Taomeow

There's a hawk who teaches me walking qigong on occasion, and he told me that wings should, in the case of a human, be sprouted out of the outer thighs, not the arse as Nungali suggested. The hawk is not from a dream -- he circles around when I do my Longmen practice by the local lake, he probably lives nearby.

You didn't believe me when I said cholesterol stories are all bogus of course. When I have a moment, a "Taomeow on cholesterol" thread may be in order. Starbucks -- I remember the times when I was asked to sign petitions to stop it from aggressively putting out of business all little mom and pop coffee shops that used to light up some neighborhoods, though the coffee situation in the US was already tragic when I first came. I worked in the center of this world, 3rd and Madison in NYC, and you could get a bite of anything you fancied during your lunch break within 100 feet of anywhere you went in the Four Directions, but coffee the real thing was already limited to one vendor, who was a lot like the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld, in case you remember that episode where a rude psychotic chef made what everybody referred to as "the best soup in NYC." What Starbucks serves is a milk and sugar fix for the infantilized population, a tit to stick in the baby's mouth to get it to shut up. And the baby did. Oils in coffee are precious, they safeguard against neuromuscular disorders (working in synergy with caffeine -- you can't accomplish it by popping caffeine pills, you have to have the real preventive medicinal herbal decoction for this, real coffee). The trick is to drink it right away because they are highly perishable and go rancid rather fast from exposure to light, heat and oxygen. So "coffee" that has been sitting there at Starbucks for hours is indeed safer for being dripped and filtered, who wants peroxidized oils. But these same oils start out as a fountain of health. (This is the method repeatedly used in bad studies -- substitute the denatured version of a time-sensitive substance and then announce that the rule applies to the real thing. This is how vitamin C was "debunked," by the way. It was administered in a solution prepared 24 hours in advance, and this is oxidizing instead of anitoxidant!) Coffee oils stimulate the liver to increase production of superoxide dismutase, an enzyme that is the most powerful antioxidant known. (The largest amounts of it of all live creatures are produced by the bacterium radiodurans that lives in nuclear reactors -- it is what lets them -- it is this powerful.) This is why Gerson therapy and a bunch of other naturopathic traditions use coffee for detox enemas -- taken from the other end, it can increase superoxide dismutase release by 700%.

LOL... Did you find yourself among these?.. I didn't. Not even close. And what do you think of George Carlin's... er... sweeping generalization: "The more complex the Starbucks's order, the bigger the asshole?"

Spotless, you are about to convince me that all is lost and the world is really coming to an end.

Coffee has wonderfully brain-protective antioxidant oils that a filter will filter out, together with much of the "real thing" taste and smell. The whole cholesterol hoopla is one of the most bogus stories in medical history, however it's quite possible that non-organic coffee will very insignificantly raise one's cholesterol because one of cholesterol's many important functions in the body is to trap toxins to prevent them from circulating in the bloodstream and directly hitting vital organs. Coffee is one of the most heavily sprayed crops, alas, so some extra cholesterol may be working on inactivating the pesticides, has nothing to do with coffee itself. (There is no dietary source of cholesterol known to man that can raise it in the body by more than 5%. Toxic substances, however, do it easily -- the body invariably increases production of cholesterol trying to defend against those.) Acid-alkaline line of thinking, while made popular a while ago by some amateurs trying to "translate" Ayurveda into Western science (unsuccessfully), has no biochemical reality behind it, since the Ph of vital fluids -- blood, lymph, hydrochloric acid in the stomach, intrarcellular fluid, bile, cerebrospinal fluid, amniotic fluid, synovial fluid, etc. -- is maintained at a very stable and precise level regardless of whether foods you eat are "acidic" or "alkaline," and is disrupted only by far more drastic interventions, which are usually medical emergencies even if the deviation is very small. Herpes can be brought out by some free-form amino acids it likes to use for its growth -- notably L-arginine -- also by RNA if you take chlorella or spirulina supplements -- but coffee is not a rich source of either (or rather, the brew may or may not have negligible amounts of the former and definitely none of the latter.) As for temperature. Yes, absolutely, if you have the patience and the equipment, you can do it exactly right -- for this, you need a quartz sand heater, since it's not only the temperature but the even all-around top-bottom heating of the brew that matters. Coffee made like that in Yerevan was the best I ever had anywhere, oh god, the whole city smelled of it, they used to have those sand heaters on every corner, it was paradise... long ago, far away... The next best thing would be to simply start with cold water (which I always do and always advocate -- don't do it any other way, this ain't no tea, folks!) and if you have the time and the patience, put your burner on the lowest setting and let it heat up very very slowly and gradually. I do it when I have the time and patience, and some of my friends (coffee fundamentalists like me some of them, but a couple of them even more radical than me) do it every single time. I applaud them, but my first morning cup of coffee is not made like that, I just can't wait. The second, however, is sometimes made like that. Which brings me to the next point, a subtler set of perceptions you acquire as you cultivate your coffee skill. You learn to judge what's going on in your ibrik by the sound it makes. Coffee brewed on very low is silent at first, then it sings a bit, then it starts sounding like a tidal wave that is coming in slowly at first, then faster, then you know it's about to erupt onto the shore -- and if you have studied these noises well, you can make perfect coffee with your eyes closed -- even though you have no more than a fraction of a second to remove it from heat at just the right moment -- thrice.

I discern between two types of dreams -- the "I want" dreams and the "I command" dreams. "I want" dreams are dreamed up by my ordinary waking mind. They originate in my heart shen. "I command" dreams are dreamed by my dream-body, my greater shen and my ling, originate in my yin zhi and are acted upon by my dream-body's yang zhi. The wants of my ordinary mind are largely ignored by the dream-body. It has its own dreams. Some of them shock me when they come true, but I can never disown them even though I know that "consciously" I didn't dream of that. I seldom dare relegate an "I want" dream to my "I command" machinery, because I don't have full control of that and full understanding of its goals and methods. Once I threw a fishing line into the ocean fishing for some sea bass and a killer whale took the bait instead. I still don't know what to do with it. Can't pull it out, can't let it go. So who's caught whom is the question. When they say "be careful what you wish for," pay attention.

Muscles know everything. Or even, everything knows everything, it's a matter of tuning in and understanding the language. I know which day of the lunar calendar it is if I drop or spill something. A moment of strength above, or of weakness, is a moment of strength below, or of weakness. One sunny day a little kid in the playground by the beach randomly threw a little pebble across his shoulder. My car was parked nearby, the pebble hit the windshield. The kid was no more than five, the pebble, no more than five grams. The windshield cracked. Much can be learned from such occurrences. I studied the layout of the qi of that day with utmost care.

I've used it for years. Accuracy depends on several factors, and it is high with some practitioners and low with others. If everything is down pat, it is pretty high (as high as that of lab tests, for which accuracy also varies and is seldom if ever one hundred percent.) But the practitioner must be able to tune out his or her own agendas, which can interfere and throw off the results. You might be interested to know that at one point I even designed and implemented a double blind placebo-controlled study which I used on a skeptical subject. I put a dozen toxic substances in capsules (the subject, a chemist, had a lab that could provide them) and added another batch of a dozen capsules, with harmless stuff (green tea extract, bilberry and the like). Before testing I wrapped each capsule in a piece of paper secured with a rubber band, with the name of the substance written on the inside of the paper, invisible to me or the subject. Then I mixed them all together in a hat and got him to pick them one at a time and muscle tested each without knowing what it was. The accuracy was about 90%.

I try to do just that -- eat only unprocessed, organic foods ("local" ain't where it's at if I may submit, that's another myth... Is your tea local? Well, hardly unless you live in China, Ceylon or the like? No? Then where do we draw the "local" line? My coffee -- well, it doesn't grow in CA, so do I emigrate to Columbia or what?.. Going to China, when I asked people there what to bring for presents to give to some very knowledgeable TCM practitioners, they said, "Norwegian fish oil." Very non-local for them, still hard to get locally, but very useful in one's diet, particularly in central China that has no seafood to speak of.) This is better for my personal health than the alternative, but I am acutely aware that this solves nothing in the grand scheme of things. It is not just three or four times as expensive, which especially those who need good nutrition the most -- children, the elderly, the disabled, the disenfranchised, students, young mothers and fathers, people in low paying jobs or out of jobs, etc. etc., can't afford. But it is also getting to mean not much at all when the whole soil is drastically intoxicated and depleted and can't provide the nutrients OR fight off the toxins because this is a live organism that has been mortally wounded -- and it's getting worse every year, and exponentially. Or because the wind blows without asking permission to infringe on a patent and the pollen from GM crops gets on the neighboring supposedly organic plot, or... well, here's from my personal experience: Some years ago I decided to grow my own vegetables in my back yard in NJ. Organic, of course, and I've never sprayed anything on anything, nor "fertilized" with anything, ever (the neighbors kept asking, "what do you use, what's your secret?" and when I said "nothing at all, I have earthworms..." they thought I'm refusing to reveal some new and improved miracle-grow chemicals to them, and were annoyed.) My earthworms did absolutely everything, all I did was refuse to poison them and they thrived and my vegetables and flowers looked and tasted (the former, not the latter) like they were growing in paradise. When the earthworms crawled out after a thunderstorm to bask in the sun a little, I swear they were as thick as anacondas. Well, almost. So the "authorities" (shudder) came up with the West Nile virus-carrying mosquito scare and sprayed the whole tri-state area with malathion. They were at it every week. My earthworms died. Malathion manufacturers made millions upon millions. None of my very very local cucumbers were organic anymore, and neither were anyone else's in the three states, despite the label. They keep spraying malathion in the area every year ever since. Everybody forgot about the West Nile mosquito (whose purported sightings are way more elusive than those of the Loch Ness monster, and I have more reasons to believe in the reality of the latter), but malathion is there to stay. They spray, don't remember the figures, thousands of tons or millions, every year, because... well, because this is what people were trained to allow to happen because they have been made completely retarded by this and hundreds of thousands of other toxins administered. This is a vicious circle I don't know how to break. The more people are poisoned, the more retarded they get, the less ability they have left to realize they are being poisoned and do something about it. So, what would I do?.. Oh brother. I would make it a crime punishable by life in prison to use weapons of mass destruction on the environment, for starters, take it from there... I would make sure that those imprisoned for this crime eat ONLY Monsanto... currently they don't, they have their own sheltered organic farms for internal consumption...

The point is, it is not meat agriculture that is selectively murderous but the whole system of our agriculture is murderous -- and this can't be solved by not eating meat or bashing those who do by any stretch of imagination. Everything you eat, carrot or rabbit, if it is factory farmed, monsantoed, round-upped, genetically chimerized, monocropped, toxic and earth-killing and water-killing and requires vast fossil fueling for its production (yup, a lettuce muncher munches on agricultural machinery munching on oil munching on earth munching on all its creatures great and small, steak-ready or not), drats, I don't even want to finish this sentence. You (the generic you) want to feel moral and compassionate, wake the frack up, stop fragmenting your consciousness into soothing lies disconnected from disturbing truths, don't go vegetarian, go real. Fight termiator seeds, fight deforestation, fight corporate monsters suing farmers out of business for possessing GM crops when the farmers' own organic ones get contaminated by Monsanto's -- this qualifies as their stealing from Monsano, infringing on its patents!! -- legally!!!! -- do something that matters -- or, alternatively, just openly say, "I can't, the monstrosity is too big and powerful and I'm too puny and scared shitless," which would be accurate and honest, and eat your McDonald's OR your organic salad in silence, like your grandmother told you to eat, don't make any moral noise. Please. It really makes me sick to my stomach to eat lettuce if a morally propelled vegetarian puts a seal of approval on that. Poisons it with toxic hypocrisy for me. God I hate hypocricy.

I'm told the myth it busts is that vegetarians are kinder to the live creatures than meat eaters. This is the part I wanted Rara to check out, since his reasons for considering vegetarianism were compassionate rather than nutritional. I've read books of this nature before but so many and so long ago that it was easier for me to go with the last in first out impulse. Maybe it's not the best. I dunno. I do know from vast prior explorations that the message of vegetarians doing something morally and environmentally more sound is fucked up to the max.

I have to respectfully bail out. In addition to briefly citing my experiments on myself (not limited to the two I mentioned by any stretch of imagination), I've been doing nutritional consulting for some 15 years, have studied pretty much everything related to the subject, historic modern ethnic scientific medical biophysical anecdotal experiential etc. etc., which is why I normally avoid these discussions -- thousands of prior ones (including with vegetarians) make for a good sapientis sat. What caused me to get into Rara's thread was his explicit request for advice, and my idea (which you immediately proved wrong) that I can do something useful without getting involved in the thread, by just suggesting a book which people I know and respect swear by.

There's over 200 five-star reviews and one one-star review?.. Why do you think this one is more accurate than two hundred of the opposite ones? As for bacteria absent from the stomach, I have no idea what the author of the review means ascribing this view to the author, I would need to see the context. I am aware though of a huge controversy around the subject of which are beneficial and which are harmful. I remember when my mom, in the old country, was getting e.coli prescribed by a doctor -- it was thought of as beneficial back then. Now the medical consensus is it's pathogenic. Go figure. My own context for the book I suggested is two of my taiji friends who were vegetarians for years, for whom this read was the last straw that broke their vegetarianism. Before, they used to go to doctors trying to deal with assorted health issues, now they just eat differently (meat back in, gluten and dairy and sugar out), and the problems went away. The problems didn't appear overnight so they were not immediately traceable to dietary choices, and kept piling up gradually. But given these people's overall exemplary lifestyle (organic food only, daily taiji, etc.), narrowing it down to a mismatch between their ideology and their physiology took a while. And then ideology had to go. Me, I spent one year as a strict vegetarian, and one year on strict paleo, and I won't touch vegetarianism again with a six-foot pole, while paleo may be revisited. It was hard to maintain practically (god only knows how few foods are available to anyone who refuses to eat filler material and insists on actual nutrition), but it convinced me that quite a few people could solve quite a few common physical, emotional and mental health problems doing just that.

As someone who has run into "rare" and "less common" (per FDA) "side effects" of FDA-approved drugs every single time, I always go to the "side effects" section of any meds descriptions before even looking at their "effects." Typically it's one look followed by a verdict: no fucking way. (However, nootropics, a whole class of drugs approved in Europe and pretty much globally decades ago but not approved by the FDA because these, oops, actually make people smarter -- and, yes, without any side effects exceeding in severity those of a cup of strong tea -- these do decrease one's need of sleep, usually by about an hour. And that's, well, their "side effect," they are not primarily for this, they just do it on the side by improving the brain's utilization of oxygen and hemispheric communication. I've only had experience with an older generation nootropic, piracetam, way back when -- and I've known people, infants to 90-year-olds, who had been given this for years and fared exceptionally well. But this one is the only exception I know to the general rule that all medical drugs are monstrosities of "side effects" and many are mediocre or feckless in their intended effects as well. That's because piracetam (and, possibly, pramiracetam, a later more potent version developed from it, but this I don't know for a fact) is so close to some natural substances in the human brain that it is accepted without having to break in and demolish stuff there -- unlike pretty much all other synthetic substances with CNS activity.) So here goes for Modafinil (sorry it posted in straight lines -- was supposed to be a table with two columns, disorder brought about by its use on the left, severity on the right): The following side effects are associated with modafinil oral: Common side effects of modafinil oral: Inflammation of the Nose Less Severe Indigestion Less Severe Backache Less Severe Dizzy Less Severe Chronic Trouble Sleeping Less Severe Head Pain Less Severe Feel Like Throwing Up Less Severe Diarrhea Less Severe Nervous Less Severe Anxious Less Severe Infrequent side effects of modafinil oral: Depression Severe Lazy Eye Severe Problems with Eyesight Severe High Blood Pressure Severe Abnormal Heart Rhythm Severe Abnormally Low Blood Pressure Severe Throat Irritation Severe Loss of Memory Severe Fever Severe Chills Severe Voluntary Movement Difficulty Severe Fast Heartbeat Severe Chest Pain Severe Cannot Empty Bladder Severe High Blood Sugar Severe Confused Severe Mood Changes Severe Widening of Blood Vessels Less Severe Dry Mouth Less Severe Incomplete or Infrequent Bowel Movements Less Severe Abnormal Increase in Muscle Tone Less Severe Flu-Like Symptoms Less Severe Involuntary Quivering Less Severe Loss of Appetite Less Severe Excessive Thirst Less Severe Heart Throbbing or Pounding Less Severe Throwing Up Less Severe Numbness and Tingling Less Severe Rare side effects of modafinil oral: Hyperactive Behavior Severe Inflammation of the Middle Tissue Heart Muscle Severe Asthma Severe Painful, Red or Swollen Mouth Severe Hepatitis Severe Bloody Urine Severe Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis Severe Stevens-Johnson Syndrome Severe Abnormal Peeling of Skin Severe Hives Severe Small Skin Blister Severe Rash Severe Visible Water Retention Severe Trouble Breathing Severe Abnormal Liver Function Tests Severe Life Threatening Allergic Reaction Severe Giant Hives Severe Decreased Blood Platelets Severe Deficiency of Granulocytes a Type of White Blood Cell Severe Decreased White Blood Cells Severe Increased Eosinophils in the Blood Severe Behaving with Excessive Cheerfulness and Activity Severe Mental Disturbance Severe Having Thoughts of Suicide Severe Feeling Restless Less Severe Aggressive Behavior Less Severe Itching Less Severe Excessive Sweating Less Severe Taste Problems Less Severe Gas Less Severe Feeling Weak Less Severe

I could and would do this if nothing interferes. Voted for the house. Will teach an Armenian coffee workshop every morning if there's a stove.

Since you've asked for advice, I recommend this book, written by someone who was a vegetarian for 20 years.

Thank you too, Spotless. Regarding "left" -- I think it has to do with the structure of deep reality. What taoists call wuji, primal unity, tao-in-stillness, gets a first impulse of motion from the third trigram... (sorry... a trigram is an arrangement of three original forces of creation. The number of these original forces is eight, the Eight Trigrams, aka bagua. Each of them is comprised of three yin or yang "portions" -- two of them are, respectively, all yin and all yang, then one is two yang and one yin, then one is two yin and one yang, and there's also a sequence to the appearance of yin and yang in each trigram, i.e. the one with two yang and one yin can have yin appear first, followed by two yang, and another with two yang and one yin can have yin sandwiched between two yang... it's better illustrated by the diagram of the Eight Trigrams, which can then be analyzed in depth for the rest of one's taoist life. ) Now then, directions of wuji, primal unity, are not arbitrary, they are inherent in the structure of deep reality. True yin, North, is below and true yang, South, is above. (Yang ascends, yin descends.) This reflects in our manifest world's arrangement with the sun above and the earth below, and in scores of its other spacial peculiarities. So, original Thunder strikes in the East (which happens to be on the left since North is below and South above -- unlike on our Western maps where the world is topsy-turvy). It sets the three forces in their eight arrangements in motion, and the motion unfolds in what appears to be a circle but is really a spiral. The spiral goes clockwise, to the right, and unfolds the cycle, brings Spring, then Summer, etc.. This is tao-in-motion, taiji. This is the manifest world -- life. To roll it back into non-manifestation, the opposite spiral folds it all in, the counterclockwise one. It swirls to the left. Nonordinary states, one of which I described, can make one aware of these "massive dynamics." That's what happened to me -- all the concepts were a later afterthought, the original thing was just sheer perceptions. I wasn't thinking anything while I was perceiving this, I was using one of the abilities of the moment -- uncommon sense.

Thanks for asking. So, OK, picture a shamanic ayahuasca ceremony in the depth of the Amazonian rainforest, at night. The air is suffused with moisture, which does not sap you of energy unlike our common "humidity" because its oxygen content is much higher, the air feels very different from what you're used to, it is charged with possibilities, is the best way I can describe it. It is more strongly "there," not in an intrusive way like strong wind but as something almost as substantial as water, only you can breathe it -- and it also makes it easy to remember how you did breathe water once, in the womb, in the primal ocean. It's air that has yin, lots of it. It sets the scene. It's pitch black, the ceremony takes place in complete darkness. You are not allowed to strike a match or use a flashlight. There's a reason for this. The physical reason is that ayahuasca of sufficient potency temporarily suspends communication between your light receptors and your visual cortex, in other words your eyes stop talking to your brain. This lasts for about 20 minutes, but you don't want to freak out if you turn on the light and see that you can't see it. Freaking out is not a good idea. For the rest of the time, the nonphysical reason is that you want to go into the depth of yin -- there, you will see true yang arising, born of true yin (well, there's no way to avoid the special terms here, sorry... ...yin and yang are not interchangeable with any other concepts, much like you are not interchangeable with me. I'll do better with other terms I hope.) So any light you might see that does not arise out of the depth of this fertile darkness is false, superficial -- and it will interfere with the true one. In complete darkness, things start happening -- if you can call it that, it's not "happening" in any yang sense, it's coming into the depth of the hidden, or rather being pulled there. The hidden things do not become "visible" in the visual sense, not at this point -- instead, perceptions kick in that are usually blunted and shut down by visual input and by the habit of interpreting non-visual input visually. Many people "visualize" things, not many bring stuff out of nonexistence by other means. These other means are now going strong. Most of them are not possible to put into words, but one becomes prominent and surprises the hell out of me: the spacial directions of life and death. Never before did I believe that the "left hand path" and the overall cautions against things "to the left of center" have a basis in reality. But they do -- to the left lies death, nonexistence that is much more complex than any "just nothing there" can be, it's not nothing, it's not something, it's a sweeping pull, the whole world is falling to the left like sand in an hourglass, unstoppable. The sand of dark nonexistence pulls you deeper. Nothing bad is happening to you, but the terror of falling into the ultimate unknown stops your heart. And it is not yin, death is not yin. It is dynamic. It's a pull, it moves, it's a swirling necessity, resistance is futile. For a mere confused mortal, that is. Then the shaman notices I'm pulled into the dark nothing of death and builds a stable (yin) bridge for me to come back. He uses a rattle to make sound, tobacco smoke to align along the waves of the sound, and the smell of aqua florida which he had me smell before the ceremony and remember, so now I know what for. He uses these three yang phenomena to flip into yin and stabilize into a bridge. Together they form a something within the nothing, a very ephemeral bridge that goes to the right, over and through the dark left-slanted nothing. I -- my consciousness -- use the bridge to come back. This happens in the first hour. There's many more hours of yin explorations ahead of me. I was in true yin for three weeks nonstop. So it would be hard to write a post about that... She suggested that I write "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Ayahuasca," but I'm sure she was being sarcastic, or at least humorous. At one point I was taken to the yin core of the sun... That was the single scariest event of my entire life. I chickened out of it, and begged Her to take me back to earth or even the underworld (been there too, there's tons of yang creatures trapped there, incidentally, in case anyone's been wondering), the yin of the sun, the true dark sun, was just too overwhelming. Another thing that became clear. Thoughts all go to the left. Thoughts are the force that pulls the world to the domain of death. They are like steps, one step at a time you go there all your life. All your life's energy gets dragged there, yin and yang alike. The senses that reveal this are not normally present, not in any state I'd ever experienced before (and I've been around the block before.) So, that's a glimpse of the Dark Mother for you... She has everything, and light is one of her babies... So, there's many many levels of perceiving yin, and to say it is "feeling a certain energy" is perhaps partially true for some situations, but mostly it's not "feeling" and not "energy" -- it's "being it" that reveals what it is... nothing short of that, really. But it leaves you with a pattern of recognition, so every glimpse of true yin you get, you know, been there, been that. And this feels awesome.

I believe a depressed person is lost in false yin. Didn't someone say that "depression is anger minus enthusiasm?" That's your false yin in a nutshell. Lost in true yin feels awesome. I was lost there once, in Peru... I wasn't depressed in the least, I was feeling awesome in the primary sense of the word -- ecstatically terrified.

I have learned much about feeling yin directly from my taiji teacher. I described a bit of the approach in my PPF. It is indeed not easy but only because the whole indoctrination of our civilization, physical and mental alike, is about promoting, cultivating, selectively supporting yang. I don't think mental models can work at all until physical ones are reformed but physical ones can only be reformed if pre-conditioned ideation is suspended -- hence the difficulty. "Mental" and "yang" are synonyms. Yin is not mental. You may have trouble feeling it -- but you have no way of thinking it. The good news is that yi, not a thought but a vector, an impulse of intent, stopped just short of turning into a thought, produces it with ease. Yin is first and foremost 'open receptivity," so, e.g., learning to open your joints is a lesson in feeling yin. Few modern people can open their joints without years of proper training, few can melt the hardness, stubborn determination to be "just so," tensions in the way of feeling yin. Then there's mind-fracks from ideology that are also in the way. I wrote about "endarkenment" as the yin alternative to "enlightenment" years ago, but I can't really explain to those who are chasing a radioactively glowing cat in a brightly lit room that she isn't there.

Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui, by Karen Kingston. I've read it before, it's one of those I come back to. No hard-core Xuan Kong feng shui in this one, an ideal book for a beginner -- feng shui light. I am not a beginner, but Kingston emphasizes things even a seasoned FS practitioner may overlook, which is great -- it's been a while since I had a nagging grandmother, I needed that. The bulk of the message is, get rid of clutter -- all clutter, in all areas of your home, office, life. SImple but not easy. I am naturally messy and hate the mess, so it's a constant practice, meditation, roll up your sleeves battle against self. I believe only sterile, cold, obsessively orderly environments are worse than messy ones -- the golden mean is, as usual, elusive and involves a conscious effort toward balancing things out. It may surprise you that a book on the subject matter of this mundanity actually comes across as passionate, but it does, and I like it -- I like it when an author actually cares about her subject (without getting overly agitated -- this, I don't need.) The basic FS premise -- outer and inner environments are one and the same, your environment does not just reflect who you are, it is who you are, an extension of your body and soul into your style, your strengths and weaknesses, ultimately your overall psychophysical health -- is sound and correct, of which I've had many chances to be convinced. The last thing that matters is how expensive or how cheap things are that surround you -- the kind of connection (or disconnection) with them you maintain is what matters. Look around -- does your environment reflect who you are, who you used to be, who you want to be? Does it inspire you or drag you down? Does it make you feel safe or threatened, proud or ashamed, calm or anxious? It's not always obvious, like I said, you need a conscious effort to cultivate precision of your psychometric skills. E.g., I have a very large, very beautiful Italian ceramic bowl in which I keep fruit. It sits in a prominent spot, I see it every day, I use it every day, it is gorgeous and tasteful, and the only problem is, I got it as a present from a person I'd rather not remember, under circumstances I'd rather forget. The fact that it's been several years and consciously I hardly ever remember the downside of that bowl, according to this book, matters little: my unconscious still knows. Always. Her advice under such circumstances is, get rid of it. She makes a very convincing case, but I'm still reluctant. So, this object is not a simple thing in my life, per Kingston, it is an embodiment of an inner conflict... So, I'll go over things in the book again ("doing," not just nodding my head), and then maybe enough qi will get liberated to give me the courage to take another long hard look at that beautiful bowl and put it on craigslist maybe?..

If this was really true, one would expect nuns to age the least and remain the healthiest?.. Not the case. The reason some women (not all) bloom during pregnancy is an influx of yin fluids provided by the fetus. You give the growing baby adequate nutrients and nurturing emotions, he or she will thank you by converting them into what you need to keep up the good work. It's natural alchemy at its best. And the reason some women (again, not all) age after giving birth is that in modern times the set-up often compromises phase I -- pregnancy, botches phase II -- labor, aborts phase III -- nursing, then phase I\/ -- elevated social status and respect (a morale booster for new mothers of indigenous cultures, beneficial for their overall well-being), then phase V -- full immersion in dynamic yin-yang interactions (an infant or toddler is very yang, a mother taking care of him or her full time would naturally maintain a very yin, very nurturing state -- instead of interacting with her child on the side, on the run, in between her typically stressful work schedule demands), and so on. In other words, what you observe is what abnormal social situations do to women -- and, by extension, in a never-ending vicious cycle, to their children, men and women to be.