TAU — opening passages

I have just returned from an immersive TAU weekend in the Ardennes, the fourth I have attended this year.

This time, I was struck by the number of people there living with serious physical illnesses, often at a relatively young age: Parkinson’s, stroke, cancer... Others came with less visible forms of suffering — addictions, blocks.

I remain convinced that health, like illness, is multifactorial. But I was deeply affected by what emerged in the circle: what we had held back or prevented for years — duties left undone, desires or talents to which we had given no place, feelings left unspoken, parts of ourselves set aside.

TAU does not lend itself easily to definition. It does not need one.

For me, it is a portal that works through the body.

Arianna, the founder of TAU, and her team work with bodies, energy, the unconscious, symbols, archetypes and the power of the collective — to restore movement where something has become frozen, and open the way to concrete changes in our lives.

This weekend, I had an experience of rare intensity there, one whose full measure I did not grasp at the time.

Occupying another place

Several times, Arianna called me into the centre of the circle, as a kind of emblem of healing, to make tangible what might be possible.

I felt like the embodied representation of a possibility of healing. The group was looking at me from that symbolic place. I felt it in my body. I could literally feel the collective gaze transforming something in me, reinforcing that possibility.

This movement flowed in both directions.

At times, I almost felt as though I were becoming a channel. As though, through me, the others could come into contact not with my healing, but with the possibility of their own.

It was up to them whether or not to embrace it.

Healing took on a tangible place in the circle because, symbolically, I embodied it.

This is what the infinity sign represents to me. What the group reflects back to me acts upon me. What I embody returns to the group, and may open something new in someone else.

Places shift. And when places shift, life begins to flow again.

This experience connects with a question that runs through my own journey: how many of our lives are organised by roles, by repetitive patterns that have become invisible through familiarity?

We can change an enormous number of things around us and yet continue to recreate the new from the old that lives within us.

Opening a passage may mean making visible what keeps repeating, so that something truly new can emerge. So that the old ceases, without our knowing it, to determine what comes next.

A surgeon present that weekend, herself facing a serious illness, said she had realised that all her technical expertise represented only a tiny drop in the ocean.

I found that image striking.

TAU does not claim to grasp the whole ocean. It opens passages.

TAU called to me along my path.

Arianna and her team now wish to open these passages to more people, particularly internationally.

I hope they achieve it.