I’ve been in Veldhoven (near Eindhoven in southeast
Netherlands) for the past few days, starting a new EFT Level 2 training
there. All the hotels in Veldhoven were
booked this time (there was a barbershop quartet convention, of all things!), so
we ended up at a funky little hotel in Steensel, a small village 5 miles west
of Veldhoven. On the way to and from
Veldhoven we passed a couple of signs directing travellers to Grafheuvel. “Grafheuvel?” I asked Anja. “Burial mounds,” she said. “Oh!” I said. “Graf = grave, and heuvel =
hill. You mean, burial cairns?” “Yes.”
The training went really well: Although new to me, the group was experienced
and enthusiastic, and over the next two days we got into a groove. The lectures, discussions and skill practice
all went well, with the able assistance of Anja and Kurt. Although it could use further fine-tuning,
the revised material on Collaborative Case Formulation in EFT didn’t overwhelm
the participants. And the Day 2
afternoon session on Alliance Ruptures worked really well, with most
participants bringing in and role playing clients they had been having
difficulties with. This pushed us all in
the direction of therapist self-development so that the skill practice
encompassed both trying out Relational Dialogue and exploration of therapist
personal issues that were being tapped into by the difficulty.
After it was over late Saturday afternoon and Kurt dropped
me off in Steensel, I went out for a much needed run, hoping to find the
grafheuvel. After about a kilometre, I
got to the little side road with the sign I’d seen before. I followed the road around several bends and
a large farm, finally taking a dirt road to the left until on the right I
reached a low mound surrounded by a larger circle of wooden stakes. Suddenly it was as if I was in Scotland
again, at one of the ancient burial cairns in Kilmartin or Arran. The wooden stakes would most likely mark the
positions of the original wood posts that such sites typically had at their
earliest stages, before the stones were put in place. Dusk had fallen, but I could still read the
sign that announced it as the Gendersteyn Grafheuvel, dated to the Middenbronstijd
(Middle Bronze age), 1850 -1550 BCE. The mound
was about 4 feet high, entirely covered in dirt. I walked around it, climbed onto it and stood
there for a few minutes in the gathering dark.
Behind the grafheuvel was the forest; in front the mysterious mounds and
buildings of the farm, itself possibly on the site of some ancient farm. I climbed down, finished my circumnavigation,
and continued my run.
The main road between Steensel and Veldhoven passed by more
forest, probably plantation, but not as densely planted as in Scotland. On the way back, I passed another grafheuvel
sign pointing to the opposite side of the road from the one I’d explored. I ran off along another dirt road looking
forward another ancient burial cairn, and after a few minutes of running, I
found a low rise of earth in the midst of the forest. There were no signs and it was getting darker
by the minute. Was this another ancient
grafheuvel, not yet explored enough to make it worth signposting? Was this whole area in fact another ceremonial landscape,
like the row of cairns that runs down Kilmartin Glen? (Further investigation confirmed this suspicion: more than
30 grafheuvels have been discovered in the area around Veldhoven.) What kinds
of unfinished business did ancient supplicants bring to these sites? Given the ancient, multi-layered nature of
human emotion processes, what parallels between their “technologies of the
spirit” and EFT might there be?
The Gendersteyn Grafheuvel.
By Peter Maas (2005), reproduced under Creative Commons license
[CC-BY-SA-2.5] via Wikimedia Commons. Downloaded from: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grafheuvel-Gendersteyn_PeterMaas.jpg
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