karen

This guy is flow and focus.. Jake Shimabukuro And for unusual.. This guy embodied it all.. Michael Hedges

Lots of possible causes, but one method that covers a lot of bases is Palming. (See Bates, and especially Meir Schneider's work with this). Rub palms together, place over eyes gently, and visualize blackness. Do this for a few minutes at a time as often as possible. I sometimes prop my elbows on pillows so I'm not creating any neck tension. An eye mask is great too, the kind that blocks all light.. I love the one I have called the Bucky eye mask . Schneider says it's best to palm using your hands, but for sleep and when you want to relax for longer periods of time than you can do the palming, the mask is great. Also if you're at the computer for long periods, look out the window periodically and focus on something in the distance. Avoid eye irritants like chlorinated water. I have a shower filter and try to remember to wash my face with that water rather than from the sink. If you have dry eyes, an Ayurvedic remedy is to put a drop of ghee or sesame oil in the eyes.. I'm a little skittish about putting things in my eye, and haven't tried that, but it's traditional and I'm sure it's safe. Another Ayurvedic remedy for excess Pitta in the eyes is to wipe the eyelids (while closed) with aloe vera juice (very cooling) or rosewater. Just a very small amount gets into the eye, and it should be comfortable. Cod liver oil for Vitamin A. (in the mouth, not in the eyes Eyebright herbal infusion, or you can use a tincture if you boil off the alcohol or dilute enough so it doesn't irritate, use as an eye wash. Homeopathic Euphrasia (eyebright), medium potency like 30C. -Karen

Looks to me that "global warming" is a manufactured crisis, according to the global elite's dialectical M.O., "problem, reaction, solution." Create a problem which triggers a reaction, provide the "solution" that now seems more attractive -- loss of personal freedoms. Food for thought.. here's one synopsis of the manipulation of environmentalism: Global Warming is a TRICK OF THE RICH WHO RUN THE UN

I knew I didn't need to spell things out, especially for the highly creative minds here But it's fun to spell out. How about associating "hard" with a sexual context, and then use that in another context when something is (unpleasantly) hard or difficult. How about associating having your mouth open with a sexual context, then take that context to the dentist when you're experiencing something unpleasant. Whoa. Then of course vice-versa. Those anchors are fun to mess around with. You start noticing how fluid experience is, underneath the anchors, and then you notice that you have an anchor for swimming Karen

Opposite script, if you like. Reframe it as easy if you like. OR.. just be aware of experience and you may find yourself pleasantly, and maybe surprisingly, not interested in thoughts of easy or difficult. Or you might find those thoughts interesting in a whole different way. I've done this while engaged in what I call "extreme sports" of life so I think it's well field tested for rigorous conditions. At least you could substitute the word "hard" for difficult, and see if that's any more interesting! Karen

Hi Ian, If you haven't gone yet.. this might just be OH so much fun ... Re. spiritual practice being difficult. I wonder.. how do you know that spiritual practice is difficult? I don't mean that rhetorically, but I think it's a really interesting question. Also with anything I think is difficult, I always find it interesting to explore what my actual experience is, that I've labelled "difficult." Not to analyze why I think it's difficult, but to explore the experience and see what it really is. Exactly how is it difficult, and what do I experience, not why. Not to describe it to me or anyone else (unless you feel like it), but just to see how the question takes you out of the trance of the word difficult and into pure experience. Hope you're having fun Karen

Hi Jack, Sean is the host here, and I'm sure he'll fill you in with any details you need, but your posts came out fine on the forum. The quoting worked fine. A reply to a forum message posts publicly, but the forum also has private messaging, under My Controls. To create a live link, just click on the globe icon right above where you're composing your message. (I think it's a globe.. little blue ball with a chain link thing). That inserts a link wherever your cursor is. You enter the URL first, and then the way you want the text to appear. Also you can go to My Controls to change your email options, to receive email notification of replies to your forum messages, or turn that feature off, etc. Talk more soon! Karen

Hey Jack! Small world, Reality A big WELCOME to you! I think you'll enjoy the good folks here. (Folks, Jack's work is the cream of the crop, clear, true and accessible. Do check out his website, Finding True Magic Yay! Glad you're here. Karen

I'm not sure that longevity correlates with intelligence. Then we'd have to look at what we mean by intelligence! But I think a simple way to look at this is that each organism has its true nature. It may be the nature of certain plants, and some microorganisms to live only one day. Maybe some animals, I don't know. Some trees live hundreds of years. Each are just living according to their intrinsic nature. When humans live according to their true nature, the potential lifespan can be well over 100 years, and then the person just leaves the body consciously without disease or trauma. We have the potential to take on disease that can't be overcome by the life force alone, and we also have the potential to use our consciousness to overcome disease. But we can't measure consciousness in terms of health, as if a highly developed person should be physically healthy, and we can't judge what should be a particular person's potential, because we each get the experiences we happen to need. According to Rudolf Steiner's view, humans have 4 bodies: physical, etheric, astral and ego (soul) bodies. Animals have 3: physical, etheric and astral. Plants have 2: physical and etheric. Plants express greater vitality in a certain sense, because the expression of their being is in the etheric which is about the metabolic forces, life force. The astrality of animals is about instinct. But humans have the soul body which allows us to develop consciousness. It's sort of a tradeoff, where we lose some of that plant-like vitality in order to allow for the evolution of consciousness. There's a lot more in that body of knowledge, fascinating stuff if you have the patience to read Steiner! Karen

To me the article was just an invitation to a personal exploration. But then again, I'll sometimes enjoy articles that I largely disagree with, because my reactions are sometimes even more interesting to notice than the actual content . Re. "cool and non-attached," those don't go together for me. My experience of what I'd call non-attachment is just deeply engaged, no particular sense of cool or pure. -Karen

An article I like on the ethics of eating meat. Not because I agree with the ideas, of course

Great, Freeform. Some thoughts.. Ah, but I really like that "dream-logic of interwoven coincidences." My view is that ideas are useful or not. If the idea of karma is useful for you, use it, but be aware that you are the one doing the using . Even trances can be useful as tools for waking up, the way hypnotherapy uses it homeopathically (like cures like, trance cures trance). Yes. You could look at this in a broader context, and see that wherever there is suffering, there's some kind of resistance to natural law. I just tend to think of this more as phenomena than conceptually. So you could be going around avoiding stepping on anything alive, uneasy about killing microbes by breathing, and you could be living a very suppressed life that way, with the suffering that follows from that. You can be creating harm in a misguided effort to practice non-violence. What is your own particular natural expression of that? Otherwise the word "respect" is just a nominalization, a generalization that doesn't have meaning until you embody it personally. It sounds like you're looking for some resource that you're not in touch with right now. My sense is that you have within you what it would mean to live in respect. A natural resource, so that it's not a matter of having to bring in this sense of respect as a sort of chore, but that you are that respect. And you may already know that in a certain way but not in a deeply embodied way, not in a way that the resource has seeped into all the nooks and crannies of all the contexts in your life. But as it seeps in, it becomes just a relaxed rhythm of getting your food and eating it, no concept of respect surrounding it, but you feel congruent with it. Meaning that nothing is missing from the experience, no deeper need is getting left out of the experience or going hungry. Exactly. The cave person isn't here now, and even you aren't who you were yesterday. Maybe that question is difficult because there are some hidden assumptions there. first, i think that we've set up this false polarity between the nostalgia and purity of native ways vs. the arrogant, soul-numbing civilized ways. I was into anarchism and primitivism for a time. But I think just like a lot of things that we grapple with these days, the polarity is a false one, a seeming either/or which is really neither. I also had an existential crisis in my 20's when I thought that I couldn't stomach beccoming an adult, which I thought meant dutiful assimmilation into the soul-numbing mediocrity of civilization, my only other choice being to live on the fringes, in poverty, isolation and suffering! Either the Matrix or resistance to the Matrix which amounted to a different sort of hell. Didn't occur to me that my resistance was just as driven and rigid as the way that was abhorrent to me. Well. Took me a lot of years to discover the way the choices could open up as I opened up. I think that the arrogance of agribusiness isn't answered by strict avoidance of it, a more subtle form of arrogance. I sometimes eat meat from the supermarket when it's just practical. I used to need to bring a sense of the sacred into my life. Now I don't have a concept of something being more sacred than something else. I just experience the moment, and trust my experience to guide me in everything. I make a lot of mistakes, but also I don't identify things as mistakes so much anymore, just things that didn't work out according to my expectation, and I learned something. If you feel it's not adequate, maybe you could say what it would feel like if it was adequate . Yup. I used to (try to) eat what Aajonus told me to, and it was with a lot of rigidity and fear. If I eat some store-bought sliced turkey because my sister is buying it for me and it's what's best for her, given the totality of the situation, I'm grateful. Maybe the critical mind can't reconcile it, but the resourceful, creative mind can. A ritual could be useful, but rather than have it be weighed down by heavy concepts, it can be a light, open and playful approach, just an opportunity to explore something. Karen

Here's another take on that experiment. First do something kind, noticing the preconceived judgment that it's morally good. Then do something (moderately) hurtful, noticing the preconceived judgment that it's morally bad. In both cases, you have attachment and judgment. I would suspect that in either case, after a while if you go deeply into your direct experience, the quality of both will begin to merge, and you may not be so sure which is which. That could be an interesting experiment from the point of view of looking at where the real attachments are, and how all attachment is essentially the same. The more you live from your authentic self, the more the correct actions come naturally. Not those which are good or right from any belief about karma or morality, but the ones that flow naturally from the true self. Then you're honoring natural law. Here's another one: Do anything, noticing the attachment to being good and the aversion to doing wrong. Go more deeply into the experience. Not the interpretive thoughts about the experience, but just watch those thoughts as they come and go and the more authentic experience is revealed more and more. "It's all for the experiment" can be said at different levels, where one is coming from true experience and the other from false belief. For example, I used to think, "Everything is just experience, nothing has intrinsic meaning or value." That thought came as a result of a lot of "mind-expanding" encounters, not real knowledge, and it was just another belief to hold onto to replace other beliefs, where the absence of knowledge leaves a gap. It's just the other side of the very same coin of attachment. Two opposite beliefs are fundamentally the same: Belief. If someone gets beaten up, they usually don't say thanks for the interesting experience. But.. in processing the experience deeply and seeing through attachments and aversions, you really can discover the truth hidden in those words, and then it's authentic. In other words, go deeply into any experience, not the interpretive thought process about experience, and you see things as they really are. Stay on the level of discussing false polarities, and you see things as they are filtered through ego-mind beliefs. I think it was Anais Nin who said that we don't see things as they are, but as we are. I was a strict lacto-vegetarian for 27 years up until seven years ago. I know a bit about wading knee-deep through the swamp of beliefs Karen

Freeform, Yes, I've done a lot of the Changeworks programs, but a lot of years ago, and I remember liking Tom Condon then. Some of the tapes I've liked, although some I didn't.. some had some negative energies, just my subjective feel. I studied with Jack Elias, and I like his hypnotherapy materials a lot, www.findingtruemagic.com. His book is masterful, and draws heavily on Buddhism and Taoism. I remember liking Tom Condon's Enneagram material, although probably good Enneagram material can be found on the web now rather than spending a lot for videos. Re. motivational patterns.. I think that when people are doing personality typing, they're usually lumping various patterns together, some which are part of the healthy genotype, and some which are part of the phenotype, the distortion of the genotype due to various stressors. Maybe Sean can speak to this more than I can, because I haven't studied the Enneagram itself too deeply, only as an adjunct to other inner work. But for what it's worth, I think that to whatever greater or lesser degree a person is aware of their false ego patterns, they'll answer the questionnaires and relate to the types somewhat differently. In other words, if a person isn't aware of their conditioned mind, they might mistake those habit patterns for their healthy motivations. For example, if I'm aggressive and controlling, but I see that as healthy autonomy, I might mistake the defense mechanism for a healthy motivation. As people gradually strip away the layers of false ego, you see the healthy pattern emerging more clearly. But often there's quite a mix of things, and it can be a challenge to be objective enough to sort out the various elements. But that's the cutting edge where the learning is. I'm sure there's Enneagram material that elaborates on the genotype/phenotype distinctions for each type (not using those terms, though). I think you can kind of just dig into it creatively and see where it takes you. Karen

If you use the system to understand your false belief patterns and how you habitually filter reality (I'm not picking on you.. it applies to everyone , it can be very useful beyond simply validating what you already know. -Karen

Safe to say that quick and active vata minds are well represented on this board!

You could release the belief that forms such a question, and then see where you are. Not your idea of fun? All this winking is becoming too vatagenic for me.

You can't control it when it's unconscious, but as you become conscious, you can master it . -Karen

Good insight, Sean, thanks. I may even be moving toward 7, what with all this variety Would be interesting to look at this at different stages of life and see the shifts.. or, just wait an hour.

Interesting this came up now, because I hadn't looked at the Enneagram probably for 10 years. So I just looked at it again, and I'm resonating more with 1 and 3 than with 4. And now doing some EFT for wanting to find the perfect number But it was a really helpful tool for understanding how people in your life usually behave from their own patterns, not necessarily because of anything to do with you. Like the guy who was just being his 7-ness . -Karen

Why did you get the idea that you had to? Just because some "authority" said so? That's not very 8 of you

The Enneagram doesn't have to tell you what you are . You can read all the types and decide which you resonate with, and how you can learn from it. It's not so much a box to fit into, but that we tend to limit ourselves in certain ways. "I am not a number -- I am a free (wo)man!" -- '60's TV series The Prisoner (out on DVD and awesome) Also, "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own." Love that stuff .

Here are some bready recipes using almond flour, from my files. They're all grain-free, although some contain ingredients that are somewhat of a compromise-- heated dairy products and honey, for example (which are terrific raw). But for some people, getting off wheat or grains is an important step, and these can help fill in the gap. Usually you can make some substitutions if you don't like certain ingredients. These recipes are rather forgiving, not like yeasted breads that can fail miserably if you deviate from the recipe. See below the recipes for mail-order sources for ingredients. _____________ Parmesan-Herb Bread From Lucy's Specific Carbohydrate Diet Cookbook (posted with permission) 2 1/2 cups almond flour 1 cup grated parmesan cheese 1 1/2 teaspoon mixed herbs (oregano, basil, thyme, etc.) 1/2 teaspoon baking soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 eggs 3 tablespoons butter, melted 3/4 cup dry curd cottage cheese or Farmer cheese 1/2 cup water 1-2 cloves garlic, optional Preheat oven to 325F. Combine dry ingredients (first 5). In blender or food processor, blend all other ingredients until smooth. Stir everything together. Scoop dough into 3 small buttered loaf pans, or two larger. Bake 50-55 minutes or until done. Cool loaves before removing from pans. To make crackers, chill the baked loaf (easier to slice when cold), slice baked loaf into 1/4 inch slices, bake at 200 degrees until very crispy. This bread keeps well in the fridge or freezer. _____________________ Cinnamon-Ginger Cookes 4 tablespoons butter, melted 1/3 cup honey 1/2 tsp cinnamon 1 tsp ginger 1/8 tsp salt 1/4 tsp baking soda 2 cups almond flour 1/2 cup grated coconut (optional) Preheat oven to 300F. Place butter in mixing bowl. Add all other ingredients, stirring flour in last. Form dough into 1-inch diameter balls and place on a buttered cookie sheet. Bake 10-15 minutes, or until done. Watch that they don't burn around the edges. You can adjust the spices to taste, or add others like nutmeg, cloves, etc. _______________________ Almond Spice Cake From Lucy's Specific Carbohydrate Diet Cookbook 4 tbsp butter, melted 1/3 cup honey + a little more 1/2 cup homemade yogurt 2 eggs, beaten 1 teaspoon vanilla extract Spices: 1 tsp cinnamon, 1 tsp allspice, 1/2 tsp nutmeg, 1/4 tsp ground cloves 1/2 tsp baking soda 1/4 tsp salt 2 1/2 cups almond flour 1/2 cup walnuts, chopped 1/3 cup raisins (optional) Preheat oven to 310F In mixing bowl, stir together butter, honey, yogurt, eggs. Stir in all other ingredients. Spread batter into a buttered 8 inch x 8 inch baking pan, or loaf pan. Bake 30 min or until done. Optional frosting: 1 cup cream cheese or dripped yogurt (let yogurt drain through colander) 6 tbsp butter, room temperature 3 tbsp honey 1 teaspoon vanila extract Combine all ingredients, chill. __________________________ Banana Bread or muffins From Lucy's Specific Carbohydrate Diet Cookbook 3 tbsp butter, melted 1/4 cup honey 2 eggs, beaten 2 ripe bananas, mashed 3/4 tsp baking soda 1/4 tsp salt 3 cups almond flour 1 cup walnuts, chopped (optional) Preheat oven 310F In mixing bowl, stir together all ingredients, adding flour and walnuts last. Scoop batter into 3 buttered loaf pans or two large ones, filling 3/4 full. Batter can also go into muffin pans. Bake loaves 45-50 min; muffins 20-25 min Cool before slicing. ______________________________________ ALMOND FLOUR: Almond flour can be mail ordered through: Lucy's Kitchen Shop, 1-888-484-2126 (In WA) or email Lucy Rosset at [email protected] www.lucyskitchenshop.com Information about the Specific Carbohydrate diet: The SCD diet is mainly for people with intestinal disorders such as colitis or Crohn's disease, but is also helpful for all kinds of immune problems and those who don't tolerate wheat or gluten. It is completely free of sugar and all grain. See: www.breakingtheviciouscycle.info Book: Breaking the Vicious Cycle by Elaine Gottschall Cookbook: Lucy's Specific Carbohydrate Diet Cookbook (order directly from Lucy) www.lucyskitchenshop.com CHEBE BREAD is a delicious gluten-free Brazilian bread made from manioc (tapioca). www.chebe.com

I'd suggest that that reluctance may itself be ready to be healed. There are two good alternatives to wheat, both really yummy -- almond flour bread and chebe bread. They're both unyeasted. Almond flour breads have the crumbly texture of corn bread, not exactly like wheat bread, but far better than those awful gluten-free breads made from rice flour and gums. It needs to be made from finely ground almonds, but I find it easier to buy the flour already ground. I've made excellent cookies with almond flour, butter, honey, ginger and cinnamon, nothing else. Chebe bread is made from manioc (tapioca) and is a traditional Brazilian bread. The manioc has a natural doughiness similar to gluten but without gluten, so no extra gummy stuff is needed to fix the texture. I make it into long baguettes, very easy to make. There are chebe bread mixes available in the U.S., although I don't know about elsewhere. Otherwise, it can be made from scratch, and there are recipes online. Karen

Great. I'm not doing phone consults, but prefer email so that I don't have scheduled appointments to stick to . I find that format works well, especially since I tend to be more concise and organized in writing! But sometimes a phone or Skype check-in works. Re. bread, I don't know of any commercial breads made with almond flour, but making it yourself from scratch is easy. If you look for almond flour in Whole Foods, make sure it's finely ground, or grind it yourself. I recently got some coarsely ground almond flour that was more like chopped almonds. I figured it would just come out a little chewier. Well, the cookies came out more like granola! Tasted fine (can't go wrong with almonds, butter and honey), but sometimes you want a cookie and not granola . I'll post some recipes here soon. Chebe bread mixes come out amazing. If you're okay with cheese, adding a little grated parmesan to it is even more amazing, but it's fine without that. -Karen