Into Action
For my emotional sobriety, I avail of a variety of resources such as the Twelve Step Recovery Programme, the PQ Mental Fitness modality, and further elements from ancient spiritual to most recent neuroscientific practices, including many body-based therapy forms which have emerged over recent years. These help me retain, and where necessary, regain my balance, always following the principle of `progress, not perfection´…
Carcinogens
Further, more detailed data on these rising figures published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that from 2010 to 2019 in the United States, breast cancer accounted for the highest number of cases in the under-fifty population, while rates of gastrointestinal cancers were rising the fastest. This dramatic increase in gastrointestinal cancers alone demonstrates the implications and risks associated with our modern culture…
Resurrection
The necessity of `dying to the old´ is the crux of the challenge. For, no matter how we have matured, an old script etched on our psyche keeps admonishing us to avoid the dangers and pain of death at all costs. Better the devil we know than the devil we don’t know, the Saboteurs declare. They also incite blame and resentment, which perpetuate the old. Forgiveness is the product of Sage, an indispensable component of relinquishing the old, to make way for the new: Father, forgive them for they know not what they do…
Food?
Evolution is a slow process. Our bodies have evolved over thousands of generations to extract and digest proteins, calories, and vitamins from organic food in a certain way; ultra-processing interferes with that. It’s not necessarily that we’re eating too many calories (which we are) and engaging in insufficient regular exercise (also true), it’s that those calories, now synthesised, are coming in a way that our bodies cannot effectively assimilate. This is the advent of the Super-Size-Me Effect…
Aloneness
Intelligent beings that we are, we develop strategies to survive. The first element is to identify the cause of the problem. The idea that our parents are not up to the task of child-rearing is so cataclysmic that we deduce that the problem must lie in the only other variable of the equation, namely in ourselves. The pain, shame, and guilt resulting from the conclusion that we are unlovable are easier to endure that the spectre of incapable parents, on whom we are still fully dependent…
Global Consciousness
The Mind Command piece is pivotal. When we recognise that the Saboteurs have become active, we use brief powerful body-based exercises to bring us back into the present moment. These produce the effect of circuit-breakers in our stinking thinking, so that, in this new placid awareness, we can consciously switch from Saboteur to Sage, and thereupon determine our next move…
Courage
Worrying about what others think of us leads to a constrained life where actions are taken not for personal satisfaction but for external validation. It is we, ourselves, who engineer the role of becoming a puppet on a string, even without the participation or even the knowledge of those who are ostensibly `pulling our strings´…
Misfortune
In the cultivation of emotional sobriety, we first become the witness to our own patterns of thinking and feeling. This is achieved by taking inventory of self. We then learn that we can have our feelings without our feelings having, (i.e., controlling) us. We come to realise that there is a gap between impulse and riposte, and that we can begin to work with, and gradually take up conscious residence in, that gap…
Waking Up
I cannot remember a period prior to incessant rumination about who I was going to be when I grew up. In retrospect, under ideal circumstances this question would never have arisen. I would have been secure in simply being me. That would have been the sturdy foundation for further healthy growth and development. In the absence of such a foundation, we develop neurotic tendencies and come to believe in the reality of our idealized self. The false self lures us into the belief that it is the only true self. We have been hypnotized, have fallen asleep…
Leverage
While wisdom had accrued on how to protect crops using natural methods, the concept of applying synthetic toxins in the process of growing food had not yet emerged. It was a niche which began to be exploited by the chemical industry as soon as the markets of World War II abruptly began to fall away. It was at this point that the focal point of food was moved from the soil and the kitchen to the laboratory…
