Flow research is a very interesting field in modern neuroscience. One of its basic findings is that energy follows attention. If we focus on worry or fear, our energy follows this direction. If we focus on a healthy rhythm of creating and releasing energy our life will follow this direction. This has huge implications for our lives. Creating Shangri La was an example of moving with my flow, not letting my fears stop me.

Often people who come here to Shangri La show their appreciation about how beautiful this place has become, the houses, the gardens, and sometimes they ask “How did you manage to create all this?” Obviously a lot of work and energy has been put into the place over a prolonged period. Soon we will celebrate our 25 years of Shangri La next summer, and people assume that there was a plan, and a lot of effort to materialise this plan. And this is not at all how it was.

It had been my vision to create a Meditation center in the countryside for a long time, and to live there, but I didn’t have the means to make this happen in Germany where I lived. But falling in love with a woman from Czech changed everything . Suddenly what was not possible before was possible. What was needed was the courage to say yes to what the flow brought in this moment. Of course there was a lot of work to be done, and patience, commitment, trusting oneself were tested many times, but the reason why Shangri La exists today the way it exists is, that it was happening as part of a flow for me on my life journey. And things developed step by step. Moving towards a direction that was right for me, with the flow, not against the flow. Without a given picture of what it should like in the future.

What was of big help for me on this journey were the experiences I made in Hypnosis work. Learning to relax deeply, and find a positive attitude towards my Unconscious. I learned to bridge the gap between Unconscious and Conscious, making friends with the Unconscious instead of fighting with it. I started to accept and integrate the obstacles there, rather than fighting with them. The subjective perception of separation is deeply engraved into our psyche, and separation creates an attitude of having to struggle through life, using effort. The single biggest source for that is the loss of contact with essence and its aspects when we were very small. This we work with in the Essence groups

When we meditate, we meet the individual and collective structures of our mind. This ongoing mind activity of identifying with one thing, rejecting another, jumping back and forth between Past and Future, creating a rollercoaster of hopes and fears. Thoughts jumping back and forth between money, sex and food. Only when we start to be able to watch and not choose this mind traffic slows down eventually, and we can relax. Many meditators meet these challenges which our mind creates. And it is easy to end up fighting with the mind, trying to control it. But then we are back at the starting point, “I want inner peace, I don’t want these thoughts”, the eternal duality creating tension.

Osho talked a lot about Meditation, about that it is not possible to go into Meditation and silence from a negative mind, from a tense mind. And that this is exactly what Hypnosis can give us. First we need to move from a negative mind to a positive mind, and only from a positive mind we can move into No-Mind. This literally is a re-education of our Mind. It is amazing to see, what can happen when strength and experiencing oneness are connected. My life experience is that the flow exists, but we need to learn to perceive and move with it. This we learn in Meditation. Integrating the obstacles in our mind and expand into this open field of awareness and perception is what we work with in the oneness experience.

The picture I have for this is wave surfing. One needs a sense of balance, strength, timing, and courage to meet the power of the waves and move with them, but the power comes from the wave, and the flow comes from moving with the wave.