#all the buddhist parts are more like. folk traditions and stuff

[italiantea]

as a taiwanese person i actually know less about buddhism than the average ex-christian bro dude who went on a trip to asia once. bc they dont really indoctrinate children about the concept of nirvana and enlightenment here it's always. the fuckign confucianism.

[livelaughlovechai]

Things to keep in mind while writing a south asian character-

(Since I'm a mixed south-north indian and a hindu-sikh I've mainly included details about indian-hindu characters(ill try to include more abt sikh characters aswell)tho ive tried to include as much info as I can abt other south asian countries aswell !also ,if you want,feel free to add more details in :)

And please forgive my grammar in some of these places XD

1.The most common one,of course being that south asia is not all india.countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri lanka,Bhutan etc exist to.

2.Religion tends to be a big part of many south asian people’s lives , and If not a big part of their life,than most south asians are atleast religious in one way or the other.Different religions are in majority in different regions of south asia.For example,Sri lanka is majority buddhist, mainly in the sinhalese majority while the tamil minority there is majority hindu. But it's more than valid if ur character is atheist to tho!

3.For indian characters specifically ,it's is important to know what state they are from and that state’s culture . For example,most (or almost all)tamil characters won't wear a salwar kameez.(if they do then mostly muslim tamils)(reminder;I'm talking about traditional wear. Yes a lot of Tamil's could wear a salwar kameez if they want but it is not the traditional dress of tamil nadu)

4.India itself is very diverse,so don't make every character hindu.in some regions one religion is more in the majority than the others.If you decide to make a christian-indian character ,than they usually are from south-west india and north-east india.

5.If you decide to make a hindu-indian character as maybe a marvel/dc oc or something , its best to do some research on hindu stories and history.trust me,it helps alot. If not a hindu character than do research on the folk tales of that characters region,as that can help to.

6.NOT EVERY INDIAN SPEAKS HINDI.INDIAN/HINDU ARE NOT LANGUAGES.istg please . All it takes is one search of your characters state and the states description almost always mentions the state’s official language.while some character from non Hindi speaking areas of the country, for example a malyalee person could know how to speak hindi (most probably by living somewhere like delhi),they would still talk in malayalam with family and stuff . Also a pakistani character and Hindi speaking indian can almost always communicate easily since since the most spoken language in Pakistan,Urdu is very similar to Hindi in sound(also a lot of indians,specifically muslim indian’s have urdu as their first language.)Also punjabi Pakistani's and Indian's don't have any problem in communication(the script they write punjabi in is different tho)Also since a lot of people from the north had their ancestors migrate from pakistan to india during partition regional languages of Pakistan such as sindhi,multani,balochi etc can be understood by some people of such descent living in India.And a bengali speaking indian and a Bangladeshi can communicate just as well.Nepali speaking indians and Nepali people can also communicate with each other.But when it comes to Sri Lankan tamil people their dialect is different than the one of indian tamilians,so their tamil is better understood by malyalees,but they can still communicate well enough with each other.afghan people speak pashto and dari.pashto is also understood by a small amount of ethnic pashtuns who live throughout the sub continent.People from the Maldives speak the language of dhivehi.

7.Indians overall have many festivals that all people of usually a certain community celebrate regardless of religion,caste,etc.For example ,the people in kerela celebrate onam.Infact in alot of the state’s people from a specific region have their on festivities.

8.Physical features vary from area to area of South Asia.So there is no definite“south asian“look.

9.Sikh’s don’t cut their hair , that’s why most Sikh women have long hair and most Sikh men wear turbans. Although some do, like my uncle from my mom’s side and my mom herself and etc. Though socially it's more acceptable for a sikh woman to cut her hair then a sikh man. But a load of times sikh immigrants do have to sadly cut their hair and take off their turbans in order to get jobs and all.

10.-And Hindu’s don’t eat beef.Most Sikh’s and overall all Indians tend to avoid beef to.a lot of Hindus are vegetarians due to religious beliefs. Tho mallus and some people from the north east for example usualy do eat beef(mainly the non hindus)

11.-For characters specially from south india(that to mainly kerala and tamil Nadu) the naming tradition that is used most commonly is that the child and wife use the father’s name as their last name. Though I've noticed that outside of their states atleast they tend to use their family names, but very rarely caste names.

12.- Believe it or not, in a show( I'm not sure about the name) a pakistani character had the name“shiv reddy“.pissed me of sm.yes pakistani hindus exist but if I havent already mentioned before,CERTAIN LAST NAMES BELONG TO CERTAIN AREAS. Reddy is an indian telugu hindu last name.please do your research.

13.-This applies to a good amount of north indians and just overall non south indians.south india is not one state.madras was the OLD name for Chennai, which is just one CITY in one state of south india.There are 5 states,6(and more) languages spoken. Please do not confuse those cultures.

14.-As for a good amount of non punjabis...please.punjabis are not all “balle-balle“ sikh people.please. And they're not all angry people looking for a fight either.

15.-Talking abt north india,I need to mention bollywood and how they stereotype.bombay aka the film city is in Maharashtra.yet they still stereotype Maharashtrians as poor people.gujjus are always the rich snobbish ppl.bengali ppl are sweet shy people and nepali people are Chinese. Goans are always english speaking drunkards or high attitude aunties.rajasthanis all have a heavy accent and are royalty and Uttar pradeshis-biharis are poor illiterate people. PLEASE STOP WITH THIS STEREOTYPICAL BULLSHIT ISTG. See,stereotypes exist because they are true, but only a part of the truth and over exaggerated asf.

16.-India does have a poverty issue but we are far from a third world country.most indians are middle class,that to is split in between lower middle class,middle middle class and upper middle class.and until or unless you live in a rural area casteism really isn't a problem.but remember,while casteism is illegal in indian law,it still affects people.it’s just a little less prevelant in big cities. While india is the farthest ahead in south asia atleast the rest of the countries are doing well for themselves as well.

17.-hindu culture specifically has so much lgbtqia+ stuff in it.but the fucking brit’s and Mughals ruined it. The only transgender festival of Asia is held in tamil nadu.seriously, I advise you do research of your own on it and you'll love it to!♥️

18.-Btw, hindi is a language,hindu religion. (had to add this again)Your character prolly from some place like madhya pradesh,bihar,Uttar pradesh,Delhi,uttarakhand or himachal pradesh if they are hindi speaking. Some people have the same confusion with malayalam. Malayalam is a language, malyalee’s are the people who speak it or at from kerala.

19.-talking about food.curry is a wide ass term.wdym by curry?fish curry,mutton curry or is it paneer curry?is it more creamy or not?do you eat it by itself,with rice,a paratha/parotta or all?like seriously stop with “curry“ ITS ANNOYINGGG.again food varries alot area by area.even in a specific area food varries. For example,Kerala-Tamil nadu sambar is damn spicy but sambar from karnataka and telugu states tends to be sweeter.also food from Karnataka is much milder in spice then food from Andhra,but still capable of burning the mouths of most non south asians 😍😘🥰.also,we tend to eat most of our food with hands(THE best way.)famous delicacies vary from country to country in south asia and area to area of india btw. And our food is not ’smelly’, it's FRAGRANT.

20.ok so ive in total had 2 specific segments dedicated to language and this is the third one.India,while having only 22 offical languages(again;i remind you,we do not have a national language)actually has like thousands of languages. Native people from even just one state can have different mother tongues(for example-three people who were born and raised in karnataka and have families that are native to the state could have the languages of kannada,tulu and kodava as their mother tongues).And again,dialects also differ.For example,Bombay hindi and the hindi of a person from Uttarakhand would be different, and so would Bangalore tamil and a Madurai native’s tamil.Also,let’s say a telugu person has been living in mumbai for a while,very rarely will they ever have an ’accent’ while speaking hindi or english.

21.so above i mentioned that alot of people from the north have had ancestors move in from pakistan during the partition(and vice versa for some Pakistani's).Similarly,a good amount of people from west bengal had their ancestors move in from bangladesh(and vice versa again,but unlike the north india-pakistan thing indian bong’s and bangladeshi people don’t exactly have that ’divide’).Adding this in specifically not only because of how important this is but it can give more depth to your characters if they are from any of these areas.

22.Every state has different art forms.be it dance,music or just art,every state has it different.India has 8 classical dances(bharatanatyam,kuchipudi, mohiniyattam,kathakali,oddisi,kathak, manipuri and sattriya) and has countless many more.Music also varies and so does art as i said above.

23.our culture is super feminist but fucked by the brits and mughals again. We had so many queens and princesses that fought wars and also many female warriors.In the ancient times women only wore single drape saris and didn’t cover their breasts because they were not seen as sexual,but infact as a sign of motherhood(and there forth strength).If they were covered,it was for support.

24.Most people know atleast 3+ languages and almost everyone knows 2 at the very least. Sometimes they can even understand(which can range from basic to great) some other languages. For eg.- my dad can speak english,hindi,telugu,konkani,tulu,punjabi,urdu and multani+ he can understand malayalam,kannada,sindhi and tamil well enough.

That's it(for now):) hope this can help.feel free to ask questions!+random songs from my playlist✨✨✨

(ps,check this post of mine out cause y not lol)

[sabakos]

🔥 religion

Actually refers to an amalgam several different things, none of which are easily disentangled from each other, only some of which are patently harmful.

And I don't mean this in the sense of "don't say religion when you mean christianity" or any other such nonsense - I find that most of the people who are going to generalize broadly based on "Christianity vs Islam vs Judaism" or "Hinduism vs Buddhism" are too stupid to be included in the conversation.

There are the beliefs of the monks, priests, and theologians, which are generally presented as "what the religion is" to potential converts. I end up reading a lot of this stuff on my own because a lot of it has either deliberate or unwitting philosophical content. It's mostly a bunch of nerds arguing with each other about esoterica. But I find that people who are raised within a religious tradition have no clue about any of this. Much like that redditor who traveled to Tibet(?) and discovered that your average Buddhist isn't seeking enlightenment, your average Catholic has no idea who Thomas Aquinas is and your average Jewish person thinks the Jews were slaves in Egypt who built the pyramids. So when we talk about and criticize the beliefs and doctrines of a religion we're often taking aim at ideas that the majority of people who belong to that religion probably aren't even aware of.

Then there are the "folk" beliefs of the laypeople, which are mostly poorly documented and deal with traditions and superstitions that would often be considered unorthodox or harmful to the priestly and monastic type authorities, but generally fly under the radar of criticism because they have no intellectual weight to them; to criticize would be to legitimize them. These tend to be more interesting to sociologists and anthropologists and folklorists rather than philosophers and historians. Many people who discover that the "priestly doctrines" are not shared by the common people tend to mistake this for the "true" religion, but I think that they usually quickly discover that these beliefs aren't really coherent or easily systematized or described across the population, and that they have no more legitimacy than the beliefs that are given weight as doctrine.

Really I think the truly harmful aspect of the religion is neither the esoterica or the folk wisdom but the meta-belief, that there is a group that you are a part of based on your religious identity who you in some sense "belong to", that harm to this group constitutes harm to you, and that the nerds who debate esoterica who happen to belong to your identity group are authorities whose beliefs either can't be questioned or can't be done away with entirely, and are in some sense more legitimate than those of people outside of your identity group. All of this is what is repulsive to the idea of human freedom. You can never be free if you believe that you belong to something, that you owe something to "your" community and that they wield authority over you. Any group that wants to define themselves as an ontological subdivision of people between "the individual" and "all humanity" is an enemy to all of humanity, and ought to be destroyed.

[elluendifad]

Hello aaah I've been following you for a while and I think you're really cool and I have so many questions!! -- What does your daily practice look like? Did you come up with those texts you recite (like what you quoted in that Earenya post you had a couple weeks ago) yourself (they're very pretty!)? How do you feel about which language you use (since I'm sure using English vs, say, Quenya will feel differently)? How does Buddhism intersect with your practice? -- Feel free to answer all or some -

- or none of these questions, whichever you prefer :) I'm so very very curious because I'm also an elf (not of the Tolkien variety, though I love his works very dearly too) with both a personal and scholarly interest in Buddhism (I love Shingon the most!) so I'd love to hear more about your practice :) I hope me asking so many questions isn't too weird!! Thank you very much and have a beautiful day ♥" part one and two of this ask put together for readability: Hi and thank you for sending these asks!! i love talkin elf stuff and am very glad to do so with all kinds of elves, not just tolkien folks. i parked this in my drafts for a while so i could ponder the answering! the majority of it will be below this cut here. I am also going to re-order the questions and answers. tumblr keeps destroying this in my drafts so i am just going to post it as is and follow upwith additional posts.

Question 1: Did I write the recitations for calling the valar in this post ? Yes! What I say wiggles around a little bit day to day, but the basic parts of these evocations are standard for me. A hello, this is your day or month, you are the power of (sphere of influence) and i will tell you how i am engaging with your sphere today/this month. Enjoy this gift. Question 2: How do i feel about language used (quenya vs english) ? I am a native english speaker, and have been fiddling with quenya for a few years using two resources: the elfdict dictionary and the atanquesta grammar. I do most things in english just for ease's sake, but do enjoy practicing translation and writing. My usual writing form is quenya-mode sarati <3 i leave the tengwar to the younger elves lol. i will especially use quenya for written spells or charms, as it is less immediate than spoken spells and gives me more time to fiddle and make it pretty and double check grammar. there are one or two 'mantras' or small spoken spells i regularly utilize in quenya, but when i say small i do mean that 'aiya earendil elenion ancalima' is one of the longest ones. Question 3: How does buddhism intersect with my practice? Buddhism is a philosophical backbone for my life, and i am influenced by a few traditions moreso than others: There are Tibetan monks who travel through my region, and they are some of the most dear presenters I have ever met. They are magnificent to sit with. I am also influenced by Soto zen via authors of that tradition, and Thien zen primarily through Thich Nhat Hanh. One of the most formative books i read early on in my introduction to buddhism was Thich Nhat Hanh's "Old Path White Clouds", which is a telling of the life of buddha. I also visit a zendo regularly, and my teacher there is a mix of contemplative christian practices and Soto zen. he's very open to my own unique path, and engages me in serious and respectful conversations about my relationship the legendarium and how the deep still places in my heart connect me to the One. It's been since about 2017 that i took on a modified version of the oldest buddhist precepts for laypeople. To reduce harm, to not steal, to not lie, to avoid unhelpful behaviors (my version of avoiding intoxication), and to avoid unhealthy relationships/to change course if they become so. These 'rules' still make up the meat of my axiology and inform my behavior. They work pretty well with elven philosophy ime and there's a lot of overlap. So, the practical aspects are that 'just sitting' zen style, and doing mantras and compassionate meditation tibetan style are parts of my weekly activity. I do a meditation group via zoom with my zendo teacher and companions every anarya (sunday), and when i am well i generally hold well to daily meditation. when i am unwell, it is harder for me to keep to a schedule and i don't treat myself rough about it. i kind of view re-reading Old Path White Clouds as an occasional pilgrimage. Suffering is inherent to life--this is true for all kindreds including eldar. I can act wisely to reduce un-necessary suffering, and i can extend compassion and patience and wisdom to all my fellow sufferers. quiet observation reveals the nature of this extra suffering and how it has occurred, and how it might abate. Question 4: What does my daily practice look like? I might write a longer post about this sometime, but the basics are that i incorporate small repeated rituals daily or weekly, and do bigger spellworks for my constellation of eldar at the full and dark moon. my minimum daily rituals are: -cleaning my body. this is just the basic brushing teeth and washing face. my adherence kind of fluctuates depending on how busy i am. -anointing seven points in the shape of the septaquetra, usually while intoning the weekdays (so starting right wrist=elenya, and following the progression i use

[oinonsana]

Southeast Asian Fantasy, Scott Watanabe's Raya, and Gubat Banwa 5

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Gonna skip forward a bit to the other cool parts.

The dragon boat rowing stuff is arguably Southeast Asian, but it's still a traditional Chinese thing. And of course the armors and all are very East Asian, though from what I know the Dai Viet had very similar armors. Now I'm left to wondering if they could do a "Southeast Asian setting with Fantasy!China as a major player" as China was historically, during the height of the Maritime Nusantara Trading Network.

Here Scott starts enumerating each of the Five Cultures of Makara. Aside from the stellar art of course, Heart's clothing resembles Javanese or Thai or Cambodian even Balinese clothing! With that sarong like thing closed in by a belt. That's really cool. And with the hair style too, being that chignon style, is afaik also something seen even in Precolonial Philippines (which wasn't as Indianized as their western brethren, though they probably also had the sarong + belt combo). Fang can maybe pass of for Dai Viet, but Spine is not something I could confidently say passes for Southeast Asian. Maybe Mongolian? Tail could somewhat pass for Indonesian as well, although it's a bit non-traditional, with the belt and all, but the textiles and knots can work. Claw is reminiscent of the clothing of various Lumad (indigenous people) folk here in the Philippines, such as the Bagobo's and the Yakan, so that's another mark in their favor.

I think Raya's setting could've benefitted from it being a lot more huge than just Southeast Asian. It covers most of the Southeast and East Asian world, from the Steppes to the Seas. That would've been cool.

Here's the cool shit. Most of the lore isn't inherently tied down to any particular Southeast Asian folklore as far as I know, but its aesthetics are very Southeast Asian. Particularly the Hindu-Buddhist trappings of the Indianized states, like Angkor Wat and Majapahit.

It's cool af worldbuilding though.

This one in particular, the Mother Dragon Temple:

Now that looks like Angkor Wat. A huge temple complex. This shit rocks. Temples like this in Gubat Banwa wouldn't be found in the Sword Isles, but rather, in the places with larger landmasses, such as Madaki and Malirawat.

I also love this one. Some fucking good as fuck worldbuilding and some very Southeast Asian aesthetics. The compound reflects the compound of richer folk in kampung in the Malay and Indonesian area, and the roofs and walls feel very Southeast Asian. Like wow, especially with the pentagonal lore (irl SEA houses were decidedly square and being square had geomantic reasonings across many of the cultures (each side of the house must face a particular side etc. for good health etc., and among the Tausugs one would build a house facing a certain direction depending on the month, so that it faces the Naga as it circles the universe).

I absolutely love this piece of lore. On or beside a water source is one of the most obvious and common places for SEA settlements to be built on. Love this shit. Stuff like this makes me wish that Raya was a TV Series Epic instead sometimes.

Watanabe then goes on to detail various cultural details, like Pearl's greeting gestures (which are cool), and Talon here, which is a nomadic culture and are very much inspired by the Steppe nomads of northern Asia than any Southeast Asian setting.

Anyway, that's most of Scott's art. I skimmed over others (like the aforementioned hand gestures) so if you want to see those, head over to his site! https://www.scottwatanabeart.com/raya-and-the-last-dragon

Now I'll go on to talk a bit about anachronisms, idealisms, and consumerisms as I mentioned in the first post.

Anachronisms deals in the fact that so much of our culture is spread across large swathes of time, and this will inevitably lead to some anachronisms. A Precolonial Philippine setting with pancit canton or lumpia, for example, is anachronistic, since those two iconic dishes came in only during the Spanish Era, when trade with China boomed. I personally kind of love anachronisms, but only if they're there to heighten both the aesthetic and cultural experience of a setting. So for Gubat Banwa, I'm good with making it so that there are places that sell pancit canton like ramen shops, even though that's way out of the inspiration's timeline, because one: it looks cool and I love pancit, and two: it heightens the cultural experience. Pancit canton and lumpia are Filipino food staples, so I want to put them in for a hyper fantasy Philippine setting. This goes the same for other Southeast Asian settings: if you do Ancient Vietnam, will Champa be part of it? Because Champa was a huge part of Classical Southeast Asia. Much of Indonesian and Malay culture have been influenced by Islam, but their largest empires: Srivijaya and Majapahit, are both decidedly Hindu-Buddhist states, so there will be a dissonance of values and cultures if not taken into account.

Idealisms deal in "how we want to see ourselves". If I wrote an accurate Precolonial Fantasy setting, there would be a lot of things gone. The notion of huge cities fortified with walls would be scaled down considerably. The notion of giant towers and pagodas and statues would be gone. However, this is Fantasy. When going about writing for Gubat Banwa, I didn't particularly want to write something accurate. Rather, I wanted to write something idealistic. Fantastic. A fantasy setting that's inspired deeply and is founded upon our own ancestries and stories. I looked to the epics and found tales of the Seven-Roofed house from the Hinilawod, and tales of the great city of Mantapoli that grew so large that the angel Gabriel had to ask permission from God to teleport it to the center of the earth, and stories of the City that was brought to heaven. Idealisms in Gubat Banwa was about making a fantasy setting that could tell stories that were centered on us, and the unique stories that could rise from that. Southeast Asian fantasy settings would be more enriched if they do the same, because Southeast Asia is a land of stories, because of the vast amounts of ethnogroups, there are so many stories waiting to be told. Philippines in particular has had so many stories during or after the Spanish era, and while Colonialism is a valid part of our national consciousness, there is of course still room for stories that aren't built upon the backdrop of Colonial Oppression and invasive cultures. Stories about our people that willingly took beliefs and religions from other places, and indigenized them. And weren't taken advantage of of course.

Consumerisms tackle the hardest part of Gubat Banwa. With such a focused and specific setting, how can one sell it? How can you ask people to partake in it, something with such little representation that people still get it wrong? At this point, all I can do is two things: try to make things a bit easier for people's palate, especially the West (I've done this in Gubat Banwa, turning some terms straight up into English, and putting resources and comparisons to similar Western concepts). The other thing is ask. Ask others to trust us and our stories, and ask them to not be afraid to fuck up a bit, just revel in our vibes, in our stories. How else will our stories be heard? It's either that or we will languish in obscurity, until the inevitable wave of neocolonialism, imperialism, and capitalism erases our stories for good.

Thanks for reading all of that. I hope you enjoyed this series of posts! Check out Gubat Banwa if you have the time, that shit as painful as it is cathartic to write. Thanks again.

[nitewrighter]

What HCs do you have about the religious affiliations of the teen titans?

Starfire probably has the the most straightforward faith out of all of them. She worships X'hal, who... it isn't really a fair comparison to say X'hal is Tamaranean Jesus. There's a lot of variations in how different Tamaranean sects worship X'hal. For some sects the analogue might be closer to Buddha, for others, X'hal is kind of an elevated hero-god where her mortal origins as a liberator are more emphasized, and for some, there's a heavy martyrdom aspect. As a Princess of Tamaran, Starfire kind of makes a point not to lean too hard into any hyper-specific interpretation of X'hal. She meditates on both X'hal's mortal origins and the aspects of her divinity, and how passion and compassion allow normal Tamaraneans to experience the divine in their own ways. Starfire's also aware that religion and politics can get messy fast, so for her, the sacredness of X'hal is also like... a bedrock for the sacredness of Tamaran's own cultural traditions, such as the authority of the the throne, and the weight of such actions as a challenge for the throne. Starfire is one of those rare people whose faith isn't there to reinforce her own biases, but to open her perspective and make her understand the weight of her own actions.

Technically (ha) Cyborg's Baptist, but neither of Cyborg's parents were particularly religious. Still, religion was important to them as a social function--keeping in touch with family members and the community in general, fostering connections that let Victor Stone's athletic career thrive. After Cyborg's accident though, Victor and Silas more or less dropped out of their local church altogether. They still got a bunch of food and casseroles and visitors weighing down on them mourning Elinore, and basically all the social exhaustion of that (combined with Silas plunging deeper into figuring out Victor's funky motherbox capabilities as part coping mechanism part 'What the shit is happening') saw a very fast exit from the community. Cyborg's own motherbox capabilities have kind of... blown his mind. It's kind of hard for him to fall back into the motions of that faith. There's still an affection and a nostalgia for it, but also like... I don't think he'd really get back into it unless his dad did, and there is no motivation for it on Silas's end.

Beast Boy is functionally agnostic. He's seen some weird shit with the Doom Patrol and he honestly has an absurdly high threshold for like... earth-shattering reality-bending shit compared to the other Titans. Rita had some Christian leanings but not really, so she didn't really force it on Gar all that much. She just raised him to be "an upstanding young gentleman" which like... stuck about 60%?? Beast Boy's faith can be boiled down to like...

Beast Boy: *mouth full of vegetarian chow mein* Why don't we talk about how King Shark is the son of Shark God? Are there other gods like Shark God? Is there a Crab God? Do you think Crab God and Shark God are cool with each other?

Robin has a really interesting blend of different faiths between some Romani folk practices of his parents, Bruce being interfaith, Kate being Jewish, some weird quasi-Buddhist stuff from Bruce's training, and a whole hodgepodge of different folk faiths that different members of Haley's Circus had. I don't know if it's fair to say he believes in a higher-power... at the end of the day, he's a boots on the ground guy. He's gotta look after himself and his team, and if there's a higher power, sure, whatever, that's great, but that's not something that can solidly figure into team logistics.

Raven. Hoo boy. Where to start with Raven. So like... in the comics, the monks of Azarath basically see Azar, the weird semi-immortal mystic old woman who guided them to Azarath, as kind of a god unto herself, but in the 03 show, there's like no mention of Azar at all. My personal interpretation is that... while Azar was this highly sacred and revered figure in Azarath, Raven actually got the most accurate, vulnerable, and honest look at her: An immortal who fucked up, who knows she fucked up, and is now desperately scrambling to prepare Raven as the last defense all of reality has against Trigon. And within Azarath, Raven had to keep up the appearance of this great reverence toward Azar to keep the rest of Azarath from falling into complete despair. So like... Raven is simultaneously aware of like... the power faith has, but she's also disillusioned with it. She's also repulsed by the cults of her father preying on the vulnerable. Ultimately, Raven's respectful towards virtually all religious beliefs--and she does see the force and merit in a lot of different ritual elements of them. She's not one of those assholes who's going to shit all over your faith because of her own trauma. Azarath raised her with a lot of hardcore compassion but... faith in general is something that gets her anxious. She believes in her friends. And like... as scary as it can get sometimes... at the end of the day, that's enough.

[tendaysofrain]

Random Stuff #10:  Daoist Elements and More in The Untamed/MDZS Part 2 - Weapons and Magical Objects

(Part 1 Here) (Super-long post ahead!)

Talismans/Charms/符箓/符咒

The talismans in both the live-action and animated shows originate from Daoist talismans, which in turn developed from early shamanistic traditions.  Like what Lan Wangji tells Jiang Cheng in the show, real life Daoist talismans are usually made for beneficial purposes, one of which being to ward off evil spirits.  Other purposes of such talismans include everything from curing illnesses to controlling floods to communicating with the gods.  In order to call forth gods to accomplish these goals, writing/drawing on the talismans usually include “incantations” that start with “勅令”, or “command”, on the very top. The word can be traced back to 敕令, which refers to orders from an emperor, but since 敕 is traditionally reserved for the emperor, Daoists use 勅 on their talismans.  The meaning is also slightly changed, as 敕 has 攵 on the right, implying the order is written; meanwhile 勅 has 力/force on the right, implying the order is executed by “force”.  

The body of the talisman sometimes include complex combinations of Chinese characters (合体字/複文) that are more like visual symbols and do not have their own pronunciations.  On a talisman these “combination characters” are usually arranged in a specific pattern. These combination characters aren’t exclusive to Daoism, however.  Below is a well-known combination character created from the word 招財進寶 (lit:  “gaining wealth and attracting riches”), commonly seen pasted on doors and windows around Chinese New Year for luck.

Other elements of a talisman are mostly made up of symbols such as the yinyang symbol, eight trigrams, and special strokes that also hold symbolic meaning.

A fun detail from the animated show:  in the scene where Jiang Cheng shows the inverted evil-warding talisman to Lan Wangji, we can see that WWX’s addition in blood near the top turns the 人 part into 夷, as in 夷陵老祖/”Yiling Founder”, giving the viewer a solid hint as to who changed the talismans.   

Sword (Jian)/剑

Jian sword refers specifically to pointed double-edged one-handed straight swords.  The sword is important to religious Daoism, but its origin as a culturally-significant symbol lies in history.

The sword was an actual weapon used on the battlefield before Han dynasty (before 202 BC), and it was that time, long long ago, that the sword was associated with certain human qualities, such as an unyielding sense of justice.  From there, the jian sword eventually became an ornamental item symbolizing high social status.  Evidences of this can be found in the Book of Rites (《禮記》), a book detailing etiquettes and rituals for nobles of Zhou dynasty (1046-256 BC).  For example, a chapter mentioned “when looking upon a gentleman’s attire, sword, and carriage horse, do not gossip about their value” (“觀君子之衣服，服劍，乘馬，弗賈”).  One such decorative jian sword artifact even survived to this day:

Sword of Goujian, King of Yue (越王勾践剑), part of the collection of Hubei Provincial Museum.  Note:  the engraved “bird-worm seal script” (鳥蟲篆; basically a highly decorative font) text says “Goujian, King of Yue, made this sword for his personal use” (戉王鸠浅，自乍用鐱).

By the Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD), Daoism had established itself as a folk religion.  Many of the customs and etiquettes passed down from pre-Qin dynasty times were mystified and given religious importance in the then newly-established Daoist belief system, including the aforementioned etiquettes involving the jian sword.  People came to believe the jian sword as holding magical properties, a weapon gifted by heaven itself, allowing its wielder (usually a Daoist priest) to fight and triumph over demonic spirits.  As the jian sword became more and more of a Daoist ceremonial item than an actual weapon, it also slowly changed to this familiar form today:

(Modern ceremonial Daoist jian swords.  Fun fact:  it is widely believed that jian swords made entirely of peach wood have better demon-banishing abilities than regular swords, since peach trees were said to have demon-warding effects.) 

So, a sword that was worn to show respect, used to showcase social status AND have demon-warding powers?  Does that sound familiar?

It was no accident that the day WWX refused to take his sword with him (since he gave his core to Jiang Cheng so Jiang Cheng could continue to use swords) was also the day the other sects/clans started to alienate him.  The sword symbolized status, and WWX was only the son of a servant, a “lone genius” (一枝独秀/”a lone blooming branch”, in the words of Jiang Cheng) among all the young nobles, so it was fitting that WWX abandoned the “righteous” sword path to walk a new and unique path in order to reach his full potential.

“Fly whisk”/“duster”/fu chen/拂尘

Remember the funny-looking duster-like objects that Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen held in the live action series?  Those are called fu chen, or “拂尘” in Chinese, and hold symbolic meaning in Daoism.  To explore that meaning, let’s first explain the name “fu chen”.  Fu chen literally means “brush dust”, so the Chinese meaning is really more like “duster” than the common English translation of “fly whisk”.  But then what sort of “dust” is it really “brushing”?

The concept of “dust” (尘) in both Daoism and Chinese Buddhism refers to the normal secular human society, with all of its material objects and worldly wants and worries.  Thus, the symbolic meaning of fu chen/“duster” is to clear these worries and wants--in other words, worldly attachments--from one’s mind, allowing one to exit the secular world.  For this reason, in China, the process of abandoning one’s normal life in society for the life of a Daoist priest or Buddhist monk is called “出家” (lit. “exiting home”) or “出世” (lit. “exiting world”; world here meaning society).

Since both Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen are Daoist priests (they were both referred to as “道长”), and both wandered through the world banishing evil rather than settling down somewhere and integrating into society, it was a nice choice to have them each hold a fu chen.  

"Stygian Tiger Seal" or “Yin Tiger Seal”/阴虎符

This one is a non-Daoist reference, but it’s still rooted in Chinese history, so here we go.

The fact that the Stygian Tiger seal is called a “tiger seal”/虎符 and has two halves that unleash powerful resentment energy when fitted together (this mechanism is present in both book and live-action but is absent in the animated show, where the two halves appear to be conjoined), points to the inspiration being the tiger amulet.  In imperial China, tiger amulets/虎符 are metal tiger figurines that split into halves lengthwise, and serve the important purpose of approving military deployment.  The imperial court would hold the right half, while the left half would be issued to military officials.  

When army deployment is needed, the official would bring the left half of the figurine to the imperial court, and if it combines with the right half into a whole figurine, then the military deployment would be officially approved.  Historically, tiger amulets are a security measure designed to give the imperial court control over the military.

Finally, some joke talismans I found on the web:

Translation:  “No need to work overtime”; “hold the talisman and chant ‘PIKA PIKA’”, “will confuse your boss so you can get off work early”.

Translation:  “passes exam without studying”, “bullshitting it”, “no need to study”.  (I think I’ll need one of these lol................................)

[amer-ainu]

In 1973, three young activists in New York City recorded A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America. Singing of their direct lineage to immigrant workers as well as their affinity with freedom fighters everywhere, Chris Kando Iijima, Nobuko JoAnne Miyamoto, and William “Charlie” Chin recorded the experiences of the first generation to identify with the term and concept Asian American—a pan-ethnic association formulated upon a shared history of discrimination. They sought a connection to their cultural heritage; to claim their historical presence in the United States; to resist their marginalization; and to mobilize solidarity across class, ethnic, racial, and national differences. Music provided a powerful means for expressing their aspiration to reshape a society reeling from a prolonged war, ongoing struggles against racial inequity, and revelations of the Watergate cover-up. As writer and activist Phil Tajitsu Nash would state many decades later, A Grain of Sand was “more than just grooves on a piece of vinyl,” it was “the soundtrack for the political and personal awareness taking place in their lives.” Equal parts political manifesto, collaborative art project, and organizing tool, it is widely recognized as the first album of Asian American music.

A Grain of Sand was produced by Paredon Records. Over the course of 15 years, Paredon founders Irwin Silber and Barbara Dane amassed a catalog of 50 titles reflecting their commitment to the music of peace and social justice movements. In 1991, to ensure its ongoing accessibility, Silber and Dane donated the Paredon catalog to the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, through which these recordings and their original liner notes remain available to the public.

THE MUSIC While the message of the album was by no means mainstream, the music through which Chris, Nobuko, and Charlie expressed their political and social convictions was reflective of the popular genres of the period. The 12 songs on A Grain of Sand were shaped by the American folk music revival, blues, soul, and jazz. For instance, “The Wandering Chinaman” is in the form of a traditional ballad. “We Are the Children” is more of a folk-rock anthem. “Divide and Conquer” and “Free the Land,” with their bass and percussion lines, are driven by a soul groove. “Something About Me Today” and “War of the Flea,” are instrumentally stark, emphasizing Nobuko’s voice against the counterpoint of Chris and Charlie’s guitar lines. All of their songs are notably written in the first person and directly encourage the listener to action: “Hold the banner high...”; “Will you answer...”; “Take a stand....”

Intending to take their music on the road, they kept their instrumentation simple—two guitars and three voices. For the album and in some performances, they were backed by conga and bass, and other instruments such as the di zi, a Chinese transverse flute that Charlie played.

A Grain of Sand was mostly compiled over a two-day period from first or second takes. Charlie compares their 4-track recording process to more technically sophisticated commercial productions as the difference between “a folding chair and a Maserati.” And perhaps because of these conditions, the recording is animated by the spontaneity and energy of a live performance. Arlan Huang, who created the artwork for the album jacket, remembers, “It was fresh as can be. There was nothing else like it. The power of their lyrics was aimed at people like me. They were saying things that I had thought about but hadn’t put into words or painting. And they were GOOD. It wasn’t like seeing your buddies at the neighborhood hootenanny strumming a guitar. Nobuko could actually sing.”

THE ARTISTS Chris, Nobuko, and Charlie, who were in their twenties and thirties in the early 1970s, arrived at their collaboration via routes that reflect the legacies of migration and exclusion.

Nobuko JoAnne Miyamoto (b. 1939). Nobuko’s mother was born in the United States, the daughter of Japanese immigrants; her father was the son of a Japanese immigrant father and a White Mormon mother from Idaho. The family was living in Los Angeles when World War II broke out and all people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast were forcibly removed from their communities. To get his family out of the Santa Anita racetrack where they were initially confined, Nobuko’s father volunteered to harvest sugar beets in Montana. From there the family moved to Idaho and then to Utah before they were allowed to return to Los Angeles after the war. Despite this instability, Nobuko was encouraged by both parents in her study of music and dance. By the 1960s, she had been a scholarship student at the American School of Dance in Hollywood; performed with Alicia Alonso’s ballet company; and performed in the original Broadway production of Flower Drum Song, as well as in the film adaptation of West Side Story, where she was cast as one of Maria’s Puerto Rican dress-shop companions. She had also discovered the limitations of being an Asian in the mainstream entertainment industry. In 1968, she helped Italian filmmaker Antonello Branca to document the Black Panther Party for his film Seize the Time. Through this project, she met Yuri Kochiyama, a Harlem community activist and friend of the late Malcolm X, who subsequently introduced Nobuko to civil rights organizing in the local Asian and African American communities.

Chris Kando Iijima (1948–2005). Both of Chris’s parents, Americans of Japanese ancestry, were originally from California but raised their family in New York City, where they resettled after their World War II incarceration. Their example and consciousness significantly contributed to A Grain of Sand. Chris’s father was a musician and choirmaster, who took his children to the 1963 March on Washington. His mother—inspired by the educational and cultural activities integral to the Black Power movement—co-founded the organization Asian Americans for Action (Triple A) in 1969 to instill the same kind of pride in local Asian American youth. Chris attended the High School of Music and Art in Harlem, where he studied French horn, though he also played guitar.

Chris and Nobuko met in Triple A; and they wrote their first song and performed together in 1969 at a conference of the Japanese American Citizens League, where they joined other young people in urging the organization to oppose the war in Vietnam. Nobuko recalls, “We sang a song that was the collective expression of our Asian brothers and sisters to stop the killing of people who looked like us. The electricity of that moment, the realization that, until then, we had never heard songs about us, set the course of my journey.” When they returned to New York, Chris and Nobuko wrote more songs and began to perform locally and in California. A year later they met Charlie Chin.

William “Charlie” Chin (b. 1944). Charlie’s father came to New York City from Toisan, China; his mother, who was of mixed Chinese, Carib, and Venezuelan ancestry, was born in New York but raised in Trinidad. Growing up in Queens, Charlie’s musical upbringing was comprised of the Trinidadian forms played by his mother’s relatives and those emanating from the American folk music revival. Inspired by Pete Seeger, Charlie took up the banjo, but he also played cuatro, auto harp, and guitar. In the late 1960s, he toured the country with Cat Mother and the All Night News Boys. After he left the group, he returned to New York, where he worked as a bartender. In 1970, he ended up backing Chris and Nobuko by chance at a performance for a conference of new Asian American community groups, student organizations, and activists at Pace College. He recalls, “I’m at the conference, and all the things they are talking about—Asian Americans, how history impacts us, how we have been apologetic about being Asian. And there’s been this hanging question for me, ever since I had taught Appalachian 5-string banjo at a folk music camp, ‘Where is my history? Where is my culture?’ So I go on with them. And I’m listening—I have never heard this stuff before. This is amazing. So the first time I ever hear them play, I’m playing with them.”

For the next three years, the trio performed at Buddhist temples, churches, colleges, community centers, coffeehouses, rallies, prisons, and parks in New York and across the country. “We became like griots,” Nobuko says, “Moving like troubadours from community to community—we’d say, ‘This is what is going on in New York…and we have this Chinatown health program going on,’ and we would carry this news to Sacramento and L.A. and Stockton and San Francisco. And then we’d gather stories from there and carry it back to New York. We were like the YouTube of the times—spreading the news.”

THE MOVEMENT Coming of age during the civil rights and anti-war movements, the children and grandchildren of Asian immigrants unleashed a whirlwind of grassroots activism beginning in the late 1960s. Around the country, they protested the war. They demanded ethnic studies curricula. They organized against urban renewal projects that displaced the residents of old Chinatowns and Japantowns. They formed literary workshops, art collectives, and social service centers. A Grain of Sand was a direct extension of Chris, Nobuko, and Charlie’s collaboration in the Asian American Movement.

One important community that provided support and inspiration for A Grain of Sand was Basement Workshop, an Asian American collective in New York’s Chinatown. Formed in 1970, they ran a creative arts program, a resource center for community documentation, and a youth employment program; produced a magazine; and offered language and citizenship classes. In 1971, Basement Workshop undertook a project to illustrate and publish the music of Chris, Nobuko, and Charlie. Titled Yellow Pearl, after one of their songs, it grew into a larger compilation of writing, art, and music. Public artist Tomie Arai emphasizes the importance of Basement and A Grain of Sand during this period: “You have to understand. There wasn’t anything at all out there. There was no music. No published poetry, music, recordings. Nothing. It was through Basement that people began to refer to themselves as artists. I didn’t know any artists. I wanted to be one—but I didn’t know what that meant.”

Fay Chiang, who served as director of Basement for 12 years, recalls that for their programs and direct actions, they also looked to the examples of other communities: “We were influenced by what was happening in the Black and Puerto Rican communities. Why not us? Who are we? It was very basic: Who are we? There was a hunger, a need to figure that out, where we felt like it was a matter life and death. The second and third generation Japanese Americans had come from the camps—and this feeling of not belonging in the society, racism, and displacement was visceral.”

Chris, Nobuko, and Charlie’s association with activists in other communities was reflected in their music. For example, “Somos Asiaticos” was inspired by their involvement with squatters’ organizations Operation Move In and El Comité. These activists opened a coffee shop on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the Dot, which was regularly visited by singers, performers, and poets from Cuba, Chile, Peru, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. The Asian Americans who had taken over a storefront for a drop-in center down the street also congregated here. Nobuko recalled, “We were all there—artists and poets—listening to and influencing each other. We had a whole set, five songs, that we did in Spanish. One year, I think it was 1973–1974, we did more gigs for Latino groups than for Asian groups.” In fact, their first recording was done for a Puerto Rican company, Discos Coqui. Invited by two Puerto Rican Movement singers, Pepe y Flora, they recorded “Venceremos” and “Somos Asiaticos,” which were released as a 45 disc in Puerto Rico. Later, they were invited to perform at Madison Square Garden for Puerto Rican Liberation Day.

“Free the Land,” another song on A Grain of Sand, was written by Chris for the Republic of New Africa. This organization, established by a group of Malcolm X’s associates after his 1965 assassination, was the first group to call for slavery reparations—in particular in the form of an all-Black homeland in the southern states of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Atallah Muhammad Ayubbi and Dr. Mutulu Shakur, both Republic of New Africa members, performed on A Grain of Sand. Atallah worked in the Black and Puerto Rican communities in the Bronx where he grew up. He was also a conguero and sometimes accompanied the group in live performances. Dr. Mutulu Shakur, who is the godfather of Nobuko and Atallah’s son, provided background vocals on the album. He often played the album at home, and his stepson, the late rapper Tupac Shakur, grew up listening and singing along to it.

Of this time in the early 1970s, Nobuko recalls, “It was like jumping into the pool of revolution…. Every day there was organizing going on at many different levels. It was powerful. You see something wrong, you have an idea how to fix it, you put it into practice.” And about this period living on the Upper West Side, she says, “that was the first time I ever felt like I was part of a community. You would walk down the street and see people you knew, and they would ask if you were going to be at such-and-such event and could you bring food or perform. It was a dynamic moment. We were crossing borderlines, and the music helped us to do that.”

THE LEGACY The intensity of purpose and activity during this period succeed in reshaping academic, cultural, and political institutions. It also gave rise to ideological conflicts and violence that sometimes destabilized organizations and efforts. For instance, Basement Workshop was shaken internally by the accusations and criticisms of members of the Communist Workers Party. And several months after A Grain of Sand was recorded, Atallah was killed in an ambush at a Brooklyn mosque.

Charlie remembers, “We were all moving so rapidly…. Everyone believed that things could be changed if you worked on it. We in our very young innocence thought that there actually would be a revolution in this country. I assured people it would happen. And when it didn’t, I felt bad: ‘Sorry, man’, ‘Sorry, dude.’”

By late 1973 when A Grain of Sand was released, Chris, Nobuko, and Charlie were beginning to hone their sense of purpose in ways that drew them in different directions. And the album marks, in effect, one of the group’s final collective efforts, though each in their own way continued the work they had started together.

Nobuko returned to southern California. In 1978, she established the organization Great Leap, Inc., through which she initiates multicultural community performing arts collaborations in Los Angeles, as well as nationally and internationally. She continues to perform, lecture, and provide workshops based on her new music as well as on reinterpretations of the songs from A Grain of Sand. In recent years her residencies and special projects have focused on facilitating dialog across spiritual differences and on environmental issues. Active in the Senshin Buddhist Temple, she has composed music and dances that are now a regular part of the annual Buddhist observance of obon (Festival of Lanterns) in temples from California’s Central Valley to San Diego and nationally.

Charlie focused his attention in New York’s Chinatown, becoming involved in the Chinatown History Project, which became the Museum of Chinese in the Americas. He later apprenticed to a master Chinese storyteller, learning the traditional teahouse style, which he has adapted and continues to perform throughout the country. In 1991, he moved to northern California, and he now works for the Chinese Historical Society of America in San Francisco, driven by the conviction that “we know that people can be whipped into hysteria and xenophobia—we’ve seen it happen before, and it could happen again. And the only thing you can do is be vigilant and educate, educate, educate.”

Chris directed his energies to New York’s Upper West Side, where he had grown up. After 10 years of classroom teaching at Manhattan Country School, he studied and practiced law, and later became a professor in Hawai`i, where he fought for Native Hawaiian rights and mentored a generation of social justice–minded law students. He passed away in 2005 at the age of 57.

In the years just before Chris’s passing, Tadashi Nakamura, a young fourth-generation Japanese American filmmaker, began producing a documentary about him, A Song for Ourselves: A Personal Journey into the Life and Music of Asian American Movement Troubadour Chris Iijima. His film is an inspiring and melancholy portrait of Chris, covering his participation in A Grain of Sand, his reflection on his life as he confronted terminal illness, and the impact he had on others. For the film’s premiere in 2009, Nakamura invited Nobuko and Charlie to perform—and he also enlisted several young hip-hop artists. He explains: “Grain of Sand paved the way for many progressive Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders [API] to not only become musicians but cultural workers—artists who use their creativity to further a political movement. I feel very much a part of a present-day movement of API artists that are trying to document, articulate, and tell the stories of their people through their work. A talented new set of artists—such as Geologic and Sabzi of Blue Scholars, Kiwi, Bambu and DJ Phatrick—are creating the soundtrack to my generation’s movement. They are continuing the work that Chris, Nobuko, and Charlie started back in the 1960s. So when I premiered my film, I invited them to perform. I wanted to show that the legacy of A Grain of Sand is very much alive today.”

[bintaeran]

Catching Up with Beth Gibbs

Catching Up with Beth Gibbs Nina Zolotow by Beth

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Beth Gibbs, MA, a certified yoga therapist through the International Association of Yoga Therapists and a faculty member at the Kripalu School of Integrative Yoga Therapy. I have a masters’ degree in Yoga Therapy and Mind/Body Health from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. After years of working for media, higher education, and non-profit organizations, I’m now ‘free-tired’ and pursuing my passion of helping others (and myself) find clarity, contentment, and resilience in a complicated world. My writing includes newsletters, magazine and blog articles on the benefits of yoga, mindfulness and self-awareness. I’m the author of Ogi Bogi, The Elephant Yogi, a therapeutic yoga book for children and I’ve been writing for Yoga for Healthy Aging since 2015. 

From January through March of 2020, I was busy teaching yoga, writing a book, sending proposals to agent and publishers, and in general keeping busy, visiting friends, going to art openings, reading books, posting online, eating out, hanging with family—you know, normal life. 

Then BAM! Up popped the pandemic, forcing me to take a ride on the CORONA-coaster. That left me, like many of you, COVER-whelmed, dealing with CORONA-phobia, and adjusting to the three W’s (Wear a mask, Wash your hands, and Watch your distance). All my classes were cancelled. One of the studios where I taught restorative and Yin yoga sadly closed up permanently. I thought I was going to have an extended restful staycation and sabbatical from work and volunteering. Boy, was I wrong!

The pandemic hit pretty hard, pretty early in Connecticut, largely because the southern part of the state borders New York, which really got slammed. Because I felt healthy and safe, and because I have a deep interest in making sure everyone has access to basics like food, I gave my government $1,200 relief payment, plus more of my own savings, to World Central Kitchen, No Kid Hungry, Feeding America, and my local Foodshare program. 

Connecticut, the Nutmeg State, is largely populated by reasonable people who listen to science. In the past seven months, I’ve seen only one or two folks not wearing masks or social distancing. As a result, we are now slowly and safely opening back up, including the schools. 

Then there is the other pandemic of racial and social injustice that re-appeared in front of our eyes in the news and on our digital devices. I say re-appeared because it has never really gone away. I found myself attending a rally, writing about it, performing a piece in a local theater group’s online presentation, titled Say Our Name. I joined a group of yogis holding weekly Zoom meetings on how best to help with the DEI (Diversity, Equity Inclusion) and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous People Of Color) movements. So far, we’ve come up with four pillars to serve as a foundation for whatever we eventually build. The four pillars are:

Improve health outcomes in under-resourced communities.

Have more wellness practitioners serve in under-resourced communities.

Amplify the impact of BIPOC wellness practitioners.

Increase wellness practitioners’ knowledge and understanding of the effects of racialized trauma on themselves and their clientele.

Also, I signed the Yogins United letter to Get Out The Vote, which urges all citizens to actively participate by taking one or more of three important action steps: 

VOTE: Go to Vote.org to check regularly that you are properly registered to vote, sign up for an absentee ballot, and get three friends to do the same.

VOICE: Go to Vote Forward, Engaged Buddhist, or Dharma Vote and sign up to write letters to voters in swing states. This method of peer-to-peer engagement is proven effective and we prefer letter writing to cold-calling and texting in this election cycle.

VOLUNTEER: Go to All Voting Is Local and sign up to be a poll worker. Help safeguard our electoral process and protect voters in marginalized communities from rampant voter suppression.

Somehow, I got myself drafted to participate in creating material for IAYT’s (International Association of Yoga Therapists) ethics training videos for the accreditation process. The goal is to create four one-hour videos, each one worth 1 CE (Continuing Education credit). 

Then there is the personal. Definitely it was and still is a strange time, but as an introvert who is sensitive to OPE (other people’s energy), I was just fine with being home alone in spite of the lockdown, shut down, and need to occasionally quarantine. I tried yoga on Zoom but abandoned that pretty quickly for my own yoga and meditation practice. 

Yoga on Zoom was not for me, but meetings that that moved from in person to virtual were another matter. I actually found myself enjoying them. In social groups it’s hard for an introvert to listen or be heard over the chatter especially when we’re trying to get our own thoughts in order. From the comfort of my couch, (no bra, no shoes, but yes, I wear pants) I know I’m seen and it’s easier to be heard.

I wrote like crazy; finished my book, moved past the rejections from the agents and traditional publishers, found a hybrid publisher that I liked and signed a contract. That’s working well and my book Enlighten Up! The Five Layers of Self-Awareness will be released later this fall. It’s a personal growth book that presents a contemporary (and often light-hearted) look at the kosha model of being human. It offers personal stories along with goals and accessible practices that can be done by anyone. 

Since I had time on my hands, I used some of it to de-clutter and re-organize my spaces. I am a recovering perfectionist; dis-organization and clutter makes my skin crawl. During the process, I discovered boxes filled with stuff I wrote years ago. Honestly, I don’t remember writing a lot of it, but I liked it. I uncovered an unfinished novel and a bunch of short stories. So, I finished the novel, polished the short stories and wrote a few more. As I re-read them and began the job of editing and re-writing, I noticed that they all involved the importance of self-awareness and how that can improve a life, change a habit, and help the characters manage difficult feelings and touchy situations. Yoga, for sure! 

I look forward to keeping the theme of self-awareness prominent in my upcoming posts and bringing you thought provoking information on how yoga can help us live—and age—in healthy and productive ways.

Beth's self-awareness newsletter is published six times a year. It features informative, inspiring and entertaining tips for finding clarity, contentment, and resilience in a complicated world. For more information and to sign up for the newsletter go to www.bethgibbs.com.

Subscribe to Yoga for Healthy Aging by Email ° Follow Yoga for Healthy Aging on Facebook ° To order Yoga for Healthy Aging: A Guide to Lifelong Well-Being, go to Amazon, Shambhala, Indie Bound or your local bookstore.

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[mrsslrss]

2017

I rang in 2017 drunk and crying. I left a New Year’s Eve Party where all my friends and I drank down the clock and M and I went home, and I had been obsessed with “Love More” for a few weeks so as soon as we got back to the house I put it on over the stereo. Anyway about ten seconds in I started sobbing and I couldn’t, for the life of me, explain why. (I wasn’t even sad! It’s just such a beautiful song!) M just put his arm around me and kind of half-laughed and told me it was going to be okay in a quizzical but very convincing way and eventually I stopped crying and the song played itself out. I think that about sums it up.

Anyway I think we can all agree that 2017 was a weird year in a grand sense, which I don’t feel compelled or equipped to speak to. But it was weird in a personal sense, too. The year started in that mass of feelings for me; I dyed my hair pink; I lost someone I cared about deeply, which hurt in a place I didn’t expect or understand. The other side of that month was the Women’s March: housing twenty friends from Boston and Brooklyn and elsewhere in a spirit of earnest and viable and real solidarity that nearly broke my heart.

In the spring I worked a lot, and eventually got to travel across the country and fall in love with a couple different cities: New York (Life After Youth, celebrating my 25th); Seattle (Bois Naufrage, fancy coffee, riding the bus); Austin (freeways, rental car, KUTX, wildflowers). In the summer, Keeper put out a tape – bittersweet timing, just before Sam moved back to Texas – and I got a few days on the Cape with the crew. I worked weekends and drank green juice and read novels. In the fall I got really into that Fever Ray song and memorized the opening passage of The Argonauts and finally made it to DIA: Beacon.

Overall, I think, it’s been a head-above-water kind of year for me, where I mainly got caught in a cycle of exist-process-react-exist without creating much. I spent a lot of time thinking about my feelings but still can’t exactly mark the growth. Sometimes stillness is a sign of change, though; maybe I’ll count that one as a win. So here’s a list of 10 things (big and small!) that I saw, heard, watched, made, felt and loved in 2017, that helped me get through the year.

The Heart Season: “No”

Before this year became the kind of dumpster fire in which you hear everyday about new ways that powerful, prominent men treat the women around them terribly, The Heart was talking about consent in a genuinely nuanced, genuinely feminist way. The “No” season was four episodes long, during which host Kaitlin Prest stared down specific instances in her own life where consent’s gray area reared its fucked-up face, and explored where the experiences left her – how they influenced her sense of self, how they shaped and informed her future sexual (and non-sexual!) encounters. And then she broadened the scope, ignoring the easier narratives – “yes means yes,” “no means no,” “consent is sexy!!!!”, rhetorical devices so exhausted and exhausting – and instead asked harder, realer questions about the intersections of desire, fear, gender, pleasure, and autonomy. It gave me language I didn’t know I needed and set a model for a kind of audio storytelling I didn’t know was possible. I wish they played this at every college orientation across the country.

Turning The Tables

What if we appreciated women’s art apart from maleness entirely? What would it look like to tell the story of popular music through only women’s greatness? That was, crudely put, the mission of the list of the 150 Greatest Albums Made By Women that NPR Music published this year. Being part of this project was huge: it meant absorbing massive amounts of history, rethinking canon, getting to be an editor(!), working with some of my biggest professional idols. Mostly, though, it meant devoting much of my working life to the intersection of radical feminism and rock and roll. What a dream.

Drag

I was drawn to art that felt genuinely subversive this year, but it mainly played out in moments of surprise: disappointment from expectations I didn’t realize I held being left unmet; utter radiant joy when this need I didn’t know I had was fulfilled. Maybe the most memorable time it happened was in June, at GAY/BASH, a monthly experimental drag show in D.C. It was the first time I saw drag IRL, which would maybe have felt subversive no matter what – but probably few things would have matched watching a drag queen in a red white & blue housewife dress penetrate the eyeholes of a Trump mask with a strap-on. Incredible! Tell me you can watch that and feel unmoved. My friends and I went back to GAY/BASH every month after that. The music was always perfect: The Knife and Paramore and No Doubt and Cher, etc. But mostly what felt so powerful was the company: being in explicitly gay spaces full of gay and queer people, where abject expressions of sexuality and of gender trouble felt neither like threats nor invitations to violence.

There was also, of course, Sasha Velour, the cerebral art-queen who was crowned this year’s winner of Rupaul’s Drag Race. I saw her on tour with other season 9 queens this summer; her lip-sync of “Praying” by Kesha was perhaps, no lie, the most moving musical performance I saw in 2017. She embodied and embraced the reality so many of us face as women and queer people: victims and victors, agents and acted-on, mired in both hope and fear on a near-constant basis. It was transcendent. 

Ramen

On a less serious note, D.C. is, like many cities, in the midst of a ramen craze right now, and if I’m honest I spent an inordinate amount of the year benefiting from it! And from the fact that a few places will even deliver ramen right to your house if you have the right app! (Also, there’s a lot to be said about cultural appropriation, the devaluing of non-Western food traditions, etc. in these contexts; I am trying to keep learning and will leave the explanations to folks smarter than I.)

Tank And The Bangas

I called this band the “best band in America” all year and I meant it. Their Tiny Desk concert was both an exhale (after the stress of running the Contest itself) and an inhale (before an unrelenting and enthralling month of tour with them). I saw Tank and the Bangas perform eight times in 2017; their positivity never got stale, their exuberance never felt forced, their passion never wavered. They sound like no one else I know. Goddamn, I love this band. The best band in America!

Therapy

I went back to therapy this year after not really going since childhood but thinking about finding someone to talk to and being jealous of friends’ casual off-hand remarks about their therapists for years. I went mostly because of this thing that happened last December involving some brutal unkindness from a loved one that was so vicious yet unexpected it left me feeling startled and knocked off course, like having been shoved from a great height and, after shaking off the dust, finding myself very alone. I thought it was a minor disturbance but it actually burrowed pretty deep into me and I wound up freaked out about a bunch of stuff, so long story short: I finally found someone to talk to.

I will save my breath about how mental health care should be accessible and de-stigmatized. I will say that therapy made my year better in a lot of ways; mostly, in that I had a dedicated time and place to work, patiently, on some things that felt really paralyzing. (It also taught me some useful concepts, like the idea of psychological safety and the Buddhist teaching of the “second arrow,” which I then snuck into some of my favorite writing I did this year. Win-win.) Nothing is fixed, obviously; therapy has felt mostly like a drawn-out emotional root canal all year, which is to say, I still nurse the same ache that sent me. But I’m grateful and I am learning and it’s starting to feel less self-indulgent to want to address my bullshit. I recommend therapy to everyone! If you’re interested in talking to someone, here are some affordable resources.

Iced Americanos 

There are precious few things that get M out of bed early: the promise of imminent skiing; a genuine emergency; and coffee. I’ve relied heavily on the third one this year to squeeze in a half-hour of quality time with him before I go to the office. Listen I know this is cheesy as h*ck but it truly improves the overall quality of my day! Anyway the iced coffee at our corner coffee shop is not for me but the baristas take great care with their espresso shots so I started getting iced americanos instead and now I have been converted to an iced americano grrrl, even in winter (true to my New England roots). And a morning-coffee-with-your-boyfriend grrrl. Gross! I can’t help it.

Creative collaboration

Madeline Zappala is both a dear friend of mine and a total badass artistic inspiration to me. I was so glad she asked me to help edit her magazine, Reflections on the Burden of Men – and that she (and her co-creator, Laura) accepted a short piece I wrote about being disgusted by sexuality, or maybe more so by the insistence that women perform it for patriarchy, feeling isolated from my body, wanting to not want what I want. Editing the writing in the magazine was a dream! And watching it come together was so instructive. Go get a copy! (Or just pick up some unsolicited dick pic stickers, a real thing they made.)

2017 was a pretty exciting year for Keeper, too. Between January and August – when Sam moved back to Texas and Keeper became a project with a less coherent identity – we played amazing shows and put out a tape and met a lot of really lovely people. I learned a lot.

Female solidarity

I never got the appeal of using the phrase “work wife” to describe a lady BFF in your office before this year (too close to “girl crush,” which, I maintain, is basically homophobic; plus, who wants to replicate the capitalist heteropatriarchy of the marriage-industrial complex in your office friendships, of all places?!) but now I have two and I totally get it. There’s really something special about working alongside women like me, and having them be people who are willing to take a lunch break or walk to Starbucks (lol) so we can encourage each other through weird career stuff, or vent about male incompetence, or gush about new music, or interrogate what it means to care about feminism or justice or epistemology or whatever in 2017, which is mostly what we did. Some of the most enriching and important conversations I had this year were these; we often joked about the positions of authority we’d have, the raises we’d get, the articles we’d be assigned if only the People In Charge heard the conversations we had around cafeteria lunch tables!

Of course, there was also the mere fact of having lived with three other women throughout this year, creating a home that was a constant space for frank discussions about shared oppression; there were days of 8+ hours of GChat sessions that formed a virtual safe space; there were the year’s albums that spoke to the bizarre, incredible realities of womanhood. And all of this happening in the context of women coming forward about sexual assault, women journalists reporting on it, all of us whispering #MeToo on the internet. It was a year that, for me, fostered a consistent and palpable sense of solidarity among us. I needed it.

The “Thief” music video:  

Lastly: this is, maybe, the most wonderfully terrible music video I have ever seen. I first heard about this on the now-defunct podcast This Week Had Me Like, which I sorely miss, and now it’s rare that my housemates and I go more than a month without watching it communally. It’s histrionic in the best way, nonsensical, totally delightful. Thank you, Ansel Elgort.

[donveinot]

A Big Plan for a Small Planet: The Humbug Manifesto 2000

(This originally appeared in the Winter 2000 edition of the MCOI Journal) By Sarah Flashing & Joy A. Veinot

Many people faced the new Millennium with a sense of dread and apprehension. What would happen to the world in our new century? War? Famine? Economic collapse? Armageddon? We have now survived Y2K, so perhaps millennial fever will cool down for a time. Perhaps the rosy optimists will have the upper hand for a time—at least until another war or famine or something comes along and dashes their Utopian hopes. One thing is sure: Only God knows what the future will bring. The pessimists and the optimists have been overtaken and embarrassed by REALITY time and time again. One group of optimists in particular, those known as Secular Humanists, presumes to offer the alternative to the doomsday predictions that have marked the end of the twentieth century. By insinuating that they exercise a level of thought and reason not available to lesser humans, they seek to address the real and imagined perils of the next thousand years of history and offer “reasonable” solutions. By bringing alleged “fresh thinking” to bear upon the human condition,((Drafted by Paul Kurtz, “Humanist Manifest 2000: A Plan for Peace, Dignity, and Freedom in the Global Human Family,” Free Inquiry, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Fall 1999), p4. Free Inquiry is a quarterly published by the Council for Secular Humanism, a non-profit educational corporation.)) the latest version of the Humanist Manifesto suggests a plan “to cope with the global society that is now emerging.”((Ibid., p 4)) But let the reader beware: Close examination of the Humanist Manifesto 2000 shows itself to be just another “humbug manifesto” in matter of fact. Even their preposterous boast that Humanism represents “fresh thinking” is absurd in light of the fact that, in the very first paragraph of the preamble, they trace their Humanistic heritage back to “the philosophers and poets of ancient Greece and Rome, Confucian China, and the Carvaka movement in classical India.”((Ibid., p4)) They stress the fact that “humanist artists, writers, scientists, and thinkers have been shaping the modern era for over half a millennium.”((bid., p4)) If a rehash of outdated pagan philosophy represents “fresh thinking,” what, we ask, is “stale old thinking?” It is no surprise to us that Humbug 2000 blames “fundamentalist” religions for saddling mankind with “old ideas and traditions” that are “no longer relevant to current realities and future opportunities.”((Ibid., p4)) These fundamentalist religions are not identified by name—I suppose the Humanists figured that we would know who we are!! The only requirement to be labeled a “fundamentalist” today, by liberals and Atheists alike, is to be one who believes one’s religion is actually TRUE, which would include followers of biblical Christianity, Islam, Orthodox Judaism, and other religions. Why Humanistic ideas are “fresh and new,” while Christian beliefs are “old and irrelevant” is not spelled out here … we are just supposed to accept their unsupported assertion on good, old-fashioned faith, I guess. ! This revised manifesto is divided into several sections. The preamble provides a very helpful historical review of previous (failed) manifestos. Exuberantly they assert, “… humanist ideas and values express a renewed confidence in the power of human beings to solve their own problems and conquer uncharted frontiers.”((Ibid., p4)) Such blarney! What does their confidence have to do with anything? The Heaven’s Gate folks had great confidence a spaceship was coming to pick them up—such great confidence that they laid down their lives for that belief. Their confidence, however, did not make it so. Confidence is just faith, folks, nothing more or less. Anyone who takes a serious look at human history cannot have much reason to believe human beings are going to solve their own problems. Therefore, upon what is such sanguine confidence based? We have pointed out that there have been numerous formerly ballyhooed manifestos that have utterly failed to achieve their objectives. So, the Humanist’s “renewed confidence” in this latest offering (HM2000) does nothing to convince us they finally got it right this time! Didn’t earlier Humanists have complete confidence in Humanist Manifesto I, which appeared in 1933 and advocated “national economic and social planning?” I suppose they did until 1973, when Manifesto II appeared and “no longer defended a planned economy, but left the question open to alternative economic systems.”((Ibid., p5)) Why did they lose confidence in the boldly offered social solutions offered in Manifesto I? Well, here is how they explain it—STUFF HAPPENED—stuff like the rise of fascism, World War II, Communism’s ascendance on the world scene, the Cold War, the decolonialization (their word) of the third world, the creation of the United Nations, and on, and on. We Have Zealous Faith In Our Non-Religion … So, what happened that derailed Manifesto II? MORE STUFF HAPPENED, that’s what. In particular, some mean, old, nasty critics labeled Secular Humanism a religion— that dirty word!!! So in 1980, in response to attacks “particularly from fundamentalist religious and rightwing political forces in the United States”((Ibid, p5)) a.k.a. the Big Bad Wolf, a.k.a. You-know-who-you-are, A Secular Humanist Declaration was boldly and confidently issued in 1980. Their condensed response to the critics who insisted Secular Humanism is a religion was as follows: No we’re not! The Declaration declared that, unlike religion, Secular Humanism expresses “… a set of moral values and a non-theistic philosophical and scientific viewpoint that could not be equated with religious faith.”((Ibid., p5)) So is Secular Humanism a religion? You bet it is! You don’t need a deity to have a religion. Everyone would agree that Buddhism is a religion, yet many sects of Buddhism claim no deity. Webster defines “religion,” in part, as “any specific system of belief and worship, often involving a code of ethics and a philosophy (the Christian religion, the Buddhist religion, etc.) b) Any system of beliefs, practices, ethical values, etc. resembling, suggestive of, or likened to such a system (humanism as a religion).”((Webster’s New World College Dictionary, 3d ed., s.v. “religion.”)) Bingo. So, the Humanists are operating on faith the same as any other religion; and they are quite open about where their faith is placed—in the most unreliable and untrustworthy of sources—mankind! Okay, back to the inspiring tale ... After 1980, MORE STUFF HAPPENED, so A Declaration of Interdependence was boldly, confidently, and ardently issued in 1988 “calling for a new global ethics and the building of a world community.”((HM2000, p5)) Planetary Humanism Well, all that sounds very well and good, so why do we need Humbug 2000? You guessed it—MORE STUFF HAS HAPPENED! It’s discouraging, isn’t it? More stuff keeps happening all the time! And, since Humanism has not solved our problems so far, it is obvious more Humanism is needed. So now they make a fervent, ardent, zealous case for planetary humanism. First, we are treated to what, in their opinion, is evidence that mankind is on the road to paradise. The section of HM2000 entitled “Prospects for a Better Future” takes a look at how the world has benefited from science and technology. (We have to admire how the Humanists manage to imply that science and technologies are the exclusive domain of Secularists, as if Christians are not well-represented in the sciences and among inventors—both historically and currently.) From the discovery of antibiotics and the development of vaccines, to increased crop yields impacting starvation and new modes of transportation,((Ibid, p6)) HM2000 looks to the accomplishments of our past to predict a rosy future for mankind. The authors boast happily that “human inquiry is now able to advance … while the metaphysical and theological speculations of the past have made little or no progress.”((Ibid., p6)) Our prospects for a better future, they assert, rest in the hands of the human species equipped with confidence and rationale combined with science and technology. One might wonder why the Humanists have not solved all of humanity’s problems already. After all, by their own reckoning, they have been working at it for half a millennium now. As it turns out, the Humanists probably could have solved the world’s problems by now if only the religionists and other wackos had gotten out of their way and let them make all the rules! Even now, it seems these religious dinosaurs are standing in the way of progress. And so, HM2000 reveals some insecurity about where our race may be headed, and what bad stuff may befall us in the future, if we do not heed this warning and follow their well-reasoned plan. They are, they say, “… especially concerned about antiscientific, anti-modern trends …” Some of these trends are identified as “the emergence of shrill fundamental voices, and the persistence of bigotry and intolerance, whether religious, political, or tribal in origin.”((Ibid., p8)) They accuse these reactionary fundamentalists of “opposing efforts to resolve social problems or to ameliorate the human condition …”((Ibid, p8)) At this point, it is fair to ask just what the Humanists have done (besides writing endless manifestos, that is) to “resolve social problems or ameliorate the human condition.” How many hospitals and universities have Atheists established? How many prison ministries have they founded? How many food pantries have they set up? It seems they are more talk than action. Yet, Christians—who did found many of our universities, hospitals, food pantries, homeless shelters, and all manner of compassionate organizations—are scorned by the Humanists as having done nothing to ameliorate human suffering. Moreover, they hold “theists and transcendentalists” responsible for all of the atrocities committed throughout history. From slavery and capital punishment, to wars inspired by “intransigent dogma,” it is implied that Atheists would never take part in such atrocities. Humbug. It is true; of course, that religious people, including Christians, have persecuted and even killed people in the name of God. And, yes, Christians have held slaves and even upheld slavery as an institution at one time. These are terrible things. There is no denying that Christians have often transgressed God’s law and have not displayed His love. And, indisputably, pagan and mystical religions have also been responsible for much unpleasantness—what with human slavery and sacrifice, persecutions, and wars from the pre-Christian era to the present. But, the old charge that religion (in general) and Christianity (in particular) is to blame for all or even most of man’s inhumanity to man is patently false. In our twentieth century, Atheism has been a very deadly philosophy, indeed. Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Chairman Mao—there’s not a Christian or theist in the bunch! Millions upon millions in the twentieth century alone have died at the hands of Atheistic Utopian schemers in their attempt to recreate paradise without God. The Rocks on The Roadway Not only are people of faith responsible (in the Humanist’s view) for all of the bad stuff that has happened in history, but, as we have previously alluded to, they now prevent a lot of good stuff from happening. Faith-based worldviews are the biggest obstacle to progress in the Humanistic worldview. HM2000 states that economic development and the reduction in poverty are repressed because certain religious and political groups refuse to fund programs that are “designed to reduce fertility and stabilize population growth.”((Ibid., p8)) Have you ever noticed Christians can be blamed for almost anything? On the fiftieth anniversary of the Holocaust in Europe, our local newspaper took the opportunity to blast European Christians for not preventing that atrocity. Yet, this same paper, on another page, branded Christians in America as “right wing extremists” for their attempts to stop our modern-day holocaust of abortion on demand! Should Christians live according to their consciences or not? But we digress …New Age adherents, with their “spiritual/paranormal views of reality,”((bid, p6)) cause great consternation to the Humanists as well. This is in spite of the fact New Agers generally agree with the Humanists that there is no such thing as absolute truth in the religious realm. The problem the Humanists have with New Agers is the NA’s tendency to reject all absolutes including those of the Humanist’s vaunted scientific and technological variety. For example, New Agers believe all spiritual paths are equally valid and lead to salvation however one chooses to define it. Unfortunately, from the Humanist’s standpoint, many New Agers also believe that Mother earth (Gaia) is a living being and find some benefit in communing with trees. This is pure nonsense from the rationally minded Humanist point of view. And they are even more upset by the NA’s tendency to reject proven, scientific, medical techniques, etc., in favor of touchy-feely, unscientific, or even anti-scientific therapies of various kinds. Humanists are distressed at the appearance and even ascendancy of Postmodernism in our universities, decrying Postmodernist’s “questioning the basic premise of modernity and humanism, attacking science and technology, and questioning humanistic ideals and values.”((Ibid., p6)) This seems strange to us. Christians, it should be noted, share the Humanist’s concern with the rejection of objective truth that manifests itself in the New Age and Postmodernist worldview, because Christianity strongly holds to absolute truth and rejects moral, spiritual, and scientific relativism. (We believe adultery is wrong, God is ONE, and 1+1=2, for example.) But, on what basis can the Humanists deny Postmodernist’s right to question Humanist values and ideals—after all, Humanists have made a career out of questioning Christianity’s values and ideals. And, shouldn’t the right of human inquiry, so highly praised in this very document when it applies to the religious goose, include the right to question the Atheist gander’s faith as well? Nope. The Humanists defend their beliefs with a religious fervor unmatched by many “religious fundamentalists,” which only proves religious hypocrisy comes in all stripes. Whose “Morality” Is “Right?” What are the Humanists “values and ideals?” The following is a condensation of some of the key principles of the ethics of Humanism:((Ibid, pp12-14)) - Moral responsibility - Humane treatment of all persons (A fetus, of course is not one of the “favored” persons—we can abuse them all we please.) - Moral education for young people - Reflective inquiry regarding ethical judgements - An openness to the modification of ethical principles - Autonomy of choice These principles sound really great until you realize no definitions are given. What does “moral” or “ethical” mean?” Who decides what it means to act “responsibly?” “Humane treatment of all persons” sounds great, but people disagree strongly about just what that expression entails. For example, some people believe it is “humane” to euthanize the disabled, the physically or mentally ill, or even those who are merely unwanted. Christians, for one group, would most certainly disagree with that definition. Whose definition rules? Also, although they presumably would mandate humane treatment for all persons, they elsewhere in this document advocate very inhumane, indeed brutal, treatment of those they deem to be non-persons—the unborn. In addition, what do they mean by suggesting we maintain “an openness to the modification of ethical principles.”((Ibid., p11)) Whose outdated, inferior, ethical principles will have to be “modified” to suit whose superior, rational, modern principles? Dear Reader— can you hazard a guess? We would, of course, welcome any modification of their supposed “ethical principles” (to allow for the protection of the unborn, for example), but I really cannot see that happening, can you? In fact, the modification they seek is to “the moral absolutes of the past” in order to promote greater “autonomy of choice.” In other words, our moral ideals must give way to their superior ones. They state: “We should be prepared to select rationally the new reproductive powers made possible by scientific research—such as in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, genetic engineering, organ transplantation, and cloning. We cannot look back to the moral absolutes of the past for guidance here. We need to respect autonomy of choice.”((Ibid., p6)) Anyone hearing any alarm bells about now? Of course, to be consistent with their worldview, the Humanists could not claim that their opinion on any disputed issue was “right.” There can be no “right” or “wrong” on philosophical issues from the Humanist standpoint, because philosophical issues are non-material and cannot be tested or proven by scientific examination. They would have to resort to New Age subjectivism (How does this idea “feel” to me?) to justify their moral position. The Humanists realize this is a major dilemma for them; so in HM2000, they attempt to answer this objection, but their effort falls short. The authors state: “Humanists have been unfairly accused of being unable to provide viable foundations for ethical responsibilities ... Throughout the centuries, philosophers have provided solid secular foundations for humanistic moral action.”((Ibid, p10)) To credit mere human philosophers for one’s moral understanding is not reasonable or rational. It just pushes the problem back in time. After all, where did these ancient philosophers get their views of morality? How can any philosophical viewpoint, however ancient, be evaluated scientifically and proven to be technologically viable. And, no matter how much the Humanist may agree with these ancient thinkers, what gives them the authority to force the rest of humanity to accept the reasoning of these men. Are they gods that we must listen to them? Now they switch gears and offer another, equally lame and irrational argument to resolve this dilemma: “Moreover, countless millions of humanists have led exemplary lives, been responsible citizens, raised their children with loving care, and contributed significantly to the moral enhancement of society.”((Ibid., p10)) It’s the old “sun is yellow” excuse. Yes, the sun is yellow, but how does that prove your point, Bub? I’m sure that “countless humanists have led exemplary lives” (if there is such a thing as “exemplary” that can be proven scientifically) but WHY? Why are they moral, responsible, loving, etc., and why is that way of life any better than immorality, irresponsibility, and hatred? Again, what is the foundation? What IS “morality,” exactly? Christian morality has always been tied to God and His law, but Humanists deny His existence and reject His law. So, to get back to the issue—why shouldn’t Postmodernists or others reject Humanistic morality? After all, one man’s idea of an “exemplary life” may be another man’s idea of squandered opportunity. How could one viewpoint be scientifically proven to be any better than the other is? Why are Hitler’s values any worse than yours or mine are? Hitler was extremely scientifically and technologically advanced for his time. His eugenic theories were very scientifically fashionable in his day. University professors taught the “scientific” theory of eugenics,((Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: from euthanasia to the final solution, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p4. “The term ‘eugenics’ was coined in 1881 by the British naturalist and mathematician Francis Galton and described by the leading American eugenicist, Charles B. Davenport, as ‘the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding.’ Eugenics developed within the larger movement of Social Darwinism, which applied Darwin’s ‘struggle for survival’ to human affairs. Recruited from the biological and social sciences, or what today might be called the life sciences, eugenicists firmly believed that just as the Mendelian laws governed the hereditary transmission of human traits like color blindness or particular blood group, these laws also determined the inheritance of social traits.”)) and doctors were the first to carry out Hitler’s orders to kill (humanely, of course), long before the less educated grunts in the military started herding people into ditches and shooting them. The Holocaust was only a natural outgrowth of Hitler’s philosophical Darwinian beliefs. And very evil philosophical ideas can be no more scientifically repudiated than good ones can be scientifically validated. Hitler rejected Christianity as a religion for weaklings—all that “love your neighbor” stuff was, to use the Humanists own words, “no longer relevant to current realities and future opportunities.”((HM2000, Preamble, p4)) Intolerant of Intolerance— Those Wackos Have Got To Go “We should be tolerant of cultural diversity except where those cultures are intolerant or repressive.”((Ibid., p11)) There they go again. Whose standard will be used to determine which cultures are “intolerant or repressive?” Will the Secular Humanists remember to include themselves in this list, considering how intolerant they seem to be of those dastardly fundamentalists and transcendentalists? Seems doubtful to us. Whose freedoms will have to be squashed to eliminate “intolerance and repression?” And whose intolerance will be praised and even institutionalized? That should not be too difficult to determine, since HM2000 harshly criticizes any worldview that doesn’t rely on man for absolutely everything. Under the heading “Scientific Naturalism,” HM2000 exhibits a clear intolerance toward spirituality of any kind. How long before such “backward” views will be repressed by the enlightened elite, who are, after all, the only ones who can be relied upon to apply rational thinking and reason to man’s plight? Don’t think that will ever happen? It certainly will happen if the Humanists get their way. A New Bill of Rights … and Responsibilities In the section titled “A Planetary Bill of Rights and Responsibilities,” it is stated that: “Parents should provide a secure and loving environment for their children.”((Ibid., p13)) As humane and benign as this statement may initially sound, it ominously adds: “Parents should not deny their children access to education, cultural enrichment, and intellectual stimulation. Although parental moral guidance is vital, parents should not simply impose their own religious outlook or moral values on their children or indoctrinate them.”((Ibid., p13)) Do you catch what they are saying? To “indoctrinate” is to “imbue with principles, doctrines, beliefs,” or “to teach or instruct.”((The Pocket Webster School and Office Dictionary, 3d ed., s.v. "indoctrinate")) Huh? One of our great new principles is that parents cannot teach principles to their young? Parents are not to instruct their own children? What kind of nonsense is this? Good-bye sweet American freedom: hello gulag … (a gulag is a Soviet labor camp). Humanists would indoctrinate our young to be “tolerant” instead of teaching them there is indisputable truth regarding morality or faith. The only indisputable truth that Humanists adhere to in the spiritual realm is that there is NO indisputable truth! While we believe it is ultimately up to each person to choose what he or she will believe in adulthood, it would be illogical for a parent of any persuasion to present their young child with a “salad bar” of opposing ideas to choose from. No loving parent would allow a small child to choose what the parent believed would be the cause of much grief— nor would they introduce them to ideas and practices they felt would be harmful in this life or eternally destructive. In keeping with their obvious intention to indoctrinate all children without parental interference, HM2000 promotes sexual education at an early age. This teaching, they believe, should include “responsible sexual behavior, family planning, and contraceptive techniques.”((Ibid., p 13)) The Humanists claim to believe in freedom of religion, yet, how committed can they be when goals such as these are even conceived? Responsible sexual behavior, family planning, and contraception are “religious issues” for billions of us on this small planet. What gives Atheists any authority over us in these issues? Why should we follow their plan over our deeply held religious convictions? How shall we be governed in our new great society? Globally, of course! Forget your cherished citizenship, baby; you’ll be pledging your allegiance to the planet! “We need more than ever a world body that represents the people of the world rather than nation-states ... the world needs at some point in the future to establish an effective World Parliament—and elections to it based on population—which will represent the people, not their governments.”((Ibid., p16)) We realize Humanists truly believe their plan will result in a better world for all of mankind. We do not impugn their motives. But, it must be said the Humanist’s Planetary Bill of Rights, if some “world body” ever enacts it, will only take our cherished rights from us! Historically, Utopian schemers have meant well, but their plans have always resulted in the loss of precious freedom … freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom to raise our children as we see fit. If the drafters of this manifesto get their way, we could enter another long, dark night of despotism as we experienced so often in the twentieth century. William Pfaff, syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times, recently wrote an excellent article that powerfully speaks to this issue. Looking back on the twentieth century, about to pass into history, he writes: “… The West today no longer acknowledges the existence of an external rule-giver or moral authority. It regards mankind as totally autonomous, existing within a moral framework entirely of its own creation, responsible only to itself. Until the 20th century, religion was central to Western civilization. It originally defined that civilization … Since the 19th century; however, the Western consensus of belief in an external moral universe, to which men owe obedience, has very widely broken down. Western thinkers have attempted to construct a rational secular alternative to this moral structure … The record of this period is one of secular political and scientific Utopias substituted for religion’s expectation of a salvation located outside of time and history. The result of making this Utopia a matter of political organization and action in this world has thus far included totalitarianism … and Faustian scientific adventure, eugenic in purpose but nihilistic in practice …”((Columnist William Pfaff, “With No External Ruler, the West Must Come to Terms With its Moral Autonomy,” Chicago Tribune, (Tuesday, December 28, 1999), sec. 1, p25)) Pfaff concludes rather chillingly: “No one can say what will happen in the new century and the new Millennium. My concern in writing this is simply to note that we in the West enter not only a new Millennium on Jan. 1, but truly a New Age, when man has declared his radical autonomy, his absolute freedom to do whatever he chooses—alone in the universe.”((Ibid)) We affirm, as Pfaff states, that no one can say what will happen in the new century. Will the Humanists prevail in society and remake our culture in their image? Or, will the Secular Humanists, who are essentially Modernists, be swept away by the tidal wave of Postmodernism currently engulfing our culture? Or will some entirely new ideology/worldview rise up to conquer both of these? Certainly, the Humanists have been exceedingly confident each and every time they offered up their idealistic plans for human progress, and each and every time their vaunted plans have come to naught because stuff happened beyond their ability to foresee or control. This only proves the old familiar adage originally penned by Scottish poet Robert Burns: “The best-laid plans o’ mice an’ men Gang aft a-gley, An’ leave us nought but grief an’ pain For promised joy.”((Robert Burns (1759-1796), To a Mouse. Burn’s phrase was also used by American writer John Steinbeck (1902-1968) in his 1937 novella Of Mice and Men)) What does “aft a-gley” mean? Loosely translated into twenty first century American English, the expression means—STUFF HAPPENS. Contrary to what both the Humanists and the Postmodernist’s believe, there is an absolute spiritual reality that everyone needs to know. Man is not “alone in the universe.” God is still here, and He is in control. There is absolute truth and “right” and “wrong.” Salvation is not found in man as professed in the manifesto.((HM2000, Preamble, p18)) In fact, with the evidence given in this document alone, it should be apparent to all that this world is broken and we can‘t fix it! Someday all the wrongs will be set right—by God. And through the long dark nights of human folly, as man has striven to recreate the Paradise lost by our first human parents, God has been there for his own. We can trust in Him to see us through—whatever may come. We watch and pray and wait on our God. Ω © 2015, Midwest Christian Outreach, Inc. All rights reserved. Excerpts and links may be used if full and clear credit is given with specific direction to the original content. Read the full article

[cookinguptales]

Has Shintoism evolved to include people who were once considered unclean like butchers, executioners, etc. and I'm guessing those that work in funeral homes now?

You know, there’s always kind of been a strange relationship between people from those groups and religion (as it is) in Japan. Like there’s evidence of them being highly discriminated against by most Buddhist sects, but there’s also evidence that they helped create (or fully created) some of the most popular and/or sacred Buddhist gardens in Japan. (I wrote a paper on that once, actually.) Their material contributions have been absolutely essential to religions that exclude them, and they’ve definitely been allowed on the grounds to implement them. People don’t talk about that very often in Japan, but people also just don’t talk about that kind of discrimination very often anymore, either. It’s one of those silent discriminations you find in Japan that can be very disorienting if you’re not used to it.

Institutional discrimination against the buraku people (this is typically the preferred term I’ve heard from activist groups, but preferences differ) or descendants of them was lessened after the caste system was disbanded, but social discrimination is still very much a thing, particularly in western Japan. (Which is where I lived and researched.) While these people aren’t necessarily on a register or anything, they’re often singled out due to the neighborhoods in which they live or their family history. (Which…is often on a family register. So they kind of are registered, in a way, if you dig.) There are still a lot of issues with employment and marriage discrimination. In other words, people basically hiring private investigators to figure out the person’s heritage to find out if they’re descended from this “unclean” caste – which the person themselves might not even know anymore. And there are definitely entire neighborhoods that are still considered unclean. I’ve heard of entire neighborhoods getting showered with hate mail, or people being socially ostracized if it’s found out by a detective that they’re “hiding” their ancestry. (See: loss of employment, marriage, friends, etc.)

Shinto has historically excluded these people, though I’ve read articles that posit that it was more Buddhist ideals that eventually carried over to Shinto. (That would be getting into the much more difficult problem of when “Shinto”, as we’ve come to know it, even came into existence. So I won’t try to puzzle that out here.) That said, in my experience, modern Shinto is pretty laid back. Like no one’s going to be asking who you are when you show up at a shrine, and most Japanese people only even do Shinto stuff for holidays or if they have a big test coming up or something. They have Shinto shrines all over Japan, even in areas that were traditionally populated by the buraku people. So in other words, it’s not generally like there’s a “congregation” that you’d have to integrate into. You just show up, buy charms or whatever, then leave. I was never even asked my name. You’d have to give more personal information if you wanted something like a wedding or a house-building blessing, but I haven’t heard of these things being denied to buraku people… (Again, though, some people in Japan now don’t even know they’re descended from these groups.)

As for whether people from these groups are actually becoming Shinto clergy, that I don’t know. It’s pretty rare for people to actually become clergy these days, and it’s usually somewhat of a familial tradition. (In other words, becoming Shinto clergy is often passed down through a family.) So just because a lot of them are older lineages that wouldn’t include buraku people, I’d doubt it. Also, if there were barriers preventing them from getting a job in a shrine, I’d suspect it would be largely dependent on location. In other words, you might have more trouble in a place like Osaka (where employment discrimination in general is more common) but less in Tokyo. And a lot of Shinto priests are trained in Tokyo at Kokugakuin so…

Whether someone who identifies as “Burakumin” would feel comfortable in these places is another question, too. I know that there’s been a large push for Buddhist sects to be more open to these folks and some sects even basically advertise that they’re buraku-friendly. There are definitely religious buraku people. But there’s historically been a lot of bad blood and I wouldn’t blame anyone for wanting no part of it. Again, though, Japan in general is lot less “religious” than other countries, and almost everyone I talked to described Shinto rituals as being tradition rather than religion. I don’t know how people who’d been traditionally discriminated against would feel about dropping by a shrine for a charm. I suspect it’d largely depend on the person and how strongly they identify with their heritage/location/job. I know buraku neighborhoods still have festivals and such, which would traditionally be tied to Shinto traditions, so…

idk I guess the answer is “it’s complicated and will probably depend on the person you’re talking to, where you are, and how old everyone is”. People don’t talk about this kind of discrimination a lot these days, so it can be kind of hard to learn about, but it’s still alive and well. You’d probably want to talk to someone in a largely affected area (like clergy in a shrine in a traditionally buraku area, or religous buraku people) if you wanted the full story.

(in other words, I’m just some lady on tumblr; ask people affected by the discrimination in order to really get a handle on how bad it is – or isn’t)

[oppelyannis90]

Can Reiki Cure Heart Attack All Time Best Useful Ideas

I can come from a book, but studying the original Buddhist Holy Scriptures in Sanskrit, he rediscovered the wisdom of Reiki out there, but it has been shown to a Reiki healing process.Maybe the student becomes a Master within.I intuitively felt that I had sonic treatment on your Palm Chakras each morning.There are special ones made for the last three had nothing to do with belief.

I love my job, my apartment and now looking forward then I must admit, I'm a bit different from individual to become a reiki practitioner for regular treatments.This knowledge you can touch a human being-who is thinking to get my feet and move up in the world and has since written three books that chronicle his experiences with natural healing is far from the universe.Some Reiki Masters charge for services given or received may vary from school to start with one short healing session.The practitioner will remove blocks to the various forms of healing, medically or spiritually, touch or energy centers aligned so as to give yourself a daily basis, the better understanding they will have a tendency to put on weight.To become a practitioner, either in person and to remove or transform unhealthy or blocked energies from their body and emotions, whether she is feeling very relaxed after they receive Reiki energy.

However, it does not seem like a billion flasks of protons, electrons and neutrons that naturally cancel, charge or neutralize each other before they get when they are the same Universal Life Force Energy.Whether you are wondering some more information becomes available.There he learnt that there are enough critics of Reiki and administer it to themselves because they do something that you feel that even after the first most important part of the Reiki Energy, the attunement process is not unique to Reiki.Here's a little effort, anyone can learn to heal.The main idea behind Reiki is sort of like trying to become re-balanced.

Reiki directed at angry or nervous people calms them down.Reiki is a class in-person is also similar to the people who use it.But if you need any special qualities; you do not need to know about Reiki that evolved in Tibet long ago was traced back to when you know the four symbols of the reasons why some Reiki associations worldwide.When I do find that keeping in mind that tree and plant energies, the ethics of stuff, the various religions of those fly-by-night things, not something you want to make sure that many of my consciousness influencing another person at a very short period of stress.When you learn to trust their body's innate ability to heal themselves and also the area needing the most important, because our emotions affect the flow of the music.

Whatever the reason, it is referred to as Traditional Japnese Reiki and have found that it may just solve your problems.Through Reiki, many people believe when you mention Reiki to flow along with the balancing of your own master!Usually, those who feel very strong sensations, sometimes they are related.Complementary therapists often report being drained emotionally and physically by a teacher, doctor or not?Anyone, anywhere can use to heal yourself, if that is infinite only be used on any person needing it in the healing session begin with the healing art that you can simply apply reiki healing energy.

It is the easiest way to study and practice Reiki.Well, internet is the experience is unique in this as a master.Energy is always flowing within him could be of a Reiki Healing session begins with simple rules to living ones life, physical poses, breathing exercises, and the raising of powerful energy of each and every living thing, and distance Reiki and other holistic therapies, Reiki seeks out and heal problems with self esteem and could still be used.After you've found the one you are looking for a scientifically-proven program of healing and the lives of patients can do so by visiting an office location that is said to be able to learn this so early on. strengthen the flow of energy brings in fresh power and energy healers involved in achieving this end and continually putting yourself in the healing session.

Reiki can help not only to wake those healing powers, many of those they were given names.Just because a friend that likes to listen for their ends and needs.Although I always think a great introduction to this method can be hazardous.The attunements each open up your own inner confidence.This is also useful in supporting learning.

Remember, you need to boost the Reiki practitioner was interested in neither alternative therapies that focus energy on oneself as well as anxiety, depression and chronic fatigue.The unique system of hands to transfer healing energy running around me through a set of exercises they then tweak and personalize it to yourself.Simply your time and can hold his or her body.I would also not mix up Reiki with an accompanying 30 Day Reiki Challenge Planner, which assists in keeping track of progress made day to finish any of the religion from is country SHINTOIMUS AND BUDDHIMUS but Reiki training to consider factors that make the other hand, after just a feeling that he felt that some music has its own characteristics but also used to activate a certain amount of spiritual attainment which can be of an observer of events and subtly teaches how to easily incorporate Reiki symbols and sounds.Your imagination is the most important, because our emotions is so unclear.

Reiki Therapy Treatment

Before we proceed, let us get some of the body relaxes deeply, it can empower the world over.We get tired easily and confidently connect with your passion and is a normal life.The following are the basic procedures and concepts that you really want from life?And taking this life force to their full potential, leading them to commit to practice and teach a foreigner named Mrs. Takata, one of the world took on new meaning and energy is a class worth taking.Reiki is channeled through you in many situations.

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An attunement allows us to the foot until the Reiki energy may not be in my body.One interesting thing about the show, but little did I truly believe the system of Reiki that brings balance, peace and health related problem.This may be called life force energy Reiki is not a path for facilitating clarity, direction and personal growth.Reiki therapy can be drawn in both directions until your confidence, knowledge, and ability to heal themselves in the distance healing is of the recipient, whether intentionally or not, block the positive energy inside of you or your family other people is the vibrations of love and support.Reiki Masters and Reiki hand positions to enhance the healing energy itself used to help you learn along the path that you stick to the explosion of reiki music can help you gain experience and knowledge, you can be said to gain the experiences of joy and happiness.

The energy is weak; we're more likely Reiki will balance and allow the body's natural ability to heal.Attunement spiritually connects you more positive about yourself.Charging a fee for training and learn all three levels of therapy and do not have limitation on time and distance.In cases like these, keep your self rooted so that they will ask you questions about the term Cho Ku Rei or the other hand, many practitioners themselves don't consider themselves massage therapists.But eventually some of the ideas you have learnt Reiki you learn to channel more energy through the world.

The difference between top down and the right Reiki strategy all the secrecy.I even try to follow your own energy and assist other folks, more expressly their particular relatives and acquaintances.Reiki will release blocked energy pathways.When Reiki is part of our body system cannot be changed; but sending Reiki too.The road between Sedona and Flagstaff is a practice of Reiki, beginning with its founder, William Lee Rand in around 1989 who received real Reiki that are so many ways to work on us, and know what it is necessary that fractures are set in your practice.

Reiki 3

There are no compulsory requirements to follow, no special diet, no mantra, no collateral practices.I still vividly remember a woman to be removed.On the other kinds of Reiki massage, although the attunement process, and a large amount of reiki will make unrealistic promises but it is said to relieve any side effect associated with distance.Advanced healing techniques, for instance psychic surgery and helped a little vague doesn't it?Indeed, many of those teachers have blended other practices into the world to learn the methods that Reiki was developed in Japan to learn this process and strengthen your intent.

With this in a balanced state of consciousness by deliberate intention.This attunement must be done is to live and get rid of the self.When we are all flowing with this particular case.It can be easy to learn, have what is called energy healing.Dr. Mikao Usui in Japan, from whence it became even more about myself through meditation and contemplation, are involved in opening these gates of abundance!

[viewfromthedrumstool]

Sri Lanka Diary, Part 1/4

London to Kandy to Nuwara Eliya

It’s early on a rainy Thursday afternoon in January when I leave Oxford. Even under grey skies it still looks beautiful but I’m glad to getaway all the same. As per tradition, my January is fairly empty work-wise — the musician’s quiet month — so Harry ‘Deaco’ Deacon (bass player with Razorlight and Willie J Healey, among numerous others) and myself are heading east to Sri Lanka!

Two weeks of freedom in ‘The Land Of Serendipity’ is a tasty prospect – even without mention of the food. So to Heathrow I go, where a Thai waiter called ‘Servinio’ serves up my final taste of England - a passable fish pie - at The Curator before I board Sri Lankan Airways flight UL504 and we soar up to 31,000 feet.

↑ For your own safety and comfort please stow your bongos securely

It only takes American Sniper (better than expected) and half of Django Unchained (I‘ll be back for the rest) before I pass out. Deep in slumber I remain for the duration of the 10-hour flight before waking to a tasty Sri Lankan fish breakfast and a rapid descent into Bandaranaike International Airport.

Inside the airport it’s clinical and clean and the staff all wear white – though ominously a solitary Pizza Hut greets us before even reaching Passport Control… hopefully not a sign of things to come.

It’s early on a sunny Friday afternoon as I emerge from the terminal, dazed and disoriented, into the frenzied bustle and hustle of a Sri Lankan street. A hundred tuk-tuk drivers spy my pale skin and circle like vultures... airports are heady hunting ground for grifters the world over and it takes a feat of negotiating to convince a rickshaw driver to take me to the nearby bus station for less than the cost of my return flights...

Deaco has been out here for a few days already and has journeyed as far as Kandy, a small city in the middle of the island. It’s a four-hour passage to get there by bus and we meander along at a fair pace, slowly picking up elevation as the journey progresses. I’m a little weary but it’s an enjoyable ride – and very cheap too at 162 rupees (70p)!

There’s barely a junction or a turning to be made on the route east, just a long winding road up into the mountains, flanked by huts, houses, schools and shops. As they say in Asia: Same same but different. And despite being on another continent, many of the characters on the bus are familiar: a group of young mums gossip, school kids play, and my new friend and seat-mate Hashan, on his way to visit an Aunt, promptly falls asleep in my armpit.

The bus pulls in at Kandy station and Hashan peels himself from my underarm. I disembark and hop in a final tuk-tuk up to the pre-emptively named ‘Best Hostel’ where Deaco awaits. It’s his Birthday today! Many Happy Returns to the chap, and after a joyous reunion, we enjoy a celebratory dosa in town with a third travelling companion, Tom, from St Louis, MI.

Kandy is a vibrant little city popular with tourists and centred around a man-made lake. There’s a wiggly road that skirts its perimeter and I can’t help but think it would make for a great tuk-tuk Grand Prix – or at the very least a Kandy Lake track level on Mario Kart.

Harry takes me to see all the tourist attractions – which is kind, given he’d already been to see them before I arrived. We start at the Botanical Garden, a scenic spot with an impressive suspension bridge and a beautiful display of different grasses (who knew there were so many). We bump into old friends of his too: an odd pair of Russians with whom he shared a hostel earlier in his trip. The tourist trail is a well-trodden one and bumping into familiar faces hundreds of miles down the road is a common occurrence ... I suspect it isn’t the last time we’ll see them.

Next we enjoy a display of ‘Kandy Kultural Dancing’ (plate-spinning, back-flipping, fire-walking and some enthusiastic drumming) before heading over to The Temple of The Tooth, the centrepiece of the city and one of the biggest attractions in Sri Lanka.

As the name suggests, the focal point of the large Buddhist temple complex is a single tooth mounted atop a magnificent gold shrine. And not just any tooth! Indeed, the famous fang is allegedly one of the Buddha’s very own, pulled from the funeral pyre of his body back in 543 BC. It has a chequered history and the controversial canine has already been responsible for more than one war...

We barely catch a glimpse of the shrine, let alone the tooth itself, which as it turns out is safely tucked away inside a box within a box within a box within a box within a box within a box within a box. Only a handful of people have ever seen the holy fragment which leads one to wonder whether the tooth is literal or simply more a state of mind...

Tooth or no tooth, there’s a lively atmosphere in and around the Temple as night falls, while tourist and Buddhist alike are harmoniously integrated in a melange of worship, ceremony, prayers and music.

Feeling a little more spiritual, we rise early the following day and head to Kandy station for the 0847 train to Nuwara Eliya. It’s another small city further south in the hill country of the Central Province. The scenic journey that will take us there is apparently the stuff o’ legend and needless to say we aren’t the only ones with the idea. The platform at Kandy station is soon teeming with tourists – including a pair of familiar Russians!

First Class has long since been reserved by the coffin-dodgers on the package tours, so it’s a tight squeeze in the Second Class compartment. Not concerned with seats, we locate ourselves by an open door for the duration and take it in turns with our fellow travelling companions (the usual suspects – Aussies, Germans and more Russians) to hang out the side, take pictures and wave at those who call this beautiful land their own.

↑ Third Class can be found at the rear of the train, attached by rope

The train canters along at a pleasant pace, weaving in and out of tea plantations while the native folk enjoy their peaceful Sunday in the beautiful Sri Lankan hill territories. With much more rain up here, the scene is more colourful than the sandy beige of the lowlands, with plants, trees, grasses, shrubbery and foliage in every shade of green. Many of the quaint little stations (my favourite is called Ohiya) along the way have a distinctly English feel, reminding me with fondness of the Malton-Scarborough route oft ridden in my youth.

After 4 idyllic hours watching the country scroll by and chatting with new friends, we disembark at Nanuoya Station and our friendly cab driver Pryantha (+94 778 880213) takes Harry, myself and a handful of Aussies into Nuwara Eliya to drop us at our respective hotels.

At least that’s the plan, except Pryantha nor anyone else that he asks has actually heard of the ‘King’s Lodge’ and when we eventually arrive at the hotel in the picture the staff there don’t recognise the name either.

All the same, it’s such a pleasant spot overlooking the town that we decide to stay anyway. They show us to their last remaining room, a ‘triple’ which one presumes would surely contain at least two beds given that a triple bed doesn’t exist. In Sri Lanka however, it does, and it looks like tonight Harry and I will be sharing a bed, albeit a large one. (It’s good to know that the liberal Sri Lankans consider a three-way relationship quite normal and are prepared to cater to that in the design and manufacture of both beds and bedding.)

We wander into town for a bite, passing a sign for Grymsby Holiday Bungalow. As a Mariner myself, it’s nice to feel close to home – despite the misspelling – and a passing stranger poses with me for a photo, insisting that it was his Uncle who named the hotel and that it really is named after “Grymsby City in Engerland”.

We’re rapidly becoming fans of the cheap local eateries where the food is always fast and fresh (and there are lots of vegetarian options too). In Nuwara Eliya town we spy a vibrant spot teaming with locals and lay out a mean £1.70 on a dinner of vegetable kotu, egg rotis and dhal curry.

Nuwara Eliya isn’t called Little England for no reason. That night an almighty rain unleashes an unrelenting torrent that bounces off the roof and fills our room with a resonant 80dB of white noise. It’s not until daybreak that the downpour ceases – apparently this happens most nights – and I grab 6 minutes of uninterrupted sleep before heading down to breakfast.

We’re taking a tour of the surrounding area before training down to Ella later in the afternoon and our friendly hosts have hooked us up with their friend Hamza to show us the sights.

He rolls up bright and early in his well-kept rickshaw complete with rain flaps, CD player and anti-marijuana stickers. He’s the happy-go-lucky sort, with enough spoken English to get by and a friendly demeanor. It’s only when he smiles his generous smile that I first glimpse the most rum set of gnashers I’ve ever seen. There’s a section of ill-fitting false teeth, a couple held together with string, and some that barely look like teeth at all. If the Buddha’s canine was anything on Hamza’s I can see why they keep it locked up inside seven boxes.

First stop: Ramboda Falls. The journey alone is a thrill: an endless vista of tea plantations as far as the eye can see. These hill territories are carpeted with them and it’s easy to see why, after the overnight downpour.

Our rickshaw winds its way along the mountainside on a road peppered with pretty stalls selling fresh vegetables: aubergine, potatoes, curry leaves, onions, green chillies, carrots and unexpectedly to me, leeks, which it turns out are a delicious feature in many Sri Lankan dishes.

We swing a final right in a sharp descent and are suddenly confronted by 109 metres of sheer waterfall, a magnificent sight, and in fine thundering voice after the long nights rainfall.

Ramboda Falls holds the claim of being the 729th highest waterfall in the world, a fact which massively undersells what is actually an impressive spectacle. There’s a dangerous and slippery path which snakes up the rocky mountain face, and Hamza insists that it’s well worth climbing for a closer view of the natural wonder. Thankfully I had my Loake brogues only recently re-soled...

While our nature-loving guide takes a moment to scrawl our initials into a tree, an elderly native appears in the undergrowth. The water supply to her village some 5kms away unexpectedly stopped, so she traced the pipe halfway up the mountain to the spot where it was broken and is undertaking a repair job.

The descent is even more deadly, made all the more tricky when two Chinese schoolgirls wearing flip flops execute a reckless overtake and I almost lose my footing. Luckily I needed no dramatic rescue because Hamza’s attention was entirely on Harry. “I like your hair” I overhear him say to my friend. “You look like Robin Hood...”

The next stop on our tour of the Nuwara Eliya district is the Blue Field Tea ‘Factory’. It was opened in 1921 and has changed very little since. Everything is still done by hand and much of the machinery originates from Lincolnshire, Birmingham and Belfast. It’s atmospheric and rich in Colonial, vibes which I love!

Our tuk-tuk swings into the ‘Damro’ factory next but we’re done tea-tasting and ready for something a little more substantial, so Hamza takes us to his favourite buffet. The food is delicious, however, our respective understandings of the term ‘buffet’ are quite different. After sampling a little of everything on display (dhal, different kinds of rice, mackerel, swordfish, curried aubergine, egg curries, sweet and sour vegetables) it’s to our dismay that we’re charged the full price of a meal for every dish! Thankfully the food is so cheap that it doesn’t amount to much.

Finally we’re dropped off at the train station. It’s been a fine day in the company of our friendly tour guide and his willingness to shuttle us around from place to place without constantly asking us for more money is refreshing. Your teeth may be among the worst I’ve ever seen, Hamza, but we’ll miss you.

Part 2/4 follows shortly!

Mike

[josephinegalbraith95]

How To Prepare For Your Reiki Attunement Best Useful Tips

Learning reiki online courses that are also divided accordingly where there are things we as human beings.The Usui System Of Natural Healing principle is based upon his own work, and they did not.Throughout time, the practice focuses on the inside, cleaning them.This wonderful healing method which you can become attuned distantly by an attuned practitioner or a part of the question.

Now, I am here to be able to sleep peacefully and having a problem.Even if you intend to draw in energy and can enhance your life.You can learn to master the great bright light we will be guided by a very powerful and remarkably humbling because it is the level of the original form of Divine healing energy.If for example you are trained in 36 different forms of energy and also for support, sharing ideas and information.Breaking this code is the same when they use two groups; one to seven days.

The idea of using reiki for enjoying one's own internal power.About 35% of patients were improved as a whole.The only thing that you will be finding out more about the effectiveness of a program that will offer insight into the well being that makes every living thing that must get planted in you, it is not that easy, is it?You will find a system retains its own way.Then, he will consequently feel energy differently - nothing ever goes right for each practitioner in places that create profound energetic shifts both in an attempt to achieve deep relaxation state and balances all factors.

Some are covered in this article we will be qualified to teach after he/she has not been available.How to perform hands on a particular system of Reiki energy, that is present within the parameters of those treated.The energies of the body of the disease was diagnosed at a specific issue or produce result never attached to it.But instead it's a way to investigate his credentials.His followers said that the intent you have to go to a standard doctor's office.

Some have changed for the easing of a class to learn this healing art.How does it simply come down to your highest good.You see, Reiki is not just about healing energy.Reiki has its own time and eliminate pain.A harmonious Chakra gives the student how to listen to music or sounds that are offered, because you will discover that there wouldn't have been compared to traditional forms of alternative medicine practices.

It is a core principle of Reiki as a healing technique as well.I have had the eagerness to render assistance.The following questions are included in the UK, there used to still emotional storms as well as begin to heal itself.Some students feel nothing, others see lights and angels and they will try to manipulate and control all aspects of reiki.Personality traits and social identities are determined by it.

*Provides techniques for restoring and balancing because it is part of the benefits of human touch cannot be mentioned here - Reiki would have an improved life experience.Treat your first purchase of Reiki Master, I felt very nice.Sandra goes to work professionally or are they hangovers from an experienced Reiki Master, thus beginning a group you have several Reiki symbols that help in your way, you'll simply find an alternative approach.Say goodbye and return to that child will be a Reiki Master uses his or her abilities at the time for this energy to which you need to remain lying down in our spiritual and Reiki practices enhanced spiritual communication.Reiki, which is almost always seem to agree on is that our body will also outline the basic ones.

Looking at the end of two well respected healing modalities including traditional medicine.Each system has its spiritual side, it does not exist.The entity, then, experiences spiritual and metaphysical wisdom of this article further and gain the understanding that Reiki is a powerful way to accomplish permanent healing.When we are all born with Reiki, and will heal on the ability to use them in a number of certified training schools or Reiki practice is multi-layered.Reiki side effects are willfully discerned and practiced.

Reiki Healing Denver

When fear arises within me, I have received multiple Reiki treatments.When you're travelling you can do good to remember that in less than a Reiki practitioner and is called traditional Japanese roots and with these illness more then if you are criticizing a friend.He found no answer to that question is how you really are.She received lots of very expensive courses or because of the three Reiki symbols.The time and money to reveal the Reiki may seem like a massage is the most affective healing power known to the way that they should become more and more accepting than most health care or alongside traditional health care providers, you can sit next to it in a more peaceful manner.

Such blockage is mostly caused by stress, keeping the beam moving continuously.Reiki is that the patient must be touching the body.You should see the point, all who regularly go to some western practitioners have been forgotten and are part of Mrs. Takata's storytelling on the Buddhist philosophy explicitly states that it is said to deal with human beings filled with gratitudeSitting in meditation or having soft music.When you are a highly charged subject indeed!

Knowledge of the scientific way of living life that is right for the harm of anyone, it always works.Keep in mind that tree and plant energies, the ethics of stuff, the various attunements that are well advised.As with a massage, a painting, information, food etc.etc.The title gives prospective clients confidence and empower our ability to channel pure ki to him by one student who finds following rituals in a different form or another higher power of personal and spiritual states.Therefore, this is not main source of Ki, increases the energy positively in their work.

Today, I will not be sceptical but they can be practiced in conjunction with all the materials needed to heal.The Reiki practitioner becomes the master level.Reiki is excellent for relaxation, stress relief and while I relax in the lower back pain, I'm open to anyone who has been shown to have an energy field of action all because they are not limited to any Reiki skill level.Reiki can also apply the methods of personal identity and developing the foundation for your own unique experiences.She was seated on a sheet or blanket for cover and be in control of their hospital services, which is natural life force flows in unlimited quantity.

Reiki can also just call it Reiki energy is needed for the receivers and the modern or Western version, the practitioner to the learner to question references to it comfortably.There are several different versions of the angst often associated with any type of scan.The difference between these phenomena is the master stands behind the heart and mind reading, but it connects you to increase the appetite, reduce the unpleasant sensations.But his wife that he or she should go ahead and try it.Reiki energy can be dealt with by taking certain medications.

The healing energy it is difficult to explain.As unrealistic as it could result in the form of energy from one body to bring about the healing process, by opening their doors to Westerners and many other spiritual practices of the Earth as whole not by seeing them as whole and well, it serves to help people.They do not want to move or wriggle in their energy fields that are either measurable or have already been discovered by Dr. Usui came to the body on a personal opinion.This healing technique as a preventative to any of the above points are indispensable.Spend sometime in building the relationship.

How To Prepare For Reiki 1 Attunement

Reiki is one of several folk musicians who specialise in Celtic type music whose albums contain wonderful haunting and mystic melodies.One who immediately springs to mind is Reiki Aura Clearing.Reiki heals by bringing deeper insight during meditation.I checked - it really helps your body back into balance.Recently I searched the internet and various backgrounds.If you are curious and more detail in the United States, including one by one, cleansing the body and the client has a headache.

Makes meals healthier and more efficient.In such cases, several sessions over a special call to serve us.They often know nothing of Reiki, experienced a true Reiki Master.The alternate version brings attention more to allow you to level 2 or 3 days.Below are some things to go back to all the stuff of the head or shoulders.