on the importance of touch

(first published in The Glowing Hive Spring 2013)

Human beings are unique among animals for our long period of utter dependency after birth. No other animal is as vulnerable and reliant on parental care as the human infant. Given our relatively narrow pelvis, our babies need be born before the brain case takes its full size. A longer inter-uterine period would otherwise be ideal, but an older prenatal baby would never be able to make it's way out the womb portal. For this reason we must birth our young after nine months and give them our complete care and attention until several years later when they become ambulatory and aware enough to navigate their environment and make tentative choices.

Of course much has been written about this delicate period in human development and of the many conditions and features of this time is the sheer survival necessity of touch and bodily, particularly facial, interactions. Baby thrives when caregivers offer a tangible physical presence, when baby can feel that mother or father are an extension of their own fleshy business. The security of this connection allows the baby to develop somatic-mind, to inhabit the whole body of self, and to apply the true unfettered potential of how that body can interact with the space and circumstances it finds itself in. Spatial learning comes more easily, as does command and development of head and spine, rolling, crawling, walking, falling down and getting up, and so on.

On the emotional level, baby learns to express itself through first encountering the palette of behaviours and moods brought to bear on the environment. What baby experiences also becomes hardwired as presets, and like holes in a sieve, shape and limit how emotional contents will come to be expressed.

Ruminating on such factors attending our earliest experiences, the ones which give shape to our on-going development and unfolding, but which also reflect the areas of learning our individuality is seeking, I began to consider some of the most important features of intimate relationships. 

We very rarely think to examine, for example, the quality of our touch. The patterns of daily living obfuscate subtle distinguishing in a familiar topography of hugs, kisses, and hand-holding, and while these tend to become rote after a time, there still remains much that we could bring awareness to as portals for going deeper into intimacy and authenticity.

The hands and arms, embryologically, develop from the same cell bud as the heart, and in a very real sense they remain connected to this immense power point in the body. Not only do we use our arms to bring closer what is dear to us, we also find that orchestra conductors, who use their arms in large, sweeping, heartfelt gestures to lead an orchestra, are the longest living professionals as reported by American cardiologist, Stephen Sinatra, MD. Expressing ourselves from the heart center out through the arms and hands, in what they hold and touch and how, remains very programmatic, either serving to assist the free-flow of feeling from the heart out into life, or the unconscious obstruction of authentic connectivity to a world we don't really wish to grab hold of. 

The hands also carry in them the end point of a vast neural network that connects its sensate, tactile surface to the deepest reaches of inner space, to the organs vital for life and emblematic of the different emotional seats in the body, from the liver and anger, to the lungs and grief, to the kidneys and fear, the colon and loss and release, the small intestine with growth and learning, and so on. It is perhaps why we feel such a strong containment and closeness to the one we hold hands with and how this has so naturally become a human practice which gives much pleasure and security.

Quality of touch, then, becomes a matter of paramount importance. A playful slap or a thoughtless grab goes right into the tissues, and even if our rational minds put the kinetic event in context, the messages can accumulate, especially where there is an existing history. In this way we can both draw out of others and ourselves patterns of touch that have been imprinted from earliest life. Bringing more attention to the ways in which we put hands on each other then becomes an opportunity to unlearn old habits while exploring new, more effective ways to touch and be touched. The slightest interaction becomes a rich occasion to not slip into somatic unconsciousness, to take advantage of this sensual body that co-creates our inner conversations and outer points of view, bringing new dimension to all relationships.

on skepticism

skepticism is not only completely at odds with the spirit of science, its become a petri dish for the incubation of jingoism and reckless a priori assumptions about what can be known or worth knowing. it shucks and trades not with open-minded investigation, or confident reliance on the sufficiency of the scientific method, but with doubt (which is itself an assertion, not a question) and ad hominem attacks on either the query or the querent, both designed to poison waters and delimit the scope of true inquiry.

this world has become too enamoured with chain of command and intrigue... both of those, inspired by production line politics and the fruits of power, are, in the long run, mere wastes of human potential, barriers to progress and hazardous developers of corruption.

‎"The permanent revolution is vision, is spontaneity, perpetually renewed: every day the last day, or the first day, the beginning and the end. People are wont to speak of the necessity of a new order of things, but those in the grip of their personal ego can only give birth to an 'old' order. A new order is, correctly speaking, one which is renewed hourly."[Norman O. Brown]

regarding the following slate podcast, and the current controversy around sadomasochism: 

stanislav grof did much groundbreaking in this area... using holotropic breathing to return his subjects to the uterine period and its birth drama, he found that the expulsion from womb to the world outside involved pressures, sensations, and emotions that mix together fear, discomfort, asphyxia, and orgasm... we also know that our associations around sex and intimacy are coloured by not just our own experiences but the persona of the moment that we bring to bear on those experiences... in short, it's a fluid alive thing, in flux and subject to change. the BDSM lifestyle wants to remove self-inquiry from the link between violence and arousal, thanatos and eros, for fear of loosing 'kink' if its analyzed too much... yet these practices create more and more of an association between violence, powerlessness, shame and orgasm, and more and more of a handicapped need for these in order to access sexual release... the spiritual potential and kinetic apparatus of sex can be applied toward self-knowledge, growth, intimacy, respect and life-affirmation, but it can also be distorted by caprice, choice, or circumstance into a ill-thought-out quickening of the deconstructive instinct... what is certain is this, the more we reduce others to mere tools or instruments of pleasure that we "do" or are "done to," the more difficulty we will have looking at the world through grounded, compassionate, non-exploitative eyes...

I remember so clearly being that one voice in the room at case conferences with all of the leading so-called master homeopaths... when they would trot out different caricatures from their materia medicas and barely be able to sort their disdain from the human material, I would always ask the inconvenient questions, prompting world famous lecturers to pronounce, "I am not a psychologist madame, and thank god for that..." as if the psychological aspect of the human person could be reduced to the mere monkey behaviourism of repertorialist homeopathy (as if there could be no greater oxymoron)... of course encounters with Edward Whitmont, Rolf/Feitis, Cousens and Cicchetti were reassuring, but what I'm about to quote is the synthesis I've been really waiting to hear, and my favorite teacher Alize Timmerman has just offered it: "Knowing ourselves creates the first step into knowing a remedy. The better we understand ourselves, the better we can create insights in the core of a remedy and the person in front of us. The more self-knowledge we have, the more connection we can have with the healing power of a remedy."

LIVING OUT LOUD

(first published in The Glowing Hive Winter 2013)

Life without creative expression is inconceivable. Yet all too often in this topsy turvy world we're portioned among rules and roles, inherited from one fear-based generation and unquestionably passed to the next, biding us to suspect, even exclude, that decidedly inward realm of the personal imagination from which creativity takes its instructions and breath. We're taught it's somehow of mischief and ungodly in its autonomies, that its fundamental urge to represent what is otherwise impossible to communicate turns it into some kind of admonitory Icarus. 

Yet creativity, this infinite, ever-articulating manifestation of space intersecting time, expressed by the human in its culture of life, the crow in its toolmaking, the dolphin in its 'languaging,' this sine qua non life force energy which breaks up the weighted stone of history under our feet is surely not ours to trifle with. Like water, though it can be obstructed and constrained, it eventually wears down its containment to find free run through the tiniest chink. 

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Imagination takes us beyond what consensus reality and habit deem possible, launching us forward into undiscovered territories and capabilities we quickly take for granted.

A horse can lend its rider the speed and strength he or she lacks,
but the rider who is wise remembers it is no more than a loan.

- Pam Brown

We so easily forget that not only our art, but our tools, conventions and technologies, were all once but a far-fetched fantasy, a mote in the eye of someone others called mad or outrageous. The creative act not only furnishes us with the culture and entertainment of ages, it creates and sustains our institutions, our modalities of medicine and science, our habits of market, travel and home, even our manner of dress, cuisine, and lovemaking. Still, we are taught to think the worst, to be guarded against things that are 'all in our heads,' against 'getting carried away,' with one's 'head in the clouds...'

Ironically, our personality, which many assume to be a fixed emanation of some indestructible uniqueness, is actually a living projection of pure imagination, nothing like the concomitant, indestructible core, what Jung termed the personal and collective unconscious, which in truth guides our fateful choices and shapes our sense of person far more than our waking self. Imagination gives us play with who we are, but its deep in the unconscious where the mystery of our truth lies. 

In fact, were it not for our ability to conceive of ourselves as dramatic characters in contrapuntal role with each other and our environment, life would loose its consensual interlocks and social coherency. Were it not for our ability to at least by degree quiet the trivializing mind, to invite the cellular footprint of life to express itself in dreams and images, we'd have no problem-solving ability, no concept of future or past. 

Only the rational mind objects to clear images of mitochondrial separation in the wall drawings of ancient Egypt, predating the discovery of their behaviour in the late 1800s. 

Only a desiccant skepticism refuses to see for truth depictions of the helical structure of DNA which regularly appear in the drawings of shaman returned from entheologic expedition well before the time of Watson and Crik. 

The ring-shape of benzene came to the scientist Kekule in a dream, forcing a reckoning among at least some scientists that their best ideas came to them not under labour, effort or stress, but during times of repose and reflection, in the bed, the bath or the bus, when imagination can run free. Even the ancient Greeks posited that all wisdom is within not without, that we need merely remind ourselves of what the body already knows... the body, hardly mute, speaks independently in our dreams, our feelings, and creative acts, in our sensations, intuitions, our embodiments and diseases. It's speaking, yes and indeed, but are we listening? and do we know what to make of its imputations and visions?

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Living through the current era of specialization has fractured our proto-historic wholeness. Once we expressed our creativity in everything we did. There was no separation, Eden was not yet lost, there were no activities done in a drudgery of work. Everything that was done arose instead out of a unified spiritual continuity between the unseen, the mundane forms and our theater of necessity. With the rise of resource-anxiety and tribal war-making, we began to ascribe to healers, shaman, priests and madmen these outposts betwixt sense and spirit, while the majority applied themselves to the practical affairs of survival, strife and war, outsourcing the creative itch to artisans and spiritual yearning to those programmatic agents separated from the lower concerns of life by their monopoly on celestial powers.

Inevitably, as civilizations progressed and our labour-saving achievements hit critical mass, people became less predictable in their commitments to these bifurcations. Accountants left their businesses and became impressionistic painters. Feminists became gourmet cooks and languorous knitters. Prostitutes became math teachers. Potters became architects. Stockbrokers became farmers. The pressure has been on to circle the square, to round out the partiality of roles we've assigned to ourselves for the sake of our completeness. And now, at the turning of the age, the distinctions have become even more subtle. For with all these many change of guises now possible, we have the opportunity to realize their relativity. 

For the common denominator in all of this searching is for sukkha, sweetness, the juicy well-being and happiness that attends any work done in wholeness, mind-body-soul, human-divine, practices and outcomes in which we can see ourselves reflected, see our creative fire given form and functionality, our lives, purpose. Consciousness itself is a projection. We thrive when we what we do engages us on every level. We find ourselves out of balance when we attend one set of needs, neglecting others. We might food and clothe ourselves but be starving for spiritual dimension. We may loose our grounding in esoteric exaggerations and neglect the fact of our material needs. We might develop an aesthetic, but neglect its solvency. We might develop business without vision and heart and drown in empty lucre. In all of these and other more benighted conflicts or confusions of purpose, its the mythopoetic language of the creative unconscious which can depict for us where we have our blindspots and extremes of polarity. It can guide us to acts that might better service our needs and the needs of our community, the abilities we'd be wise to cultivate in terms of our personal and collective evolutionary aims, and where we might locate ourselves in order to connect with situations and people more in keeping with the setting, lifestyle and values that suit us best at this moment in time. 

In our religious traditions we often hear evoked a thirst for the word of god, but the gods no longer reside in sacred groves and grottos, but in our being. They are the dramatis personae of our dreams and visions, and if we give them purchase, a dignified role to play in our living, the inspired guidance we seek will always be ours. We need not be artisans to express our creative powers. It can be in the moment that I allow myself to touch someone with unaffected tenderness, cooking a special meal that came to me on the ride home, letting the tree leaves moving as the feet of babes refresh me out of a sleptwalked day. The wild howls and skirts round our civilized veneer, tapping its withered magic branch on the window like a promise. Do you hear it?

We were eating a lovely homemade meal on the cheap and at our convenience when I got to thinking on the politics of food. 

We here in urban areas, these cesspools of pretense really, dressed up in all form of extravagant uselessness, and its boredom-inspired specialization, hyper-ornamentation and trifle aesthetic dogmas, we here in the big smoke take our foodie orientations for granted and at our leisure. 

We demand to be dazzled and seduced by our own luckiness, our luckiness to be feasting on such quaintly glamourous dishes, au courant feats of hipster panache come by flesh or field, a cuisine that cares little for our real nutritional or agrinomic needs nor for what it really costs to realize it's vision on our plates but instead tells us everything about the schizophrenic ambitions of the so-called executive chef, the cynicism of business enablers and the social climate that invites their kind of distraction-lionization, pandering to scales of tantalization and hollow, short-term delights instead of higher sense or respect for others.

So it was flush with my occasion to distaste this overwrought mangling of mother nature dressed up as cutting edge gastronomy that I lighted on the obviousness of our most important Canadian index. And it goes ruthlessly like this. The closer you are to urban centers and their wholesale capitulation to the mercantile ideogram, the better your goods, municipal services, quality of life and the like. But as you travel deeper into the wilderness and its nature-dominant, more at-one ways of being, the hunter and bush lands of rock and lake forests and low-brush straights punctuated by LCBO outlets, Tim Horton's and the long highway, the less attainable food, health, and nonviolent culture becomes for the people. In essence, the more north you go, the farther you are from consensual dream of the hive, the underwhelming central planning legacy of post-industrial Canada and the worst of legislative anglophile patriarchy, the more native and untamed the people, white, red or brown. Communities are less serviced and therefore, they're more shabbily educated, fed, clothed and housed.

Canada, after all, is a disassociative country of strict regional and language lines where harmonious ways of living with the land, and the honouring of our habitat and traditional ways, are not given equal weight through mostly misunderstanding. The world is shopping, not listening to the woods or dancing on the cherry pink lake line, howling to a milked-up tit of a moon.

The politician serves the dominant marketplace valuation scheme and it alone. He can never accord with the environmental person who looks first for the best way to pass and then thanks the bush for letting her travel as she makes her way unobtrusively through the branches and trunks as if weaving through honoured elders at a long house, instead of hacking bushes down in juvenile spite, rationally dissembling about deadweight clearing and production efficiencies.   

If we could find a user-friendly and economical way to spread permaculture, mycology and guerrilla gardening, water-health and purification technologies, alternative energy networks, bodywork and movement practices, music and arts guilds, food and health scenes, narrative report and literature forms, if we could get these features out of our delusions and into genuine action, out of the centers and back into the periphery of our poorest communities and most distal outposts, we could make the government and bourgeois neglect of the past a self-solved opportunity for a reborn Canadian culture of the future.

"Lakota women's robes, late 19th century. You can see the impact of the recent conquest which disrupted the entire lifeway, not just land tenue of the Plains peoples. Instead of buckskin, navy trade wool; dentalium shell collar has old roots, and ribbonwork with trade satin partakes of a cross-nations style movement shared by peoples from the Potawatomi to those settled in Oklahoma territory, replacing quillwork and other older arts." 

[Suppressed Histories Archive]

"The energies that move the body are the energies that move the imagination. These energies, then, are the source of mythological imagery; in a mythological organization of symbols, the conflicts between the different organic impulses within the body are resolved and harmonized. You might say a mythology is a formula for the harmonization of the energies of life."

Joseph Campbell, interviewed by Joan Marler, in The Yoga Journal, Nov./Dec. 1987

i've been reflecting of late the obtuse bullshit shrouding the hallowed ground called science... we forget, at our peril, that every breakthru in theory and practice came at the price of the dude or dudette that broke the news to the establishment... researchers who stumbled upon inconvenient truths were castigated and punished real good for their courage... highly ironically, today, in the post-truth century, we laud science for coveting the 'truth' when in fact it has been and continues to be the greatest obstructor of truth, dragged kicking and screaming its old ways, on record... for the interested, here's the story of one such suffragette... Ignaz Semmelweis....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

“I have noticed that the way women look at children is different from the way men do. There are two ways of looking at a little kid in an airplane toddling up and down the aisle: one is the way the woman looks at the child; the other is the way the man does. That’s why I say that the prime female power and virtue is compassion: the lack of egoistic isolation , the opening to participation. Even in sex, the man is aggressive, but the woman opens. The opening to that ubiquitous presence which is the ground of us all is compassion. Recognizing that spontaneous feeling, embracing it, and manifesting it in action is the female power.”

Excerpt From: Campbell, Joseph. “A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living.” Joseph Campbell Foundation, 2011-08-01. iBooks.

artwork Ming You Xu

in mythology we access the human of human theme and its encapsulated truths, like in the example i'm about to quote. it's not just abstractly interesting as anthropological report. it describes the evident tango between rationality and creative imagination at the global cultural level...

"The male serpent deity became the phallic consort of the Great Mother, sometimes a "father" of the races, because he was the Mother's original mate. In some myths, he was no more than a living phallus she created for her own sexual pleasure. In other myths, she allowed him to take part in the work of creation or to fertilize her world-producing womb. When the serpent-creator turned arrogant and tried to pretend that he alone made the universe, the Goddess punished him, bruising his head with her heel and banishing him to the underworld." [Barbara Walker]

"Snake Witch," as these dragon-suckling goddesses are called in Sweden; this one from Gotland Island, carved about 1100, in other words at the cusp of christianization.

on "science promotes and thrives on open-mindedness"....

the average scientist is just as constrained by articles of faith as the orthodox zealot, they just enjoy to proclaim otherwise... 'science' routinely excludes inconvenient facts from its literature and research climate, and then uses its own conclusions to curtail exploration along any lines that would challenge its persistent, cartesian hangover. 

what science likes to derogate as 'supernatural' can't be understood through the rational functions alone... as the quantum physicists you've quoted before will attest, our consensus notions of the physical world resemble not in the slightest what underscores that world at the post-atomic level. so too, the examples brought up to ridicule the 'supernatural' can't debunk the niggling fact that while much of our encounters with things "that can't be explained" can be reduced to simple causations, a lot of experiences cannot... like spontaneous remissions, remote viewing, ESPs and so on.

the notion that an exclusive, uber-credible approach to the world is to be found in the scientific method alone, that merely applying the criteria of the sciences as currently constellated will give us some edge on the truth, is just as absurd as the circuitous logic of purely magical thinking...

science is always going to be curtailed by the assumptions it leads with, even einstein attested to this when he talked about how the experimenters expectations had a definite influence on the outcome of tests, something also discussed by heisenberg... the scientific method is a valuable method, but it's only a partial method. it doesn't strike me as odd to imagine that our approach to investigation will continue to evolve, but we for the moment are still polarized by a rational/irrational lens. in short, this video is great for arming oneself for vindication with unreflective thinkers at dinner parties but its slightly hilarious for not realizing its just as guilty of myopia as wishful, primitive thinking is.... just my two cents.

[artwork Robert Bissel]

Geraldine Farrar 1919 Cecil B deMille's Carmen

"The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind; for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves. There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives." 

[Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces]

"The Egyptian Book of the Dead is full of spells for becoming a bird - a swallow, a falcon, a heron, or the benu bird the Greeks identified as a phoenix, the bird that is reborn from the ashes of its own funeral pyre. Sprouting wings was clearly one of the preferred Egyptian ways of entering the Otherworld and embarking on a happy afterlife. The ba soul is already winged; it is depicted in many inscriptions as a human-headed bird coming or going from the body of the soul traveler."

 [Robert Moss, The Dreamer's Book of the Dead]

[artwork by Poen de Wijs]

Jackson Morisawa the Kyudo instructor at Chozen-ji in Hawaii writes:

"Hara is the seat of Life, the centre of intrinsic energy. It is also referred to as a state of mind in the development of one's character. One who controls the hara is not likely to loose his balance or composure. Who has hara does not consume himself or spend himself completely. He learns to anchor himself in the hara, and can shake off disturbances of the body and mind and alternately release himself from the ego and return to the deeper power of the "original being", the will is silent, the heart is quiet; and one accomplishes his work naturally without effort."

[artwork Robert Bissell]

La Singla Antonita's miraculous story:

From birth, Antoñita La Singla suffered in severe pain. Her Mother, Rosa, took her to several doctors. It was suggested that she had meningitis - But the truth, it was finally learned, was that the girl was deaf and mute. 

Rosa: "First I panicked, then started fighting to save her. Dr. Ramos was my last hope. He said that maybe she would start talking when she turned seven or eight years, if not, then forever she would remain silent."

> As a small child, Antonita captured words with her eyes and seemed to guess the sounds coming from the guitar strings.... And then came the Miracle: At eight years of age the girl spoke. One word, sweet, loving and eternal...a single word, that was the beginning of the miracle. After this beginning came profound effort, determination, and the will to recover the years she had spent in silence. 

She began dancing rumba, fandango, and bulerías with mastery... She was being called the heir to Carmen Amaya. And with Carmen Amaya made her film debut in the film Los Tarantos. She played in a number of theaters around the world. It is said that the real miracle of La Singla was that while she was deaf she danced with grace and duende. 

She began to speak at age 16, and retained a childlike personality. She captivated audiences with her dancing - her "duende" - Of her it is said that she had perseverance, willpower, and the courage to regain the lost years. Her mother too was tenacious – Rosa armed herself with strength and will to raise her daughter in the way that she did - [Gypsy Chronicles]

"In fact, we can see a dramatic (mythic) process in all the creations of external nature. The provings and therapeutic indications of homeopathy show how even elementary substances, as they embody characteristic personality types and traits, reflect and participate in the human drama of personality and in synchronistic events…. we can intuit it in the ways in which the dynamics of human life are synchronized with the movements of the stars and the rhythms of the cosmos."

[quote Edward C. Whitmont, MD, The Alchemy of Healing]  

[artwork Istvan Nyari]

on edward christopher whitmont, jungian analyst homeopath:

he was a star and an inspiration, that's for sure! before he died i used to drive down to his home in connecticut to sit in on his group sessions where he would work with practicing homeopaths, i was a student observer, giving them ways to work with dreams and the psyche at a time when homeopathy was in danger of becoming overrun by behaviorists... he taught how to see beyond the literal symptoms, and more important, beyond the clinician's own bias of perception and judgements about the client....these adjustments are only possible with an understanding of the life drama's purpose-fullness and its cosmic, elegiacally-birthed sense of hope and story. permitting a view of human suffering without scolding or smothering it, framing it instead as sacred communicator, the teacher that is always there but so easy to misconstrue, whitmont left the river better than he found it.

i'm having such intense cravings for cucumbers, its sometimes all i think about. in fact, i was so greedy for the bowl of quick pickle i was making a few days ago, i uncharacteristically sliced off the tip of my little finger on the mandolin. i took the opportunity to investigate why i was feeling so compelled and getting so much satisfaction in eating as many as i can. here's what the excellent, 'Healing with Whole Foods [Pitchford]' has to say...

CUCUMBER
Cooling thermal nature; sweet flavour; diuretic; counteracts toxins and lifts depression; cleanses the blood; influences the heart, spleen-pancreas, stomach and large intestine; quenches thirst, moistens the lungs, purifies the skin; acts as a digestive aid, especially in the form of pickles. Helpful during the hot or dry times of the year - treats the effect of summer heat. Apply the juice from cucumbers to relieve all burns, especially sunburn; drink the juice to help treat kidney and bladder infections. Consuming whole cucumber or its juice cools inflammatory conditions including stomach inflammation, conjunctivitis, sore throat, acne, inflamed skin diseases and discharges.

A pack of grated cucumber placed on the face beautifies the skin. If placed over the eyes, it relieves hot, inflamed, swollen, dry, or irritated eyes.

Cucumber contains erepsis, a digestive enzyme that breaks down protein and cleanses the intestines. This property also enables cucumber to destroy worms, especially tapeworms.

Caution: cucumber is not recommended for those with watery mucus or diarrhea.
Dosage: six whole cucumber daily or 1 cup juice.

Cucumber skin is rich in silicon, chlorophyll, and is bitter. Eating cucumber with skin (organic only) enhances its medicinal virtues. A tea of the skin alone is used for swelling in the hands and feet.

here's what naturalnews.com has to add....

Here are 10 Benefits of cucumbers:

1.Quick pick me-up - Cucumbers are a good source of B vitamins. Put down your sodas and coffee and eat a cucumber slice.

2. Rehydrates body and replenishes daily vitamins - Cucumbers are 95 percent water, keeping the body hydrated while helping the body eliminate toxins. Cucumbers have most of the vitamins the body needs in a single day. Don't forget to leave the skin on because the skin contains a good amount of vitamin C, about 10 percent of the daily-recommended allowance.

3. Skin and hair care - If you don't like to eat the skin, it can be used for skin irritations and sunburns as aloe would be used. Place a slice over puffy eyes and its anti-inflammatory properties help reduce puffiness. The silicon and sulfur in cucumbers help to stimulate hair growth.

4. Fight cancers - Cucumber are known to contain lariciresinol, pinoresinol, and secoisolariciresinol. These three lignans have a strong history of research in connection with reduced risk of several cancer types, including breast cancer, ovarian cancer, uterine cancer and prostate cancer.

5. Home care - Eliminates a foggy mirror. Before taking a shower, rub a cucumber slice along a mirror and it will eliminate the mirror fogging up. Instead of WD40, take a cucumber slice and rub it along a squeaky hinge and your door will stop squeaking.

6. Relieves bad breath - Take a slice of cucumber and press it to the roof of your mouth with your tongue for 30 seconds, the phytochemcials will kill the bacteria in your mouth responsible for causing bad breath.

7. Hangover cure - To avoid a morning hangover or headache; eat a few cucumber slices before going to bed. Cucumbers contain enough sugar, B vitamins and electrolytes to replenish many essential nutrients, reducing the intensity of both hangover and headache.

8. Aids in weight loss and digestion - Due to its low calorie and high water content, cucumber is an ideal diet for people who are looking for weight loss. The high water content and dietary fiber in cucumbers are very effective in ridding the body of toxins from the digestive system, aiding digestion. Daily consumption of cucumbers can be regarded as a remedy for chronic constipation.

9. Cures diabetes, reduces cholesterol and controls blood pressure - Cucumber juice contains a hormone which is needed by the cells of the pancreas for producing insulin which has been found to be beneficial to diabetic patients. Researchers found that a compound called sterols in cucumbers may help reduce cholesterol levels. Cucumbers contain a lot of potassium, magnesium and fiber. These work effectively for regulating blood pressure. This makes cucumbers good for treating both low blood pressure and high blood pressure.

10. Promotes joint health, relieves gout and arthritis pain -Cucumber is an excellent source of silica, which is known to help promotes joint health by strengthening the connective tissues. They are also rich in vitamin A, B1, B6, C & D, Folate, Calcium, Magnesium, and Potassium. When mixed with carrot juice, they can relieve gout and arthritis pain by lowering the uric acid levels.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/036769_cucumbers_health_benefits_rehydration.html#ixzz23d84NNAm

on kidneys

Psychological resemblence and general ailments:

"Conscious and unconscious emotional experiences and feelings are processed, purified, filtered and released. New energy is released through this; we are constantly transforming. The kidneys symbolize the filtering workings within ourselves. Thanks to this emotional growth, thanks to the elimination of toxins (through urine) we can experience pure joy. We purify ourselves constantly; we take in new experiences through our feelings and emotions, and we transform ourselves through processing these expereinces that also bring up old, unprocessed emotions by association. The old is brought up to the here and now, and through this we can come to an ever growing awareness. Emotional ballast is eliminated; old junk is cleaned up when we are open to this. A free surrender to your nature, a trust in your deepest Self, is necessary for this.

However, when you fearfully hold on to old emotions, or when you block the flow of your feelings with rational thought, then you slow down a decent functioning of your kidneys. After all, your awareness directs the organs, and not the other way around. A harmonic unity between the feminine and the masculine aspect is necessary. The soft, receptive, intuitive, sensitive… needs to be accompanied in a self-assured way by the aware "I", that organizes and arranges, that lets through and handles the natural aggressive and emotional energies.

The kidneys represent the continual rebirth within yourself, when you wash away old worries and grief, when you let everything flow off your shoulders that is no more than ballast in the present. A wonderful, light feeling of liberation, joy and happiness. Kidneys function optimally when you are open for these transforming powers within yourself, which process energies and transform them into joyous, radiant feelings, on the condition that you don't clamp onto dark and pessimistic thoughts, nor to a burdensome past. Trusting that your Nature will help you always; a deep connection with your nature, with your physical body, with your deepest core of feelings. The kidneys reflect the relation you have with yourself: trust or fear? When it comes to yourself, are you hard and aggressive, or soft and welcoming? Do you despise your body or do you love yourself entirely? Do you let those emotional energies flow through freely or do you block yourself with critisism, with limiting rational thinking? The optimal relation between the inner man and the inner woman, your feelings know themselves to be safely carried in the strong arms of your self-aware Self. The cause of kidney problems are mostly related to issues with the Relationship you have with yourself. Repression of feelings (not integrating the feminine within yourself) as well as denying your self-Worth. Do you destroy yourself by distancing yourself from your body, by living in your head in an exaggerated way, instead of feeling one with your physical nature? A fearful nervous tension, constantly being *too* alert, a feeling of being overwhelmed and suffocated because you don't let your feelings flow freely. The kidneys symbolize your sense of "connection": with yourself and with others. When you truly experience this union, this love for yourself, your kidneys will feel comfy, you will draw friends and a partner toward yourself, with whom you will also feel good and relaxed. To feel connected with life, with all that lives, with nature. No struggle, but peace. No distancing critisism, but an unlimited sense of safety, peace and joy. A fresh fountain, unconcerned and beaming. The kidneys ask for a balance: a guiding and organizing structure, based on common sense on the one hand, and a total acceptance and free through-flow of energies and emotions on the other hand. A marriage within yourself."

Translated from the Dutch version of "The Key to Self-Liberation" by Christiane Beerlandt.

Louise Hay on kidneys...

Under probable cause:

"Criticism, disappointment, failure. Shame. Reacting like a little kid.

Under new thought pattern:

"Divine right action is always taking place in my life. Only good comes from each experience. It is safe to grow up."

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The Premier Zeta-Factor 

Every cell in the body has an electrical potential. It is the electrical energy that 

differentiates life from death. The electrical potential, also called the zeta-potential, 

ranges from 70 to 90 millivolts in a healthy human cell. 

A very high zeta-potential is the ability of a molecule to hold an electrical charge. zeta-potential 

is the force that maintains the discreteness of all the cells in our body. As we age or become ill, 

our zeta-potential drops and so does our energy. This is one reason why it is difficult to get out 

of bed, exercise or maintain self-motivation as we either become toxic, older or unhealthy. 

Without energy, without cellular electrical potential, we not only lose our health, youth and drive, 

we have a difficult time absorbing nutrients. 

Introducing Biological Therapeutics Rejuvenate™ 

Biological Therapeutics Rejuvenate™ is by far, the premier zeta-potential nutritional product on 

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cells. We call this the CELL THERAPY Zeta-Factor. 

The secret behind the power of Rejuvenate is fulvic acid which helps transport nutrients and 

minerals through to cells and is capable of helping cells recharge with a high zeta-potential, 

restoring and maintaining their potential. The higher the zeta-potential the better the 

environment for carrying nutrients into the cells and carrying toxins out. 

Chemists say that zeta-potential is what keeps the billions of cells in the body in circulation. 

Unhealthy foods causing high levels of toxins in the blood, poor oxygen intake and other factors, 

can cause the blood cells to clump together: a condition called Rouleau. This condition leads to 

impairing the transfer of energy within the body and reducing the flow and intake of nutrients. 

From 70/90 millivolt potential, unhealthy, or aged cells can drop to 60/80, 50/70 and so on. 

When ill, electrical potential can drop to 35. In cancer patients, it can drop to 15 or lower. Losing 

our electrical potential is synonymous with dying. When you use Biological Therapeutics 

Rejuvenate™ you increase zeta-potential and cellular electrical energy aiding healing and 

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BIOLOGICAL THERAPEUTICS 

REJUVENATE™

A force that maintains cell nourishment 

Zeta-potential represents a basic law of Nature, and it plays a vital role in all forms of plant and 

animal life. It is the force that maintains the discreteness of the billions of circulating cells, which 

nourish the organism. 

Dark Field Microscopy (Live Blood Cell Analysis) represents the analytic tool which allows an 

expert to directly view red blood cell (RBC) activity and determine how zeta-potential and other 

factors are affecting these RBC!s. Live Blood Cell Analysis may end up solving some of 

society's greatest health problems simply, quickly and far less expensively than months of 

intense therapy, pharmaceuticals, herbs and other remedies. 

Live blood cell analysis is used by both orthodox and alternative medical practitioners 

worldwide, and although it is not formally approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration 

(FDA) medical professionals are increasingly discovering that this innovative procedure 

provides a level of diagnostic information on cellular activity, dynamics and health far beyond 

standard or even expanded medical blood panels. 

Live blood cell analysis is thus a tool to evaluate in near-real-time, the cellular response of RBC 

to a wide variety of external stimuli (food, water, medication, etc.). The responsiveness to 

various stimuli can then be evaluated in minutes rather than in months and corrective measures 

quickly applied. 

Nutritional absorption is key 

55 out of 100 Americans can expect to die from some type of cardiovascular problem or 

alternatively have to live with severe long-term physical and/or neurological damage. On a 

lesser level, tens of millions of people worldwide are seeking ways to improve nutritional 

absorption, obtaining more effective cellular and bodily detoxification or elimination of 

environmental free radicals, achieving higher cellular and bodily energy levels and increasing 

cellular hydration for increased stamina, energy and overall physical well being. In short, such 

people are seeking healthy RBC. 

A simple analogy of an unhealthy live blood cell would be an automobile engine without a 

carburetor to inject fuel and without an exhaust to dispose of toxic carbon monoxide. Who would 

want to own an automobile like that? As it turns out, the vast majority of people are walking 

around not knowing that their body's cells are not equipped with an efficient exhaust 

mechanism. 

Zeta-potential is a term commonly used in colloidal chemistry. When tiny mineral or organic 

particles are suspended in a fluid, zeta-potential maintains the dispersion or discreteness of the 

particles in suspension. In science, we learn that like charges repel and opposite charges 

attract. In an ideal system like blood, we want all particulates to have a like electrical charge. If 

the particles have no electrical charge, the various particles will clump together and form sludge. 

Therefore, the higher the zeta-potential the better the dispersion of particles in suspension. 

Thomas Riddick, a pioneer in colloidal chemistry, said that without zeta-potential, life could not 

exist. The high Zeta-potential or negative electrical charge on particles entering the bloodstream 

may help to increase the dispersion or discreteness of blood cells by helping to enhance the 

electrical charge on blood colloids which include blood cells. When blood cells are free flowing, 

they expose maximum surface area to the blood and are therefore able to hold and transport 

more oxygen and other nutrients throughout the body. 

Zeta-potential can be imparted to colloidal materials by a number of methods including vortexial 

fluid flow and the presence of certain types of ionic minerals that impart a negative surface 

charge to adjacent objects such as RBC. When the surfaces of adjacent RBC are similarly 

charged with a negative charge, the cells push away or repel each other, much like similar poles 

on two magnets would repel each other. 

Conversely, the improper type of ionic minerals act as free radicals and neutralize the negative 

surface charges on RBC, making them collapse on top of each other. A lot of the processed 

foods with chemical preservatives, pesticide residue and additives are of a cationic nature. Bad 

for humans. These foods have a natural Zeta-potential lowering effect on the blood. When we 

add negative health items to our diet that have a sludging effect on our blood, the situation for 

health begins to deteriorate. 

Biological Therapeutics Rejuvenate™ with its high Zeta-Factor— thanks to  its fulvic acid 

content— accomplishes these two important objectives: efficient cellular hydration and cellular 

dissociation while dark field microscopy(live blood cell analysis) provides the visible proof of 

these important results. Since the blood is nearly 90 percent water, the addition of the 

Rejuvenate™ to a regular diet may provide precisely the needed components for this de- 

coagulation of the RBC. 

It would seem that a significant reduction in cardiovascular problems could be possible by the 

use of Rejuvenate to enable the zeta-potential effect to be present in the intravascular 

bloodstream. [Biological Therapeutics]

     

     

     

on the whole, this is, at it's most skeletal, compelling opinion, setting aside for the moment how important it is to hear someone speak at last and so clearly about this very particular forged manacle between alcohol and the muse...

(Katha Pollit) So many people have praised Christopher so effusively, I want to complicate the picture even at the risk of seeming churlish. His drinking was not something to admire, and it was not a charming foible. Maybe sometimes it made him warm and expansive, but I never saw that side of it. What I saw was that drinking made him angry and combative and bullying, often toward people who were way out of his league—elderly guests on the Nation cruise, interns (especially female interns). Drinking didn’t make him a better writer either—that’s another myth. Christopher was such a practiced hand, with a style that was so patented, so integrally an expression of his personality, he was so sure he was right about whatever the subject, he could meet his deadlines even when he was totally sozzled. But those passages of pointless linguistic pirouetting? The arguments that don’t track if you look beneath the bravura phrasing? Forgive the cliché: that was the booze talking. And so, I’m betting, were the cruder manifestations of his famously pugilistic nature: as F Scott Fitzgerald said of his own alcoholism: “When drunk I make them all pay and pay and pay.” It makes me sad to see young writers cherishing their drinking bouts with him, and even his alcohol-fuelled displays of contempt for them (see Dave Zirin’s fond reminiscence of having Christopher spit at him) as if drink is what makes a great writer, and what makes a great writer a real man.


So far, most of the eulogies of Christopher have come from men, and there’s a reason for that. He moved in a masculine world, and for someone who prided himself on his wide-ranging interests, he had virtually no interest in women’s writing or women’s lives or perspectives. I never got the impression from anything he wrote about women that he had bothered to do the most basic kinds of reading and thinking, let alone interviewing or reporting—the sort of workup he would do before writing about, say, G.K. Chesterton, or Scientology or Kurdistan. It all came off the top of his head, or the depths of his id. Women aren’t funny. Women shouldn’t need to/want to/get to have a job. The Dixie Chicks were “fucking fat slags” (not “sluts,” as he misremembered later). And then of course there was his 1989 column in which he attacked legal abortion and his cartoon version of feminism as “possessive individualism.” I don’t suppose I ever really forgave Christopher for that.


It wasn’t just the position itself, it was his lordly condescending assumption that he could sort this whole thing out for the ladies in 1,000 words that probably took him twenty minutes to write. “Anyone who has ever seen a sonogram or has spent even an hour with a textbook on embryology knows” that pro-life women are on to something when they recoil at the idea of the “disposable fetus.” Hmmmm… that must be why most OB-GYNs are pro-choice and why most women who have abortions are mothers. Those doctors just need to spend an hour with a medical textbook; those mothers must never have seen a sonogram. Interestingly, although he promised to address the counterarguments made by the many women who wrote in to the magazine, including those on the staff, he never did. For a man with a reputation for courage, it certainly failed him then. (Years later, when he took up the question of abortion again in Vanity Fair, he said basically the exact same things, using the same straw-women arguments. Time taught him nothing, because he didn’t want to learn.)

excerpted from Katha Pollit's
Regarding Christopher | The Nation http://bit.ly/OvIFI0