HE ALTH & HE ALIN G


Resolving trauma with chi Another good reason to take up a chi


practice, if you don’t have enough already, is its therapeutic benefit. You can eventually build such emotional and metaphysical strength that you can look your most painful memories in the eye, both the things people did to you and the things you did to other people, and think ‘so what’. According to Chinese medicine,


traumas are stored in your body in the form of toxic energy. Drugs suppress this, but when you quit it will come forward. Your life might suddenly seem to turn to crap, and you feel as if ‘trouble follows you’ (I hear this all the time from clients). If you don’t understand why this is happening, it is very tempting to go back to drugs to handle it – but this will just make everything worse. Despite what I said earlier about


unhappy childhoods and addiction not necessarily being connected, I do treat people who became addicted as a result of self-medicating for emotional or physical trauma, usually experienced in their early years (it’s just not the majority of drug users who start this way). It’s not unusual for me to see people in their thirties or forties who may have only had seven or eight non-medicated years; usually their first seven or eight years of life. Plenty of people have terrible


experiences in their childhood, but they don’t take drugs. They might suppress these memories or develop some other coping mechanism, but they are still ‘here’ in ordinary reality. If you used recreational drugs to self-medicate for pain and trauma, you have chosen a different option. Talk and mind therapies work within the framework of being here, but your recovery has to include a method to process trauma within the framework of disassociation, of being ‘elsewhere’. Chi practice puts you into an altered


state; it takes you into the realm of ‘elsewhere’. The chi postures clear blockages in the pathways in the body where the toxic energy of past traumas is stored – mainly the thighs, legs and lower back – allowing it to release. It’s no coincidence that activating these muscle


36 JULY 2016


Daily chi meetings Finding your cosmic self after drugs is


not an easy path. All the gurus, yogis and Daoist masters knew this. This is why they developed chi practices. Do a chi practice every day, otherwise you’ll feel like you are on your own and the desire to relapse into your old negative or destructive behaviours may be overwhelming. The chi practice makes you feel supported and connected to yourself, to other people and to your soul family. You want your chi practice to be


groups is a core component of both tai- chi and yoga. The idea is to tune into the painful memories or feelings as you do your practice and you will slowly release and transform them. So, if sitting on a therapist’s couch


feeling like a loser, or sobbing as you revisit every terrible incident from your past, isn’t your style of therapy, or you can’t face doing this yet, the chi practices are a great alternative. People spent thousands of years working these systems out, and they are extremely effective. I have been doing chi practices daily for more than 30 years now and I can’t emphasise enough the power of chi to change everything – to resolve painful memories and to heal. Even if you didn’t start using drugs to


deal with pain, recreational drugs often end up being used for this purpose as, regardless of how happy and cheery you were when you began. Once your intake reaches a certain level you are creating major imbalances. At some point you switch from using drugs for fun to using them to suppress symptoms. This pain will be stored as toxic energy in your body and when you quit, it will come forward. The path after drugs is the liberation


of the soul, the processing of trauma or karma, the merging of yin and yang. So make chi your priority and your lifestyle becomes an ongoing therapy, processing not only your past but also the ongoing physical, emotional or spiritual hurdles that are a natural part of life on this interesting planet. Make your lifestyle therapeutic


playing the role of a friend. This might sound weird, but if you’re a committed user, drugs probably felt as if they were your friend. Try to recapture that relationship with chi. None of us is here to go it alone. We are supposed to see and feel the


path ahead, and feel supported as we follow it. The chi practice will do this and connect you to Dao. So learn the arts and fight to stay on the path to a future of ecstatic freedom. Do it now and don’t ever look back. This article is part of a series of


articles excerpted with permission from The Rebel’s Guide to Recovery by Jost Sauer and published by Centre of Dao, Maleny, Australia. Jost addresses the issues involved in overcoming addiction and gives practical, life-changing advice based on his own experience and that of his many clients. n


The next chapter will be published in the next LivingNow. If you want to fast forward your life, the entire book is available for download from Amazon.


Born in Germany in 1958, and living in Australia since 1981, Jost is an ex speed addict, dealer and deserter, turned drug and alcohol


counsellor who then became an acupuncturist. After lecturing in traditional Chinese medicine for a decade and running numerous health centres, he developed his revolutionary recovery programs and his rehab program is now available on the Sunshine Coast, Australia.


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