DaoWaDiddy

Try here. This is a very cool image - and it will take more that a bit of time for me to digest.

How To Destroy the Earth Just in case we miss 2012... Charlie

Major computer geek. I've been doing this for a long time (first programming job involved punch cards) and like it most days - although there's always the escalation that happens as a project nears completion. The new system goes live tomorrow morning so the past few months have been a very busy. I find myself saying "I'll sleep when I'm dead." Charlie

Root: under-active (-13%) Sacral: under-active (-13%) Navel: under-active (-13%) Heart: under-active (0%) Throat: open (38%) Third Eye: open (13%) Crown: under-active (0%) This seems like a fit...

Interesting approach - I will start to track that. It goes along with the general tenet "Never reward behavior that you don't want to see again." Many years ago my son went through a phase of whining to get what he wanted. I was very careful to not reward the behavior by giving him what he was whining for. In fact, we discovered together that I could whine much better than he could. Then I noticed that when he returned from his Mom's house (we were separated) he was whining again. So she and I had a little talk and it stopped working there also. The phase ended soon thereafter. Charlie

Agreed that true hugs are wonderful while false hugs are less so. In a lot of cases it's pretty obvious at a non-verbal level which type of hug someone is set to deliver - or even whether they would prefer to skip the whole thing. So I often skip the whole thing. On the other hand some hugs start out as tentative, but if you give it a few seconds and center you can feel the other person relax into it. I have seen other folks who are very methodical about how they share hugs with true or false huggers. Dr Dave Dobson (one of the people Bandler and Grinder modelled when they were putting together NLP - he taught Other Than Conscious Communication) gives true hugs with one side of the body and false with the other - not only as a way of sorting personally but as a communication (other than conscious) to the hugee that he is aware of the difference. Meanwhile, Mrs. Diddy hugs everyone - and these are true hugs. She hugged our waiter at a restaurant in Cancun. She recognized Nathan Lane (yes, that Nathan Lane) on the street in NYC and gave him a hug - thereby scaring him pretty thoroughly until he figured out he wasn't being mugged. Life here is often other than dull. All the best, Charlie

Happy day after your birthday! Over this next year may the sheer Yaelishness of you life be cause for celebrating even more joy and zest. All the best, Charlie

Happy Birthday! May you live as long as you want and love as long as you live. Prosper, Charlie

Congratulations and welcome to the club! When his daughter was about 9 months old , a close friend said to me: "Why didn't you tell me how much this was going to change my life? I had no idea I could love someone this much!" And I just had to shrug. You'll discover that you can't encompass it with words.

Someday you too will want to amuse your granddaughter. All the best, Charlie

You can tell that the beauty and serenity of Yoga have truely merged with mainstream consciousness when you notice things like this: A shopping bag with the image of a figure on the side in vrikshasana pose (yes, I had to look up the name) with the phrase "Life is a balancing act..." Of course, the rest of the phrase was "...I'm lovin' it." And I pulled out my very own yoga-enhanced Egg McMuffin and finished breakfast in the car. WTF? Charlie

I agree with your post. I also wanted to draw another interesting and often useful distinction: "grounded" - verifiable in physical reality versus "ungrounded" - opinion, judgement, nominalization For example, if you tell the weedy guy above ("weedy" - ungrounded opinion) that "you're weak" that is ungrounded because it is a judgement of his relative strength compared to some unstated standard. However, if you told the guy who is 6'2" tall and weighs 120 lbs that he was able to bench press 70lbs twice that would be a grounded statement. "That is an ugly jacket" - ungrounded "That jacket has 4 buttons" - grounded "You're in my space" - ungrounded "When you breathe I can feel air moving on my face" - grounded It can be interesting (and a bit appalling [ungrounded]) to use this filter to examine arguments, political speech, the newspaper, etc. It's also interesting to be in the middle of an argument, etc. and then switch from the ungrounded statements that you are probably using to physically verifiable grounded statement - it tends to take the steam out and bring all participants back closer to the here and now. If that result matches your outcome, this can be a useful strategy. ------------------ Very useful - this is what I aspire to and sometimes remember. Thanks for the reminder And thanks to Lozen for an interesting topic. All the best, Charlie

Sean, I tend to agree - somewhat - but I think that the key phrase is "what we tend to call spiritual practice." What we tend to call spiritual practice may be "a nice crystal, some herbs, a book on NLP, and a Tibetan Lama" and "glamours or esoteric" (and I realize that you were setting up a straw man) but spirit breaks through all up and down the ladder. For example, my understanding is that AA has a strong spiritual component - "giving ourselves to a higher Power". It's a little strange to think of someone going to AA and discovering their True Will. The classic conversion experience - Saul on the road to Damascus stuff - may or may not make you more socially functional but it usually changes the quality of your life in interesting ways. Charlie

Richard learned from one of the best. Milton Erickson often used phonological ambiguity - he used to call Bandler and his partner (at the time) John Grinder "Bandit and Swindler" --- I think that the comparison between Therapy and Spiritual Practice is very much like the difference between Tragedy and Comedy. On the one hand the previous sentence made sense. However, even if you limit the range of Therapy to those with psychotherapeutic roots you will have things that range from Fraudian to Jungian to Reichian - and my understanding is that the experience of these can be as broad as the difference between Zazen, Tai Chi and Osho's chaotic meditation. And even the sentence before this one took fairly broad ranges of experience and lumped them as Fraudian and Tai Chi. "How many therapists can practice spiritually on the head of a pin?" Charlie PS If an NLPer met the Buddha in the road he would ask him "How - specifically - do you know that suffering ... did you not?"

There's a semi-standard NLP psycho the rapist - er, psychotherapist - joke in there somewhere...

Harry, I too have had occasions where the "coincidence" gets a bit thick and sometimes scary - where mundane, down-to-earth causality seems to say that there is no relationship but still... These times seem to be somehow related to practices or other means of opening awareness to other than the standard Western consensus reality. This conversation reminded me of a story I remembered reading about Jung and Freud so with a dash of Google I found this article, which reminded me that with these practices I am playing in a different league where the world view (I Ching) supposes a different interrelationshp between the parts of the Dao. Oh, yeah. That's what I'm up to... RedFox said: This sounds very familiar. In the past I have backed off from too much strangeness - whatever that was at the time - rather than treat it as an opportunity to find a new balance. This inspires me to take a different look at things when the going gets weird. Of course, it's just a coincidence that this discussion came up now as I am reevaluating my course of practice for the next period of time. All the best, Charlie

Blessings to you as you return to the northern darkness without yet another addiction... Be well, Charlie

You fit in with: Humanism Your ideals mostly resemble that of a Humanist. Although you do not have a lot of faith, you are devoted to making this world better, in the short time that you have to live. Humanists do not generally believe in an afterlife, and therefore, are committed to making the world a better place for themselves and future generations. 20% spiritual. 50% reason-oriented.

And now for something completely different: A friend recently turned me on to Jellyroll. For a good taste of what they are about, take a bite out of this. Charlie

On the links page Silent Ground Retreats is linked to thecontemporarytaoist.blogspot.com. Looks like a cut and paste error to me. Charlie

Well, I'm just wondering about what I can do with my posts after I put them in place. Do they remain static after someone has replied, or can I fiddle with them? --- Well will you look at this! I can change my posts. So, after someone responds to my shit I can clean it up and make the respondent look silly. What wonderful fun that will be. Gosh, I certainly am witty!

Michael, It was good to have your insight into this. I've been around internal arts just a little bit over the years but most of mine was fairly early stage Tai Chi - and while I think my teacher was a good martial artist I don't recall seeing him demonstrate anything at this level. And I'm one of those Doubting Thomas types - I want to "put my fingers into the nail holes" - to be able to see it live and feel what's going on. Having someone with some experience share is not quite as good but goes a ways toward setting my skepticism to rest. I did not know about the more spastic response in trained people - seems like the other side of the increased sensitivity that lets you read an opponent. Charlie

I'm not sure if the first link was a deliberate joke (Thanks for the link, Cameron!) but the content didn't feel like a spoof so I started poking around the main site. Dr P. Young seems like the real deal as a GrandMaster in Chinese Internal Arts and a Ngakpa Lama (Tantric Yogi) of the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition. This clip starts with yet more fa jing demonstrations and then goes to a solo demo of Chi Kung and various internal arts. Right at the end of the fa jing check out the guy who is charging in from the left and then seems to bounce off without being touched.

There is more of the same guys getting thrown around in this one - give it some time to get past the picnic stuff. http://www.pathgate.org/pi_video_02.html In some twisted way this reminds me of the fight scene in "The Chronicles of Riddick"

That's what comes from conversing with persistent geeks. Geekamundo