MY WORK ... MY PASSION

• Certified Transpersonal Hypnotherapist ; Past experiences: Dream Analysis /10 Years Experience •Psychotherapist / Use of Gestalt, Jungian, Zen, Reality and Energy Therapies /10 Years Experience •EMDR • Men and Their Journey: the neuroscience of the male brain, and the implications in sexuality, education and relationship • Women: Their Transformation and Empowerment ATOD (Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drugs) / 21 years experience •Ordained Interfaith Minister & Official Celebrant • Social Justice Advocate • Child and Human Rights Advocate • Spiritual Guide and Intuitive • Certified Reiki Practitioner • Mediation / Conflict Resolution • “Intentional Love” Parenting Strategy Groups • Parenting Workshops • Coaching for parents of Indigo, Crystal, and Rainbow Children • International Training: Israel & England • Critical Incident Stress Debriefing • Post-911 and Post-Katrina volunteer

MSW - UNC Chapel Hill

BSW - UNC Greensboro


With immense love I wish Happy Birthday to my three grandchildren!

May 22: Brannock

May 30: Brinkley

June 12: Brogan

All three have birthdays in the same 22 days of the year ....what a busy time for the family!

"An Unending Love"

This blog and video is devoted and dedicated to my precious daughter Jennifer, my grand daughters Brogan and Brinkley, and my grand son Brannock. They are hearts of my heart. Our connection through many lives..... is utterly infinite.




The Definition of Genius

"THRIVE"

https://youtu.be/Lr-RoQ24lLg

"ONLY LOVE PREVAILS" ...."I've loved you for a thousand years; I'll love you for a thousand more....."


As we are in the winter of our lives, I dedicate this to Andrew, Dr. John J.C. Jr. and Gary W., MD, (who has gone on before us). My love and admiration is unfathomable for each of you..........and what you have brought into this world.....so profoundly to me.
The metaphors are rich and provocative; we're in them now. This world is indeed disappearing, and the richest eternal world awaits us!
The intensity, as was in each of the three of us, is in yellow!
In my heart forever.........

Slowly the truth is loading
I'm weighted down with love
Snow lying deep and even
Strung out and dreaming of
Night falling on the city
Quite something to behold
Don't it just look so pretty
This disappearing world

We're threading hope like fire

Down through the desperate blood
Down through the trailing wire
Into the leafless wood

Night falling on the city
Quite something to behold
Don't it just look so pretty
This disappearing world
This disappearing world


I'll be sticking right there with it
I'll be by y
our side
Sailing like a silver bullet
Hit 'em 'tween the eyes
Through the smoke and rising water
Cross the great divide
Baby till it all feels right

Night falling on the city
Sparkling red and gold
Don't it just look so pretty
This disappearing world
This
disappearing world
This disappearing world
This disappearing world


TECHNOLOGY..........

In “Conversations with God”, by Neale Donald Walsch, there is a warning I think of. I refer to it as the Atlantis passage, and I've quoted it a few times before." As I have said, this isn't the first time your civilization has been at this brink,"

God tells Walsch. "I want to repeat this, because it is vital that you hear this. Once before on your planet, the technology you developed was far greater than your ability to use it responsibly. You are approaching the same point in human history again. It is vitally important that you understand this. Your present technology is threatening to outstrip your ability to use it wisely. Your society is on the verge of becoming a product of your technology rather than your technology being a product of your society. When a society becomes a product of its own technology, it destroys itself."

Friday, March 30, 2012

"Death of the Ego" ~ David Loy



The Fear of Death is not an instinct: it is a reaction of the animal who is conscious enough to become aware of himself and his inevitable fate; so it is something we have learned. But exactly what is it we have learned? Is the dilemma of life-confronting-death an objective fact we just see, or is this, too, something constructed and projected, more like an unconscious game that each of us is playing with himself? According to Buddhism, life-against-death is a delusive way of thinking it is dualistic: the denial of being dead is how the Ego affirms itself as being alive; so it is the act by which the Ego constitutes itself. To be self-conscious is to be conscious of oneself, to grasp oneself, as being alive. (Despite all their struggles to keep from dying, other animals do not dread death, because they are not aware of themselves as alive.) Then death terror is not something the Ego has, it is what the Ego IS. This fits well with the Buddhist claim that the Ego-self is not a thing, not what I really am, but a mental construction. Anxiety is generated by identifying with this fiction for the simple reason that I do not know and cannot know what this thing that I supposedly am is. This is why the "shadow" of the sense-of-self will inevitable be a sense-of-lack.
Now we see what the Ego is composed of: death terror. The irony here is that the death terror which is the Ego defends only itself. Everything outside is what the ego IS terrified of, but what is inside? Fear is the inside, and that makes everything else the outside. The tragicomedy is that the self-protection this generates is self-defeating, for the barriers we erect to defend the Ego also reinforce our suspicion that there is indeed something lacking in our innermost sanctum which needs protection. And if it turns out that what is innermost is so weak because it is...nothing, then no amount of protection will ever be felt to be enough and we shall end up trying to extend our control to the very bounds of the universe.


If, however, the Ego is constituted by such a dualistic way of thinking, it means that an Ego can die without physical death and without consciousness coming to an end.


What makes this more than idle speculation is that there is ample testimony to the possibility of such Ego death:
  • No one gets so much of God as the man who is completely dead. (St. Gregory)
  • The Kingdom of God is for none but the thoroughly dead. (Eckhart)
  • We are in a world of generation and death, and this world we must cast off. (William Blake)
  • Your glory lies where you cease to exist. (Ramana Maharshi):
    "All of a sudden, he was seized by a chill of Fear. He felt he was almost dying by an all encompassing Fear of Death. Trying to prevent this feeling from weakening him, he began to think of what he should do. He said to himself:

    "'Now death is approaching. I am dying. What is death? This body gets lost.'

    "Then he held his breath completely, closed his lips and eyes, lay down as one dead, and began to ponder:

    "'Now my body is dead. They will carry this body, motionless, to the cremation ground and burn it. But do I really die with this body? Am I merely this body? My body is now motionless. But still I know my name. I remember my parents, uncles, brothers, friends and all others. It means that I have a knowledge of my individuality. If so, the "I" in me is not merely my body; it is a deathless spirit.'

    "Thus, as in a flash, a new realization came to Venkataramana. His thoughts may seem boyish fancy. But one thing must be remembered. Usually a man wins God realization by performing tapas for years and years, without food and sleep; he subjects the body to great suffering. But Venkataramana won the highest knowledge without all these. The fear of death left him. Venkataramana became the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi."


NOTE: It should be brought to the attention of the reader that in 1912, at age 32, fifteen years after Sri Ramana's initial death experience, he was once again confronted by death, in his little known Second Death Experience.


A moving example of death and resurrection is of course one of the sources of Western culture; but examples are found in many religious traditions. The problem is demythologizing these myths, extracting the core of psychological and spiritual truth from the accretions of dogma and superstition that all too often obscure their meaning, in order for that truth to spring to life again within our myth--the technical, objectifying language of modern science (in this instance, psychology). Blake's quotation (from The Vision of the Last Judgment) points the way because it implies that we are not seeing clearly but projecting when we perceive the world in terms of the dualistic categories of birth and death.
Precisely that claim is central to the Buddhist tradition. "Why was I born if it wasn't forever?" bemoaned Ionesco; the answer is in the anaatman "no self" doctrine, according to which we cannot die because we were never born. Anaatma is the "middle way" between the extremes of eternalism (the self survives death) and annihilationism (the self is destroyed at death). Buddhism resolves the problem of life-and-death by deconstructing it. The evaporation of this dualistic way of thinking reveals what is prior to it. There are many names for this "prior," but it is surely significant that one of the most common is "the unborn."
In the Pali Canon, what are perhaps the two most famous descriptions of Nirvna both refer to "the unborn," where "neither this world nor the other, nor coming, going, or standing, neither death nor birth, nor sense objects are to be found."


"There is, O monks, an unborn, an unbecome, an unmade, an unconditioned; if, O monks, there were not here this unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, there would not here be an escape from the born, the become, the made, the conditioned. But because there is an unborn,...therefore there is an escape from the born...."







Philosophy east and west
Volume 40, No.2 (April 1990)
P.151-174
(C) by University of Hawaii Press



David Loy is a tenured professor in the Faculty of International Studies at Bunkyo University in Chagasaki, Japan. Dr. Loy has also served as a Senior Tutor in the Department of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore from 1978 to 1984. Dr. Loy received his BA degree from Carleton College in Northfield , Minnesota, and his MA in Asian Philosophy from the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, Hawaii. Dr. Loy then pursued his PhD in Philosophy at the National University of Singapore. Dr. Loy undertook a Zen journey in 1971 that included attending a sesshin with Yamada Koun-Roshi in Honolulu, Hawaii. Dr. Loy then moved to Kamakura in 1985 to continue Koan study, and in 1987 he completed the formal course of Koan study and was recognized as a Zen sensei. His most recent publications include A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack (2002) and The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory forthcoming in June 2003. Dr. Loy also sits on the editorial boards of Cultural Dynamics, Worldviews, Contemporary Buddhism, and the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

"The Horrors of an Ayn Rand World: Why We Must Fight for America's Soul" |Gary Weiss/ AlterNet

The whole damned history of the world is a story of the struggle between the selfish and the unselfish! . . . All the bad around us is bred by selfishness. Sometimes selfishness even gets to be a cause, an organized force, even a government. Then it’s called Fascism.
—Garson Kanin, Born Yesterday

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

How Do Obsessive Compulsive People Think? | Psychology Today

In a previous post Those Damn Unwanted Thoughts I indicated how your anxiety often is a result of your fear of your thoughts and sensations. Let's say that you are obsessive and you have the recurring thought, "Maybe I have cancer". But you don't. You've seen the doctor, she tells you that you are fine, you go home and begin thinking again, "Maybe she's wrong. Maybe I have cancer". Then you think, "The fact that I'm thinking that must mean that there is something to worry about. I need to know for sure. I need to do something." So you Google endlessly every possible cancer and expect to see your pretty face appear on the screen......


Walking While Black | Psychology Today

People tend to not be openly racist (at least when filling out a survey) which is not a claim that could be made so confidently in decades past. However, declaring that one is not racist and not behaving in a racially biased manner are two different achievements. In other words, just because someone says, and maybe even believes, that he or she is not racist, does not mean that he or she would not engage in behavior that could be described as racially biased. To illustrate this point let's consider just a few behavioral studies of racism.....


Saturday, March 24, 2012

Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy: "The War On Religion Does Not Exist"

 Apparently, attempts are underway to open a new front in the supposed "war on religion" in my home state of Louisiana as it takes center stage in the presidential primary season. Truth be told, from what I have seen lately, those claiming there is a war on religion are the ones most guilty of waging that assault.......


CONTINUE READING: Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy: The War On Religion Does Not Exist

Friday, March 23, 2012

Paranoia Strikes Deeper By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: March 22, 2012
Gas prices are bringing out the crazy during this campaign season.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/opinion/krugman-paranoia-strikes-deeper.html

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

The Narcissist's Dilemma: They Can Dish It Out, But . . . | Psychology Today

It's precisely this need to be viewed as perfect, superlative, or infallible that makes them so hypersensitive to criticism. And their typical reaction to criticism, disagreement, challenges-or sometimes even the mere suggestion that they consider doing something differently-can lead to the "narcissistic rage" that is another of their trademarks. To.......


"Do Therapists Live Vicariously Through Their Clients?" | Psychology Today

.....In sum, I can think of nothing more important for a therapist than becoming ever more attuned to what their clients have gone through . . . and then communicating to them how such oppressive experiences may likely have affected them. As a direct result of so .....


Afghan Rampage: Who's to Blame? | Psychology Today

Out of context, such a question might sound strange—or possibly stupid. After all, if we're not responsible for our brain and what it tells us to do, who would be? But on the other hand, what if we have a diseased brain—say, a schizophrenic's? Or what if—perhaps because of some combination of traumatic brain injury (TBI), post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and protracted situational stress—we suffer a psychotic break? .............


Wounds That Stay Forever | Psychology Today

The PTSD coach was designed with veterans in mind, but can be used by anyone experiencing the symptoms of PTSD. The app allows users to check in with themselves to determine levels of distress; has features, like the option to upload personal photos or music, that can help manage symptoms; and serves as a complement to ongoing therapy with a mental health professional.......


Sunday, March 18, 2012

"The Real Impact of Food Stamp Cuts" | The Washington Independent

Congress is poised to cut food stamps again, taking more away from an extended benefit created by the 2009 stimulus, before its original expiry date, and setting up an unprecedented “cliff” in food stamps......


"Why I Use Sex Toys to Satisfy My Wife" | AlterNet / Salon

I place the vibrating sex toy, which is packed in a plastic container with the words “Diving Dolphin” written in a wavy blue script, on the counter along with my American Express card. It’s been about one week since Deb and I argued at the Wig and Pen. That’s one week without sex.....


Arizona out-crazies other contraception bills. Use birth control, get fired.

The GOP is all for small government—one that's small enough to drown in a bathtub, but big enough to fill up a uterus......


"This week in the War on Women: Who's ready to go on offense?" ~ DAILY KOS

Raise your hand if you're sick and tired of Republicans waging war on women........

The Truth About The Minimum Wage That Will Make You Gasp

Blame the GOP for $4 gas - Gas Prices - Salon.com

 "......the rise in gas prices has almost nothing to do with energy policy. It has everything to do with America’s continuing failure to adequately regulate Wall Street. But don’t hold your breath waiting for Republicans to tell the truth......"


Friday, March 16, 2012

Natural Born Drillers - Krugsman - NYTimes.com

To be a modern Republican in good standing, you have to believe — or pretend to believe — in two miracle cures for whatever ails the economy: more tax cuts for the rich and more drilling for oil. And with prices at the pump on the rise.........


"there were no words, but images flooded every cell in her being ...4 and a half decades!"

"there were no words, but images flooded every cell in her being ...4 and a half decades!"