Pathwork Center July 1992  I wasn’t going to the afternoon classes and after a few days Mantak asks me why not.  ‘Not sure I’m ready for the Healing Love stuff,’ I answer, ‘we Brits are a bit inhibited.’  (Plus I don’t want to give up my uninhibited afternoon tulip-plucking but that’s my little secret.)

‘Oh,’ he says, ‘so what do you think we do?’  I admit I don’t know, not having attended.  He spreads his arms and grins, ‘So how can you learn?’  No sex in class, I discover, to the disappointment of some and the relief of others.  Handy work, no relief, but get into trouble a few years later introducing a bit of reality into my own classes – although it eventually pays off on reality TV.

I suspend my afternoons in the woods until revisiting suspenders in Amsterdam and instead start learning the secrets of stemming the squirt.  Takes me a while to get into it – in fact the full hundred days.  Meanwhile he introduces the Magic Elbow and I relearn how different from my own is his concept of pain.  In those days I needed Valium at the dentist: he said in Chiang Mai they didn’t even give injections!

Seventy-five of us are here for Chi Nei Tsang training: several doctors, a sprinkling of scientists and many body workers, acupuncturists, healers etc and Mantak is bursting with enthusiasm, declaring, ‘In five years this will be standard practice in every hospital!’

Alejandro, a former heart-surgeon who turned to acupuncture and now moving into Chi Nei Tsang is amused at our thirst for detail. ‘Relax,’ he tells us, ‘it’s not surgery.  There’s over four thousand precise moves in a heart transplant – not much room for creativity…’

Alejandro was just one of the interesting people hanging out with Mantak and me at the Pathwork Center.

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Next week – Interesting people.

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