Saturday, February 24, 2007

Biophilia: bonding with the Earth

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In ancient times, when nature was perceived as alive,with intelligence and soul, a natural process took place. people bonded with the natural world in much the same way modern people of today bond with their pets or family.

This bonding process has decreased in recent history......viewing the world as mechanical and less alive . This attitude has engendered a certain kind of belief toward nature. Edward Wilson calls it bio-philia- a genetically encoded or innate emotional affinity toward all other life-forms on Earth.

The more that children are taught that the Earth is dead , intrinsically other life-forms posses less value, and the more they are separated from regular contact withWisdom ,nature, the less biophilia occurs- and so this lessens the genetic encoding for caring for and bonding with life on Earth.




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Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Attention RN's 32 Contact Hours: introduction to mexican herbalism

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Calling all RN's within the United States! This continuing education program is designed just for you. Travel to the coast of Mexico and attend this accredited program. You will not only receive 32 contact hours but enjoy the beautiful town of Yelapa, Mexico, just outside of Puerto Vallarta. Its a mini vacation that is structured to relax, heal and inform the participant.
Check out my website at www.concentricrings.org

Mexican Herbalism
An Introductory Workshop

Join us for 9 beautiful days in Yelapa, Mexico. Experience a renewed, healthier you!
Our workshops are designed to expand your knowledge of the local healing methods known throughout Central America, as Curanderismo. As you begin to experience the stress free jungle setting of Yelapa, a sensation will start to flow over your being as you realize this might be the first time ,in a long time, that you’ve really relaxed.
My vision for Concentric Rings began with an idea to share a model of alternative healing with the people I meet. It is a healing knowledge that honors the human body and the health of the planet we all share.
Concentric Rings is designed to send this healing knowledge radiating outward , creating a ripple or concentric ring of information through education. I hope the experience will inspire people enough to ponder this question….
“ Why is it important for you to become more responsible for your own health care?”
Our healers and locations are carefully selected to offer you, the participant ,a rich experience of the local healing traditions and customs.

Provider approved by the California Board of Registered Nursing,
Provider # 14811 for RN’s 32 Contact Hours






www.concentricrings.org
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Attention RN's 32 Contact Hours: introduction to mexican herbalism

yelapa-banderas-bay.jpg

Calling all RN's within the United States! This continuing education program is designed just for you. Travel to the coast of Mexico and attend this accredited program. You will not only receive 32 contact hours but enjoy the beautiful town of Yelapa, Mexico, just outside of Puerto Vallarta. Its a mini vacation that is structured to relax, heal and inform the participant.
Check out my website at www.concentricrings.org






Mexican Herbalism
An Introductory Workshop

Join us for 9 beautiful days in Yelapa, Mexico. Experience a renewed, healthier you!
Our workshops are designed to expand your knowledge of the local healing methods known throughout Central America, as Curanderismo. As you begin to experience the stress free jungle setting of Yelapa, a sensation will start to flow over your being as you realize this might be the first time ,in a long time, that you’ve really relaxed.
My vision for Concentric Rings began with an idea to share a model of alternative healing with the people I meet. It is a healing knowledge that honors the human body and the health of the planet we all share.
Concentric Rings is designed to send this healing knowledge radiating outward , creating a ripple or concentric ring of information through education. I hope the experience will inspire people enough to ponder this question….
“ Why is it important for you to become more responsible for your own health care?”
Our healers and locations are carefully selected to offer you, the participant ,a rich experience of the local healing traditions and customs.


Provider approved by the California Board of Registered Nursing,
Provider # 14811 for RN’s 32 Contact Hours








www.concentricrings.org
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Monday, February 19, 2007

Pour some absinthe, fluff the pillows, take off your pants. It is time.

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Because now we know: Getting nicely and wholly high on illegal but completely natural hallucinogenic drugs might, just might open some sort of profound psychological doorway or serve as some sort of giddy terrifying rocket ride to a higher state of consciousness, happiness, a sense of inner peace and love and perspective and a big, fat lick from the divine.

It's true. There's even a swell new study from Johns Hopkins University that officially suggests what shamans and gurus and botany Ph.D.s and alt-spirituality types have known since the dawn of time and Jimi Hendrix's consciousness: that psilocybin, the all-natural chemical found in certain strains of wild mushrooms, induces a surprisingly large percentage of users to experience a profound -- and in some cases, largely permanent -- revolution in their spiritual attitudes and perspectives.

Not only that, but the stuff reportedly made a majority of testers feel so much more compassionate, open-hearted, connected to and awestruck by the world and the universe and God that it ranks right up there with the most profound and unfathomable experiences of their lives. I know. Stop the presses.

But let us sidestep the face-slapping obviousness. Let us look past the fact that you are meant to react to this study's findings like it's some sort of revelation, like it doesn't merely reinforce roughly 10 thousand years of evidence and modern research and opinioneering and responsible advocacy by everyone from Timothy Leary to Terence McKenna to Huston Smith to the Tibetan Book of the Dead with yet another study to add to the pile in the Science of the No Duh.

You know the type -- studies that merely reinforce ageless common sense, that simply reiterate something that's been said and understood for eons. There have been, for example, recent studies that prove that meditation actually reduces blood pressure (no!) and that MDMA (Ecstasy) is amazing at releasing inhibition and tapping the deeper psyche (shocking!) and that marijuana is roughly a thousand times less harmful than Marlboros and nine vodka tonics and smacking your family around in an alcoholic rage. You know, duh.

Because one thing painfully redundant studies like this do provide is a nicely clinical framework, a structured context from which to view a long-standing phenomenon. But here's the fascinating part: In the case of something like psilocybin, it's not so much the astounding findings that can make you swoon, it's also, well, the illuminating shortcomings of science itself.

Put another way, they are trying, once again, to measure enlightenment. They are attempting to put a frame around consciousness, cosmic awe, God. And of course, they cannot do it. Or rather, they can only go so far before they hit that point where the sidewalk ends and the world spins off its logical axis and the study's participants cannot help but deliver the death blow every scientist dreads to hear: "You cannot possibly understand."

Witness, won't you, these revelations:

The psilocybin joyriders claimed the experience included such feelings as "a sense of pure awareness and a merging with ultimate reality, a transcendence of time and space, a feeling of sacredness or awe, and deeply felt positive mood like joy, peace and love." What's more, for a majority of users, the experience was "impossible to put into words."

It doesn't stop there. Two months later, 24 of the participants (out of a total of 36) filled out a questionnaire. Two-thirds called their reaction to psilocybin "one of the five top most meaningful experiences of their lives. On another measure, one-third called it the most spiritually significant experience of their lives, with another 40 percent ranking it in the top five. About 80 percent said that because of the psilocybin experience, they still had a sense of well-being or life satisfaction that was raised either 'moderately' or 'very much.'"

You gotta read that again. And then again. Because those statements are just a little astonishing, unlike anything you will read in some FDA report on Prozac from Eli Lily. The most profound experience of their lives? One of the most spiritually significant? Can we get some of this stuff into Dick Cheney's blood pudding? Into the Kool-Aid at the American Family Association? Into Israel and Lebanon?

But this is the amazing thing: Here, again, is hard science running smack into the hot cosmic goo of the mystical. Here, again, is science peering over the edge of understanding and jumping back and saying, "Holy crap." It is yet another reminder that our beautiful sciences have almost zero tools with which to quantify something like "transcendence of time and space" or "a feeling of sacredness and awe." And watching them try is either tremendously enjoyable or just depressing as hell. Or a little of both. It all depends, of course, on how you see it.

Here then, are your choices. Here are the three ways to look at the effects of magic mushrooms on the consciousness of humankind. Which angle you choose depends a great deal on how nimble you allow your mind, your heart, your spirit to be. Or maybe it's just how much wine you've had.

The first way is to simply presume that the lives of the study's participants had obviously been, up to their psilocybin joys, tremendously mediocre. So bland and so limp that something like hallucinogenic mushrooms could not help but be, in contrast, as profound as being licked by angels.

This is a clinical interpretation. The gorgeous experience itself means nothing except to say that normal life is terribly drab and crazy drugs temporarily scramble your brain in occasionally positive and interesting ways, but never the twain shall meet, so oh well let's go back to work.

But you can also take it one step further. You may conclude that the study underscores the harsh fact that we as a species are so divorced from deeper meaning, so detached from the mystical and the divine and the universal in our everyday instant-gratification lives, that it takes something like a powerful hallucinogen to show us just how meek and limited and far from merging with God we still very much are. This is the pessimistic view. And it is, by every estimate, a very primitive and sour place to be.

Ah, but then there's the third way. This is to suggest that it's exactly the other way around, that perhaps at least some of us are, as Leary and his cosmic cohorts have suggested for decades, just inches from the celestial doorway, already on the precipice of realizing that we are, in fact, the divine we so desperately seek. Problem is, we can't see the edge through the tremendous fog of consumerism and conservatism and quasi-religious muck.

But even so, every now and then we manage to take a tiny, unconscious, clumsy step ever closer to the edge, stumbling toward ecstasy without really knowing or understanding that we're doing so. And ultimately, sly entheogens like psilocybin are merely nature's way of clearing the fog for a moment, of letting us know just how close we are by smacking us upside the scientific head and tying our cosmic shoelaces together. And doesn't that sound like a fascinating way to spend the weekend?



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Friday, February 16, 2007

Spiritual Toothache: a life rewired by experiencing ayahuasca

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Just how deep down the rabbit hole are we willing to go...... ?

"Life constraints, pursuit of financial freedom and soul growth were giving me a spiritual toothache of sorts.
I needed to have some unknown "experience",to take take the true test
and I was certain it could be induced with some ayahuasca medicine I had yet to be in contact with."

I'm discovering how my own life is becoming rewired from experiencing the ayahuasca medicine and enjoying old friends that present original ideas that stimulate deep thoughts within myself, thoughts that make me aware of an understanding, that place I hold in the universal oneness. My responsibility.

At the time I had been hearing quite a bit of vocal rumbling about the movie WHAT THE BLEEP DO WE KNOW, I went to see it to decide for myself,what the bleep do I know for christ sake.....up to a year ago I was flopping around in the information pool gathering what I felt I needed to know to sustain me until I created the opportunity to experience the ayahuasca journey first hand.
Until I saw the movie, I had been drinking the brew during the past year and that experience has made all the difference in the way I looked at how and why I do what I do in the world. It also meant I had to accept responsibility for it...
Whew, that was tough.....looking at that reality...well...quite frankly it scared the shit out of me.

I now had to be honest with myself and look in the mirror ....deep into the mirror ( down the rabbit hole ) and say..." I love you " to myself.....

I found the information from the movie very thought provoking and many of the view points that were discussed had been gifted through thought and shown visually to me in my own ayahuasca experience of the past month in South America.

The movie put words to a concept that I was unable to do, it is worth the money and time to go see this film, truly it is ,even if you disagree with it.
"Why?", because it gets you thinking and that makes a great difference within ourselves .....





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Sunday, February 11, 2007

Shopworn Metaphysics: only aya knows!

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I know this may sound like shopworn metaphysics to some readers, but it is true to my experience. The pronoun of the ayahuasca journey is not me but we.

We are all wounded, we are all healed; we are all lost, we are all found; we are all damned, we are all saved, we are all separate, we are all one. Ayahuasca helps us as individuals to heal, by gathering together the various aspects of ourselves; we see how one person’s healing contributes to the healing of us all.

We see how each self is really part of a larger Self. Said another way we are all one.




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Saturday, February 10, 2007

First Story ever Told: sun and earth's love

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Firelight is the best light to write by, make love by and to tell stories by.

The first story ever told should be told by firelight.

Let your mind go back and remember ……………………………………….

It began when the Sun shed a tear.
Time was young then, when the Sun shed a tear that fell upon the Earth.

The Earth courted the Sun, orbiting the object of her love, turning to show off her every aspect, spinning round, like a young girl pirouetting, seducing the Great Star with her blue-green beauty, while her sister the Moon circled in attendance as the chaperon.

Now the truth is that the Sun had always favored the Earth, but there was a time when the Great Star’s attentions had been taken by the Moon for her own. But the light of the Sun always shone upon the Earth, for it was the true object of his passion.

The old maid Moon resigned herself to their love, and although she was devoted to the Earth and would attend her faithfully, she found that she could not look steadily upon the lovers, and took to hiding her sadness in shadow once a month.

So it was at such a time, when the face of the Moon was hidden behind a shadow shroud, that the Sun and the Earth, free from the attentions of their pale matron, consummated their love.

Of course the Earth was pregnant for quite some time. The seas became swollen with child, for life grew in the Earth’s ocean womb. Sister Moon, faithful matron, became midwife, for everybody knows that the seas respond to her gentle pull.


Then one day, the Sun smiled, the Moon beamed and the Earth trembled when life was born from her ocean womb.

The Sun shed a tear of joy that landed on the Earth. It fell in the land of the stone people, this tear of fire. The stone people were the first to tell this story.

Before the plants and animals there were the stone people, and as all life emerged from the Earth’s ocean womb, the stone people gathered around the tear of fire that the Sun had shed, and they wondered what to do.

They formed a circle around the tear of fire and watched it burn like a fallen star. As long as the circle was unbroken, the fire stayed within and burned, there was warmth and light even when the Sun was shinning on another part of the Earth.


The Moon would show her full face many times and the Earth would dance around and around the Sun while the stone people sat in council and deliberated what to do about the tear of fire. The debate was long because every word the stone people spoke took one full year to pronounce.

Remember that time was not measured as it is today and all the while the stone people debated the fate of the tear of fire, life was growing on the shores of the Earth.
There were stories of a great cavern in the center of the Earth, the place of the stone people’s origin. Finally the stone people agreed that this cavern would be the appropriate place for the shimmering tear, but the problem was how to take it there..

Finally the stone people could not contain the great tear the object of their wonder. The ground trembled with their agitation, and the tear of fire spread to the four directions. It filled the cracks in the rocks and fell into deep ravines, it traveled along the rivers finding its way down and into the underground streams and eventually all the way to the center of the Earth, where it will burn forever.

That is how fire came to the Earth. It was a gift, a proud father’s tear of joy, to his children.

The Sun and the Earth would go on making life, for they are very passionate. And the children of the Sun and the Earth would love their mother and father and live in the paradise that their parents had made for them.

On the ground and in the cracks of the rocks along the rivers where the great tear had traveled and cooled the children of the Sun and Earth would find something soft that shone like the Sun and this was called gold.
The gold was a remembrance of the Sun’s ancient love for the Earth. The children of the Sun gathered the god from the ground and used it to cover their places of worship and to fashion their sacred ornament to show their love and respect for the Sun and the Earth that gave them life..







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Friday, February 9, 2007

The Fairy Tale: mythological belief





Every woman knows the fairy tale:

find the right man, give him what he wants and needs, and he’ll love you forever.

But when the myth you’ve been asked to believe fails to deliver—when you sense you’ve been settling for far less than you know in your heart
is possible—how do you attract and keep a man capable of meeting what you most passionately yearn for?



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Thursday, February 8, 2007

This Year I Will......strive to complete myself




This year I will love myself the way I want to be loved. The manner in which I treat myself sets the tone for how men will treat me, so I will respect myself, believe in my worth, and take pride in my unique beauty-both inside and out!

I will see the world as full of possibilities and live each day believing that I could meet that special man at any time, in any place. The openness I feel within my heart to meet someone wonderful will transcend to my outward appearance; I will smile, laugh, and be just as friendly and approachable in the grocery store, in line at the bank, and while walking my dog down the street on a Tuesday morning ,as I am when I open my heart space to Great Spirit.

I will choose not to engage in the emotional turmoil of an unhealthy relationship but instead, I will only give my heart to a man who is truly aware of his own value and can honor my worth as an individual.

When I am happy with my life and feeling fulfilled I am not expecting a man to complete me. This confidence and contentment is the antidote to neediness and will attract men of healthy quality who want to be a part of my fabulous life!



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Tuesday, February 6, 2007

Feminine Energy Spirit





Em visita de trabalho à nação Arara, às margens do Juruá, no fundo da mata amazônica, bebi, em noite de pajelança, sábado passado, um pote inteiro de ayahuasca, o lúquido milenar, antigo conhecido dos povos da América pré-colombiana, e vi que o gosto era forte e bom, vegetal adstringente, profundo. Não vieram as tais náuseas de que muitos falam(e pelas quais outros anseiam). Ao contrário. A náusea, aquela de Sartre, o spleen civilizatório, é que se aplicava ali, cercado que estava eu de gente de paz, jovens pajés, aprendizes, suas mulheres e irmã, etnia outrora flagrada nos seringais e hoje sedenta de reativar os canais do tempo.

Um dos homens puxava, do fundo dum vaso, ressonâncias em idioma pano, ora palavras, ora impulsos vocais, interjeoções de júbilo ou dor, suspiros e sopros de poderosa acústica contra maus ventos em contraponto com as vozes femininas, suspensas, dissonantes, sensuais no limite do divino.


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Sunday, January 21, 2007

Choose Wisely: boomerangs

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Thoughts are boomerangs,

returning with precision to their source.

Choose wisely which ones you throw.





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Sunday, January 14, 2007

Passion: the dream of ayahauasca

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Softly clasp your arms, like a girdle, about me. Touch, oh, touch my skin like that again! Neither water nor the noon-time breeze is gentle as your hand.

Today you shall fondle me, 'tis your turn. Remember the caresses that I taught you last night, and kneel beside me and do not say a word.

Your lips sink from my lips. And all your unbound hair flows down, as the caress follows fast upon the kiss. The strands unfurl and fall upon my left breast; they hide your eyes from me.

Give me your hand, it is so warm! Press mine and do not leave it. Hands join with hands more easily than mouth with mouth, and nothing can compare with their passion.


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Saturday, January 13, 2007

Feminine Energy Spirit

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Feminine Energy Spirit



It is a natural part of spiritual development to have periods of activity and growth followed by periods of relative quiet. Sometimes I need to rest in order to integrate a new vision of the world, or of myself, taking time to assimilate new realizations and to let old patterns and habits fall away. The purpose of times like these are to stabilize my new growth. While it may appear that nothing is happening, these can be necessary periods of rest and integration..

Ingestion of Ayahuasca usually induces altered states of awareness that have assisted me with my spiritual development. Ayahuasca "vine of the soul," refers to this freeing of the spirit.
There is a Zen expression: Practice as if your hair were on fire. What this is meant to inspire is the sense that there is no good time not to be on one’s spiritual path.

The plants involved with the brew are called plants of the gods, for their power is claimed to have supernatural forces residing in their tissues, and they have been divine gifts to the earliest of Indigenous cultures.


The shaman may use Ayahuasca as a tool to diagnose illness or to ward off impending disaster even to tell prophesies of the future, but it is more than a shaman's tool. Entering into almost all aspects of indigenous life, the people who use it and to that extent it can hardly be called a drug, it’s more of a blessing from the natural world.


I challenge myself to always be awake in my life, and to keep showing up in the moment. If a need to rest arises, I rest in the moment. But when I start stagnating-numbing out, escaping, or being unconscious-it is up to me to acknowledge it for myself. Ayahuasca has been a divine channel to keep me awake and in the moment. Fully alive and embracing life to its fullest.

This is not to say I have not experienced stagnation settling in just before an important breakthrough. It may be a symptom of my fear, one last wall thrown up by my small self in order to protect me from a life-changing realization. Sometimes when I explore the stagnation, I find I can move beyond it. I have compassion for myself as I work to remove the obstacles that block my progress.

The Ayahuasca tea is employed for prophecy, divination, sorcery, and medicinal purposes, it is deeply rooted in native mythology and philosophy and there can be no doubt of its great age as a part of a sustainable village belief system for connecting with Spirit. I have had profound interaction while under the guidance of this teacher plant.

Jungle brews are magic intoxicants that the Indians of South America believe can free the soul from corporeal confinement, allowing it to wander free and return to the body at will. The soul, thus uninhibited, liberates its owner from the realities of everyday life and introduces her to wonderous realms of what she considers reality and permits her to communicate with her ancestors or angels in this dreamtime. I have at times felt blessed to be so aware of Spirit while being held with unconditional love.


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Saturday, January 6, 2007

Dawn Of Consciousness : imagine

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Imagine what it would be like to read the story of your life before it actually happened ...


I’d like to feel you all more potently with my own sense of today.

As I awaken in my room, I embrace the quiet of this space and the returning of the early dawn. I see what I have left unappreciated and untended to,on my own feasting plate of Life.

When Life is seen and understood as nutritive, graced by its existence and generous in its design.....then a deep.... ahhhhh....is felt.

Why, you may ask has my inspiration led me to this place of reflection?

Out of the depths of my shadow self, I must deepen my own appreciation of the beauty before me and especially within me.

My own darkness has called me forth to move my daily life out of this small room, it is mostly dim and not adequately private.

Now I am called to a new room, full of light, full of life's pulsings to and fro and yet exquisitely private. I now begin a new journey of allowing a deeper reflection to become visible, one into the vulnerability of seeing the remaining shadows. A paradox of relaities that Life has laid on the feasting table before me.

The awareness of that awakening is humbling and penetrating to my core.


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Tuesday, January 2, 2007

Walking on Water: what's your dream?









Part of the allure of ayahuasca is its power to put the user in direct contact with the spirit world.

For most tribal people, the risk was not so much one of dying but of not living properly. It was the quality of your time on Earth, not the quantity, that was important to them. As a modern culture we have forgotten this part of the dream. Our relationship to the natural world and the natural world’s to us.

An objective, if you will, is to change your dream, your way of thinking about this reality. Not just through talking about it like we are doing here, but to feel it deep inside ourselves with such intensity that it will forever change our dreams. Being aware of our unity with all living things; animals, plants, minerals, mountains, air, water.

Becoming attuned to every single thing, to the sacredness that surrounds and inhabits us. The concept of We Are All One. In having said that, consider your relationship with water John.

Can one come to an understanding within this relationship that both parties agree to? Shifting our dream of reality about “what is water” and our relationship to it.

Finding a deeper relationship to the reality of water and to ourselves. If so then you may very well find yourself walking on water due to that agreement. Remember what we learned in What the Bleep about water!


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