Both my kids were born without any medical intervention, and my daughter even here at home. I praise my children and myself lucky for it: when your baby finally pops up after 9 months, all you want to do as a mother, is to hold it in your arms, close to your heart, and sooth it in all its tiny wetness and nakedness.

I’ve had many discussions, even arguments, about this with foreign friends who are vehemently in favour of being sedated and hospitalised when giving birth, and who proclame you an irresponsible idiot when choosing to give birth in a natural way and a safe and warm home environment.
There is an unlucky tendancy these days to blame the relatively high rate of child death at birth in Holland to this ‘puritan’ system. I’m more inclined to think it is partly due to the huge amount of economic stress our society generates, and the way this is liable to alienate future mothers from their primary instinct to know what is going on with there womb child in their own body. Some other factors are the mounting age of future mothers in Holland due to the necessity to party and make a career before becoming a mother, and the fact that taking the pill for years increases the risk of birth complications and having twins.

In ‘our’ Western society it is a very rare thing to find a guide who dares to take a path that hasn’t been walked on before, a teacher who dares to acknowledge the unknown, a Man-child that dares to open up to the world as a whole being.

So keep up your good work, my fellow traveler, with heart and soul.

Being in the presence of Olivier and his sharing his depth of wisdom invited me on a journey inside myself to feel my feelings deeper than I have experienced thus far in my life of 50+ years. To connect all the way back to my ancestors, to feel my desires and to honor those desires; opened my body, mind and heart.

Olivier builds relationship that creates trust, respect and deep connection. He brings fun and humor to every thing he does. He knows how to generate profound presence to whatever is going on with you, so you can feel, and honor all those places in you that you have not felt or acknowledged. I left the workshop knowing myself has powerful, clear and excited about trusting myself and honoring myself in courageous ways that I did not know possible.

I would highly recommend anyone to give your self the gift of being in the presence of Olivier and especially to receive his gift of medicine for your soul. Thank you Olivier for seeing me and honoring me for right where I am. You truly are an inspiration to me, and honored to have had this opportunity to share this awesome experience with you. I pray there are many more! What you have to share with humanity is truly beautiful, fun and empowering.

Deborah York
Yoga Instructor
Massage Therapist
Esthetician
C0-Leader with Vision Force

Thanks for engaging and thanks for joining the adventure on Feb 20th & 21st.

What is obliterated? What is left after total obliteration?

What is fear? Where is it?

To me it’s so fascinating how language creates realities that only have reality in language, and then the body gets trained to submit to linguistic reality, instead of language clearly, articulately, and beautifully describing our experience. So there are language structures such as “Fear is…” that create the impression that there is some objective object called “fear” and that we can describe it and come to conclusions about it. But where is it? Where is this object called “fear”? Nowhere to be found because fear is not an object. We experience Life in its ever-sinuous, ever-transforming variety of flavors, contractions and expansions. And then we learn that, as we are little ones innocently experiencing and expressing, that some of our expressions and experiences trigger our parents’ joy and delight, and others trigger their anxiety, their “fear,” and all of the little labels that pop up like “stay out!” signs around a construction zone. The verb of our incessant experiencing gets objectified into a static noun that we can draw conclusions about in any which way we damn well please, especially if it please the “powers” (parental, educational, governmental - i.e. whoever can steal your cookies and hurt you too). We learn that fear is not love and all kinds of nonsense where language is simply pointing to language.

But if we dare to venture into our Experience, there is no clear line between fear and ecstasy, passion and hatred, etc. The river flows incessantly and in unison through rapids, eddies and shoals. We are this river. We are not our own enemies. Our experience is not our enemy. Fear does not simply pass, it IS passing, as we are, as all flavors and experiences are. When we dare to TASTE ALL of Life, we get the thrill of that taste in passing. This is the miracle of being human: we are set up to savor that taste in passing, and each of us does it in unique ways.

The greatest fear is to FEEL fear. Open yourself to fear and tell me if fear is still there. Open your musculature, your breath, your chest. Welcome fear and fear is ecstasy. As is hatred, rage, grief. We are not our enemies. Our experience is not our enemy. Most of these labels we use, “fear, anger, jealousy, grief” and the conclusions we reach about these “emotions,” simply point to our resistance to truly FEEL: we get trained to suppress, repress or express. But to FEEL is different: it is the willingness to experience this moment and to allow it to fade away too. Our experience is so beautiful and fleeting that we cannot even catch the hair of it, but we remain with the sensation of it in our entire being when we FEEL it, and surrender even that feeling (as noun) to feel again.

As you point out, when fear passes and I turn to see it’s path THERE IS NOTHING because it is not an object. My experience is not an object. I am not an object. I can neither disappear nor remain. I am passing ITSELF. I am one way that PASSING plays at having a face, a body, a life.

The other emotions: anger, jealousy, grief, they are anchored in the body. They have gifts for us in their expression. If they are not felt, acknowledged, allowed to move through, then a whole lot of energy gets used in pretending, stuffing, and repeating patterns.

Fear may hook itself into one of these others and keep them in place, festering. So letting the fear evaporate helps us meet these other emotions directly, richly, fragrantly.

Do you believe it is possible to be happy, no matter what? Is happiness a state of mind, complementary to fear, anchored in the body and having links into emotional states such as pleasure, ecstacy, contentment, desire.

Love and Fear are commonly known as the great opposites, the ultimate choice. But what do we know of either without their emotional flowering?

I will face my fear(*) and permit it to pass over and through me.

When the fear(*) has passed I will turn to see it’s path

There will be nothing……. only I will remain!!!!!!!

(*) also of course anger, jealousy & grief.

O, thank you. this begins to answer my question that I could not quite ask earlier, of being in relationship with someone who is still hooked into drama. Being in judgment of that person is the greatest threat to my presence. and finding myself on the defensive is the second greatest threat.

I can release my past, their past, and put my lips to the flowing now.
My best training is to put my lips to the flowing now of me.
The mind’s has a very small role to play here, it’s natural role as an organ of perception and awareness’

bottoms up!

Who “you” are is the one who is arising in my experience. To the degree that I am willing, simply willing, to be with THIS experience, to this measure I can be with “you.” It is not two.

Yes, as you point out, this emptying is the magic, isn’t it? Because the Past is dead, even the Present is dead. By the time we perceive it, it is already past. But Life itself is pouring over the Lip of the Unknown. We are that which is pouring over and that which brings its lips to taste it. Am I willing to drink it in and be drunken in and let it all through, completely, to drink anew?

The old refrain was “Know Thyself” and we went on compiling manufactured certainties.

I tell you, “Not-know Yourself and Bring The Lips of Your Entire Being to Taste Again!”

I like that. Well said, O.

Equally beautiful is the “wilderness of the heart”. I am doing some bushwacking, trailblazing, getting-lost-so-I-can-find-myself trekking through the wilderness of my heart these days, and I am in solitude, though not in isolation. Even when I must work alone, someone’s watching out for me, somewhere on the planet, or the ethers.

Now you remind me of the wilderness of relationship. It’s wilderness to powers of 10! A funhouse mirror of expectations to infinity! You know what they say about having sex with all your partner’s past sex partners? Any relationship is like that from the board room to the dining room to the bed room. We are all in relationship with everyone that person ever knew, especially the traumatic ones! It might be helpful to remember that, so I don’t take it all personally, because I am also as likely to be reacting to someone in my past as to the person in front of me! I am very curious to begin the practice of being “willing to venture THROUGH the discomfort all the way through to the vital connection”.

Humus. I am reminded of my worm bin. I love my earthworms.

“Are we willing to BE with each other, to simply BE with each other WITH and THROUGH the discomfort that arises if we remain in each other’s company for longer than the novelty?”

Spending a week with you during your/our course and following only your initial invitation to come “Empty as a simple clean teacup” I experienced the most marvelous sensations. I tasted unknown foods, drank unknown drinks, heard unknown ideas, moved in unknown ways ….. always emptying every notion of a past “i” that doesn’t like this or that. Being Empty, allowing the NEW experience to arise and digest itself ….. oh my it was so much fun! The only uncomfortable momentary experiences were when i overindulged and immediately felt the desire to Empty and come clean anew.

Yes, the experiences were novel and yet the movements of eating, drinking, walking, talking, looking, hearing, sleeping were of the ordinary variety that take place every day, day after day. What if ‘i’ were the seeming void of the Empty teacup “simply” (certainly not “easily” sometimes!) willing to BE the space where looking, hearing, tasting, moving, feeling happens?

What if “you” occur as an unpredictable, unknown Happening? What if I don’t “think” you into existence at all? Perhaps what may occur is a natural, ever new experience.