The cessation of doubt

The cessation of doubt is the beginning of fearlessness. Doubt also has a purpose - overcoming your own doubts gives you the tools to challenge and overcome the doubts of others. Doubtlessness is an extremely powerful and healing state but it is not to be confused with bloody mindedness. Doubtlessness is also a state without the crazy commentary we have in our heads. It is without the monkey mind. It is pure unadulterated awareness.

It is said that a situation will continue as it is until the lesson is learned, doubt is a good measure of thumb to know if you've learned it yet. We have to answer all our questions and grey areas to gain conviction. Oh and we have to have humility too, without that we won't necessarily have the grace to achieve our goals. Humility is an openness to possibilities, it is a friendly disposition towards impermanence, it is recognising that our not knowing is the truth and all of our knowing is rooted in that single unique mystery of existence. Explain that and you explain all things. Except most of us try and explain the things and leave out the biggest question.

My biggest doubt was 'Should I be this happy when others are suffering?' Both my perceptions of 'I' and of 'other' were wrapped up in this. In essence it was the lesson I had to learn. I had reached a place of doubtlessness, or quiet; a place where I was not suffering (not simply that I wasn't ill - I was at the time quite unwell) it was a place where I didn't have the anguish that accompanies suffering or the pain itself even. Somehow I recognised that my 'I' was not that. As a Tibetan teacher once said when he went to the dentists and didn't use anaesthesia and the dentist asked him if it hurt; although he himself was not hurting he answered 'The glass over there is...' He had removed his identifying with himself to a much broader version inclusive of all things and so the pain was displaced. Pain is something we 'identify' with. To be capable of fully lovinng something Amma says we need to lose the 'I' and 'mine' the past and the future. So there's a measure with which to check yourself - is there an 'I' in this problem, is there a 'my' in this problem, is there the 'past' in this problem or is there the 'future'. Then you can be truly present, fully loving and no doubt the answer is also waiting there for you. Freeing yourself up from those things provides a great deal of space around any issue, any suffering that you may have.

The reason I stumbled upon this place was because I wanted to find for myself that place without suffering that I understood existed according to all those enlightened people's experiences. I pursued it with great determination at a time when I was in unbearable pain and discomfort. In fact I didn't have a lot of recourse. I had understood that in any human state, at any point in time it was possible to free ourselves of suffering. One of the greatest tools for this was a single pointed mind, a focused mind, the other was self reflection - the mind looking at the mind so to speak, then a great wish for freedom and a wish to help others.

For many months I lived in that state of 'no thought'. I had no preconceptions, no commentary, no filter, no judgement. It did not mean that I didn't speak. The words came without any precursor or thought. It was much more like I was living in realtime as opposed to a step behind as we are when we filter everything through our 'experiences and judgements'. I also had a great sense of well being and bliss, I knew exactly what I needed, I knew exactly what level of vitality I had, I was helped with both western and chinese traditional medicine. It was the confidence I had that was most remarkable as though that is our natural state. My vision also changed, things seemed to emit their own light, and were absolutely beautiful, I could not separate myself, nor could I call something inanimate - everything was vibrating with a life, an essence that ran through all things. As my mind remained peaceful and still, so my body calmed. I even looked at 'my' self in the same way, its kind of an intrinsic detachment if that makes sense. i could treat myself in the third person and approach otehrs with the same care and attention I used to reserve for myself.

This state went on many months until one day I had one thought. My first thought in all those months. On that day I thought 'Should I be this happy?' I did not answer it, my mind returned to its clarity and stillness like a pebble has just landed in the water. The next day the thought continued 'Should I be this happy.... when others are suffering?'. And in that way my thoughts continued to grow right back up to monkey mind again. That chattery non stop commentary upon life and experience, only this time I was watching. I am still watching. It was an unusual doubt that interrupted my repose, but I think actually that it holds within it many answers.

Conviction overcomes doubt but sometimes looking for and finding the truth can be painful. Having the humility to capitulate when you're wrong is a marvellous trait leading to learning and peace. But one should not capitulate if your awareness would remove the suffering or the ignorance of others. Yet it doesn't mean you're there to proselytise; a silent example is enough, a word of warning, just as you would teach a child and even then, even if you have the ability to move mountain of ignorance, sometimes the right thing to do is to let them make their own mistakes.

You'll always be there for them, the rules are - you can't always take on their burden of suffering. Sometimes it seems we have to carry our burdens until we have exhausted the results of an action and then we can put it down. The act of carrying it, of butting our heads against the obstacle in frustration, the fighting, the loss and the despair, all of these can be great and pure lessons; the main obstacle that we are repeatedly confronting being ourselves. We have to step aside. One thing such suffering teaches us is empathy for others. We will help others, we will carry the bags of a stranger, we will share what we have because we know what it's like to suffer, or we understand we could be there too. And lastly there is a disentanglement from the self; much of our suffering is a direct result of our concept of 'self', remove that and a whole swathe of types of suffering fall away.

What is left when there is no doubt is a beautiful state of confidence. It is always there. My nan used to say 'Trust in providence'. Our confidence is profoundly shaken when we have an 'I' and the rest of the world, an 'I' and the other. What a frightening place to step into when we are so separate and so alone. But step into a place where everything is intrinsically connected, where your 'I' is not in bits, not an island, and then you're not alone; your awareness stretches out through all time and through all existence. It reassuringly blinks back at you. We are in a world full of mirrors of the same awareness.

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Glowing pigs

To me a glowing pig is pig abuse. You might think that's going a bit far especially if you're from the medical profession. You may tell me that this pig is well looked after that it hasn't suffered. I know that a lot of animals have and do suffer all over the world because of medical experiments, besides you say the pig is a GM pig. Like that makes it OK. People think because animals don't present intelligence like a human that its OK to cause them suffering, especially if it's to preserve human life. In the natural world the pig and the jellyfish would never meet let alone cross. I take umbridge that science thinks that in the name of medicine this is OK. I don't object to advances in medicine, I object to the proposition that its OK for pig and jellyfish to be crossed in the name of medicine. I don't care whether it helps you look up a donkeys arse - find ANOTHER way.

Take longer if you have to, people might die, yes, but at least there wouldn't be glowing pigs and you never know I expect there is ANOTHER way.

Another experiment where there was this issue was the mice growing human ears where they had the ear attached to them while it grew. If scientists want to grow ears perhaps they should attach them to themselves, and if they want things to glow they should inject themselves with jelly fish which is the aim eventually isn't it to use the jellyfish glow in medicine?

I see all living things as sentient. Pigs are very intelligent, dogs are very intelligent. Many animals present an advanced set of emotions, empathy, protectiveness, cognition - all sorts of human qualities. However they don't have choice, we have choice, they don't. In my opinion we should not cause suffering to any living being. Even if our modus operandi is to find away to reduce suffering of any sort, it should not be done through the means of suffering or genetic manipulation that would never happen in nature beyond what happens when you cross roses in your garden. That's the same species. Why it strikes me that that is OK and it isn't Ok for interspecies crossing and yet this seems to have been completely overlooked by science, I don't know. Interspecies breeding = BAD. Same species breeding = GOOD. Does it make it OK if the characteristics have been genetically isolated = NO. Why? because it has taken millions of jellyfish years to get that jellyfish glow. Glowing pigs were another billion years away and more than likely NEVER a possibility. So when I accuse science of playing God, that is why. I don't think we are wise or capable enough to take such decisions. That we do this on so many levels for progress is quite frankly frightening. Things like this include:-

• GM foods like Glucose Fructose sanctified by the scientific community, the FDA and WHO which are now causing diabetes, obesity and terrible allergies. People are dying because they drink soda with this stuff in
• Nuclear power whose consequences have the potential of just one incident; just one human error could make the entire planet uninhabitable. Also we are leaving a lethal legacy for hundreds of generations to be equally threatened by.
• Petrochemicals, nitrates, dioxins, radiation, asbestos - all these scary words are products of science they have said its OK to have in our world. That we previously didn't have that kill people, cause water on the brain in babies, make two headed babies, children with terrible deformities, cause asthma and eczema, leukaemia and cancer
• Medicines; antibiotics, radiation therapy, thalidomide, vaccines - all ostensibly OK'd by the scientific community - who it is apparent DON'T KNOW

We can choose not to. We can create new guidelines that protect us and future generations from all of these scientific breakthroughs. To me a scientific breakthrough should have its consequences considered when it is created and these should be fully considered before it is allowed into the mainstream. If the consequence is 100000 year old lethal substance, then it should NOT be allowed. If the consequences are NOT known, then it should not be allowed.

Science carried out without causing suffering, without manipulating the natural rules that already exist is OK. It could be amazing. Imagine a Buddhist and a Scientist being one and the same things; experimenting with wisdom and awareness, not causing suffering in any way- understanding the natural laws that govern. We have lost much of our respect and our roles as guardians, we don't know how to live in nature so we make misguided decisions that we consider OK. They're not OK

To me creating a glowing pig is pig abuse. I would not like it if I was made to glow in the dark or if my dog was; what are the consequences of such an action? A jellyfish and a pig who'd of thought they'd get it on?

Will we all one day glow in the dark because of a genetic accident?

To me all existence is sentient; my awareness doesn't stop at my skin. I sense some places to be lovely, beautiful, scary, horrible, calming, unsettling; places not just people. Take a rock from Auschwitz and rock from where the Buddha sat beneath the Bodhi tree; the Auschwitz rock is a sad rock, the buddha's rock is a healing rock.

And yet we cast about assignations that imply humans are hierarchically above everything else. This subtle perception permits us to blow vast holes in the earth, scar swathes of it with open cast mining, drill in it, spray DDT on it, irradiate it, destroy it. We have no comprehension of balance. A long time ago we lost our connection, our understanding and ability to live in balance with the earth. Even those of us that do care are locked in an inbalanced way of life. We are reliant on fossil fuels, or nuclear power that generates tons of toxic waste so lethal it could kill all of us. We accept this because we are not given other options when there are other options. We are yoked to a chain of paying for our basic needs, of expecting a certain level of service in return for which we pay and pay and pay and so does everything and everyone else.

I do not want to pay any more. I want to honour the rock around me. I want to have a healthy respect for the glowing pigs of this earth that symbolise such an erroneous assumption on our parts it is astounding. It is the emperor in his new clothes. It is madness argued as sanity walking amongst us. I want to honour the plants around me. We manipulate them, we package them, we sell them as if all the sacredness had been drained out.
I want to honour the people around me. They walk around as if divinity and freedom were myths told in fairy tales. I bow to the spirit within all things. You can find it, it begins with the recognition that you don't know. The question is - after all these scientific advances can Pandora's box be closed? I think that depends on us coming to our senses. How can we fight against the invisible, against the illogical when it is presented to us as truth, as the gospel of science, engineering, chemistry and economics? When it is dressed in the anonymity of a corporate brand and 'licenced to kill'. They have been killing with negligence, with human error, with arrogance, with disdain, with accountability, without accountability. They have been killing for years and years and years in the name of this new deity Science and his consort the Economy. I think its time to choose your religion and choose it wih care and consideration, to recognise your ignorance wherever it is.

I live in a country where 80% of its electricity is from nuclear fuel. Even though when Chernobyl exploded it spread a plume of deadly ash all over it, all over Europe. Even though the highest rate of breast cancer is here, even though they have to bury waste that is lethal for 100,000 years in a repository that will cost billions and only function for a century; with capacity for 20years waste. It will take twenty years to complete. It is illogical when a methane digester fuelled by waste, by rotten vegative matter, by the renewable resource that is poo, can equally capably provide for our energy needs, especially when accompanied by other harmless renewable resources.
We can grow organically instead of using pollutive nitrates, ferilisers, pesticides and GM.

I don't know why we are doing this. Why are we acting so insanely. I know most people have no idea about living in nature, they are clueless, a business man from the city who goes camping, who earns a fortune and is qualified up to the hilt, will take a dump outside his tent because he doesn't know. It is these same people deciding the fate of the earth, of nature, of ecological systems they know nothing about. How can they decide when they don't know the effect they have when they turn the light switch on or flush the toilet?

We are trusting animals. We believe what they tell us. We listen to them with our eyes closed. In the light of the lamp I am writing by and by the hum of this computer, my quota of nuclear waste has been produced by those atoms splitting and my legacy will be something that is hazardous for one hundred thousand years. When I could wait until daylight, when I could use a candle, when I could plug into a solar panel or a generator fuelled by vegetable oil, by methane gas, or by hydrogen.

I don't understand their plans but I'm going the other way. I expect they will catch up shortly at least I hope so. I guess they won't get lost in the dark as they have glowing pigs to see by.

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Choosing how to live

I love this quote - 'Where am I willing to die? It all depends on how I’m choosing to live.' Sheena wrote in this post.

In my life I have done my bucket list. I did as much as I could and then one day it became unnecessary. I had a dream I did everything it is possible to do in a human existence. I did every career ( did it all in a kind of sped-up real time where I remembered doing it). At the end when there was literally nothing left to do, I found myself in a red desert in that beautiful time of the night when some of the sky is still light and blue and yet it is dark. Nearby a group of bushmen elders sat (like Kalahari bushmen) they moved aside so that there was space for me to sit. They said nothing, but there was some laughter that I had finally arrived as though it took me a long enough time to figure out the truth. They had on loin cloths and a digging stick/spear and nothing else but the flames of the fire, the night, the desert and Oceans of wisdom. And then I woke up....

What do you do when you have 'done' everything already? That's how I woke up.

Since I dreamt that dream I have been in one long, extended gesture of thoughtfulness, like a two year long repose. Kind of like surrender or saturation or both.

I love finding the other yogis out there; Sheena yogis.

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Positive Impact Living - a recipe book for life

'Delicious recipes for life.'

'Optimising our adaptive capacity to personal and planetary disasters.'

I have gathered ingenious and simple answers from all over the world and put them together after over fifteen years of seeking solutions; what works, what really, really works!

I'm a qualified survival instructor. I know what it takes to live directly and sustainably with the earth. I know how much energy is needed per person and extremely accurately. But I didn't stop there; I wanted to know how nature could be designed to support our needs as we grow, as our awareness increases, as our technological abilities advance. Whether we live in a house or a hammock. I wanted to know how to help the most desperate, the ones that can't find a way out; learn how to avoid catastrophes both inner and outer and minimise their damage.

To do this I met ballistic missile engineers who became ecovillage pioneers, I learnt to run visioning workshops and solar installations, I listened to lectures on 'Living machines' and built them, I did sweat lodges and retreats with people who retained and resurrected the old ways, set up co-operatives to acquire land and hold it in trust. I met refugees, put asylum seekers up on my sofa. Listened to stories from the families of those fighting corporate injustice and/or ignorance, like Ken Saro Wiwa.

I took homeless folk out for a night on the town and a proper dinner and brought them home so they could sleep in a bed and get cleaned up. I encouraged them to seek out their families and try again.

I worked in minimum wage jobs where you end up with less than nothing for a month's work and barely manage to feed yourself. I had two jobs but nowhere to live and nothing to save for that better life. I bought train tickets for families with small children when the conductor was going to throw off in the middle of the night. I heard the tales of Africans forced to travel illegally; I worked with them, I heard their stories. If they had had a legal option - they would have taken it, but there was none. There was no box for those with nothing but their names.

All of these stories informed me. I wanted to know the truth, not guess at it, or make presumptions. I wanted to throw out my preconceptions and come home laden with truth.

It is difficult now. It is very very hard for many people. But I think I have found some ways to make it easier.

I had a vision of a human being so in touch with their surroundings, with nature that they no longer perceive a sense of separation. We actually produce the fuel for life with our bodies; plants NEED us, the soil needs us, the air needs us. Let me explain...

A garden is not simply somewhere plants grow; in a sense the entire planet is a garden. All of our biological processes happen here. Over the last two hundred years we have a developed rudimentary systems for the basic requirements of towns and cities. We discovered processes and chemicals that enabled mass production, mass waste treatment, mass provision of food and water. But unfortunately these weren't sustainable processes.

At some point many of us stepped away from the very natural knowledge we need to survive from one year to the next. But this doesn't mean that there aren't processes we can adopt that ARE sustainable - there are... and they can be applied at any scale they are needed. I have brought all of them together. They are the very essence of survival lore and ecological design adapted to an industrial standard - applicable to the individual, the village or the mega city. If you are stuck in your life. If your freedom seems to be diminshing rather than increasing. If you can't imagine what true freedom feels like - then this is the book for you. Its the kind of book you wish your grandmother had given you. It has recipes for life, for living, for vitality, for abundance.

It explains what to physically focus on to empower yourself and those around you. You will have a positive impact on your surroundings, on your colleagues, your friends and families and their future. It is called 'Positive Impact Living' because you cease to have a negative impact upon yourself with your thoughts, words and actions - you begin to generate life, that's what humans are for. We're creative geniuses, capable of manifesting our dreams; we haven't even begun to imagine our potential.

It is a How-to-Guide for the desperate, for those of us at our wit's ends, for those of us despairing of anyone doing something sensible. It's economic basis is rooted in balance and harmony. None of this profit-over- purpose-and-sustainability malarkey. If you build this it won't break down and you won't have to buy a new one. Its a garden. Its your garden. its one you can carry with you wherever you go.

Sounds ambitious. It is. Our souls are starving for meaning and sense; for encouragement, wisdom and balance. We don't know why it is we shrink away from things. From chemicals, hospitals, from congested roads and empty neighbourhoods. We're not empowered to take control of our lives; we need to take that power back and be in total control of our decisions and environments. Our ancestors had that freedom - together we can find it again - its not gone anywhere.

I had a great vision when I was young and I also had a long line of very practical grandmothers. They were left to bring up fifteen children, they were left without their husbands, they washed clothes and floors, rented dresses, started shops. And my grandfathers; they were carpenters, builders and policemen, they died in wars, gassed in the trenches, killed in the streets, eaten by cancers and lost, their names are on stone memorials and in the warmth of my heart. I asked my family for the stories.

Every generation has a different priority. For my generation, it is one of salvage; salvaging hope, of unearthing solutions, of changing rapidly. Change doesn't equal hardship though. We have been out of alignment; knocked there by such a fury of violence, but now we are stepping back into alignment and with those steps comes harmony. We are all taking those baby steps in our different ways, at different paces. We have to be gentle on ourselves and each other and we need to listen and hear because the answers are there. The prayers have already been answered all we have to do is become silent enough to hear them and be focused enough to be a conduit for those that matter. This is not just a theoretical book or a poetic book although it has some of those qualities, above all it is a practical book - follow the recipes and you can SEE the results. I can explain the why's the wherefores and the how to's but only you can make the magic.

We will feed the hungry, house the homeless, educate the poor and cure the sick. We will not only get through this year but we will heal and make next year better :) I saw it it's written on my soul.

NB It' coming out in October, but you can contact me if you would like to pre-order and I will add you to the first come first served list :)

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Take that L'Oreal

So everyone is making their own cosmetics. Well a lot more folk are and WHY is that? The shelves, the shops, the stalls are stacked with cosmetics. In Afghanistan you can purchase the latest hair, make up, body mask-not-quite-bomb-proof-age-reducing substance (puts a whole new spin on it that does) and plaster it all over in the hope of staving off wrinkles, or dryness or god forbid saggy bits.

Except we're all turning to the kitchen cupboard. We're splitting egg whites, we're looking for pure mud - just the mud nothing else. We're searching for Natural Oils, not the denatured gumph that's being spewing in the Gulf these last months - after all that IS mostly what our cosmetics have been made of. And our toothpaste is the leftovers from the Aluminium industry.

The big companies have been making a great BIG extra profit all these years, by making sure nothing goes to waste. Nothing at all. And if they can put it into something we use and buy EVERYDAY, perfect, it all adds up in the precious columns of profit.

Except for one thing; I can't use ANY of their stuff. None of it. Sensitive skin you see, so sensitive it just about fell off when I turned up on the planet and breathed.
Lanolin, mineral oil, petroleum jelly, any kind of preservative and more recently the soya and coconut derivatives that are killing Orangutans. It seems anything made, processed by a BIG company wants to kill me. I am almost thinking there's a real effort to try and kill me. If its not the fumes making my lungs rebel, its the washing powders with 'enzymes' that make your whites whiter than white, only this white goes a shade of deep red and attempts to die when it comes into contact with the lethal everyday household product. Oh my poor genetic heritage - maybe one day I'll be able to buy a tub of new genetic heritage and plaster it on and be reborn as a God with eternal life and similar godly attributes. Except I doubt it, immortality doesn't sit well with those on high; there's an overpopulation problem don't you know; they have a scarcity consciousness?

So I retreat for some sanity to a bottle of extra virgin olive oil or freshly squeezed lemon juice. I find consolation in almond oil and surprises in the herb cabinet. Cloves fight tooth decay and so does the humble Tea Tree oil (though don't swallow the stuff) so does Myrrh, used for thousands of years.
Oats are a soap when you add water, hey presto! Even the most sensitive skin is soothed with the simplicity of oats. In fact 'saponins' the quality of soap is in a lot of green stuff including grass. That's why when you go camping you can wash your pots with water, grass and ash and it works really well. Wow! My mum was trying to clean the fire place and for years she'd used this stuff that nearly killed me if I was within a few feet of it and I said 'Why don't you use the ash and some vinegar?' and it wasn't until one day she ran out of her cleaning product that she took my advice and WOW it worked better than the chemical cocktail.
It is sooo true nowadays that you should take everything with a pinch of salt. But if someone is making a profit from what they are selling you and it has anything remotely chemical in it, you should take it with a whole shipment of salt. Because some of it is killing us. Not just me with my flawed genetic watsit that made staying alive very precarious and forced me to become an ingenious genetically mutated hippy hybrid; but people like you.

If you've just cracked open a can of soda it is 100% likely that you have just swallowed the latest in death speeding cocktails 'glucose fructose'. It used to be simply sugar in those things - from sugar cane. But now it is a GM version of corn or wheat that's been so processed it couldn't get more different from the original. Its killing off the cows that they feed the 'corn' it comes from to. They're dying from acidosis and holes in their tummies. It's appalling the suffering of those animals. So what do they do? The FDA says it's OK to put it in soda, in cereals, in desserts, in sweets and liberally apply it to our kids. OMG everyone is getting sooo FAT, and they're getting diabetes, OMG obesity and heart disease have risen so HIGH in the last ten years, OMG. People like my mum and I have been forced to stop eating wheat products (coz they're no longer wheat) but primarily the glucose fructose because we damn near pass put. My cousin did pass out - on the motorway...

Everyone I know knows someone who's 'allergic'. Our family members are dying like flies from this or that cancer (it is MORE, way MORE than it used to be as attested by those who can remember). Sod the flying bombs of WW2, this stuff is staring up at us from our breakfast cereals and we bought it because it said 'Natural goodness' on the front. What complete knuckleheads we are... we are beating ourselves up and shortening our lives starting with cleaning our teeth and looking in the mirror.

When my mum got her severe reaction to this stuff we did the obvious and stopped buying it in the first place. Except it's in EVERYTHING. Whatever used to have sugar in it now has it in. What I wouldn't give for a natural cream cake that had actual fresh cream in it and real pastry, OMG but no, not gonna happen unless I make it.

But I'm not going to put that on my face.  Everyone is in the same chemical confusion, it doesn't matter whether we run the companies selling it or are kneeling at the end of the conveyor belts swallowing the stuff with our hands tied behind our backs. There is ignorance to a degree that I find incredible. All these intelligent people, doctors, scientists, managers - saying 'It's OK. It's SAFE'.

Hmmm? Why don't I believe you? After one of mum's worse reactions I went away and thought about what might help. It was before I knew about the cows etc. What I knew about gluten reactions/leaky gut syndrome, which is where these 'ose's (glucose, fructose, sucrose) go into your blood stream, was that it causes an acid reaction. Your body is like 'Holy shit... INCOMING' it thinks it's being attacked by the 'missiles it can't recognise'. In the history of your body it never ever saw glucose fructose until like ten years ago. So it shuts down, blood pressure gets scary, you keel over, your blood is boiling in an acidosis reaction to the scary stuff. It's actually trying to protect you. Its trying to do the right thing to 'KILL' the invading bastard'oses'. So I thought about 'bitter herbs'.
Bitter herbs do the opposite, they calm the acid reaction, they alkalise the blood. Many of them have magical properties - really and NO side effects. Goldenseal is one of these, with breast cancer curing properties, its superb for tummy things, a natural antibiotic its great against Flu and other viruses, also for skin healing.
I doused my mum liberally with some glycerin based Goldenseal and it WORKED. Instead of passing out for hours, she recovered quickly. Go Dr Lou! I am qualified up to the rand of my boots in medicine - literally I have about an inch of traditional western medicine, but I studied Tibetan Medicine for six years and most of all I was forced to study myself. Truly we are our own best doctors up to a point. I realised early on that Doctors know nothing at all about skin problems. They didn't know that my eczema/asthma was caused by my gut going OMG look at all the chemicals, and the STRESS. Help I wanna die now. I had to slowly figure out I was allergic to milk, wheat and eggs the hard way, by being ill and nearly dying. I had to figure out that I couldn't use 'biological' washing powder because I would 'biologically' cease to exist once the anaphylactic shock set in. No Dr told me that I had to cleanse my gut for my asthma to calm down, or use blood purifying herbs to heal my skin or attend to my emotions.
And why was I so F***** ill, because some Doctor in the early 80's gave me a cocktail of antibiotics for a cough and a neuroleptic called Phenergan when I was a baby. Because he didn't know did he, I'm assuming, that such a thing is not a good idea. Or that giving vaccines to a baby is like a fast track to them getting some other illness. The antibiotics wiped out my fledgling immune system and and the neuroleptic gave me the apparently rare Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome at aged 2 (which is a bit like that film about the Vietnam era soldiers being guinea pigged on hallucinogens that made them kill each other coupled with acid burning all over your body) and stress suddenly became something I had no weapons to deal with. If you're going to take antibiotics and neuroleptics ONLY do it if you're about to drop down dead anyway - is my advice.

And my other advice is start making your own cosmetics. Sheena of the 'Sociology of Sheena' has some great ideas and practical advice here at Granola Tendencies

Natural is best. The closest to the original is best. yes western medicine can serve us, its diagnostics are excellent if a little slow compared to some traditions and certainly full of holes in relation to chronic conditions. Western medicine needs to develop some new thinking that involves the other world medical traditions that ARE healing people who would otherwise die. Thyroid diseases in Tibetan medicine can be healed even without a thyroid, now you guys can't do that can you? Asthma, eczema, chronic fatigue syndrome, leukaemia, certain cancers, epilepsy, autism, diabetes, M.S, M.E, the FLU, obesity, acidosis... all healed and potentially cured altogether in other medical traditions.
Ageing is caused by a low level of inflammation to our organs. The raw food revolution is happening at the moment and resulting in cancers and obesity being reversed and these same people who were facing imminent death in their twenties and thirties are now glowing icons of the raw food industry - it is happening for a REASON. Because it works. But not for L'Oreal, or Glaxo Smith & Kline, or Kelloggs and especially not for those beneficent folks at Monsanto. I'm sorry chaps you're just going to have to be made redundant or come up with some new and healthier ideas for the rest of us. And some lipstick that's not been tested on animals.

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The Strong Man

A FB friend commented this:- 'Contrary to the prevailing beliefs and weak male role models of the past 50 years it actually is still OK to be a strong man.'

And there was a huge discussion beneath it which covered everything from single mums to muscle building - and my comment got extra long (see below). I want to know what you think though.

'Ooh, I enjoyed that semantics discussion :) I think there is a new dynamic from single parent families - it's very hard to be both parents and of course everyone who becomes a parent figure affects a child's behaviour and personality. Strong men who are confident in themselves and who they are = GREAT. The world needs them. Not namby pamby folk who can't stand up for shite. And women need men to stand up on their behalf around the world. There are so many countries with so much oppression that if the strong fellas began to speak out on behalf of those who are oppressed it would help so much. Like in the past a strong man had to have so many qualities; as a provider, as a protector, but in particular caring for everyone; the old, the young. And women have done that too, in a way with so many men dying in wars over generations they have had to man up so to speak; my family was all women brought up on each side because all the granddads died in WW1 and the same a generation before that. In a way that helped women folk gain their equality - its sad but true to say. Did we lose something? Yes, we did. A strong man to me isn't just someone who can get the lid off the jar, its someone who can choose where they stand in the complex field that is today's world and say something really important and be a rock among the craziness. It always amazes me how - un-leaderish our male leaders look; muscling up would inspire some confidence I think, but empty posturing - no thank you. I don't think I ever thought it wasn't ok to be a strong man - I just think a lot killed and our society burns them up. Come out come out wherever you are? We need physically strong chaps and mentally strong ones. We need all the strength we can get. We need savvy ones. I don't think its just OK to be a strong man/role figure I think there's an absolute necessity.

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