Michelle, it is so interesting, you know. The concept of a 'pool of pain' certainly seems logical, but like everything else, nature and consciousness, in this case, has its own method of storing things, etc, its own logic it developed through millions of years of unsupervised (lol) evolution, and it didn't turn out to be as 123 logical as an obscure psychotherapist in LA guessed.

There's a wonderful quote from William Faulkner which I've always loved: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

And another from Dogen, my favorite Zen master: "Everyone thinks time is passing them by. They're wrong. It stays right where it is."

Why am I bringing this up, hmmm? Well, that tells you why Primal Therapy works, but also not in the way Janov was guessing. The facticity of whatever might have happened to you doesn't magically disappear, but, as you take the edge off, it loses its damaging effect on your system, whether it's childhood trauma or PTSD from war or all the other violence we humans are so good at.

Primal Therapy was my start, but I soon realized there's a lot more to this nutty stuff. I call it "Energy Meditation" to distinguish it from Mindfulness, which (of course!) can simply be yet another attempt to calm oneself and ditch whatever those nasty memories might be. But the real meditators eventually luck onto this magic of time standing still. So, in my mind, yes, the content of whatever happened to us in childhood is real, but the mistake is to concentrate on the trauma and not the magic of how time actually works. Einstein discovered that if you're hitching a ride on a light beam, then time has stopped.

And that's why they call it Enlightenment.

OK, enough for one day.