liminal_luke

Having feelings and paying attention to them is not a symptom of narcissism and definately not exclusive of taking compassionate action in the world. I dare say you have some pretty strong feelings yourself (say when you watch a video of animals being slaughtered) that has a lot to do with the position you take. Feelings, thoughts, and actions are all connected.

Dao rain Tao, First off, I'm not holding myself out as someone whose diet, social consciousness, or spiritual attainments are anywhere near ideal. They aren't. When I talk about a "deep sense of reverence and gratitude" I'm articulating the direction I'd like to head in. I doubt someone with the kind of consciousness I'm describing would spend much time at KFC. Along with the "feeling" of gratitude would come an effort to seek out meat that had been raised and slaughtered in a humane, compassionate way.

I don't think chickens are people. I think chickens are chickens. That's not to say they don't have emotions. Honestly, I have no idea about the emotional life of a chicken but I'll grant you this: feeling a deep sense of gratitude and reverence for all that happened so that we can eat is a very, very good idea. There's a principle in tai chi that everything is connected; the body moves as a single unit. Beginners wave their arms around as if they were rebel troops gone awol from the central command in the lower dan tian. A master moves seamlessly, a study in unity. Can we eat a meal like a tai chi master does his form? Recognizing our seamless connection with the natural world, and indeed the broader universe....or do we tense up and hold ourselves apart from the rest of life? I'd rather eat a lamb chop with a grateful heart than a carrot with contempt.

It's great to look at a cow and see a friend. What do you see though when you look at a human being who eats meat? Someone like me, for instance. Do you see a friend because I'm not feeling it. I'm not getting a peaceful vibe. No, what I'm feeling from you is anger, perhaps the sense of hurt that comes from feeling like a victim, smug self-righteousness. Maybe I'm wrong and you're none of those things. Maybe I'm just generalizing from previous experience. You see, I've known my share of hostile, bitter vegans. Certainly some vegetarians are truly peaceful (towards humans as well as animals) but there's a strong contingent who only respect you if you eat like them.

The gemstone necklaces are arguably way overpriced but there's a lot of interesting information over at http://www.gemisphere.com I can't speak to whether what they say about the energy of the various stones is true or not but people into this kind of thing might find it worth taking a look.

Great, hope you find it helpful. You might also be interested in checking out the practice journal of Eric23 a fellow bum who worked with Unwinding the Belly over a long period of time and wrote lots of entries about his experience

Abdominal massage could be great. Is there anyone who does chi nei tsang (a form of taoist abdominal massage) near where you live? Also check out the book Unwinding the Belly, a self-help chi nei tsang book that will teach you how to do the massage yourself. You might try finding a tender point on your belly and keeping your finger right on that spot making gentle, superficial counterclockwise circles until you start to feel some release. Then move slightly to the next tender spot and repeat. This self-treatment could take up to an hour or so a day and help a lot over time. Also, similar gentle circling around the rim of the navel (covered in Unwinding the Belly) might help a lot. A similar idea you could also try. Make the same kind of gentle circles starting at the center right below the sternum and then working right below the lowest rib slowly towards the periphery. Then come back to the center and work towards the periphery on the other side. Be patient and work slowly releasing little by little. If emotions come up that means it's working.

I don't pay a whole lot of attention to whether my various interests and proclivities conflict with each other prefering to give myself over to my passions willy-nilly. So I can't really speak to the question of whether it's particularly taoist to eat paleo, or particularly paleo to be taoist. All I know is that when I eat more or less paleo my blood pressure falls into the normal range, and when I commit to my taoist cultivation I feel happier and like I'm doing what I came here to do. And that's good enough for me.

I think one of the most useful ways of working with a dream is to see everything and everybody in it as aspects of yourself. What particularly struck me reading through your dream was the beautiful image of the bird.... "strange multicolored bird in the sky by a tree, with multiple layers of different colored feathers" What a beautiful image! And yet for some reason (might be worth doing a little more work into what the reason might be) you are mad at the bird and try to hurt it. And then the dream switches to a scene where surgeons are trying to repair your own gashed heart. Do you think the strange multicolored bird could be your own tender inner self? And if so, what happened to make you so angry with yourself? Can you find compassion for the "strange multicolored bird"? Perhaps the source of some of your anger can be found in the earlier part of the dream. "I told him I was pissed at him for buying black magick candles and using them against his own family, and then making up lies to hurt his own family." Here again I suggest looking at all the characters as different aspects of yourself. So you are you, the man you are mad at is you, and your family as a whole is you. Seen this way, it boils down to betrayal of the self. A part of you has bought black candles to try to hurt another part of you. Hope this doesn't sound too harsh. I don't mean it that way. We all have many different "parts," and it's super common that they don't all have the same agenda and point of view. If you can use the dream to open up a dialogue of sorts among the different characters perhaps everybody can have a chance to be heard and can come to a common understanding of how to proceed. I'm betting that if you can get your different inner aspects to treat each other with compassion, you're outer life will start to reflect this harmony as well.These are just my impressions. It's fun for me to think about dreams, but if these ideas don't resonate with you just let them go. Liminal

Thought I'd add a few more thoughts.... First off, the book. You tell us that it's a paperback and heavily under-lined, two pretty telling details that indicate this is a book that has actually been read. Someone (you I'm thinking) has taken the time to absorb what it has to teach. This might seem obvious but so often people buy books for other reasons than to actually process the information in them. I'll admit to having bought books because having them fit my self-image of the person I wanted to be. Or because I thought other people would think good things about me (look how smart he is!) when they saw the book on my shelf. But books bought for pretentious reasons are more likely to be hardback and certainly not underlined. Your book is a well used one. About using mirrors to break curses. Many curses are basically projections, psychologically speaking. Someone doesn't like something about themselves so instead of owning it they claim it was yours all along. If you agree and say yes that's mine, you've effectively been cursed. But if you say "hey wait a minute, look in the mirror," and then hold it up for them so they can see themselves, well, that's using a mirror to break the curse. On realizing your mom is a real witch. I think this is half the battle. So many times we make excuses for childhood mistreatment. Abused children (and I'm not saying this was you necessarily) often don't recognize themselves as abused. They minimize what happened to them, think it was normal, disassociate so they don't feel or even remember it, think they somehow deserved it. But given enough years and enough psychological work, eventually they can look the situation right in the eye and say: "hey wait a minute, no more sugarcoating this, my mom was (is) a real witch!" This realization by itself is powerfully curse breaking.

TI.... Thanks for your posting. I don't practice the kind of meditation you do, haven't had the kind of experiences you've had, and find your account inspiring just the same. How rare it is that someone truly dedicates themselves to spiritual practice! By cultivating awareness, prescence, etc and then telling your story here on taobums, you open a doorway that makes it that much easier for others to follow where you've gone before. They will, I'm sure, appreciate the work you're doing just as you no doubt appreciate the efforts of those who have come before you. Our willingness to connect with the deepest parts of ourselves links us to one another in gratitude and love. It's really quite beautiful. Liminal

I can't resist so here goes. All parents are witches of a sort and, for the most part unknowingly, curse their children. It's just the nature of having kids when you're not yourself a fully conscious, realized human being. All the unworked through issues and unconscious complexes of the parents inevitably and automatically get dumped in the lap of the unsuspecting offspring. You can call it family baggage, but it's really a curse-- the "big curse" as you say. Other people who come along later in life also have the ability to curse us (usually by bringing up the issues implicated in the original parental curse) but their treachery is not nearly so potent and, as you point out, is more easily dealt with. A big part of reclaiming our real identity and healing ourselves is breaking the family curse. We learn that we don't have to be like our parents. We learn that we don't have to be different from our parents either. We are the way we are because it's how we choose to be as free people, not as slaves to inherited family drama. That's breaking the curse, and it's one of the most important tasks of adulthood. Your dream indicates you know how to do this. You have in your possession a heavily-underlined how-to book as well as other symbolic objects to help you now. Objects you've gathered as an adult that you didn't have as a child. Equally important, you've gone through a kundalini experience--twice. To me this indicates a greater integration and consciousness of the energy. Maybe the first time it was just something that happened to you. The second time around you've brought more of yourself to the experience. You've suceeded in integrating it further into your being, to the extent that you can now use the energy (like a witch yourself?) to break curses big and small. As you say, opinion alert and all that.

Personally, I don't recommend a grand gesture right off the bat. Running through the streets naked while it would make a great scene in a movie, might not play so well in real life. Better, and more respectful, to approach the situation in a more low-key way and find out where she's at. Is she dating, seeing anybody else seriously right now? Is she interested in hearing your story about the divorce papers? I think a simple phone call to open the lines of communication is the way to start things. If she's happy about your news and wants to get back together there will be plenty of time for grand gestures later.

We might not like it, but it's true. Things die in order for us to live. It's part of what it means to be an incarnated being on this earth. So many of us, especially perhaps those attracted to "spirituality," aren't really comfortable with earthly existence at all. It would be easier just to go to heaven, and not have anything to do with the earth. The earth feels dirty and bad. We want to escape the earth, send our kundalini energy flying upward, never touch the ground. We want to believe we can escape the moral ambiguities of life in the physical plane. For better or worse everyone writing on this forum is a human being living on the earth. We are part of the cycle of life on this planet, a cycle that involves killing and being killed. To me, the true moral issue is whether we can learn to embrace that reality or choose to live in denial. You can choose not to eat meat but make no mistake....this realm isn't all light and love in the heavenly spheres. We all kill (knowingly or unknowingly), we all die, we all belong to the earth.

Ummm, sure ya do. We should probably both cite scientific sources rather than just making off-the-cuff comments. That way our claims would have more meat to them. I didn't because (1) I'm lazy, (2) nutritional geekiness isn't really my thing, and mostly because (3) most people aren't going to do the work to think critically about the science anyways, no matter what I post. I'll tell ya what though--I'll show ya mine, if you show me yours. One caveat: no epidemological studies please.

Along with just about everybody I know, I used to think vegtables were healthy. Turns out I was wrong. Vegtables are, at best, neutral from a good-for-you perspective. Sure if you switch from eating sugary soft drinks and boxed macaroni and cheese to a diet of salads and such things will improve. Still, the fact is that a purely vegetarian diet is not optimal for health. For optimal health you really have to eat some animal products. If you have the taste for them, adding a few veggies and fruits in with the meat won't hurt but it doesn't help much either. Before all the veg-heads attack with horror stories about suffering and slaughter in factore farms let me just say this: I totally agree with you. Factory farming is gross. If a person decided not to eat factory-farmed meat, well, I could totally get behind the ethics of that. But truly grass-fed cows? Wild salmon? Those are different beasts altogether. And if the goal is not to kill sentient beings, do you really think no animals died so you could eat your broccoli? If your eating the products of modern agriculture that simply isn't true.

This makes sense to me. I don't smoke, but I wonder if living in Mexico city--not know for the cleanest air--also contributes to a down mood?

Hi Old Green, If you're willing to go into it, I'd be very interested to hear more about how you've benefitted from Sun Salutations. I haven't done them much, but am always playing around with my practice and considering trying new things. Thanks! Liminal

Thanks Taomeow! Yep, certainly makes sense that there are times to be more withdrawn, and other times when a more outward push is called for. Yin and yang I guess.

Sins of ommision, eh? Yikes! Here I've been skating along, smugly comfortable with avoiding at least the big, glaring abuses of power. Now that you mention it though, my powers, supernatural and otherwise, are chronically underutilized. If I don't use my powers I figure I won't be noticed, and I'm more comfortable disappearing. It's a false comfort though, perhaps akin to an anorexics false refuge in an ever-decreasing bodyweight--the numb semi-suicide of taking up less space in the world. Time to wake up. PS. I have the perhaps not exactly supernatural but nevertheless quite unusual power of being fearlessly self-disclosing in a public forum.

Ah ok, learn something new everyday. I thought it just referred to a furry guy or a furloving guy and was going to tell you that maybe you aren't as unique a taobum as you think....but, uh, I stand corrected.

I am, but then I suspect I'm the "1 other," and you already knew that. Is a furfag a furry guy or a furry guy admirer?

My Very Special Powers I can feel comfortable traveling alone in most parts of Mexico. I can walk 10,000 steps with my pedometer with only a few stops for caffeine re-fueling. I can go to numerous workshops and retreats and not practice anything I learned there at home and still feel good about the experience. I can listen to people and usually get a pretty good feel for what they are feeling. I can stay at hotels that don't have cable, hot showers, or even toilet seats. I can eat at fancy restaurants all by myself. I can encourage people to do the thing that makes them happy-- even if it's not the same thing that makes me happy. I can be ok with getting older. I can fail at something over and over again, and still believe that I'll eventually get it and keep trying.

Hi Lindelani, I can imagine how the voices would be annoying or upsetting, especially since they are, as you say, in contrast to your own morals and values. Please be gentle with yourself. We all have thoughts and impulses to do and say things that, in real life, we'd never actually do or say. Some of us have voices that say things that are contrary to things we'd do or say in real life too. The important thing to remember is that whatever the voices say is no reflection on who you are as a person. It might seem like the voices are the devil, but that does not, in any way, make YOU a bad person. Having voices in your head is a symptom, like any other, that something is going on for you. Think of it like any symptom such as a cough. If you had a really bad cough that didn't go away you'd go to the doctor and see if your lungs were ok. Having a cough doesn't make you a bad person. It makes you a human being with a body that isn't perfect, just the same as all the other human beings on the planet who also have imperfect bodies. I think your plan to talk to the doctor at school is a great one. Hope you find out everything is fine and that the voices get better very soon. Take care, Liminal

Hi Lindelani, I think it would be worth seeking out a professional medical opinion on this. You could either go to a general practitioner to begin with or, if possible, a psychiatrist. A doctor will ask other questions to get an idea of what's going on with you, and possibly order tests to make sure nothing is going amiss organically with your brain. Of course, you're not obligated to do what any given doctor says. Think of them more as expert advisors, and educate yourself. A medical professional would be able to get more of a sense of what's going on for you and, hopefully, rule out anything serious. Are you living with family? If you're comfortable talking to them about it, perhaps they could help you arrange going to a doctor. Another possibility if you're going to school is to check it out with the medical person there. Most schools have a nurse you could talk to, and that would get you started. Getting information, and possibly treatment, from medical professionals is an important part of taking care of yourself--something we all need to do. Good luck! Liminal