Feng Shui of Letting Go to Allow the Flow

So, a number of days ago, May 30th, I was in a bit of a funk, it might have been prompted from a slight hangover after having the evening before, bicycled over to the last evening of a several day cultural street festival, with music and alcohol, where I’d been walking, jumping, singing and dancing among a small crowd of people snaking through an area at the end of the festival. Over the last weeks, I’ve been retrospective about a number of things, looking within myself. And then this day, I was prompted to write down aspects of my personality I‘d been observing. Sort of like a self reckoning, or confrontation…looking inwards. I won’t bore you with details, unless you inquire.

This critique of myself; habits, actions, thoughts… spelled out to me ….signifiers (of the overused word) ‘scarcity’ mentality. Actions which are reactions to and products of fear. (Such as the habit that I don’t do, using my bluetooth keyboard while simultaneously online, thinking that it’s less secure, but I’m doing it now, at this clean and chained unused sidewalk table, which pulled me over to it. I was scouting for where I could write with the keyboard, when I spotted this. I couldn’t believe I was still connected to WiFi (Same WiFi where I sit outside, after the library’s closed; a clean and well lit art gallery) appears to wrap around the block.

So I recycled these thoughts I’d been holding within, then promptly recycled a bunch of stuff, clearing up space, part of that list. Within 24 hours, trimmed my hair, having lately noticed fuzzy ends. Made the decision to make the effort to invest in a pair of second-hand shoes and pants. At the same time, recently I’ve been paying acute attention to my posture lately, a reflection of always carrying a weight, literally and figuratively and that I often still have my backpack on, even when I take it off. Mirrors are my friend, to reflect and remind.

I sensed that these actions; picking through emotions,  behavior, purging, clean cut, recycling, relaxing my shoulders that the process of all this together, physically and emotionally, is a kind of feng shui; a lifting, lightening, making room, creating space for new energy to flow in. Out with clinging to the old, and establishing a clear space to move forward. It does actually feel emotionally like I’ve lifted something. 

I recalled ann astrological writing I read several weeks ago by Rob Brezney, because it seemed that I was going through what he predicted. I usually look at this site retrospectively, not proactively. It does appear to be on target. I have sun in Capricorn, 3 planets in Sagittarius and moon and other planets in Scorpio. An astrologist friend told me that where the moon is, is just as vital as the sun sign (so i look at all three). https://freewillastrology.com/horoscopes/archives/2023-05-18/scorpio

{Scorpio last week, freewillastrology by Rob Brezney, San Francisco columnist

“In the coming weeks, you’ll be guided by your deep intelligence as you explore and converse with the darkness. You will derive key revelations and helpful signs as you wander around inside the mysteries. Be poised and lucid, dear Scorpio. Trust your ability to sense what’s important and what’s not. Be confident that you can thrive amidst uncertainty as you remain loyal to your core truths. No matter how murky this challenge may seem, it will ultimately be a blessing. You will emerge both smarter and wiser.”

In the back of my mind (consciousness), I was remembering what the Chinese philosopher Lao Tsu said. 

“Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny“

bye the way, the reason I decided to stay longer at the place where I’m living, is because I realized pigeons were making a nest on my balcony and I looked up the time period for raising them, and wanted to protect them cuz my housemate who owns the apt, doesn’t like pigeons.

The second time I was convinced I must stay (after inquiring if I may), was when for the first time, the mother and father pigeon were suddenly perched way up high on my ajar window, very unusual, because usually they are perched above their toddler on a low ledge of the balcony to sleep. After seeing this and looking out to the water dish, I realized it was empty, the lid of a jar ai fill up regularly. I was thinking that the pigeons were trying to bring this lack of water to my attention. I’m laughing as I write this, but it’s true. I diligently cleaned out with a hose and filled the large bird bath in my parent’s yard, sometimes several times a day in hot weather when I lived there. 

My regular workplace before hitting the library, is here, beautiful, full of flowers and bird’s singing and the occasional fox or stork. These were shots taken today as I worked offline on the crescendo of completing my educational book for youth about the spiraling and electromagnetic universe in which we live…and of course leaning towards ecology.

And this is where i sit if I have more online things to do after the Staatbibliotech library has closed at 10/22:00

Healing through breath, water and psychedelics | Ayahuasca breaking Trauma by Gabor Mate

Gabor Mate transcript Gabor Mate speaks the truth, eloquently. 10 years ago!!!

It is essential to read Gabor Mate’s transcript, for the emotionally, psychologically and spiritually sick population of the Wealthy western world (specifically the USA and its derivatives, exporting sick values from a hypocritical social and economic system of Capitalism) because healing and awareness is available. 

https://theincubator.live/2016/11/15/dr-gabor-mate-on-the-healing-power-of-ayuhuasca/

This transcript of Gabor Mate’s speech, “Psychedelics and Unlocking the Unconscious; From Cancer to Addition,” he delivered at the Psychedelic conference in Oakland California on April 20, 2013”

“My subject is the use of ayahuasca in the healing of all manner of medical conditions, from cancer to addiction. And you might say what can possibly a plant do to heal such dire and life-threatening medical problems? Well, of course, that all depends on the perspective through which we understand these problems.

Now, the medical perspective, the allopathic Western medical perspective in which I was trained is that, fundamentally, diseases are abnormalities that occur either due to external causes such as a bacterium or a toxin, or they’re accidental or due to bad luck, or their due to genetics. So, the causes are outside of the usual internal experience—the emotional and psychological and spiritual life—of the individual. These are biological events, so the medical assumption goes, and the causes are to be understood and the treatments are to be administered purely in a biological fashion.

Underlying that set of assumptions are two other assumptions. One is that you can separate the human body from the human mind, so what happens to us emotionally and psychologically has no significant impact on our health. Number two: that the individual is to be separated from the environment. So, what happens to me if I get cancer? That is just my poor personal, pure personal, misfortune, or maybe because I did the wrong things like smoked cigarettes. But, that my cancer might have something to do with the lifelong interaction which I’ve engaged in with my environment—particularly the psychological social environment—that doesn’t enter into the picture.

But what if we had a different perspective?

What if we actually got that human beings are bio-psycho-social creatures by nature, and actually bio-psycho-spiritual creatures by nature—which is to say that our biology is inseparable from our psychological emotional and spiritual existence—and therefore what manifests in the body is not some isolated and unique event or misfortune, but a manifestation of what my life has been in interaction with my psychological and social and spiritual environment?

Well, if we had that kind of understanding then we would approach illness and health in a completely different fashion.

What if, furthermore, we understood something in the West which has been the underlying core insight of Eastern spiritual pathways and aboriginal shamanic pathways around the world, which is that human beings are not their personalities, we’re not our thoughts, we’re not our emotions, we are not our dysfunctional or functional dynamics, but that at the core there is a true self that is somehow connected to—in fact not connected to but part of—nature and creation.

An illness from that perspective represents a loss of that connection, a loss of that unity, a loss of that belonging to a much larger entity. And therefore, to treat the illness or the symptom as the problem is actually to ignore the real possibility that the symptom and the illness are themselves symptoms, rather than the fundamental problems.

It’s in that perspective then, that I’ve come to understand, quite before my acquaintance with ayahuasca, but that’s how I’ve come to understand human illness and dysfunction. Which is to say that illness and dysfunction represent the products or the consequences of a lifelong interaction with our environment, particularly our psychological and social environment, and that they represent a deep disconnection from our true selves.

I mention particularly cancer and addiction, but those are only two examples. Allow me to read you something from an article that appeared in last February’s edition of Pediatrics, which is the major pediatric journal in North America, and this is an article from the Harvard Center on the Developing Child, and it’s called “An Integrated Scientific Framework for Child Development.” Here’s what they say:

Growing scientific evidence also demonstrates that social and physical environments that threaten human development because of scarcity, stress, or instability can lead to short term physiologic and psychological adjustments that may come at a significant cost to long-term outcomes in learning, behavior health and longevity.

In other words, that the emotional and behavioral patterns that as young children we adopt in order to survive stressors in our environment allow us to deal with the immediate problem, but in the long term they become prisons. They become sources of dysfunction, illness and even death, if we’re not able to let go of them.

So, in other words, what was a short-term state, or meant to be a short-term state, in a helpful way, when it becomes a long-term state, when it goes from state to a trait, now it becomes a problem.

Let me give you a few obvious examples of that. I myself have been diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactive disorder, a characteristic of which is tuning out, absentmindedness. Now, ADD in North America is seen as a disease, and we see many kids that have been diagnosed with it. Now we have 3 million kids in this country who are on stimulant medications for it. The rates are going up and up and up.

According to the New York Times last week, 20 percent of American boys at one time or another have been diagnosed with it and 10 percent are, at any one time are on medication. Three million at least are on stimulants right now. It’s seen as a genetic disease. It isn’t at all. What the tuning out represents, as we all know, is actually a coping mechanism. Our brains tune out when the stress becomes overwhelming, too much to bear. And at that point the tuning out is a survival dynamic.

The real question is: why are so many kids tuning out? What’s happening in their lives? What of course is going on is that the stress in this society, and the stress in the pending environment are greatly increasing. So, the child’s brain is actually affected by the stresses in the environment.

And here’s further, from the same Harvard article, they talk about brain development and how the human brain actually develops, and here’s what they say about that:

The architecture of the brain is constructed through an ongoing process that begins before birth, continues into adulthood, and establishes either a sturdy or fragile foundation for all the health, learning and behavior that follow.

So, in other words, the architecture of the brain is actually constructed by the interaction with the environment. And they continue:

The interaction of genes and experiences literally shapes the circuitry of the developing brain and is critically influenced by the mutual responsiveness of adult-child relationships, particularly in the early childhood years.

Well, I can’t make this into a lecture on brain development; the point is that which circuits in the brain develop, and which patterns are engrained, has everything to do with the environment, particularly the mutual responsiveness of adult-child relationships. And therefore whatever interferes with that mutual responsiveness will actually interfere with the brain development of the child, including the neurochemistry of the child’s brain as well as the psychological emotional patterns.

Cancer

So then, if you look at cancer and addiction as two adaptations to stress, what do we find? Well, prior to my work with addictions, which is my most recent work —and I did that for 12 years— I worked for seven years as the medical coordinator of the palliative care unit at Vancouver hospital working with terminally ill people. And both in family practice and palliative care I had ample opportunity to see who gets sick and who doesn’t get sick. I noticed the people that got ill with chronic conditions invariably followed certain emotional dynamics that were ingrained in them so much so that these were unconscious and compulsive and for that reason all the more difficult to let go of. And, so who got cancer and who didn’t was no accident, nor was it for the most part genetically determined.

And, I’ve collected a few clippings from the Global Mailnewsletter—which is Canada’s newspaper of record, or at least it thinks it is—and these clippings illustrate the patterns that I found in people who get sick.

And I’m saying all this because in talking about my work with ayahuasca and the potential healing that ayahuasca can induce in people, we have to understand what is being healed here. What is the underlying basis of these conditions?

So, these newspaper clippings, then, illustrate something about what I have found in people who get sick chronically. And when I say chronic illness I mean cancer, I mean diabetes, rheumatic arthritis, multiple sclerosis, ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, chronic asthma, psoriasis, eczema, almost any chronic illness you care to name.

The first of these clippings is written by a woman who is herself diagnosed with breast cancer. She goes to her doctor, Harold, and you have to know that her husband’s name is [Hye], and [Hye]’s first wife died of breast cancer, and not Donna, the second wife, who’s diagnosed with the same condition. So she writes:

“Harold tells me that the lump is small, and most assuredly not in my lymph nodes, unlike that of [Hye]’s first wife whose cancer spread everywhere by the time they found it. You’re not going to die, he reassures me. ‘But I’m worried about [Hye],’ I say, ‘I won’t have the strength to support him.’”

What you notice is she’s the one diagnoses with the potentially fatal condition and her automatic compulsive thought is, “While I’m getting radiation and chemotherapy, how will I support my husband emotionally?” So, this automatic regard for the emotional needs of others, while ignoring your own, is a major risk factor for chronic illness.

These others are obituaries and obituaries are fascinating to me because they tell us not only about the people who died but also about what we as a society value in one another. And often what we value in one another is precisely what kills us. And the expression “the good die young” is not a mis-statement. Often the good do die young because “good” often represents compulsive self-suppression of their own needs.

So here’s a man, a physician, who dies at age 55 of cancer, and the obituary says:

Never for a day did he contemplate giving up the work he so loved at Toronto Sick Children’s Hospital. He carried on his duties throughout his year-long battle with cancer, stopping only a few days before he died.

So if you had a friend who was diagnosed with the same condition, would you say to him or her, “Hey buddy, here’s what you do: You got cancer, go back to work tomorrow, and not for a moment consider your life, and the meaning of your life, and the stresses that you’re generating. Just continue working while you’re undergoing chemo, radiation or surgery,”?

So this automatic identification with duty, role, and responsibility rather than the needs of the self is a major risk factor for chronic illness.

The next one— [applause] thank you, but if you’re going to applaud every time I say something smart, you’ll be applauding the whole afternoon. The next one, the next obituary, is about a woman who dies at age 55 of cancer.  Her name is Naomi. And this obituary is written by the appreciative husband:

In her entire life she never got into a fight with anyone. The worst she could say was “phooey” or something else along those lines. She had no ego, she just blended in with the environment in an unassuming manner

Now, I’m sure that many of you who are in relationships, sometimes you wish that your partner would blend into the environment in an unassuming manner, but the point is that the suppression of healthy anger that this woman engaged in all of her life actually suppresses the immune system. And I’m not going to go into the details of that, but the science of psychoneuroimmunology has amply shown that you can’t separate the mind from the body and when you’re repressing yourself emotionally you’re actually diminishing the activity of your immune system and therefore you’re less capable of responding to malignancy or to invasion by bacteria.

And again this idea that external things cause illness—take a condition like, uh, the flesh-eating disease, Necrotizing fasciitis is the medical term. And we think we know the cause, the cause is a bacterium, the strep bacterium. It isn’t. Because if we did swabs on the people in this audience, we did swabs of the throat or the crevices of the body, we’d identify the strep bacteria in probably 25, 30 percent of the people here. But there’s nobody here with necrotizing fasciitis, nobody here with flesh-eating disease.

In other words, the presence of the bacterium does not explain the disease. What happens is that the self-suppressive patterns in somebody’s life at some point will suppress the immune system, and that bacterium that has been living on your body in perfect unity with your immune system all of a sudden becomes a deadly enemy. It’s not just a bacterium, but the self-suppression that suppresses the immune system that actually causes the illness.

And I’ll leave you with one more obituary, and this is almost too incredible to believe except it is directly from the same newspaper. This is a physician who died of cancer:

Sydney and his mother had an incredibly special relationship, a bond that was apparent in all aspects of their lives until her death. As a married man with young children, Sydney made a point to have dinner with his parents every day as his wife Roslyn and their four young kids waited for him at home. Sydney would walk in greeted by yet another dinner to eat and to enjoy. Never wanting to disappoint either woman in his life, Sydney kept eating two dinners for years, until gradual weight gain began to raise suspicions.

Now, what this man believed, what he actually believed—and notice that there are core beliefs underneath all of this. The first one believes that she’s responsible for her husband’s feelings more than she is for herself. The second guy believes that he is nothing other than his responsibilities and duties and role in the world. There’s no true self there he can actually be with and be touched with. Naomi, the woman, believes, “If I am angry, I am a bad person.” And this man believes that he’s responsible for how other people feel and that he must never disappoint anybody.

Now, these beliefs don’t come out of nowhere. They’re actually coping mechanisms in a certain parenting environment. If the parents can’t handle your anger, if they can’t handle your emotions, if they’re too needy to trouble themselves then the child starts taking responsibility for the parent as a way of maintaining the relationship. In other words, the psychological coping mechanisms of the child then become part of his or her personality, and these same patterns that helped to cope with the original stress now become the major contributors to his or her illness and possibly death. What we’re talking about here are core beliefs that reflect the child’s early experience, that become ingrained into the brain and body as automatic and compulsive responses to the world. That’s my take on chronic illness.

And you begin to see now how some experiences could enlighten you that you are not those patterns, and if it can give you a sense that these patterns are simply adaptations, and that there’s a true self underneath that, and if they can put you in touch with the experiences that led you to adopt these patterns, then perhaps you can be liberated; then, perhaps you can let go; then, perhaps you can find the true self that doesn’t have to behave in those ways anymore. That’s where the liberation is. So, that’s with chronic illness.

Addiction

Now addiction. For 12 years I worked in what’s known as North America’s most concentrated area of drug use, the downtown eastside of Vancouver, where in a few square block radius thousands of people are ingesting, inhaling, or injecting all manner of substances.

And the question again is why do people do that? Why do people do such terrible thing to themselves to the point of risking their health? They lose everything, they lose their wealth, their relationships, their families, their homes, their teeth, their dignity—and they still continue with it.

The North American answer to that question is twofold. The legal answer, the socially sanctioned answer, is that these people are making a choice, they’re making a bad choice, destructive to themselves and harmful to others and the way to deter that choice is to deter them by means of draconian punishments.

The so-called war on drugs.  But there is no war on drugs because you can’t war on inanimate objects. A war on drug addicts is what there is. And as a result of such retrograde social beliefs and governmental practices, the United States which contains 5 percent of the world’s population contains 25 percent of the world’s jail population, which is to say that every fourth person in the world that is in jail is a citizen of the land of the free. And all because of the belief that we’re talking about a choice here.

The other dominant belief, which is not identical—and you’d think would at least obliterate the first belief but it doesn’t—and it’s the one held by most medical doctors, is that addictions represent illness of the brain and particularly on a genetic basis.

The American Society of Addiction Medicine considers that up to 50 percent of the predisposition to addiction is actually caused by genetic inheritance. That is more forward looking in a way than our choice hypothesis, because at least you can’t blame people for the genes they either inherit or pass on to others, but it is no more right than the other hypothesis.

Actually, if you look at it closely and if you understand human brain development which I alluded a little bit earlier in my talk you realize that if five percent of addictions are genetic. That’s not radical to say—and I doubt that anything more than five percent is genetically determined. In fact nothing is genetically determined because we know that even people that inherit genes, and there are some, that are predisposed—not predetermined by predisposed to addiction—some people that inherit genes, in the right environment those genes are never activated. Genes are turned on and off by the environment. Therefore, what is in an environment that causes the addiction?

Of course the belief again then, among the many false beliefs about addiction, is that drugs are addictive. But we know that they’re not. Nothing is addictive in itself. I mean, is alcohol addictive? If I asked a question, “How many people have had a glass of wine in your life,” most people would put their hand up. Many of you would put your hand up. But if I asked you, “How many of you have had an alcohol problem,” a much smaller minority would put their hands up.

Now if alcohol was addictive in and of itself then anybody who ever tries it could become an addict. So, the power of an addiction does not reside in a substance. Whether that substance is crystal meth, or heroin, cocaine, cannabis, alcohol, or whether it’s behaviors like sexaholism, internet addiction, gambling, shopping, work and so on, it’s not the actual activity or substance that induces that addiction, it’s that internal relationship to it, the susceptibility. What creates susceptibility? It’s very simple: trauma.

Trauma

The drug addicts I worked with in the downtown eastside Vancouver, every single one of them had been abused as children. In the 12 years I worked there, out of hundreds of women I interviewed in the course of my professional work, there was not one who hadn’t been sexually abused as a child. And that’s not just only my personal opinion; it’s also what the large-scale population studies show. Not even controversial. Not controversial, but completely impenetrable to the medical profession and certainly to governments.

So, the people who are in jail—there’s an American psychiatrist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, many of you may know his work on stress and trauma, and he says that 100 percent of the inmates of the criminal justice system in this country are actually traumatized children.

Now, trauma induces its own set of beliefs and coping styles. One coping style is to shut down emotionally so as not to feel. Now you become alien to yourself. So you don’t feel the pain, and as one patient of mine said very eloquently, pardon the language, “The reason I do drugs is because I don’t want to feel the fucking feelings I feel when I don’t do the drugs.”

And Keith Richards, the Rolling Stones’ guitarist, in talking about his heroin habit in his book on addiction, sorry, book on his life —same thing—uh, [life], he called it, talking about his heroin habit, “It’s about the search for oblivion,” he says. The contortions we go through just not to be ourselves for a few hours.

Now why would somebody would not wish themselves to be themselves for a few hours? Because they’re suffering, and why are they suffering? Because the early trauma, early emotional loss, induces certain beliefs. One belief is that “I’m worthless.” Because children are pure narcissists, and I mean narcissists in the pure sense of the word. In other words, when something happens to a child, particularly a young child, it’s happening because to him, and happening because of him. So bad things happen, it’s because I’m a bad person. Good things happen because I’m a good person. But if bad things happen, I’m a bad person. If I’m hurt, I deserve it. I caused it. I’m unworthy.

So there’s deep shame at the core of addictions; there’s also a sense that the world is indifferent and hostile, and of course the child who suffers them is abused—the world was indifferent and hostile as they experienced it. But, as the Buddha said it, “it is with our mind that we create the world.” But, what the Buddha didn’t say was that before “with our mind we create the world,” the world creates our minds. And those minds are then shaped by those early experiences.

So, to the addict, the world is hostile—is indifferent—in which he or she has to manipulate and find some way to soothe themselves because there ain’t no soothing in this world, there’s no healing in this world.

Those are some of the core beliefs at the heart of addiction. And there’s a deep emptiness here, because as the spiritual teacher— and this leads me directly to speak about the ayahuasca experience—as a spiritual teacher here in California said, “The fundamental thing that happened, and the greatest calamity, is there was not any love or support,” speaking of childhood.

The greater calamity, which was caused by that first calamity, is that you lost the connection to your essence. That is much more important than whether your mother or father loved you or not.

In other words, the greatest loss we endure is the loss of connection to ourselves, and that’s then when we experience a deep emptiness that we’re so afraid of.

And this culture is all about stuffing full of products, and stuffing full of relationships, and stuffing full of activities, and stuffing full of false meaning. But of course the more we do that, the more addicted we become, because these things can never be truly satiating. So, that emptiness can never be filled from the outside. The way through the emptiness is through the inside—is from the inside. And that’s where the spiritual experiences, and the healing experiences, empowered by ayahuasca come into it.

Now, my book on addiction came out four years ago now, and I never heard about ayahuasca until after it was published. While I was writing it I began to get emails and inquiries from people, “What do you know about ayahuasca and the healing of addiction?” and I would say, “Nothing, I don’t know anything about it.”A week later, the same question. And this went on persistently for months.

I finally began to be both irritated, and curious. And then it turned out that there was an opportunity to experience ayahuasca up in Vancouver; a Peruvian shaman was coming up and leading some ceremonies, and I did do a ceremony. And I sat there in the dark with my heart open and a feeling of delicious nurturing warmth, the tears of joy rolling down my face, and I got love. And I also got how many ways in my life I had betrayed love and had turned by back on it, which is a coping pattern, because when you’re as vulnerable and hurt as a child as I was as a Jewish infant under German occupation in Hungary, then you close down to love because it’s too painful to be open to it.

The ayahuasca got rid of my coping mechanisms in a flash, and there I was experiencing something, and I knew then that this is something to work with. And within half a year I was working with people shamanically trained in Peruvian Shipibo tradition, and beginning to lead retreats. We’ve led a number now, and the results are increasingly but uniformly astonishing.

So I’m going to read you some communications sent to me by people that have participated in our ayahuasca retreats and then I’ll talk about their experiences and why ayahuasca is so potentially helpful. Although, as the previous speaker said, nobody should ever say that it’s a panacea.

So this is Dr. Stuart Krichevsky, who writes about ayahuasca. …

Decoctions like ayahuasca, similar to many forms of meditation, has salutogenic potential. Salutogenic meaning health-giving potential i.e. can enhance physical mental and spiritual health by calling into play what is referred to as participating consciousness.

So if you can become conscious of your patterns and your beliefs, these core beliefs, and how you attain these beliefs, then you can let go of them. Rigid feeling, thought, and behavioral patterns can unclench; the self can rearrange itself and develop its inner and outer resources more deeply. So there we get to the concept of a true self and one that can be reconfigured, or at least rediscovered with the help of the psychoactive plants, particularly ayahuasca.

So I’ll read you now what some people have said about their experience at our retreats, and I’ll talk to you more about the retreats and how they function.

“The last two nights have been challenging, but I’m getting good practice. Negative thoughts as they come up, under the effect, I can feel the physical sensation of fear in my gut as the thought arises and returns to a safer place.”

In other words, when you have a certain thought, like you have a negative thought pattern—when I say negative, I mean a self defeating, self-deprecating, self invalidating thought pattern—that’s not just the thought up here, that’s immediately a physical impact on the body. You feel it in the gut, you feel it in the heart, if affects your whole nervous system, your cardiovascular system, your immune system, and this person is getting in touch with how their thoughts are influencing your body.

“In the past I’ve made many bad, irresponsible choices with hurtful consequences to myself in others. Despite knowing that right now, I’m presented with new choices I can make from a place of love towards myself and the people in my life. It’s hard to push despair aside. The despair that tells me I will continue to make the same poor choices over and over again.

That’s the core belief showing up again that “there’s something wrong with me.” But this person at least is conscious of it.

This is a physician, by the way, who has nearly lost his license because of addictions, and his marriage is falling apart, and he came to the retreat. And he thought he had a perfect childhood, by the way, and I won’t even go into the details.

“The other very powerful moment I had involved looking at the sense of being too much for my parents. I know no matter how much love they felt for me, they probably were all alone with their own fears and anxiety. Well yeah, the father had a near-fatal heart attack at age 28. I’ve experienced myself as a child when this child was a one-year old. I’ve experienced myself as too much for the world for a long time. I’ve made a grand effort over the years to prove that true, which is why it cracks my heart open so wide to feel welcomed in the hearts of you and the people here, knowing that my feelings, my hurt, fear, sadness, and need for connection are not too much. I feel that the world can hold me, in fact, always has. And maybe I can learn to hold myself. It’s painful to think that Miles, my son, may feel himself to be too much for me. I desperately don’t want that to happen. Much love and gratitude.”

I won’t read you the other experiences, but they’re all the same sort of people experiencing love, gratitude, connection to themselves, experiencing the childhood trauma.

My daughter did an ayahuasca retreat. She said that she revisited all the sad places in her childhood, and because I was a workaholic, and was very stressed, and a very undeveloped adult when I was a father to my young kids, she’s has plenty of sorrow in her life. And she said that she revisited those sad places but did so with the loving consciousness and empathy and the compassion of an adult, and if you look at the brain scans on ayahuasca … what you see is activation of the temporal lobe, where childhood memories are stored; of the limbic system where our emotions are modulated and they live, and the front part of the brain where insight is made available to us.

We can connect the childhood experience, no matter how traumatic—and it sometimes comes up for people. Some really deeply disturbing, traumatic experiences come up for people during the ayahuasca experience. And those experiences may take the form of direct memory, direct recall of an image, or what happened to them, such as a body invasion, or other kinds of trauma, or it may take the form of really scary images and creatures, but it’s like a dream. In the dream, when somebody’s chasing us, we’re not afraid because somebody’s chasing us—somebody’s chasing us because we’re afraid. In other words, during sleep, the centers in the brain where childhood memories are stored get activated, and then the brain makes up a story to explain the emotion. And I believe that much of the same is true of the scary visions that people have during the ayahuasca experience.

The beautiful images, of course, represent more the core self. We get to see both the experiences in response to which we develop these coping mechanisms that give us addiction or cancer or other form of illness. We get to experience that core self and the beauty of the world, as it actually is, when we don’t see it through a screen of suffering and misinterpretation induced by our early experience. So, we get to see both what we’ve been running from and trying to cope with, and trying to manipulate, but we also get to see that true connection that true love, that true beauty, that true vision, that pure insight, that pure strength, that pure compassion. And when we do that, we realize we don’t have to cope anymore. We don’t have to run anymore. We can just be right where we are.

Now, that’s not to say that because you have that experience it’s going to stay like that.  That takes work that takes practice. If you don’t put in some practice afterwards, if you don’t get follow up, if you don’t put it into the context of your life, this experience just becomes a beautiful memory. But the impact of it will fade. So it’s transformative, but it’s only transformative if you allow it to be transformative. And it you work with it so that it becomes transformative. But if you do, it can be very, very powerful, it can be life-changing for many, many people.

I have to say something here about context here. I don’t lead ayahuasca ceremonies, I’m not on ayahuasca, I don’t chant, I just participate in the ceremonies. Leading the ceremonies are people who wouldn’t call themselves shamans, but I would call them that because their work is that effective. They chant, and they work with people energetically. And they pick up on peoples’ energies in the dark. I don’t do that.  I pick up people’s energies in the light. I hear it in the tone of their voice, facial expression, choice of words. They sit there in the silence while they chant and they are reading the energies of the people as they emanate from each individual in that circle, where they might be 30 of us in the Malacca. And then they chant to people specifically to unblock particular energies, or particular energy blockages.

Like a person with cancer recently—two weeks after she signed up she became diagnosed with breast cancer. I’ve told you my view of breast cancer, or cancer in general: it’s a repression of anger as one of the major dynamics in it. The shaman sits there in the dark and feels the blocked anger in that woman’s breast, and then works with it to unblock that energy. So, it’s not just the chemical effect of the plant, and I’m sure other people have emphasized the same point. … It’s the context, it’s the responsiveness and supportive interaction of the environment.

Remember what I said when I was quoting from that Harvard article about how the brain develops in response to the mutual responsiveness of child and adult? In the same way the healing benefit of something like ayahuasca is not simply the chemical effect of the plant, although that of course is inseparable from its other effects. It’s also the responsiveness of the environment in which people experience the ayahuasca. So, the experience has to be in a safe context, in a context where there’s guidance.

People sometimes have negative experiences, or they think they do because they had an experience they didn’t like, and so they resist the experience. And also, the personality has a way of invalidating our essential self.

I’ll give you a quick example of that. There was a woman in a recent retreat who wanted to experience what was blocking her from engaging with life and herself in a full and passionate way. Next she reports with great disappointment and even resentment what she experienced during the ayahuasca ceremony.

“I just got psychedelic colors, for example, there was a psychedelic Indian elephant. I didn’t come here to get a trip with Indian elephants.”

The Indian elephant is Ganesh, the god-figure who unblocks difficulties. That’s what she experienced. And in some part of her brain she knew that. But because she was resisting the experience rather than being open to it, she actually missed the point. Now, that’s okay. If you go through it that way you’ll still learn what you need to learn, so I’m not negating her experience. In fact, it turned out to be a beautiful experience for her. But people sometimes need the guidance to understand the experience. It’s not enough, the experience. We have to find the meaning of the experience, and that’s where my role comes in. That’s what I help people with. But that wouldn’t be possible without the astonishing work of the ayahuasceros, the ayahuasceras, that I work with.

So it’s an overall gestalt; the plant, the ceremony, the chanting, the energetic work, and the psychological-emotional preparation beforehand, integration afterwards, and the joint exploration and the identification of meaning.

[applause]

Well, thank you.”

via Alternet (http://www.alternet.org/drugs/gabor-mate-ayahuasca-maps-conference-2013)

Gabor Maté (born 6 January 1944) is a Hungarian-born[1] Canadian physician who specializes in neurology, psychiatry, and psychology, as well as the study and treatment of addiction. He is also widely recognized for his perspective on Attention Deficit Disorder and his firmly held belief in the connection between mind and body health. He has authored four books exploring topics including attention deficit disorder, stress, developmental psychology and addiction. He is a regular columnist for the Vancouver Sun and the Globe and Mail. -wikipedia

links:  (DrGaborMate.com)

Biodiversity vs. Virtual Reality

Yes, I am opinionated. So don’t take it personally. I just responded to a virtual landscape on a page with this comment. I don’t need a virtual moon dangling in my virtual living room with my virtual body, because I go outside all the time and sleep outside (at times because of being economically challenged or when there are no vacancies) looking at the moon and feeling the air and wind in my hair. I once had a vision – literally way before Meta and virtual reality was yet manifest – about this. It was to me a nightmare, not a cool thing I intended to want to do again. To step out of what i thought was reality and realize, as electrodes in a sort of scull cap were being taken from my head, that none of it was real. I personally prefer our real relationship with the earth and its creatures, and wish to protect them from humanity and its enormously wasteful energy strategies to maintain a technological fantasy. 

I recall a ‘waking dream’ I had decades ago. It was not while I was sleeping, but during the day. I was witnessing what has since been created, virtual reality, before it existed. In the dream I was climbing a mountain. I could feel the breeze. The ‘camera’ pulled back so that I was then seeing myself from above, and then moved further away until I was high above my body looking down at myself and the earth. Then suddenly I was climbing out of a box, an isolation tank, in my living room. I then was disconnecting these wires from my scull. When I awoke from this engaging dream during the day while I was living in Washington D.C., I recall feeling very disturbed emotionally from the thought of having cheated myself by not ‘actually’ having the real experience of traveling to a mountain, and then to put out the effort to reach its summit. Instead, I was only alone in a box – the shell of the real experience. A few years later I was startled to watch a movie while I was traveling and visiting Europe called “Strange Days” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film) because it was recapturing the essence of the mechanics of how this ‘virtual reality’ of my vision and virtual experience occurred.

I wrote then > when I was still using a Macbook < I have since continued to feel this conviction (even though I’m sitting here ‘working’ and writing, creating and communicating in isolation on my MacBook Pro – and loving and needing this machine – so I think 🙂 That, if we don’t maintain a balance, our technologies will continue to isolate us from ourselves, from one another and from our connection to the natural world. I had hypothesized that primitive people perhaps had not lost our special connection to the cosmos. A friend then pointed out to investigate my theory by looking at the aborigines of Australia. They once consistently demonstrated telepathy and ultra human powers of consciousness. As modern man relies more and more on our gadgets to do things for us, our human powers of mind and heart and connection to one another and the universal intelligence will atrophy. I believe human beings do have capabilities of telepathy and of connection with the divine through allowing ourselves to quite our minds and engage our spirits and heart – our sixth sense or intuition or gut instincts – whatever you want to call it. Yet, if our thoughts are constantly engaged and busy worrying about the past and the future and what we don’t have and judging one another and watching sitcoms and shit, we don’t have the time or space to tap into what is available to us as spiritual beings on the material physical plane. yep, I said it. I always thought it. And I keep finding other human beings who also reiterate and reverberate the same message….

Eco Biodiverse Tiny House Communities with shared commons towards re-wilding and protecting the natural world

I propose building tiny house communities to provide affordable housing, with an emphasis on living harmoniously with biodiversity in a clean and sustainable manner within the local geophysical environmental parameters. 

The community members investment prioritizes clean land, water, energy, transportation, shared gardens – as part of an ‘economic’ commons – in which shared ownership encourages care and participation in its maintenance while maintaining the restoration of re-wilding the natural world.

My favorite tiny house ever.

can’t remember the source, but this image drew tears of love

The sustainable communities involve planting trees, bee highways, pollinators, maintaining community gardens, acquiring sustainable energy and building materials appropriate to the local environment, encouraging arts and culture, while providing a healthy and sustainable habitat for the larger community of life in the vicinity of the ‘pod’ – collection of tiny houses. The emphasis is on ecological education and evaluation, nurturing and incorporating biodiversity, for all of the interacting systems to harmoniously thrive. 

I reached a bit and found these articles, with examples of the more wild looking communities I could find.

‘Tiny House Communities’ With Big Potential by Anne Marie

“Every time we make a decision to own an object or a recommitment to continue owning something is a decision to spend energy.”

. ‘6 Tiny Home Communities Inspiring Minimal And Collective’ by Kayti Christian 

‘6 Tiny Home Communities Inspiring Minimal And Collective’ by Kayti Christian 

‘6 Tiny Home Communities Inspiring Minimal And Collective’ by Kayti Christian 

Carol Keiter aka nomadbeatz welcomes donations for her writing, photography, illustrations, eBook and music composition. The PayPal donation button functions in Safari and Firefox, however is broken in Chrome.

Dreamed last evening to post the current page 65 of the educational ebook I’m editing

I dreamed last night to post the current page I’m editing of my book. For one thing, I made it over the psychological hump of not having opened the book in months. Now I’m back in the swing, and perhaps wish to as much also display the kind of book I am writing. 

I was yesterday just checking links (in case any are broken and need to be updated), reading for content, updating the bibliography. I guess just to reveal that there’s a reason that this book has been taking an extraordinarily long time.

Below are pics referring specifically to page 65 in the educational ebook I’ve been researching, writing and illustrating “A Seahorse Tale – A Spin on the Matter of Motion”. 

The pics encompass the specific section of the Table of Contents in which this ‘chapter’ is located.

Plasma  |  Interconnectedness  |  Permafrost  |  Methane – Greenhouse Gas

Section of this particular page of the interactive TOC – Table of Contents – including pg 65

Each chapter includes several subjects which a student or class could choose to jump to independently to study these specifically, or the book can be read chronologically from beginning to end. Below are pics of just page 65. 

Each page has an image: art, science, graphs

Text links are red, Video links are green

I worded the links so that the subjects can be easily identified and created the bibliography in google docs so that the topics can be alternately arranged alphabetically, to quickly locate specific subjects.

Carol Keiter aka nomadbeatz welcomes donations for her writing, photography, illustrations, eBook and music composition. The PayPal donation button functions in Safari and Firefox, however is broken in Chrome.

Corporate Gifts are Giftig | Backdoor to COP26

Corporate gifts are giftig (German/Deutsch for poisonous) to government leaders. Seducing them to remain mute and dysfunctional, as they deposit them in their bank accounts.

Got the Point?

Register and listen for free to all 2 weeks of the COP26 educational events presented by 

COP26 Backdoor – We Don’t Have Time

Listen to the Scientists, Entrepreneurs, Farmers, Artists, Journalists and Intellectuals who are reaching out to help people to help themselves.  NOT GOVT LEADERS, many of whom have done not-a-fucking-thing FOR THE LAST 26 YEARS OF CLIMATE CONFERENCES. 

Instead, hear the voices of community leaders and people who have come from the Global South and all over the world, who wish to defend their habitats, their right to clean air, water and nutrient-rich soil, whose lands are being washed away or scorched by human induced petroleum fed global warming. 

Learn about sustainable, fair, renewable and positive actions that we can take in our own homes and communities and ways to bring back ownership to ‘the Commons’ – our own resources of fresh air and water and wildlife, pulled into the wealth and responsibility of the entire community (not funneled off to the CEOs of those who have taken private ownership). 

(I  just made this above paragraph up, because that’s what I’d be interested in hearing about). 

Nevertheless, listen to the truth and experiences of people who are there to share their stories, not the lies with ties to those dangling their misinformation to sway the public into buying into them.

COP26 Full Backdoor Program of Events – We Don’t Have Time

Register for tickets to local hubs here: Stockholm • Washington DC • Nairobi

Read more about our different COP26 Broadcasts here: https://www.wedonthavetime.org/event/cop26

Let’s Participate in Educating ourselves, not wait for any government mandates to happen any time soon, such as FDR’s New Deal with the WPA Works Progress Administration

Greenwich Mean Time is 4 hours ahead of Eastern Time

I just read that “FDR helped lay the groundwork for the post-war peace organization that would become the United Nations”. I didn’t know that the UN is a PEACE ORGANIZATION! Funny how the imbalance of power has tweaked and tilted the un-level playing field over the last decades, manipulated by those with economic thrust, to bludgeon the public with misinformation and disinformation. 

https://dontchooseextinction.com/en/

And don’t forget about all of the other earthlings who share our planet.

7 Species Hit Hard by Climate Change—Including One That’s Already Extinct

Carol Keiter aka nomadbeatz welcomes donations for her writing, photography, illustrations, eBook and music composition. The PayPal donation button functions in Safari and Firefox, however is broken in Chrome.

Extinction – China’s Relentless Building and Crush of Biodiversity

I just read this headline as I was searching for names of higher educational programs under the guise of environmental science, ecology and extinction.  

The primate extinction crisis in China: immediate challenges and a way forward

I had to get up and walk out of the library. Beyond disgusted and upset. I am horrified. 

https://www.eprc.asia/langurs/

“China is facing an unprecedented set of challenges in balancing the effects of economic development and global climate change with environmental protection and maintaining biodiversity. Although positive steps have been undertaken to remedy this situation, currently 80% of China’s 25 extant primate species are threatened, 15–18 species have population sizes of less than 3000 individuals, and two species of gibbons and one species of langur have been extirpated over the past few decades. Today, virtually all species of primates in China inhabit fragmented landscapes….”

White-handed Gibbons Now Presumed ‘Extinct’ In China, Forest Survey Shows

“China’s fauna exhibits a unique diversity of apes. Unfortunately, the apes are more strongly endangered by extinction in China than in any other country. A research team assembled by anthropologists of Zurich University now conclude that another ape species has just become extinct in China’s Yunnan province.”

White-Handed Gibbon (Lar Gibbon)

The white-handed, or lar gibbon, or indeed the white-cheeked gibbon, is a primate found in the forests of South and Southeast Asian countries like Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Laos and possibly China. It is one of the best-known gibbon species in the world.

They say ‘possibly’ China, because it has already had its habitat mowed over. 

global mind pull, attraction globale de l’esprit, globaler Gedankenzug, atracción de la mente global

I wrote this in my digesthis blog earlier today.

https://carolkeiter.wordpress.com/2021/10/27/horror-spilling-to-grief-not-halloween-horror-reality-insect-armageddon-dont-choose-extinction/

https://globalmindpool.org

Carol Keiter aka nomadbeatz welcomes donations for her writing, photography, illustrations, eBook and music composition

The PayPal donation button functions in Safari and Firefox, however is broken in Chrome.

The Animals’ Lawsuit Against Humanity: An Illustrated 10th Century Iraqi Ecological Fable

Rather than continuing with our current trend of the last centuries of anthropocentrism, as we learn that health, happiness and quality of life is woven into the fabric of health and quality for all networks of life on our planet, we can embrace this work and regard our behavior from the point of view of one of our fellow earthlings.  

Fabulous that more than 2,000 years ago, humans had the foresight, love and empathy to consider the right to a good quality of life for all sentient beings. 

The Animals’ Lawsuit Against Humanity: An Illustrated 10th Century Iraqi Ecological Fable Paperback – Illustrated, April 1, 2005

by Ikhwan al-Safa (Author), Rabbi Dan Bridge (Author), Rabbi Kalonymus (Author), Umm Kulthum (Illustrator), Rabbi Anson Laytner (Translator), Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Introduction)

“In this interfaith and multicultural fable, eloquent representatives of all members of the animal kingdom – from horses to bees – come before the respected Spirit King to complain of the dreadful treatment they have suffered at the hands of humankind. During the ensuing trial, where both humans and animals testify before the King, both sides argue their points ingeniously, deftly illustrating the validity of both sides of the ecology debate. The ancient antecedents of this tale are thought to have originated in India, with the first written version penned in Arabic sometime before the 10th century in what is now Iraq. Much later, this version of the story was translated into Hebrew in 14th century France and was popular in European Jewish communities into the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This exquisite English translation, illustrated with 12 original color illumination plates, is useful in introducing young and old alike to environmental and animal rights issues.”

Carol Keiter aka nomadbeatz welcomes donations for her writing, photography, illustrations, eBook &amp; music composition

The PayPal donation button functions in Safari and Firefox, however is broken in Chrome.

Good For All Challenge | Roots & Shoots – Jane Goodall

https://www.rootsandshoots.org/challenges/good-for-all-challenge/

I’m in. Hope you join in also.!

Thank you Jane Goodall for a lifetime of risk and effort to help the living creatures of the world and to save their habitats. Thank you for continually reaching out to people of the world to educate and encourage other humans to recognize the beauty and intelligence of other creatures; to respect them and see that our habits and actions can indeed make their world a better place. 

Global Obliteration of Life – Endless Development $ Seductive Automobile Marketing

I was instigated to write this right away, in response to a friend’s post of his present experience in Antarctica, talking about ice sheets breaking off while the rest of the world is concerned with debates or Coronavirus. Greg Bernie Blaug posted this caption with his pictures at McMurdo Sound in Antarctica March 6, 2020.

Amidst all of the preoccupations today, there’s still this looming event that eclipses them all.

I feel that people are so incredibly disconnected from how their actions affect the natural world. Besides global warming, there’s also perpetual indulgence in continued building and expansion.

Ancient trees

I do not know how to derail the fixation that people have on having their own personal automobile.

I’ve had friends ‘unfriend’ me on Facebook after talking about the issue; that if they’re not part of the solution, they are part of the problem.

Like displaying fashion in clothes or status in property, automobile/truck ownership is something fully embedded in peoples’ psyches.

The transportation sector is the largest contributor to global warming (the word climate change neatly replacing the former term, bc it seems less human-induced and more of a natural occurrence. Certainly individuals seem to be less obnoxious than a refinery or oil spill from pipelines, but collectively pps decision to use and own cars that are using petroleum and willfully continuing despite the fucking statistical facts, implies that there is not enough education and pressure from the society and leaders, to make these facts clear.

The Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader the Dalai Lama says “we have an urgent responsibility” to protect the planet and its inhabitants.

Ironically, it’s difficult to capture an image on a website without being bombarded with ads that are (often with respect to what I read) pointedly revealing information paradoxical to the content of the message.

As members of Climate Action Rhode Island canvassed outside of a new Chase Bank branch, to inform people that Chase is the largest supporter and investor in fossil fuels, a police officer on duty stated that he had lived in Europe earlier in his life working in the shoe industry. In Europe he witnessed much more conscientiousness with regards to automobile use and recycling. He said that here “It’s all about money”. I asked him if his colleagues saw things in the same way? He shook his head, no, no, not even close.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/global-warming-causes/

Mentioning to my friend, just like back in the days when we’d participate in the San Francisco critical mass collective bike ride, I’m still riding a bicycle. Because of this, I notice very clearly through the fumes and higher temperatures emitted by the majority of vehicles, that there are in fact an extraordinary amount of people in thIs capital city of Providence, Rhode Island, who let their car engines idle, oblivious to the present and future repercussions. I never witnessed this in any European city. I continue to be miffed by their errant mufflers. Here in this New England city, people of every race, ethnicity, socio-economic background, leave their automobiles and trucks running, engine on; whether they are pulling over to check their phone, stopping and getting out of their vehicle to talk to someone, or going to do an errand. THEY LEAVE THE ENGINES IDLING, EVEN WHEN THEY ARE NOT NEAR THE CAR; for minutes, verging on half an hour. There’s also a population of motorcycle riders (big Portuguese community from islands off Portugal) who get off on revving their motors and spewing out black clouds of smoke and laying rubber to leave thick black streaks on the pavement. I find it unfathomable. I look at this scenario as if I’ve landed on Earth in the future, and see this extraordinary not just dependence, but flagrant fixation on vehicles. But not just to show how cool one is, but to demonstrate how loud and obnoxious they can conceivably be.

I’m okay with seeing people do ‘wheely’s’ and demonstrating skill, but spinning black tar and spewing it into the air is filth, and they tend to do it down by the water, where wild birds live.

I went bicycling yesterday to find the local chapter of the Sierra Club after reading about their program introducing experiences for communities of color who are less exposed to green space, to introduce them to wonder and appreciation of the natural world, so that they will be more likely to care and want to be guardians for the planet. https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2019-3-may-june/feature/outdoors-for-all-nature-is-a-human-right The

Sierra club ‘Outdoors for All’

Sierra club was at neither address that they claimed on their website. The local director of a River council, when i mentioned idling cars, reflected on the fact that she does this too, ‘her nice warm car’ she said.

As this article points out, “will require resisting common marketing tactics.” I mean, whether you’re a low rider, motorcycle rider living paycheck-to-paycheck or a wealthy Swiss banker with a 500,000 Euro automobile, the marketing print and air waves for the last dozens of years target the human population; telling you that your worth, perceived success and luck with romance are driven by what kind of machine you drive.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/09/letters-from-the-march-9-2020-issue

“A longer-term solution may require the slowing, and the eventual reversal, of population growth, combined with a decrease in average individual consumption in richer countries. The latter change will require resisting common marketing tactics...After forty years as an ecologist, I believe that the transition to a less materialistic world would be a cakewalk compared with living on a planet with too little photosynthesis.”