SPIRITUAL ABUSE AND THE SPIRITUAL PRACTICES OF CLAIRVISION
I very much feel like what happened to me at Clairvision is spiritual abuse.
Matthew Remski says: "Spiritual abuse is not special or more damaging than any other type of abuse. but it does carry with it a particular wound. While physical abuse can disrupt bodily integrity and sexual abuse can humiliate one’s sense of intimacy, spiritual abuse is an attack on hope and the capacity for mystery."
[
matthewremski.medium.com]
One thing that made leaving very hard was that I still wanted to have a spiritual practice. But who to trust? What practices to do? I even briefly considered joining other spiritual groups, but the thought of accidentally joining yet another cult was terrifying. Sometimes doing some of the CV practices re-traumatized me yet again, and of course that's not helpful... so what to do?
The Clairvision school would like you to believe that their practices are unique. One thing that really helped me was to look more deeply at the Clairvision practices themselves and try to determine which spiritual or religious tradition they had actually come from. Someone earlier in the thread said that they remembered CV acknowledging where the practices came from, but my own experience didn't match with that, so I started to look more deeply into that.
Below is what I've come up with so far.... Although I went through the instructor training, I was never an instructor, but the more I sit with this, the more it seems like the Clairvision work is appropriated from other traditions - they just take it and repackage it as their own with talk about how their "Technical Advisors" (Archive spiritual beings not in physical form) have showed them how to do the practices.
It helped me to see this so I could pick and choose which practices had actually worked for me and then do them from a more traditional standpoint (the original tradition, not the CV tradition).
-Throat friction - Ujjayi breath, not exactly the same, Clairvision's position in the throat is just slightly different from Ujjayi breath but similar enough to compare them
-Night Practice - this is essentially yoga nidra, but it could also possibly have ties to Tibetan dream yoga
-Neti - has been around for centuries as part of the yogic system
-Humming - used by multiple traditions including yogic and Tibetan
-Candle gazing (no blinking exercises) - yogic practice trataka
-Etheric practices in general (of which there are quite a lot) reminded me a lot of other practices I have done or read about in the Taoist tradition. Some of the etheric practices included:
etheric excretion
meridian tracing
feeling the energy between hands - vertically, horizontally, cosmic antenna
channel release
hand rubbing
feeling vibration in the 3rd eye and hands
tuning into plants/other living being vs inanimate objects
tuning in while taking a bath
tuning with while working with or eating food
releasing energy into the earth
absorbing vital nutrients from food just by touching it
yawning release
-Vision spaces - Tantra eye gazing practices
-Dowsing - is an ancient practice that was used by multiple different traditions
-IST (Inner Space Techniques) itself - not too different from other regression sessions I had long ago with a non-CV practitioner I'm sure Clairvision would call "New Age". Regression sessions are in no way new, and I didn't find IST somehow very different from other traditions like they wanted me to believe it was
-Fast yoga postures - hatha yoga sped up (this definitely never made sense to me, why would you speed up hatha? I thought the slowness was part of the why it worked the way it did, but it was a reflection of how everything in CV needs to be intense and fast moving)
-Uplifting - so far this is the only practice I found that had some uniqueness about it. Although, I do feel like the upwards movement is very similar to other movements in slow martial arts like tai chi and chi gung that go upward along central channel.
There are certainly more practices than just this within the Clairvision school, but this hits on some of the biggest ones. Again, if any of you have thoughts about where the Clairvision practices actually come from I would be interested to hear.