and it doesn't always work. Many times I have had to just save those feelings for later and try to just put my mind on other things until it goes back down into the subconscious again. With the healing sounds it feels like when the sounds start pulling something up it is always already on its way out or on its way to be digested. It kind if feels like there is some sort of energetic layer around the feeling that reduces the pain and creates a kind of natural equanimity with it. The only times I had any sort of issues with emotional overload and things becoming worse with the healing sounds was years ago when I did huge amounts of the same sound in one sitting while being desperate to heal and manic in how I was doing it. So I've seen that one can overdo things with the sounds but I really had to do it to obvious excess for any issues to surface while with other practices even small dosages could still create issues. Issues around overwhelming and retraumatising the nervous system through too much release and opening at the same time is a big topic in therapy and in trauma healing circles. I am wondering if other peoples experiences with the healing sounds matches mine. If it works the same way for others it is a golden tool for trauma healing. There are a lot of people working on their stuff that can hardly do any sort of emotional work without becoming dysregulated and having it backfire. Many others can do some but are still very limited and are walking a tightrope all the time. If there is a practice that heals effectively without those kinds of issues plaguing them then it would be an incredibly useful tool for many people. So how has the Healing Sounds worked for you? Does your experience match mine?

Silent Thunder posted a link to a video concerning body work approaches pioneered by Emilie Conrad and Susan Harper. I'm finding a lot of value in this line of inquiry. (A copy of Emilie Conrad's book " Life on Land" is on the way, I'll review that as I get to it)

Im posting this in the Taoist discussion because the technique I wil be introducing works with the energy system using a chinese acupressure technique and the person that taught it to me was a Taoist. If it belongs in another section, I'm sorry. So, to give more significance to this technique I want to tell the story of how I came across it and how I completely 360'd out of mental illness into a life of happiness and spirituality with it. It is called the emotional freedom technique. And it will probably seem a little goofy to you until you experience the benefits for yourself. Or accept the benefits instead of refusing to leave your paradigm, which I will explain later. The emotional freedom technique uses tapping on your acupressure points, repeating a phrase, all while experiencing and concentrating on the emotion you don't want, to remove the emotion you don't want, leading to insight, and of course the removal of your fear or anger, depending on what you're experiencing. So, a long time ago, when I was around 11, I came down with a fear of being around other people. I played the victim and was able to get out of school at around 12, locked myself in my room, played world of warcraft until 5 in the morning, slept all day, masturbated 2-4 times after waking up to pornography, thought extensively to the point of exhaustion, grew a hardcore hatred for people and the world, had large bags under my eyes by the time i was 13, slept 15 hours a day and was still tired when waking up, by the time I was 16 I was in jail for drugs, turned 18 in jail, got out, was still a miserable jerk. Then only when I was backed into a corner and had no way out, did I finally try this technique. I was in therapy seeing the same therapist since I was 13. He taught me the emotional freedom technique multiple times. I would go in, we would do a routine with the technique, and literally right before my eyes, after doing the technique, a gigant series of emotional traumatic nonsense would disappear completely out of reality, losing every single ounce of effect it had on me. Maybe a dislike for women, or an anger toward my dad, whatever it was, in those sessions I would get rid of something. I would unblock the energy. Then why didn't I get better you might ask? I didn't get better because I refused to accept that it had happened. It was incredibly bizarre. Fear I had toward confronting my dad would disappear, but I would play it off as a placebo or just completely ignore it all together and forget it had happened. Meanwhile, I still had a whole gigant load of terrible stuff I was holding onto that I could have gotten rid of with the technique, but didn't, because the idea that I could get rid of it by tapping on myself was too stupid to believe. It didn't fit into my belief system, and because of that, I didn't use the technique. Even though I had seen it work, I didn't believe it worked. But at some point after getting out of jail and moving back in with my family, it was either do something or this is the end. So, I did something. I used all of my anger and turned it into energy for meditation. For 4 days I did a routine of sitting and walking meditation for 30 minutes each. I made the intention to do it for 10, but it didn't last. However, during the first 4 hours, I got up to walk, and I realized that all of my rapidly changing moods were impermenent and not really a big deal. I also realized the nature of the body to surcome to injury and illness and broke attachment to it for a little while. However, I wasn't getting better fast enough, and something else happened. So I used my meditation motivation and started using the emotional freedom technique. At the time I was living in the ghetto. I was still an agrophobic, afraid to leave my house, especially in the neighborhood I was in. But to use the emotional freedom technique, I needed to bring up the emotions before I could get rid of them. So I went outside and sat on a chair on my porch. I started by waving at cars that drove by. At the time, that brought up incredibly embarassing feelings and I felt like an idiot. But I just tapped and they went away. Eventually I developed a routine of doing walking meditation in my front yard while tapping on myself while cars went by. This led to my dad making fun of me and embarassing my family, but I continued. And this started a whole stream of me purposely doing things that I was afraid of or felt stupid doing so I could get rid of these things. As I tapped and got rid of all of this trash inside of my body and mind, hate, fear, insecurity, I physically felt the organs and liver and the inside of my stomach moving and readjusting itself, as if recovering from a terrible accident. My body was healing before my eyes, my mind was changing as if I was transforming into a completely different being. All of the nonsense I believed was disappearing and being replaced by love. I started to walk around day and night with a backpack and county map searching for my fears so I could face them. Once a cynical basement dwelling terribly afraid child, I had become a wandering ascetic in search of transformation. Every feeling I got rid of was replaced by clear sight and peace. The things I once hid from I began to welcome. The people that were suppose to be helping me, I became their teacher. The more I told this to my therapist, the more we connected. It turns out he was a Taoist, and the techniques he teaches,not just the emotional freedom technique, had to do with moving with the way, unblocking energy, healing with shaministic theory. And I witnessed groups with him doing different techniques on people. Seeing other people go through this process is quite strange. As one problem fades, another comes up behind it. Sometimes they don't even know. Sometimes, even though they can get rid of suffering, they would sometimes rather just complain about it, because they have justified their own suffering to cope with it, so it is ok for them to suffer and they don't want to get rid of it. It is almost like witnessing the paranormal seeing a part of someone that they believe to be themself, that they have had for the last 20 or 30 years ruining their life, just disappear in the blink of an eye, then watch that person deny that it had happened, while at the same time admitting that their problem is gone. For example, there was a person that was terrified of ladders. He wouldn't go within a hundred yards of a ladder and if he did he would freak out. The therapist had him use eft, and he just went and climed up and down a ladder. So when they asked him how great it was that eft did that, like the freakin twilight zone, he denied that the technique did that and said he never had a problem to begin with. I was told this was because people live in a certain paradigm that they sometimes can't step out of. There was a story once of an advanced meditator that was having a heart attack. He called his son away from the dinner table calmly, walked him outside, and told him he was having a heart attack and to drive him to the hospital after dinner. So the son drove him to the hospital, and he told the doctors. They said it was bs, couldn't be happening, and they wouldn't treat him. So he ended up dying of a heart attack right in the hospital. And since it wasn't within a doctors paradigm to believe that someone could be having a heart attack while being that calm, they just ignored it. It's like the skeptic that argues with someone that healed themselves of cancer with qi gong. Even though this person had cancer, and as soon as she started qi gong it went away, it's outside of his paradigm to understand this. So it must be some kind of placebo he says. Dr david r hawkins described this as being on different energy levels. Or different planes of consciousness. Anyways, I've kind of lost interest in typing this. The whole point I think was to tell you how well eft works. If you have major emotional issues meditation can take a while to get rid of them. The eft technique can just blow them into the wind with a few rounds. So check it out and good luck.

Seated chi gong On-back tai chi therapy Taiji on-chair for health