the Aaahh

Gharnapatee

(a communal experiential approach to communication and self-realization)

The Aaahh is an alternative path to enhance communication and is especially helpful to people who feel emotionally and intellectually apart, or may have difficulties relating meaningfully.

For many of us in the "West", to experience life more fully and meaningfully, we need community.

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The Aaahh, at its core, with the help of it's practices and meditations, and a group culture, is an approach to experiencing an improved quality of life and communication in all relationships. It is a way to realize our potential, and to create, on the collective level.

This way of life has its own psychology and philosophy, which can be revealed through the Aaahh practices and meditations. However, for those people who are intellectually interested, a prior basic understanding of this approach, combined with the practices, can be very helpful.

We believe that the currency of our life, and of human life in general, is meaningful communication.
When we have big problems with this, we need to look in the mirror.

girl boy plant small tree. for they like trees and want all world full of trees
because they like many many many trees!

Being Attentive, Being Aware of our Intentions, and Being Able to Connect.
(Cultivating the sense of "being", without necessarily having to communicate with ordinary words...and not necessarily deriving our main meaning from words and language)

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We practice mindfulness and awareness by cultivating our skill to direct energies (coming from within, or outside of ourselves) to our community framework and our culture - our steadfast background. Thus, we learn to become an empty channel to all these energies.

Community forms the hub for our meaning, and for a more inclusive culture. Its maintenance can be helped immensely by installing new, more 'community minded', socialization "programs" and allowing these new experimental and exploratory programs to reformat our "hard drive" into a softer and more flexible "operating system".

What is needed?

A realization that for us to be able to grow, we need friends - "my community".
We need a willingness to develop a greater level of commitment to practice, change and grow, and to form a more genuine, cooperative and communal mindset, which is less competitive, confrontational and adversarial.

What can be achieved?

Enhanced communication
Improved relationships
A sense of belonging

According to this approach, any practice or meditation, as effective as it may be, can have only a limited sustainable benefit if it is not practiced in an ongoing community culture and framework.
This realization must be a deep priority for each individual, who will then need to follow their desire to find and help create such a community.

We are social beings.

When we combine our strength with our community culture, we can achieve much more.
It means familiarizing ourselves with our emotional intelligence.
This intelligence is about the psychological morality and ethics of this very moment, what subliminal and semi-conscious signals we transfer to each other while communicating.
Are these actually positive, negative or neutral signals, and do these signals mean exclusion and alienation, or do they lead to bonding and unity?
Often, what takes place in a blink of an eye, we are unable to process properly or address quickly and effectively with words.
In a split second, we may find ourselves in either nirvana or hell. Many of us have a need in these instant, yet cumulative, 'mouse click'' moments to feel and know where we stand in our relationships.

5 Steps Towards:

Integration

Belonging

Community

By following the five learning steps given below, we can move towards helping to create a more spiritually 'integrated' community experience, and being a part of it. This, in turn, will encourage a greater 'sense of belonging' for each of us.

1. A realization that my intellect and my ego can take me only so far. Exploring, experimenting and learning with others will take me that much further.

2. I need to become my own person in an ongoing community or group and learn how to contribute. This will help me to balance the left/right sides of my brain.

3. With the aid of a Helper and Facilitators, and interactions with other members of the group, I will become more aware of my issues and commit myself to working through them, in order of priority.

4. I will adopt practices and meditations suitable to my individual needs.

5. With the help of the personal and community tools of Aaahh practices and meditations, which become fully activated in an ongoing group framework, I will feel like a part of the community and contribute in creative ways towards its spirit.

How can the Aaahh be useful to me?

The Aaahh can be applied to any problems we encounter through our life experiences. With the help of personal and group practices and meditation, it will enhance and enrich our capacity to deal with issues in an ongoing and supportive group environment. According to this communication approach, any meditation technique or practice has to be able to sufficiently include and address the most vital need of resolving our relationship issues, especially concerning our family and friends.

We may understand or analyze our situation, but this may not, at all, be enough. We in the Aaahh, with adequate safeguards and accepted boundaries, are encouraged to express freely, using only a maximum of 3 articulate words, everything we feel at any time. As previously mentioned, in the Aaahh, we acknowledge and accept a certain kind of, shall we call it, 'imaginative silliness' and 'improvised artistic expressions'. This is a legitimate therapeutic tool, for release, as well as a first step for helping to emotionally restore personal and community balance. In this manner, we work through our emotional issues by acting out or dramatizing situations. In such emotional engagement, we can "let off steam" and address issues. We may also complement this practice with mindful meditations. All this, we believe, can become the foundation of an ongoing group or community framework that provides a safe and supportive environment. In the very personal (and often semi-conscious) detail of our interactions, can lie our strongest and most subtle communication blocks, as well as unifying spiritual feelings.

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When we can, in the midst of ordinary communication, spontaneously and instinctively express ourselves, without using normal articulate language, we can experience a flow within ourselves, and in our relationships with others. Like this, we can bypass articulate fixations. Also, by such immediate action, we penetrate and shake up our linear reasoning and attitude. We start to negotiate with other members on this flexible, emotional, and flowing level, to negotiate any communication blockages that may have arisen. This kind of negotiation can be very helpful when strong conflicts loom. It will allow the parties involved in the communication to tune in, negotiate and naturally balance or enhance interactions with each other. In such a manner, we touch on mostly the subtle details felt, but not seen.

Through some of our practices, we are able to go from a full emotional engagement to total dissociation. This enables us to find a balance between these polarities with greater ease.

If issues can be worked out by discussing them, that's OK, as long as we don't continually regurgitate and repeat ourselves over and over again, going around in endless circles of talking about our talking (so to speak) or analyzing the situation in a clinical fashion, etc. As soon as this occurs, members are encouraged to switch into the free flowing Maba, spontaneously expressing their emotional 'acting out' of what is happening at that very moment. Here, we can see the Aah psychotherapy becoming fully functional and effective in our personal practices and group interactions.

Aaahh members, first on this rather personal and emotional level, learn to accept each other. However, there is also plenty of space to share spontaneous feelings of empathy and love for each other. These peak moments in communication, as you would expect, are quite apart from verbal expression, but are naturally expressed in non-verbal ways.

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The simple people say to El, the young-old Elephant: 'We live dreamtime, modern man live correct language, science-matter time.
Why no bring more dreamtime? Dreamtime ... oh dreamtime world please, come more!'

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~~Cultivating Emotional intelligence~~

Finding the right balance between the intellect and emotions leads to an experiential awareness of our intuition. This awareness can easily accommodate strong emotions, as well as feelings of a lighter nature.

In the Maba practices, two kinds of feelings and emotions will surface: First, our conditioned feelings and their culturally transferred manifestations, which tend to keep us fragmented and alienated. Subsequently, our Primal feelings - those deeper basic tribal emotions and feelings that long for unity, simplicity and belonging. These emotions do not contradict the feelings of mindfulness and non-attachment.

To allow these processes to take place, a community framework is necessary to balance and sustain us, psychologically.

Communication difficulties which arise can be addressed and resolved on the:

a) verbal level.

b) by the non-verbal and/or artistic level.

c) On both the verbal and nonverbal levels,
within a group setting or community gathering

The above processes and practices are not enforced by "do's" and "don'ts", but rather are encouraged within a flexible group culture which allows for spontaneity and individual expression.

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PERSONAL BACKGROUND AND THE AAAHH COMMUNITY.

Naturally, some of us may have a need to first talk and analyze our emotional baggage, and that is OK, too. Some people may find a need to work their way through all manner of psychoanalysis or psychotherapies. As soon as we semi-consciously or consciously become aware of our problems, we adjust them to the Aaahh framework and culture.

In such a community, our main drive is not competition, but rather to encourage more cooperation and creativity. Here, the spoken and unspoken codes of behavior and the psychological markers within our interactions are known, acknowledged and freely accepted. Our very personal, quirky and (most often) subconscious behaviors are recognized and accommodated on a broader emotional and social base. Thus, it is easier to handle problems in a responsible and democratic spirit. When our conscious, semi-conscious and unconscious facets are aligned, such a community can come into being, naturally.

The Aaahh practices can form the basis for a climate of creative and imaginative expressions, and implied comprehension. They help us to find more sustainable meaning in such expressions, rather than interpretation and communication being expressed primarily through emotionally overloaded language, or excess information. This kind of sharing in a group environment validates and fosters each person's abilities, skills and values, within an ongoing group culture.

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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 behaviors and speculative and 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 behavior 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.