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Post by Admin on Aug 12, 2019 17:06:54 GMT
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Post by Admin on Aug 26, 2019 15:54:21 GMT
Moving Forward www.namahjournal.com/moving_forward.html"An ancient Veda and a Purana speak of the three steps of Vishnu. The first step extends between earth and heaven, the second between earth and the subconscient terrains below, and the third and penultimate step is on man himself. These three steps are actually steps of the soul’s self-discovery. At first the soul in us discovers itself in creation and the world from matter to mind, from earth to the stars. The second step discovers itself below the world of matter as forces and powers that create the sense or the illusion of concrete material forms and objects, the forces that govern his psychological states from some hidden springs below and behind his surface waking consciousness. But the third step is the discovery of himself, his own true self that lies behind the masks of his ego-personality. The first two steps have been taken to some extent. But the third has just begun with an increasing interest in man’s exploration of his soul within. It is this crucial step that will in a way decide and determine the course of further human evolution. Mastering the material, vital and even psychological forces is not enough if man does not know who he truly is. Perhaps the time has now come when man must dive deep within his nature and discover the Source and core from where all emerge, by which all are sustained and evolve, and towards which all tend to return. This century will well mark this discovery and with it man will gain true freedom and mastery over circumstances and the forces that weave his complex destiny and ill-understood fate."
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Post by Admin on Sept 10, 2019 16:30:00 GMT
A Psychiatrist Shares How Interacting With Nature Can Help Heal Trauma www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/an-md-shares-how-interacting-with-nature-can-help-heal-traumaSeptember 10, 2019 — 11:00 AM In the face of trauma, it's important as ever to have a strong support system and recognize the ways we can use self-care in order to heal. One of these ways, believe it or not, is through interacting with the natural world. Nature has immense healing properties for our bodies and minds, and psychiatrist James S. Gordon, M.D., believes wholeheartedly in nature's power for reflection and self-awareness. In his new book, The Transformation: Discovering Wholeness and Healing After Trauma, he discusses why interacting with nature is an integral part of the healing process post-trauma. To learn more about how to utilize nature as a safe and effective coping mechanism, scroll down for his excerpt.
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Post by snowstorm on Sept 10, 2019 20:36:48 GMT
Surprising that he says this is surprising I don't think loads of concrete can help heal trauma.
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Post by Admin on Dec 3, 2019 13:30:30 GMT
"The two main differences between the shamanic-indigenous and the modern ideology of scientific materialism are the following: 1. the imagination that there are various «worlds» or various reality and consciousness planes; and 2. the recognition of the existence of spirits which are living as independent beings in the numerous worlds. In the ideology of shamanism, alchemy, and Yoga, all forms of nature are penetrated by psychic and spiritual energy and consciousness: the organic (plants, animals, mushrooms) and the inorganic (stones, rivers, mountains, winds), the earthly (this planet earth) and the cosmic (other planets, stars, galaxies, universe). This means that humans can and do communicate with spirits, which are living in the numerous worlds and dimensions. Personally, I agree with the scholars and the scientists who explain that we need to edit and extend the Western science paradigm so that it acknowledges and involves the reality of spiritual beings — not as sheer symbolic constructs of human understanding, but as vivid, intelligent, independent beings with whom we can communicate and with whom we coexist and interact in various worlds of reality.
The shamanic-alchemic and Yogic-meditative transformation systems operate out of a holistic ideology in which the conscious connection with the «higher» spiritual dimensions is just as important as the acknowledgment of the «lower» materialistic and denser levels. A shamanic ritual, as for example the Indian sweat lodge is simultaneously a healing process, a psychological therapy and some sort of a devotion to prayers. The Buddhist who meditates is concentrating eventually on the worlds of brutal demons and terrible pain as well as on the empires of the peaceful spirits and the normal animals and humans. The interest of alchemists in healing is visible in their search for botanical and mineral medicines and their preparation. Their deep spiritual commitment gets clear as they’re trying to create the lapis, the philosopher’s stone — a symbolic reference to the integral enlightenment."
_Ralph Metzener
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Post by Admin on Jan 25, 2020 18:52:43 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 23, 2020 16:29:54 GMT
OP-ED Keeping the Smoke Hole Open Seek Vigil Not Isolation by Martin Shaw In Siberian myth when a smoke hole in a tent is closed, the connection to the divine world is broken. Mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw reminds us that though we face a time of increased solitude, we need not isolate ourselves from the marvelous. No great story, he says, begins with business as usual. As we all navigate the uncertain effects of this pandemic, Emergence will publish op-ed pieces and short-form content that respond to the various questions and themes being raised at this moment. This op-ed by Martin Shaw kicks off the first piece in this series. emergencemagazine.org/story/keeping-the-smoke-hole-open/
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Post by Deleted on May 20, 2020 21:45:57 GMT
I love that first link. There's civilization and then there's complete detachment from nature. I've never seen an actual sheep up close but I wear wool. I know home grown peppers taste amazing. Groups like the Amish have the right idea. Tribal people's carry wisdom and natural remedies that western science can truly benefit from.
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Post by Admin on Jul 3, 2020 18:36:39 GMT
Bringing Indigenous Healing and Psychoactive Plants to Global Mental Health Researchers note that indigenous practices and psychoactive plants are finding growing acceptance in the Global North for self-care and mental health. www.madinamerica.com/2020/07/indigenous-healing-psychoactive-plants-bring-global-mental-health/The Global Mental Health Movement (GMHM) has gained traction in the last few decades as it attempts to bring psychiatric treatment to the Global South. A new opinion piece published in the Harvard Health and Human Rights Journal suggests that there might soon be a “U-turn” where traditional indigenous healing practices and psychoactive plants are imported into the Global North. The authors, José Carlos Bouso and Constanza Sánchez-Avilés of the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, and Services (ICEERS), note that despite claims that the Global North’s respects indigenous forms of mental health treatments, the underlying assumptions create a hostile environment for these forms of healing. Other researchers have pointed to similar hypocrisies within the GMHM reports. The authors write: “The GMH paradigm could lead to a turning point where, contrary to the assumption that the Western mental health model should and will expand, we are instead witnessing the expansion of traditional forms of healing beyond their native contexts.” perspective Traditional Healing Practices Involving Psychoactive Plants and the Global Mental Health Agenda: Opportunities, Pitfalls, and Challenges in the “Right to Science” Framework josé carlos bouso and constanza sánchez-avilés cdn1.sph.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2469/2020/06/Bouso.pdfAyurdhi Dhar, PhD MIA Research News Team: Ayurdhi Dhar is instructor of psychology at the University of West Georgia, where she also finished her Ph.D. in Consciousness and Society in 2017. She is the author of Madness and Subjectivity: A Cross-Cultural Examination of Psychosis in the West and India (to be released in September 2019). Her research interests include the relation between schizophrenia and immigration, discursive practices sustaining the concept of mental illness, and critiques of acontextual and ahistorical forms of knowledge.
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Post by Admin on Jul 8, 2020 12:37:45 GMT
Storytelling is a human universal, practiced by all societies. From foragers gathering around the camp-fire sharing tales of ancestors, to watching the latest big-screen Hollywood blockbuster, humans just can’t seem to get enough of stories. But why do humans spend hours listening to and telling stories, often of exploits that never happened? In other words, what's the function of a story? Daniel Smith | TVOL Article Solving Friction with Fiction: Cooperation, Co-ordination, and the Evolution of Hunter-Gatherer Storytelling evolution-institute.org/solving-friction-with-fiction-cooperation-co-ordination-and-the-evolution-of-hunter-gatherer-storytelling/The storytelling animal Evolution is ruthlessly efficient. Any trait which does not confer a fitness advantage will be lost: cave fish living in perpetual darkness lose the use of their eyes, while many birds moving to islands without predators lose the ability to fly. Any energetically-costly display which seems to flout this general rule therefore cries out for an adaptive evolutionary explanation. Storytelling is one such behaviour. Storytelling is a human universal, practiced by all societies. From foragers gathering around the camp-fire sharing tales of ancestors, to watching the latest big-screen Hollywood blockbuster, humans just can’t seem to get enough of stories. But why do humans spend hours listening to and telling stories, often of exploits that never happened? This is time and effort that could be better spent engaging in fitness-enhancing activities such as foraging, reproducing, or simply doing nothing and conserving energy. Sometimes, narratives seem to possess no obvious adaptive purpose. The following story from the Maniq, a hunter-gatherer population from Thailand, is about the origins of night and day, and exemplifies this apparent lack of evolutionary function: “Hung, the Mani Goddess’s favorite animal, shows strange behaviour: every day it must slowly swallow its tail and then gradually spit it out again before once more swallowing it – forever. As Hung swallows its tail, the whole of the sky and earth darkens, but as it slowly spits it out again, daylight starts. When it has spit out the whole tail, it is dawn. Starting at noon, it gradually swallows its tail, bringing on darkness. This is how day and night come to be.” 2 While this story may perform a cosmological function (explaining the origins of day and night), there is no obvious fitness-enhancing rationale behind stories such as these. Perhaps the human proclivity for storytelling is merely a non-functional vestige of our evolved psychology; a series of inputs which manipulate and titillate our cognitive machinery – ‘evolutionary cheesecake’, in Steven Pinker’s3 memorable phrase. However, given the ubiquity of human storytelling, the importance individuals appear to ascribe to it and the resources we spend on it – nearly £5 billion was spent on books in the UK in 20164 – storytelling may perform an important adaptive function in human societies.
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Post by Admin on Jul 10, 2020 20:44:25 GMT
NEW ‘CASCADIA’ FIELD GUIDE WILL USE INDIGENOUS CLASSIFICATION RATHER THAN WESTERN TAXONOMY CASCADIA MEDIAJULY 6, 2020 cascadiaunderground.org/new-cascadia-field-guide-will-use-indigenous-classification-rather-than-western-taxonomy/In the first ever ‘Cascadia’ field guide, local experts, poets and artists are working to create a literary field guide for the Cascadia bioregion. This area is defined by the watersheds of the Fraser, Columbia and Snake rivers, and stretches from Mt. St. Alias in the north, to Cape Mendocino in the south, and as far as Yellowstone in the East. The guide will use kinship clusters, and other Indigenous forms of classification, rather than western taxonomy. Ernestine Hayes, who is a Tlingit professor and author in Juneau, recommended using an Indigenous way of categorizing the field guide, rather than a western taxonomy, which divides things by Insect, Bird, and so on. Instead it will use ‘Kinship Clusters’, divided into group of 7-10 species which share relationships with each other, and rely on each other to survive.
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Post by Admin on Jul 11, 2020 20:53:20 GMT
Westerners refer to these stories in past tense, however, for the indigenous people of Australia they are “Everywhen” – past, present and future. The dreaming stories are how imperative knowledge, cultural values and traditions are passed down through generations. They are linked to specific places, the environment and the cosmos and are told through mediums such as ceremonial body painting, song, dance and the didgeridoo. They are based on visionary and intuitive insights into mysteries and convey the timeless concept of moving from dream to reality, which itself is an act of creation. Aboriginal dreaming stories are among the longest surviving continuing beliefs in human history. The River of Dreams Exploring the connection between Aboriginal Mythology and plant intelligence By Charlotte McAdam mindmedicineaustralia.org/2020/05/14/the-river-of-dreams/
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Post by Admin on Jul 11, 2020 21:49:22 GMT
“Many have noted that had North America been a wilderness, undeveloped, without roads, and uncultivated, it might still be so, for the European colonists could not have survived. They appropriated what had already been created by Indigenous civilizations. They stole already cultivated farmland and the corn, vegetables, tobacco, and other crops domesticated over centuries, took control of the deer parks that had been cleared and maintained by Indigenous communities, used existing roads and water routes in order to move armies to conquer, and relied on captured Indigenous people to identify the locations of water, oyster beds, and medicinal herbs. Historian Francis Jennings was emphatic in addressing what he called the myth that “America was virgin land, or wilderness, inhabited by nonpeople called savages”:
European explorers and invaders discovered an inhabited land. Had it been pristine wilderness then, it would possibly be so still today, for neither the technology nor the social organization of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had the capacity to maintain, of its own resources, outpost colonies thousands of miles from home. Incapable of conquering true wilderness, the Europeans were highly competent in the skill of conquering other people, and that is what they did. They did not settle a virgin land. They invaded and displaced a resident population. This is so simple a fact that it seems self-evident. 6”
~ ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
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Post by Admin on Jul 11, 2020 21:53:53 GMT
“I am no wino but I am no saint either. A medicine man should not be a saint. He should experience and feel all the ups and downs, the despair and joy, the magic and the reality, the courage and the fear. He should be able to sink as low as a bug, or soar as high as an eagle. Unless he can experience both, he is no good as a medicine man.”
“You cannot be so stuck up, so inhuman that you want to be pure, your soul wrapped up in a plastic bag, all the time. You have to be God and the devil, both of them.”
“Being a good medicine man means being right in the midst of the turmoil, not shielding yourself from it. It means experiencing life in all its phases. It means not being afraid of cutting up and playing the fool now and then. That is sacred too.”
- John Fire Lame Deer
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Post by Admin on Jul 23, 2020 18:55:51 GMT
... "Instead of looking for how do you connect the dots, so to speak, I always look at the space in between the dots and, actually, everything’s already connected. So what drew me into the doughnut was actually the space, and the inner circle for me represented the Earth Mother and the outer circle represented the Sky Father. And often, you need to sort of appreciate the total view of that relationship from the Moon. And so, often, it’s where you locate yourself in order to really appreciate the fullness of the symbiotic relationship between the two circles." ... - Johnnie Freeland “Circular & square systems thinking” — a Maori perspective on regeneration A conversation with Johnnie Freeland (unedited transcript!) medium.com/@designforsustainability/circular-square-systems-thinking-a-maori-perspective-on-regeneration-ba9fa5653f91
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