I made peace with Venwoude and next week I go attend a one day Intro Wild Tantra there.
(Alas, the 4 day follow up is fully booked).
Thirty years ago I did a weekend Tantra with the now late Ted Wilson.
The story:
I’m back from another two week retreat with Isaac Shapiro on Venwoude.
I have come there annually now for 15 years in a row.
All this time I had a love/hate relationship with this Venwoude, coming out in words like:
I only come there when and because Isaac is going there.
Two and a half years ago I wrote a rather critical open letter (that is for a change not on the web and this is not to change afaic).
In this I expressed my criticism on some subjects.
(Mostly on Marc Gafni, the new leader of the gang and part of the Ken wilber clan, from
which I stay instinctively on a distance. Of course it comes on my path once in a while
and then I write about it. Search for instance for Wilber in : À la recherche du temps
perdu, or Meji and Ramji 3).
After an emotional reaction of them we kept silent since.
The week before I went to the mentioned retreat, a friend wrote that she was going to attend a workshop on Venwoude and the upcoming feeling of jealousy surprized me.
I answered like this:
“Ik voel me opeens heel jaloers op je. Dat je een plek als Venwoude naast de deur hebt.
Jeetje , ik moet janken als ik het opschrijf.”
During the first days of the retreat I felt it as a hindrance that I had no access to Venwoude, at least fealingwise.
I had finally to make peace with this place. I made up my mind (the mind made up itself) and asked the guy that had received a cc of my letter how to do this.
Clear eyed he said: you can make an appointment for a meeting any time.
It worked out that I spoke indeed to the woman that had received my letter and also fully clear eyed (all those years I had never been that close!!) she said that according to her it was done already, nothing left: We al make mistakes, but we make them in the right direction.
This was a bit to fast for me I guess, so I asked to have a short meeting anyhow.
We did and it was good.
I told her what had happened in my system (to use the current jargon of the retreat, where
the system stands for the nervous system), when it comes to Venwoude.
Thirty years ago, I did a weekend Tantra with the late Ted Wilson.
(Ted only later founded Venwoude).
During this weekend, it was the eighties, Ted was instructing us how to provoke the orgasm reflex (bio energetics exercise), and giving the tempo by beating up a pan with a wooden spoon. Those were the days.
The last night one of his sannyas assistents seduced me in her bed and the result was that some time later I ended up in Rasjneespuram!!
I have imported a report of this part of my story from the web to myblog yesterday.
So only now I heard that also for Ted it has been an investigation how in god’s name so much violence could happen where a enlightened being was around.
The happening in Rajneeshpuram alieneated me for decades from the sannyas movement as such. Of course there were contacts and relationships with individual sannyasins.
And the content of what Osho was speaking I only discovered long after the Oregon shock.
Anyhow, after my decion to contact Chahat and before we actually met, I looked on a wall with flyers about all that was offered there. The only thing that pulled my attention was a day Wild Tantra Intro.
So, from tantra to wild tantra in thirty years only.