Gaia Community: Shameslaya's Blog

What friend or beloved family member lives furthest from you?

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 07:58:28 -0000

In that geography counts for nothing when hearts are connected, and that friends are not folk distanced from me emotionally by definition...then this leaves remote family members....since my father and son are the only family members living anywhere like within my heart then all my other family members live far far away...we really have nothing in common....most of us escaped Hartlepool where one would be earning a crust as a dockworker or a steelworker..I wuz the only one with a University education, meditation practice or evolutionary urge...the other cousins, bless them, remain in the cultural trance and I haven't been in contact with any of them since my mother died.

Jon x

Who was the last person you passed by without speaking to?

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 07:27:22 -0000

Would that be corporeal being or astral entity?

And if smiles or grunts speak volumes, does this question refer to basic acknowledgement?

Assuming smiles count, I last smiled wordlessly at Zena my neighbour as she went off to pit-stop Brian the gorgeous sheepdog as I was getting out of the car fresh from an eveningsworth of inquiry, attunement and involvement...

Assuming astral entities count, I then passed Gordian Slipknot, a vagrant elf, emigre of the last Oberon Pogrom (Shakespeare gave him a whitewashed press but he's got Stalinist tendencies where human contact is concerned so Gordian doesn't acknowledge me in case anybody's checking on him)....he looks like he smells but thankfully is astral and therefore doesn't since I am ectoplasmically anosmic.

J x

What were you thinking about last night?

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:17:58 -0000

I was lying there thinking about my poition on the causes of the Thirty Years War...was it motivated by the rise of Protestantism in the north, spearheaded by Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden or was it a political jobbie sparked by the onrushing Hapsburg hegemony as described by C.V. Wedgewood?.....

Okay, i was thinking about rumpy-pumpy. Lots of it.

J x

What is the most constant ritual in your life?

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 08:18:05 -0000

Some form of morning sadhana.

It's metamorphosised over the last 25 years...when I had an awakening experience at 24, I practised 3 hours of stretchy-bendy yoga followed by 45 minutes of meditation....when I incorporated magick into my yoga (or yoga into my magick) I kept on the stretch/bend but eschewed sitting meditation in favour of a Kabbalistic grounding/visualisation job i got from the canons of thelemic literature.....then I gave that up and got hooked on mantra for four years....got more efficient in this stuff as I was straightening out a functional scoliosis (lateral curvature of the spine so bad I used to limp slightly) under the excellent tutelage of Diane Kendall...I did dog stretches and triangles and I did three times the amount of work she set me and I straightened it out and grew one and a half inches in the process and am now six foot tall whereas an old passport pegs me at five ten-and-a-half.....also the practice altered my countenance so much I had difficulty moving countrues because i didn't resemble my old passport photo.........anyways with a straightened spine, I got on with some kundalini work....pranayama, chakra/energy visualisation stuff..... partially awakened it....then took up Tibetan Buddhist meditation seven days before the twin Towers got totalled...I felt the world, inner and outer...was falling to pieces.....

These days, my mahamudra practice, srength training or asana-sweat constitutes my morning ritual...it's a ritual because what does not alter is the movement towards an inner dis-closed depth..something which cannot be seen readily...although I know which of my yoga students get what i teach them in this regard, and those who do not.....the feel of the pranas in the other and the depth in the eyes have it.....

This morning ritual of depthseeking has infiltrated much of my post-medgap life now although like the rest of you I can fall off the tracks from time to time.....

Be excellent to one another. Jon x

I intend to sustain this ritual until the day I slough off this rather gorgeous body of mine, ever- thankful for my wonderful inner qualities of love and compassion and incredible self-effacing modesty....

What, in this moment, is bringing you joy?

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 09:01:47 -0000

What brings me joy in this moment is all which this moment encompasses....elements within this moment bring me gratification...or happiness, which is a word denoting the state I get in where nothing needs to change because I am fully gratified.....and so the state of happiness lasts maybe four seconds at the most before this restless organism moves on, motivated by further wanting....joy means something else to me.

I suppose that one way of viewing my evolution is that I am in the process of finding a way of transcending my animal nature whilst learning to include it in a healthy way....this means that I am not always motivated by reaching out for happiness's ever-dangling carrot-on-a-stick....so it means that I do a daily sadhana in spite of the unsatisfying discomfort it often gives me....because discomfort or happiness are energies in the open ground of my awareness which arise, have their way with me and selfliberate.....and what brings me joy is the contact with these sorts of moments, that I am the Sky and all aggregates of my experience are just fleeting clouds....shaped into seductive gestalten, I grant you...but just clouds nonetheless....which seem to be other but in fact are mere representations of the condition of the air in the place I see them.....and the quality of this seeing is joy.....

This view is partial of course...it's about seeing all things in the Self...the other side of this view is seeing the Self in all things.....those glorious unitive moments in which that Light which illuminates all of experience...that Light which is Open Sky lit by it's own Radiance....that Light shines through everything in our awareness....and when we see this..when we really see it and it's not a bit of somebody else's book you're musing upon....then our hearts open right up in spite of our shame-based contraction...and the natural desire for all other beings to feel what you are feeling now arises strongly regardless of how many books you read on bodhicitta generation (tho we read them to ground ourselves in the worldview set at the altitude I am describing).....and to see others sharing the same vision of whatever intensity....there is mudita; sympathetic joy... everybody matters as much as yr own children and you want all the folk in kosmos to be equally joyful...you will want that Light to radiate as brightly, shorn of shame's shadows, as you can and all your actions will be bodhisattvic without your needing to stop and think about what you are doing....

All things in the Self, the Self in all things....this moment, whose intrinsic nature is joy, is also compassion, (karuna), loving-kindness (metta) and equanomous (upheka)....these four are referred to as the Four immeasurables in the Buddhist canon....and one way of explaining what Immeasurable means here is to witness these four experiences each as objective correlatives, poems oded to that limitless Open Ground which is so vast as to defy measurement, a Self who cannot be directly known because it is the very Radiance which causes us to seek it....and the journey of seeking illuminates All Arising in the playful, gorgeous, horrific, banal, extraordinary carnival we call Life.

Blessings for a cloud-scud Sunday. Jon x

What is your favorite distraction?

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 08:06:04 -0000

Yea verily just as a painted steam engine carriage so readily wonks its way down some siding after the seriously-mustachio'd villain throws the switch with veronica'd aplomb, so do I cha-cha off the Cartesian-straight varma marga by constructing blogs of uranial density.... embedding more parentheses than mosquitos on a dead mackerel....opening my intrapsychic library for otiose argot-and-phrase materielle....searching the mid-altitude terraces of phrasing which wind around the valleys of the imagination like embodied contour lines...or maybe isobars delineating the pressure of expressiveness.....

I've not indulged myself in this way for some time now, having cast off the subtle shackles of the Tantricksta personna in favour of rendering myself more intelligible and I tell myself it's not to kowtow to the some several folk who used to write to me and tell me I was a twisted or silly or potentially harmful distraction to the Gaia Thing which is essentially conceived by them to be some sort of naively-rendered synergistic choir-harmony song with matching surpluses to match...which notion trivialises our ever-fractallising exploration of this Inner and Outer Mystery we think of as Kosmos or Life.... da House whose many implicate mansions...lifestyle, theory, dialogue... are being strafed into shape and substance by the far-reaching Daredevil radarvisions of those players like you ..(and maybe even those of you who wrote me those missives if you are reading this and nota bene other folks, none of these people are on my Friends' list)..who dance dervishly around a gyroscopically-ineluctable inner axis...which is your major channel....your sushumna nadi....in, up and out with you.....but I was secretly kowtowing but now no longer...

Anyways, this isn't Kansas anymore and Toto has morphed into an anthropomorphised Schroedinger's Cat skateboarding-sidekick and Judy Garland has ripped off the constricting bodice they strapped to her chest to make her look younger and now sports breasts and a fetching pair of indigo spray-on wranglers under her dress and a set of Nikes she's ironically sliced the logo off....and Jet Li is on the scene to give the set a spot of shikentaza and belt the wicked witch with a flying drop kick...(is he Japanese?...if so can we get away with saying "Cor Blimey there's a Nip in the air?"...maybe that carries the backfiring inverse irony of one-handed glossies like FHM...anyways, I call meself a Brit and don't mind if you do).....anyway there's a witch and cronies fight with Jet and Judy and the kick-flipping Cat (name of Thanateros) and it gets out of hand and spills out of the set like 1941 (one of Spielberg's finest imo) and it's all pants in the mansions in da House and eventually Jet in true hero mode finds the siding switch, belts the mustachio'd villain into submission and the painted wagon carries on down the Kubrick-straight track into a predictable and therefore aesthetically-unsatisfying violet sunset.

What distracts me most favourably?
My own train of thought when I try to answer these questions like I'm an Ivy League conformist.

Love and blessings, Jon x

When was the last time you behaved out of character?

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 07:39:58 -0000

The last time I didn't identify with the character thing which was this morning on the meditation cushion and my behaviour as such was the expansion and contraction of my breathing muscles because everything else was still as a glass of water in a sealed crypt.

I'm at the age where...

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 08:09:57 -0000

...I wear jerkins with hoods.... frequently streetboard into town for a coffee... prance around the room playing air guitar whilst my iPod blasts out something meaty....read Marvel comics...roll down grassy banks in the summer when it's dry....

I am, of course, 50 years of age.

I go visit my father who is 82...and he watches me go through some sweaty ashtanga yoga manoeuvres and says "When are you going to grow up?".....I look up at him trying not to let the sweat the bandanna didn't mop up sting my eyes...my right foot across my left outstretched thigh and my right hand stretched behind my back holding the toes of that foot and my forehead about two inches awat from my left shin...and I say "uuuunggghh" and I suppose it all looks a bit Bill and Ted from some angles.....

The truth is that I am childlike in many respects but not childish.....we tend to ascribe childishness to those sorts of behaviours which we enacted as kids and never evolved out of.....being childlike is about being open as the wind to the ever-fractalising experience of the twenty-first century and not being ashamed of showing the world that life is play.....the presixties generation, mostly pre postmodernists who held fast to the ossified-adult approach to life >pharumph pharumph< used...and use... the two words interchangeably......

I have heard of men who sulk...actually sulk!...when their partner doesn't want sex on occasion....now that's childish....egocentric, disrespectful, potentially shaming.....

I consider myself to be conducting myself with dignity as I scissorkick the air and hold a fist-microphone to my mouth whilst singing "Smells Like Teen Spirit"...likewise when I am supervising psychotherapists...which I sometimes do wearing a hoody thing.

As Bill Nelson said "Stay young...and keep in touch"

What do you think about when you're feeling down?

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 07:13:08 -0000

I think about taking a room at the Bates motel, strapping a cilice to my thigh, covering my body with a starchy mohair catsuit, dropping a few vallium pills and watching a season of Ingmar Bergman godless classics.

Enjoy your nadirs, that's what I say. They are all grist to the Mill and ultimately unavoidable...feel the energy of your despondancy and you will not get caught up in patterns of reactivity.

Blessings, jon x

What values of yours have remained the same?

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 09:00:36 -0000

Visualise my value system as a graphic equaliser with core values as horizontal bars which add vertically the more i wish to promote those values to others.....high tower of value = pushing core value aggressively in face of recipient.....single bar + quietly manifesting core value with great subtlety......

So if this system responds to sound, then rigid hard aggressive folk get The Ace of Spades from me whilst traumatised individuals get Debussy's Prelude de l'Apres-Midi d'un Faun...

The core values have always remained constant; compassion, lucidity, empathy, doing to others as i would have them do unto me, respect.......

And there is a second vector here to which the first i have described as intensity of response.......this second vector is inclusiveness...my core values have remained constant since my early teens but i have broadened their application from an ethnocentric perspective (me and my gang and no compassion for you if you're not in it)...to a worldcentric perspective...wherein we are one human family and these values are applicable to all sentient beings...the family and the animals, too....I draw the line at veg cos i gotta eat something but I have respect for the salads i eat and hope that the carrots are not all screaming as i devour them as Chandra Bhose reckoned to have proved as early as the 1920's......

Blessings, Jon x

What, or who, has saved your life?

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 08:29:18 -0000

The practice of yoga.

If I had not found this method of deepening connection with the largeness of life, love,liberty, loquatiousness ....well no not loquatiousness....always had that...trying to be clever here with all the 'lliteratives.....uh...

Essentially, if I had not found a way of deepening this connection to Life, I would have remained alone with only my cigarettes and alcahol and drugs for company....my lungs and liver would have rotted out by now..... and if I were not dead, I'd be as good as.

Om nama Shivaya

Jon x

How to slay shame

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 12:06:37 -0000

[first installment....will add to this blog in four segments. One segment written]

I thought I would take up John (Satya-Seer)'s invitation to express my thinking about what shame is, how it is experienced and what one can do about excoriating it.

Here's Gary Yontef, a noted Gestalt, on shame;

Shame reactions are negative emotional and evaluative reactions to oneself, to what one is, how one is, what one does. Most frequently, these feelings are experienced in an incohate, misty, unclear, mysterious and puzzling mode. Often the shame is hidden from awareness by automatic manoeuvresthat function to avoid experiencing exposure to self and others. For the shame-ridden person, exposure, especially as inadequate or bad, brings up an intense affective energy that is almost intolerable.

Note, first of all that Yontef is suggesting that shame is a reaction to what one is rather than what one does....this latter is the province of guilt rather than shame...when one feels guilty, it's a reaction to having done something....imaginary or real....and one can take steps towards relieving oneself of the burden of guilt by confessing and taking punishment, seeking some form of atonement or performing some kind of restitutive act....one can do something to end the experience.

By contrast, shame refers to a belief about what one is; I am wrong, I am not-Okay, I am inadequate.....there is nothing one can do to change oneself when locked in this place....therefore, the only act one can take is to hide one's shame from self and others....this usually takes up an unusually intense amount of energy unbeknownst to the shameful person...something that, when relieved of shame and the need to employ that energy in chronic repression, becomes known because of the energised, liberating feel which emerges in the wake of successfully working to feel okay about oneself.

The second significant thing about Gary Yontef's take on shame here concerns the fuzziness of the experience.....it's hazy, has a whole-body-felt-sense about it....it cannot be grasped as fog cannot be platted....it is often an "unthought known" to borrow an oft-quoted phrase from Christopher Bollas

I think that this is because the original repressive mechanisms were laid down preverbally....before we learned to speak, we opened our eyes and arms wide to the world seeking something from mummy and daddy and all in the Kosmos that said we were okay and wonderful and worthwhile and beautiful....we needed this so that we could drink this goodness in....introject it (this means essentially drinking in an experience wholesale, internalising it , and making it our own).....and then internally replay it so that we could bear ourselves aloft with appropriate self pride as older children and adults......
........and if we do not get this nutrition, we interpret the anger and pain and whatever else poisons those adults around us as being the natural reaction to our existence and conclude, in a very primitive and fundamental sense, that we caused those giant godlike adults to grimace or ignore or abuse us.....and we make ourselves bad in the process.....and because we cannot yet speak, this experience remains primary process.....deep, primal, wordless but highly potent...and cleverly hidden as Yontef reminds us.

What was, or is, your dream career?

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 08:07:39 -0000

What I'm doing; earning a living as a psychotherapist, supervisor and trainer, and teaching various forms of yoga....

Some folk tell me I am lucky but I'm not...I worked drekking hard to get where I am....in 1996, i was a disillusionned Mental health Nurse therapist, doing a job which was, and is, statistically more dangerous than being a policeman in the UK....I undertook an expensive training (ongoing...I've spent an estimated £34,000 in training, supervision and exam fees in the last 12 years...) the personal changes I underwent cost me my marriage and everything but the clothes on my back and my car......as a divorced part-time therapist with few clients and no reputation, I supplemented my income by working three night shifts in various elderly homes over the weekend to pay my way and still could not afford a daily newspaper or cappucino....

My room is in the above picture...I began working in the loft garret in the Institute for Psychotherapy and coveted Room 2 because it was the largest in the house and one could run group therapy in it....I made it my seven year plan to get installed there, refurbish it out of my own pocket (it was rather dingy) and have my name on the door.....I did it in three years after the guy who used the room relocated....now that bit was lucky for me....but to do this I had to pack in my nurses job and take the room on full time....I did this and, again, had to save up to paint the walls and replace the mouldering sofas with clean ones.....

I am not saying this out of arrogance but to suggest to you that if you have a dream career, then nobody but yourself is going to make the dream happen for you....dreams turn into reality through effort...the more visionary the dream, the greater the adversity...

And you do not have to do it alone....Tam has been a wonderful source of support over the last seven years of an ever blossoming friendship/relationship.....my son Lewis is amazingly empathic.....my ex-wife whom I now live next door to (I've done lots of hard work in all sorts of directions these last 8 years I can tell ya!!!!) tells me "Good on yer" on a good day......

I also want to say that sometimes plans have to be delayed because one literally has no resources to meet the next stage....the aim is then to garner those resources

Also, you may not know what your dream career is....my suggestion here is to note what you do with that time you label "quality"...doesn't matter what it is.....then figure out what sort of career you can embed those activities within...I asked lwewis about this last year and he talked about becoming a professional skateboarder and we talked about how he could do that...one year on at eleven years of age, he doesn't know what he wants to do anymore apart from "maybe go to University"....what is key here is not to encourage him to do this or that but to get him into the habit of learning the mechanisms for fleshing out his dreams so that he may employ them when he embarks upon adulthood.

Warmth of the day to you

Love and light, jon x

What's missing in modern society?

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 22:21:25 -0000

A plethora of kissing, tickling, listening heartfully and shameslaying.

What do you prefer to do with others?

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:03:05 -0000

Heh heh heh......

Oh, do with others...not do to others....oh well I'll have to moderate me response then.

Converse with witty trenchant aplomb
Fly kites
Practice yoga
Sit quietly watching the sun set fire to a calm sea
Hang out with Integralites in the molecules and do mature things like haveing armwrestling contests to see which one of us has the higher worldview
Go see a film and soak my head in something that moves too fast and forget the other people are sitting beside me unless they press a mint imperial into my sweaty hand
Chuck Frisbees (I knew a guy called Chuck Frisbee...twas his stage name in Rory Motion's band....played with Blind Lemon Ajax.....honest....don't know if you have Ajax in the US...it's a cleaning fluid... also knew a UK cajun band called The Buttermountain Boys...some of them stayed in my house when I ran an open house...I remember the triangle player imploring all and sundry that the triangle was a hard instrument to play well...and, bless my plum duffs, he was right)
Making luv ....sex is what I do to the Other, making love is what I do with the Other...whether the Other is my partner or the Other is whatever manifestation of Mahashakti appears before me....Robert Anton Wilson; play with yourself, others and the environment as long as you cause no damage.

Warmly, Jon x

In what way are you a good traveler?

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 08:44:54 -0000

What seems like an eternity ago, I boarded some single-celled vehicle at Original Face Terminal and I've been travelling ever since....the vehicles get snazzier and more sophisticated each time I alight at some God-unforsaken waystation that has my new earthname emblazonned within the shiny new bunting.......and we're speeding along at an ever faster rate, laying down the vasana tracks in front of us with the animated aplomb of Grommit the dog on Wallace's toy train...

I am a good traveller provided I stay clear of the junk food provided by the Bad Karma Co.....cos then I get travelsick and barf up over some fellow voyager's reeboks precipitating a carriage war.....I go for the light Middle Way Sadhana Buffet meself .....speeds the journey towards Kosmocentria where all tracks converge before the involutionary reverse jorney back to Original Face Terminus.....ever narrowly avoiding the Armageddon siding...

The above photo melange shows, from 10pm and moving clockwise....Ryutaku-ji Zen monastery near Kyoto, Japan 2005, a beach in Malta, 1996 when I still had hair, Lewis at yorkshire Sculpture Park reclining on a bit of Henry Moore (2007) and Cairo 2004.

Warmly, Jon

Who has been your greatest teacher?

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 23:02:42 -0000

Myself...because I'm learning to open up to what you have to teach me...cyberly and molecularly...

This happens most potently when i experience being in love...so special mention to lewis, my son and tam my partner....wonderful beings This Time Around as most times before...

J x

What have you been paying attention to?

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 08:40:06 -0000

'Ang on there Siona....we've had that questIon before!!!!...so I'm paying attention to the process....which makes me a bit of a postmodern lad, nyet??....anyways, speaking of postmodern lads, I have been paying attention to what it means for me to be a man...spurred by my blog on male sexuality and the two hundred-odd comments issuing forth from it....Gitanjali's Integral post on what the male has to offer the female (which i haven't responded to yet) and the latest edition of What Is Enlightenment....which is devoted to all things essence-of-man......

One of the defining characteristics of maleness, sez Ken Wilber, is that he pushes through boundaries....one agentic thrust of a push beyond the envelope...which latter is the womb of communal consensually-shared values and territory and overall cultural hallucination engineered by females or, more accurately, the feminine essence in men and women which connects rather than pushes away.....maleness moves onwards and pushes outside the envelope, pushes beyond the frontier out out out into the empty field of Implicate Potential...the unploughed sod of vasana-less latency where it's All waiting-to-happen......and into this space untrammelled by the Swedenborgian time-body of morphogenic consolidation and mimetic rulings goes Man the FrontierSlaya (hey I might adopt that name....Conanlike....could have an avatar of me all buffed up with a 12pack and a couple of babes clutching me astride legs and looking up at me adoringly...oooooh FrontierSlaya.....hmmm....one syllable too many...better keep it to the three, more subliminally-recognised-as-dialectic-in-intent......)..anyways, FrontierSlaya goes ungently into this vasana-less Good Night, Manjushri's sword akimbo in it's polymimetic scabbard...and carves out all sorts of dualities and upSpiral notions with the lasting efficacy of drawing pictures on lake surfaces with a fingertip.......

...but then The Others Come....men and women homesteaders to plough those fields and raise some vast crop of New Worldview Culture....cutting vasanas galore and peppering the land with memes and ritual......what was frontier becomes a colony becomes an established metropolis for the postmodernists to retribalise in new multiwebbed embrace.....and now, folks, we have a New Envelope for all the blokes to get bored within....yep...rumbles....can you hear it?...it's the sound of maleness-pushing-outside-the-envelope.....

Phalli and wombs, wombs and phalli.....

You know, i gotta push outside this envelope of not hyperlinking...I don't know how to...and Elissa sent me this PM yesterday peppered with blue...I got a lovely education on all sorts of stuff...a glimpse into a way of life some of you American Cousins may lead that i would not otherwise have vicariously tasted....so i am going to find out how to do it NOW so when you read this, if you get links into WIE and all, you'll know I am walking me man-talk.

Warmly, Jon xx

PS...yee-hah...I'm a linking baron!!!!

Have you ever met someone from Gaia offline?

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 07:42:20 -0000

Loads....and Nicole...... she of the God Pod cultivation.....turned up on my doorstep on Wednesday evening, busy on her UK tour with her lovely daughter.....wonderful woman...smart with a heart....we ate pizza and walked along the riverbank....

.....I have Tamettao and Goatfish here in Hebden (Tam my partner and Ruari, back from 2 years in Brighton) to talk all things Integral, Buddhist, Yogic and psychological...they have excellent minds and love to talk about all that stuff so I'm blessed here in Hebden Bridge)...

I facilitate the Integral Salon North West at the Manchester Institute for Psychotherapy where I work and many of them contribute to the members-only pod I have cultivated...mostly we'd dialogue on the Integral Pod but it's a good forum to sort out meeting dates and subject matter and the like...

I have skyped various of you pals and chums and just love it when you point your webcam out of the window and show me a different universe...it's like apparating elsewhere.....

And I look forward to doing this more and to connecting with y'all and being the change as sure as eggs is eggs.

Blessings and a warm hug, Jon x

Why do you answer these questions?

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 08:19:17 -0000

Given that this is the first anniversary of my blogging on Gaia and that i have posted a QAR stream-of-consciousness bleaugh nigh-on every day...and please to note new change of handle, explanation forthcoming....this is a fortuitously-posted question that doesn't require too much of a conceptual gymnastic manoeuvre to fit what is largely a fuzzy-although-prethoughtup answer about my raison d'etre here.....

I came to zaadz, now gaia one year ago because I had been informed that all the guys and gals who were into Ken Wilber hung out here and I wanted to get in on the action, having been reading Integral philosophy since 1983 and talked about it to friends in social gatherings over the last 25 years and they would for the most part just kind of look at me vacantly and develop a form of spontaneous narcolepsy that caused them to say the mantra "intellectual bollocks" quite a bit, coffe/beer in hand......so I sort of kept it to myself but the whole Integral framework, particularly in its fifth incarnation with the publishing of Sex Equality Spirituality in 1995 (I remember literally trembling as I reached for this new thick tome in Watkins Bookstore and having to walk home cos it cost me 28 quid and I had no plastic on me and this ate into my bus fare....six mile hike to the suburbs...)...anyways i devoured the Everything Theory which has always been clear as crystal to me and very easily imbibed......

Anyways, I have had a block on networking and have enjoyed a fear of the world and people, having come out of a background of domestic violence and humiliation where to be seen was rather dangerous....I knew vaguely that the Integral Institute was being born along with discussion forums and I turned a blind eye to these events, preferring to read and meditate and carry Ken in my head like a new dad in my cave.....after ten years of therapy, most of my fear had attenuated (extremely slow process even with one of the finest therapists in the North of England, Judi Ledward)...enough for me to want to connect, not just with yogis and buddhists and therapists which i am now networked nicely into these last ten years but with the Integralites.....

So I came here.

Another reason for remaining in the cave lay in my narcissistic defense mechanisms which served me well in the domestic climate and in the playground where i was bullied badly (I had prominent teeth, was called Bugs after Bunnikins and my hair grew stiffly upright in a pubiclike mass, like Eraserhead...I was beaten, insulted and spat over most school breaks and after school, no exaggeration here)....anyways i could selfsoothe by telling myself that i was smarter than the herd...which i suppose was true since I was streets ahead of all the other kids in the classroom....another reason they were out to get me....

Anyways, i get here on site to network, narcissism pretty much intact....get onto the integral Pod and am intimidated to fornicating hades by the intellectual calibre of discussion to the extent that I read all the threads and post up on none of them...If I can't be the smartest of them all then I will go somewhere where I can be....so I came to QAR to do a daily blog in order to be adored for being clever and left the Integralites alone for the first four months of my life here.....this move to QAR was not consciously taken as such.....

Two things resulted from this.....firstly, the knowledge that you regulars who post up on a daily basis are just as smart as I am and have big hearts to match...the disappointment I felt at recognising that I cannot be the numero uno dude here dissolving in the pure goodwill emanating from you all...and i feel among you now...one year on, I want to be thought of as one who has a heart, not a head...we-elll...yeah there's still a bit of that but that process is deeply eroded.......

Secondly....I got to realise that the Integralites are mostly a wonderful, warm and accessible sangha and I feel very welcome there now..because I gave voice to my fear of their intimidating giant intellects and many folk there responded very warmly to me and are now me pals as well.....

This site's just fab, innit!......you are collectively....WE are a fine bunch of folk in so many ways......

So thanks for disillusioning me so beautifully with yr fine words and love.....I emerge after one year with less fragility and the fear of others masked by the angry juicy thrust of my obscuritan prose....

Though i must say that I love to write that stuff.....it is my Julia Cameron three-pages-a-day.....

My method is to use outlandish mostly visual imagery (current neuroscience is demonstrating that mulling over metaphor uses more areas of the brain than any other activity...that's right people, more even than rumpy-pumpy...(aah, got that word in at last))...also mnemonists such as Harry Lorraine maintain that elaborate and bizarre imagery tends to linger longer in the mind.....and I let my ego stand aside and something Else takes over when i get up a full head of steam...I reckon i would have made a good preacher man....as a yoga teacher, the same thing happens...i sit in front of the class with no lesson plan and blag out a balanced programme saturated with yoga/vedanta philosophy...and it works!....when i do this I feel the Ancient Yogi taking over whilst i recline and watch...with these blogs it's more like channeling a cross between Bugs Bunny (I'm proud to have worn that name in retrospect) and the Hacker...both manifestations of the trickster archetype.....

Anyways in the second year of my life here i plan to write more extensively on all matters yogic...interesting that I know more about Yoga than anything else yet put so little of it into my bloggings here.....I wonder if that's about respect......

And i will continue to blog here wiv new handle....I'm experiencing mild shame writing this but...hey...shame is a vampire which shrivels in the daylight of public acceptance.

Have a nice day y'all. And bless you all for nourishing me in the ways you have.

Love and blessings, Jon x