1/26/2009

MSNBC, Yogis Have Better Sex


Yogis have better sex, study finds

Eastern enlightenment proved to be sexually beneficial for men and women


According to a recent review article in the Dec. 3 issue of The Journal of Sexual Medicine, sexually unsatisfied women who practiced the Eastern techniques of mindfulness and yoga reported improvements in levels of arousal and desire, as well as better orgasms. In addition, yoga has been found to effectively treat premature ejaculation in men......

Living in the moment
Mindfulness — an awareness of the present moment, also a key component in yoga — proved especially beneficial in a study, cited in the article, that asked women to study pennies in detail. The coins were then collected, and each woman was asked to find her original penny. Every woman was successful. "In our experience, (nearly) all women feel that they have a problem with remaining focused; they are highly distractible," the article states. "However, after this penny exercise, they accept the notion that they can focus their mind if they so choose." The study then went on to encourage body-awareness exercises, which eventually had a sexual goal..........more

Art:
Sol Leo
mandala/ 17"x24"
my dakini

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NY Times, Self Control, Religion and Meditation

“Brain-scan studies have shown that when people pray or meditate, there’s a lot of activity in two parts of brain that are important for self-regulation and control of attention and emotion,” he said. “The rituals that religions have been encouraging for thousands of years seem to be a kind of anaerobic workout for self-control.”

In a study published by the University of Maryland in 2003, students who were subliminally exposed to religious words (like God, prayer or bible) were slower to recognize words associated with temptations (like drugs or premarital sex). Conversely, when they were primed with the temptation words, they were quicker to recognize the religious words.

“It looks as if people come to associate religion with tamping down these temptations,” Dr. McCullough said. “When temptations cross their minds in daily life, they quickly use religion to dispel them from their minds.”
NY Times

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1/19/2009

Tantra & the Shadow

Shadow work, the process of reclaiming, and disarming our unconscious negative qualities, is the heart of tantra, this is compassion in action. Tantrisim requires complete acceptance and total surrender to who we are.
Repression, denial and rejection of any kind, has no room in the psychologically advanced tantric consciousness where absolutely nothing, and no one, is refused. In the tantric view, sacred is the consort of the profane, no distention exists between them whatsoever.
Practice cultivates wisdom and a calmness of mind that illuminates our denied aspects/shadows, bringing our unconscious outcasts to our conscious awareness. With awareness we can begin the wise and compassionate task of integrating our shadow selves, their gifts and secret influences. The transformative power of tantra comes with accepting ourselves wholly, completely and unconditionally. When we move from multiplicity towards unity, polarity to fusion, we free ourselves from the past and any preoccupation with the future ....we are present, in non-dual awareness we open to our own clear light of spontaneous bliss.

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The Psychology of The Dark Knight

Part One of Four
.a one hour psychological analysis of The Dark Knight and the darkest desires in us all, from the History channel, a must see!

Batman is the most relatable of the superheros, no super powers, he is one of us. As a child he is fearful, and as an adult he is conflicted, obsessive compulsive and perfectly reflects the full spectrum of human emotions and the villains offer a wide range of shadows and archetypes. Batman is Bruce Wayne's shadow and the Joker seems to be Batman's primary shadow.......

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The Joker and The Dark Knight

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1/17/2009

Yeshe Tsogyal


The Eight Mirrors From the Life Story of Yeshe Tsogyal












Source and Intention
May the radiant light of the manifest illuminate the unmanifest!
The time has come to embrace the marriage of spirit and energy!


Manifestation
I won't see any difference between suffering and enlightenment.
My human state is as profound as my ultimate nature.
I will forget in order to remember again for the benefit of beings.


Outer World
My intention is good but I will become worthless if I do not follow my path!
Please rescue me!

Inner Journey
The instructions were imparted as if the contents of one vessel were being poured into another.

All-Encompassing Awareness
My body and mind became blissful and the world partook of my great bliss.


Attainment
There is no end to my vow of practice and training.


Integration
Not for an instant will we ever really part - so be happy!

Completion
If you know me, you know that I reside in the hearts of all beings.
Just summon me and I will return!

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Sadness is Good for You?

Telegraph UK
Sadness is good for you, scientists say
Sadness is good for the health because it helps people change their lives for the better, a study claims.
By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent

Scientists have warned that growing tendency to medicate against sadness like a disease stops us embracing our miserable side and removes the motivation to mature emotionally. Like the saying "what does not kill me, makes me stronger", being sad and melancholic can leave sufferers better able to cope with life's challenges, more resilient and spur them to greater achievements, it is claimed. The researchers point out that today's society prizes personal happiness above all else and there is little tolerance for wallowing in despair after losing a job, the break-up of a relationship or the death of a loved one.

But a growing number of mental health experts fear the increasing tendency to take a pill to beat the blues could actually affect human evolution.Far from the disorder being a modern malaise, humans have suffered from depression for thousands of years - and it has survived partly because it is beneficial to the species in the long-term, they claim.....

............more


The New Scientist

Is it bad to be sad?

14 January 2009 by Jessica Marshall

"When you find something this deeply in us biologically, you presume that it was selected because it had some advantage, otherwise we wouldn't have been burdened with it," says Jerome Wakefield, a clinical social worker at New York University and co-author of The Loss of Sadness: How psychiatry transformed normal sorrow into depressive disorder (with Allan Horwitz, Oxford University Press, 2007). "We're fooling around with part of our biological make-up."......

Then there is the notion that creativity is connected to dark moods. There is no shortage of great artists, writers and musicians who have suffered from depression or bipolar disorder. It would be difficult to find enough recognised geniuses to test the idea in a large, controlled study, but more run-of-the-mill creativity does seem to be associated with mood disorders. Modupe Akinola and Wendy Berry Mendes of Harvard University found that people with signs of depression performed better at a creative task, especially after receiving feedback that was designed to reinforce their low mood. The researchers suggest that such negative feedback makes people ruminate on the unhappy experience, which allows subconscious creative processes to come to the fore, or that it pushes depression-prone people to work harder to avoid feeling bad in the future (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol 34, p 1677)............

Whether or not a little sadness is useful, everyone agrees that clinical depression is not. Unfortunately it's not clear exactly where to draw the line between the two (see "Sad or depressed?"). So which is more dangerous: to over-medicate normal sadness, a feeling which may lead us to re-evaluate our lives after the loss of a job or the end of a relationship, or under-medicate clinical depression?......more


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1/15/2009

Wolf Moon and Shadow Seduction



The Wolf Moon of January and February is a most auspicious time to court our dark, secret selves

The shadow is the often negative, unacceptable aspects of ourselves that we have disowned, and hidden so completely, we are unconscious of their existence.
Our lack of awareness and denial of the shadow increases its influence and power, with time our shadows grow larger and louder.

We see evidence of our shadow when we experience unwanted repetition in our lives, the 'One wife/husband is the same as the other', syndrome, and any strong reaction or judgement to others gives us a clue to who our shadow is. Our shadow is the source of embarrassments to the ego, social faux pas and Freudian slips

Shadows, being our own egos concept of hideous, will make us want to run screaming in denial. The trick is to invite the shadow in, make friends with it, learn from it. Many meditative systems/practice will reveal our shadows, and our relationships provide a sublime space for shadow work. As we uncover, strip away and integrate these orphaned elements we become authentic, calm and real.... we are in present moment.
No longer pushed and pulled with the distracting energy of judging, fixing, projecting or being caught up in
projection.

The nature of shadow work is tantric, we find original wholeness through the union, or yoga of light and dark, shiva and shakti, yin and yang, All things are sacred, all things profane.







"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious."
C.J. Jung

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Who We Really Are & What We Appear To Be with Zen Master John Daido Loori


John Daido Loori
of Zen Mountain Monastery speaks on truly being yourself

".....who we really are and what we appear to be should be the same, anything else is a mask....,,.....not being satisfied with who we are, being convinced that we are inadequate so we try to be something else, what our parents think we should be, or our govt, or our neighbors........we must get real, we have nothing to hide, and none of of us falls short of completeness....that's what the enlightened life is, really being yourself....get real!.........."

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Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Challenge the Projections and Reflections

10 min,5/5
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche describes Milarepa's encounters with one of the five dakini...and what it means for us

......making friends with your projections allows the projections to communicate to you , when you are willing to understand them, and not as something terrifying,not as something to guard against, but when you give into it, work with it....when you begin to work with that, then that expression of yourself becomes a source of learning........"


4/5
"....reconcile your own mind, find the root of your own confusion...."

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Jung, Archetypes

"I was always looking for some kind of link, and I found to my amazement, ...it is right under the threshold of consciousness....when you recognize the archetypes in your past,.... you see how the present moment has evolved out of the past, and you can predict the future......"

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Ken Wilber, Shadow Work



"...The shadow can be feelings of anger, jealousy, power drives.... that at some point in the past these feelings became uncomfortable and we pushed them out of awareness, we project them onto other people, "I am not angry, but that person over there is angry", or displace them or disguise them in morbid forms.......once you fill your world with your own projections you are out of the now awareness, these unconscious aspects are one of the primary things that pull us out of now awareness..once we identify with our shadows they soften and are much less likely to be projected.... Even long term meditators can have shadow elements..........

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1/12/2009

Jung and the Shadow

“The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.”

Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is
embodied in the individual’s conscious life,
the blacker and denser it is.
At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag,
thwarting our most well-meant intentions.

Where love rules, there is no will to power and where power predominates, 
there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.




— DR. CARL GUSTAV JUNG

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Patrick Sweeney, Realizing Ordinary Mind


Patrick Sweeney resides in Ojai, California and teaches at the Ojai Valley Dharma Center, and the Pullahari Retreat Center in Cayucos, California

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Sufi Mystic Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, on Shadow Work

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

*Shadow via Wikipedia:

In Jungian psychology, the shadow or "shadow aspect" is a part of the unconscious mind consisting of repressed weaknesses, shortcomings, and instincts. It is one of the three most recognizable archetypes, the others being the anima and animus and the persona. "Everyone carries a shadow," Jung wrote, "and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is." [1] It may be (in part) one's link to more primitive animal instincts,[2] which are superseded during early childhood by the conscious mind.

According to Jung, the shadow, in being instinctive and irrational, is prone to project: turning a personal inferiority into a perceived moral deficiency in someone else. Jung writes that if these projections are unrecognized "The projection-making factor (the Shadow archetype) then has a free hand and can realize its object--if it has one--or bring about some other situation characteristic of its power." [3] These projections insulate and cripple individuals by forming an ever thicker fog of illusion between the ego and the real world.

Jung also believed that "in spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness—or perhaps because of this—the shadow is the seat of creativity.".....more



Find a Jungian analyst, an authentic vajrayana teacher or dive into one or all of the books on working with the shadow...these are some of my faves:
The Sanity We are Born With by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Journey without goal by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Catching the Thread by Llewellyn Vaughan Lee
Integral Psychology by Ken Wilber
No Boundary by Ken Wilber
spectrum of Consciousness by Ken Wilber
Jung, A Feminist Revision by Susan Rowland
Developing Balanced Sensitivity by Alexander Berzin  
Meeting the Shadow-collection of 60+ essays edited by Jeremiah Abrams
Inner Gold-Understanding Projection by Robert A. Johnson
The Dark Side of the Light Chasers by D. Ford
A Little Book on the Human Shadow by Robert Bly
Romancing the Shadow by connie Zweig
Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche by Robert A. Johnson 

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