Potrait Of A Lone Woman...

UP NEXT !

Editor's note: It's been forever since I wrote this one up but I've been busy as a bee with a new job in a new city and now that I got down to it, I've a writer's block! However, for your sweet patience, I decided to throw caution to the winds, just this one time and write something outrageous than let you suffer in my silence.

Note, the blog above ( one starting with To-The-Dude, is meant for consenting viewers only so if you get easily excited or offended, please leave…

Or, you can wait for me to finish this blog or just tell me how to wrap my head around it. The best advice wins a hundred points. I don’t know what those hundred points can do, but it may help you get laid. I really don’t know. :D

Young And Full Of Beans !

'Man must shape his tools lest they shape him' - Anonynomous

This year it's Twitter. Last year it was Facebook. The year before, YouTube. Every day, you hear some technology making headlines and you find a longer list of must-join networks and must-have tools: the iPhone. Cloud storage. Digg. LinkedIn. Kindle. There’s always another social network to join or another tool to learn. Now, I ain't a Luddite but this constant need of attention is making lives soft and lazy. Between Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, it’s just me, me, me. Today’s image-conscious generation comes with a full sense of unwarranted arrogance. To crazy chicks who set up their Myspace page so they can look popular and to mamma’s boys who spend the day updating their Facebook accounts, I don’t want to know what your favorite shows are and I don’t need to know what you’re tweeting about. I don’t care exactly how many hits the video of you singing “Mama Mia” in the shower gets on YouTube and I really don’t want to hear the sickening whine of anyone who thinks of hardship as having to wait two minutes for a microwave to finish. These young, self-centred kids don’t realize there’s work involved. “I deserve this. I deserve that.” What they deserve is get smacked around a little. When I was a kid, I knew my place: down at the bottom and a whole flight of stairs to the top.

A lot of youth these days want to do their own thing, go at their own pace, live life to the fullest. When you think you’ve got a direct line to the top, know all there is to know and never make mistakes, it’s a hard awakening when something doesn’t go your way. New guys at work think they ‘re entitled to greener paychecks. When you’re a fresh-faced kid and you’re starting out, you’re not entitled to anything except a mop and a pail. I was content if some guy dropped me a nickel on his way out the door. If you want a drive a Cadillac, you have to learn to park some first...Perhaps you think of my imagery to be overly dramatic. Do you think guys who take out your garbage have a passion for garbage? No, of course they don't. They do, have a desire to make a honest living. So next time, you're asked to do a job you don't like, tell yourself that this need to be done and you're going to do it. Oh, and stop looking for that heart-pounding excitement over some job and earn pride that you worked hard to get something done. You have to know when you screwed up, and you have to learn from those instances. Got sloppy on a job? Put the decimal in the wrong place? There’s no good that comes from taking the defensive or playing the blame game. Young guys today, it’s never their fault. They’ll be pointing the finger all the way to the unemployment line.

I see guys playing video games all day, flushing greenbacks down the toilet. It makes me sick how some guys can drop a few Gs on PlayStation 3 games but don't give a single buck to charity. I also know of parents who’ve found enough of the white in their kid’s rooms to put some poor kid through college. Oh, and if your son's classmates start calling him Dot and he comes home, bends over and proudly displays a "D" tattooed on one butt cheek and a "T" tattooed on the other, you know it’s about time you had a word with him! Today, any parent handling the prickly points of a teen knows giving the child a positive self-image is important. But do we see to it that we're really driving home the right values? The reason young men and women fly off the handle and make terrible decisions when left to their own devices is because they’ve haven’t been taught anything about their past, their history or their ancestry. They’re so obsessed with their narcissism, they've no sense of right and wrong. Why blame them, blame the parents who failed to discipline them.

Excuse me for being harsh; clearly you're a little offended. Just proves my words ain’t falling on deaf ears. I’d be surprised at how many kids even reflect on their previous actions, responses or decisions. I’m not saying you have to go to the shrink every week and spill your guts, but if there’s one person you can learn from most, it’s yourself. We all need solid advice but can't afford big egos. There are plenty of good things coming out of your generation, but instead of telling you how good you are, I’d rather tell you how better you can be. Perhaps it was the same with me when I was young and my parents would deny and cringe in disbelief at my generation. Wasted potential they say, is a terrible thing. For all I care, you can join that bum on the side walk and scream about socialism and the apocalypse all you want but I wouldn't waste another second on you!

Mercury Rising

Mark Twain said, " Everyone grumbles about the weather but no one does nothing about it.” And I’m about to share my two pennies on the most blown up environmental issue of all times-global warming. Global warming is not opinion. It’s a scientific reality. And science tells us that human activity has made huge impacts to our planet that affect our well-being and even our survival as a species. The world’s leading science journals report that glaciers are melting ten times faster than previously thought, that greenhouse gases have reached levels not seen for millions of years and that species are vanishing as a result of climate change. They show photos taken from space of shorlines retreating, extreme weather events, severe dry spells and of rising sea levels.

“Those who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right...weathermen have long warned that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer.” Before you think that this is just another line from Vice President Gore’s movie, you need to know that the quote I just read you from Time Magazine was not a recent quote; it was from January 2, 1939. Yes, in 1939. Nine years before Vice President Gore was born and over three decades before Time Magazine began hyping a coming ice age and almost five decades before they returned to hyping global warming. Time Magazine in 1951 pointed to receding permafrost in Russia as proof that the planet was warming in 1952, the New York Times noted that the bone of contention for global warming “has always been the melting glaciers”.

There are three sides to this story. Yours, mine and the cold hard truth. Over the last century, the media has flip-flopped between global cooling and warming scares. At the turn of the 20th century, the media sold an upcoming ice age - and they said the world was coming to an end. Then in the 1930s, the alarm was raised about disaster from global warming - and they said the world was coming to an end. Then in the 70’s, an alarm for another ice age was raised - and they said the world was coming to an end. And now, we are back to fears of catastrophic global warming -and again they are saying the world is coming to an end. Sadly today, this media overkill of ‘climate porn’ fails to seduce people.

Global warming is real. By burning fossil fuels, the carbon dump has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century. “Earth is approaching the warmest temperatures in 12,000 years - a short blip in time to your average geologist. If we do nothing, in about 10 years the planet may reach a "tipping point" and begin a irrevocable wipeout of our civilization and most of the other species on this planet. After that period, it would be too late for any action.” These facts are stated by Al Gore in the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." Forget he ever ran for office. He’s no John the Baptist either, crying out in the wilderness. Just consider him a concerned man speaking out on the approaching catastrophe. Only a rapid transition to energy efficiency and renewable energy sources will counter global warming, protect human health, create new jobs, protect habitat and wildlife and ensure a secure, affordable energy future. Energy poverty can lead to a life of back-breaking poverty and slow death. You owe it to yourself to understand this. If you do not and you have kids, you have explain to them why you decided not to.

Hindsight is most uncommon of brain functions: You can have anything you want in this world if you just help enough other people get what they want. There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed. So better to be the fool who predicts wrong than a wise man who predicts none. But like the inability of the dinosaur to adapt to that very situation made them extinct, climate skeptics defy this conventional wisdom. They debunk hysteria surrounding global warming by arguing, “History is witness to predictions of doom that never came true. We all heard dire predictions about the threat of overpopulation, food scarcity, mass starvation and the projected death of our oceans. None of these predictions came true, yet it never stopped the doomsayers from predicting a dire environmental future.” They see global warming as a religion, not science. What they can't see, is they have only themselves to argue with, they can’t argue with melting glaciers. That, good people do good things. Bad people do bad things. But for good people to do bad things, that takes religion...

Ho’oponopono

Ho’oponopono, as I understand it, is a healing process that can be used to let go of all that shows up in your life as some type of suffering. Used consistently and with intent it has been known to powerfully change lives.

I will not claim to be an expert, I have never taken a class and I have been working with it for only a few weeks. But it is something, that once I spent just a little time with, has become familiar to me as the back of my hand and as useful as my right thumb. And I wish to share it with you. You don’t have to trust me and you don’t have to take my word for it. Just try it and then add your comments to tell me how it touched your life.

To connect with the energy and power of this prayer you need to consider the possibility that you are responsible for everything that touches your life. I recognize that this may be difficult for many to accept and I understand. But by taking responsibility you are also opening to the possibility that if you are responsible, you are also capable of transforming that which you see as unacceptable.

Read the lines below and allow it to sink into your being. Work to not argue against it. Just allow it, for now, and for the purpose of working with Ho’oponopono. There are three simple lines used to release the transformative power of this prayer.

I am sorry.
I was wrong.
Forgive me.

Now, apologizing does not mean losing face or accepting defeat. At the least, if you communicate from a honest, loving space, you experience some profound healing if not, build broken relationships. At the best, it is a method for connecting with suffering– ours and that which is all around us– everywhere we go. To overcome the fear of suffering and for dissolving the tightness of our hearts...and awakening the compassion that is inherent in all of us, no matter how cruel or cold we seem to be.

I have my own theory about this, actually on personal experience. I was deeply attached to somebody who I felt disliked me very much and I couldn't get out of it. What's more, this person was inaccessible and wouldn't talk to me about the problem. That feeling of being disliked and having no chance to discuss it made me feel something terribly wrong is happening and it hung somewhat heavy on my hands. But as I relaxed into that feeling, it went away. It always goes away. And I didn't die. That was a big moment for me. I realized that struggling with the idea that she was unlovable only made the pain worse. Unless we can relax with these feelings, it's very hard to stay in the middle when we experience them. We want victory or defeat, praise or blame. If somebody abandons us, we don't want to be with that raw discomfort. Instead, we conjure up a familiar identity of ourselves as a hapless victim. Or maybe we avoid the rawness by acting out and righteously telling the person how messed up he or she is. We instinctively want to cover over the pain in one way or another, identifying with victory or victimhood.

But in the middle way, there is no reference point. The mind with no reference point does not resolve itself, does not fixate or grasp. How could we possibly have no reference point? To have no reference point would be to change a deep-seated habitual response to the world: wanting to make it work out one way or the other . If I can't go left or right, I will die! When we don't go left or right, we feel like we are in a detox center . We're alone, cold turkey with all the edginess that we've been trying to avoid by going left or right. That edginess can feel pretty heavy. However , years and years of going to the left or right, going to yes or no, going to right or wrong has never really changed anything. Scrambling for security has never brought anything but momentary joy. The middle way is wide open, but it's tough going, because it goes against the grain of neurotic pattern that we all share. When we feel lonely, when we feel hopeless, what we want to do is move to the right or the left. We don't want to sit and feel what we feel. We don't want to go through the detox. Yet the middle way encourages us to do just that.

Next is, contentment. When we have nothing, we have nothing to lose. We don't have anything to lose but being programmed in our guts to feel we have a lot to lose. Our feeling that we have a lot to lose is rooted in fear, of loneliness, of change, of anything that can't be resolved, of nonexistence. Could we just settle down and have some compassion and respect for ourselves? Could we stop trying to escape from being alone with ourselves? Relaxing with loneliness is a worthy occupation. As the Bard once said, "If you want to find meaning, stop chasing so many things."

This loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment. Loneliness doesn't provide any resolution or give us ground under our feet. It challenges us to step into a world of no reference point without polarizing or solidifying. And the less we spin off and go crazy, the more we get the satisfaction of loneliness.

So it is working with negativity. There's nothing wrong with negativity. There's really nothing wrong with what you're going through. It's very real, and it brings you closer to the truth. And there's nothing wrong with our thoughts and emotions except that we identify with them and make them seem solid. But if you don't identify with them, you begin to see life as a sort of movie in which you are the protagonist. It still has plot and conflict-there's no other way it could be- but you don't have this tight grip on it all. We need to let the story line go and have an immediate experience of what's actually happening, without blaming ourselves or anyone else.

Okay, back to Ho’oponopono. Ho’oponopono is not just a word- its a total feeling coupled with an understanding that everyone who has ever hurt us and in fact every human being alive is only as good ( or bad ) as their past programming. That means being who those people are and the programming and resources they had at the time those people were responding in the only way they could, being the only thing they knew how to be at the time. Now it does not mean that you have to like the person, that you will ever let that person back into your life or that you will ever allow them or anyone like them to hurt you again.

Ho’oponopono simply means that you recognize that those individuals who hurt you regardless of what you might have thought, were only reacting out of the internal programming that they had at the time. With that realization one can begin to let the element of those people who hurt us in the past go, to release that energy from within us, because what is really hurting us is the part of that person, situation, or event that we refuse to let go of, and when we can let that go, when we can forgive what was done to us and forgive the people who did it...

So, why not take a break for a moment, close your eyes, breath deep, and allow yourself to just repeat these four lines over and over to yourself for a few moments. Allow yourself to sink into them, without expectation. How does it feel? Even undirected these words sooth, open, and heal.

The real power, in Ho’oponopono happens when one focuses towards something or someone in your world that is suffering, or causing you suffering. We start taking on the suffering of a person we know to be hurting and who we wish to help. For example, if your beloved is being hurt, you breathe in the wish to take away all the pain and fear of her. Then, as you breathe out, you send her happiness, joy or whatever would relieve her pain. This is the core of the practice: breathing in other's pain so they can be well and have more space to relax and open, and breathing out, sending them relaxation or whatever you feel would bring them relief and happiness. However, we often cannot do this practice because we come face to face with our own fear, numbness, anger, or whatever our personal pain, our personal stuckness happens to be at that moment. At that point you can change the focus and begin to do this excerise at you are feeling and for thousands of others just like you who at that very moment of time are feeling exactly the same stuckness and misery. Maybe you are able to name your pain. You recognize it clearly as terror or repulsion or anger or wanting to get revenge. So you breathe in for all the people who are caught with that same emotion and you send out relief or whatever opens up the space for yourself and all those countless others. Maybe you can't name what you're feeling. But you can feel it- a tightness in the throat, a heavy darkness or whatever. Just contact what you are feeling and breathe in, take it in– for all of us and send out relief to all of us. People often say that this practice goes against the grain of how we usually hold ourselves together. Truthfully, this practice does go against the grain of wanting things on our own terms, of wanting it to work out for ourselves no matter what happens to the others. And the practice dissolves the stoniness we've tried so hard to create in ourselves.

There's a joke about bodhisattvas, who are a kind of spiritual masters in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition- the biggest problem for bodhisattvas is that they don't have much to work with anymore, because fewer and fewer things bring out their negative emotions. It's humorous because this is everyone else's dream come true, but it's a big problem for bodhisattvas. I'm a far cry from that level, but I do know from personal experience that life can become smoother. Once I asked a spiritual teacher what happens as your life gets smoother, and he said you have to up the ante and go into more and more difficult situations. You have the capacity to go into the hell realms of the world and help the people there because you're less perturbed by how awful things are. As your own life gets smoother, you can move closer to people who are in severe mental or physical anguish, because you no longer have any fear of it and therefore you can be of some help. Even as Buddha cried at the moment of his enlightenment, looking out he saw that the whole planet was filled with so much suffering and everyone was selfishly acting and speaking and thinking in a way that they were blocking themselves more and more...

When you wake up some morning and out of nowhere comes the heartache of alienation and loneliness, rather than persecuting yourself or feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, right there in the moment of sadness and longing, could you relax and touch the limitless space of the human heart? When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you start to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space.

Unless you're some casual, coffee-sipping cynic and you don't believe any of this, if you think that you are that one special person in the universe who the laws of nature don't apply to, you can see this world burn...or save a life with Ho’oponopono.