“It would be a mistake to think this culture clear-cuts only forests, it clear-cuts our psyches as well. It would be a mistake to think it dams only rivers. We ourselves are dammed (and damned) by it as well. It would be a mistake to think it creates dead zones only in the ocean. It creates dead zones in our hearts and minds. It would be a mistake to think it fragments only our habitat. We too are fragmented, split off, shredded, rent, torn.” ~ Derrick Jensen

Colonialism, expansionism, imperialism, call it what you will. It has systematically destroyed both our psychological and ecological environments. It is a heartless man-machine hell-bent on conquering, consuming, controlling and repeating, ad infinitum. Like Frantz Fanon said, “Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence.”

And in its naked violence it leaves paths of mass destruction that transform healthy environments into burnt-out husks. Unhealthy and unsustainable, colonialism is an engine with outdated machinery and parochial, dyed-in-the-wool equipment. It rampages over environments like a mindless, hyper-violent backhoe; close-minded and dogged in its obsolete dog-eat-dog worldview.

Smudging or the burning of sacred herbs is a common practice in many healing ceremonies and shamanic traditions. Its a way of purifying and cleansing a space, person or an object of negative energies or influences. Burning certain herbs gives access to the power of the plants and the fragrance releases a high vibrational energy which protects the physical and spiritual bodies.

Sage is the most commonly used herb in ceremonies. Some of the other herbs used are – Copal, palo santo, sweetgrass, cedar, tobacco. The herbs used for smudging are tied into a bundle and allowed to dry to make a “smudge stick”. In traditional societies the herbs used for smudging are considered sacred and the smudge stick is treated with great respect. Smudge stick is fanned around the person’s body several times with the intent to cleanse the energy fields.

Let’s look into the five common sacred herbs used for purification and removing negative energies-

“Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one’s awareness of one’s ignorance.” ~ Anthony de Mello

Nobody is immune to cognitive biases, not even trained psychologists and logicians who thoroughly understand them. We can become more aware of them, but we will never be immune to them. And that’s okay. We don’t need to be impervious in order to be more open-minded. We just need to be more understanding, more intelligent, and more imaginative in our approach, especially toward beliefs that have not previously been questioned.

Like Robert Anton Wilson cryptically said, “I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination.” Indeed, we generally only need to turn the tables on belief in order to combat most cognitive biases. But if that’s not enough for you, here are six particularly prevalent cognitive biases and how to combat them.

“The gap is your connection to the field of pure potentiality. It is that state of pure awareness, that silent space between thoughts, that inner stillness that connects you to (your) true power.” ~ Deepak Chopra

Give Up. Let Go. Repent. Stop fighting. Just Be.

There are many teachings; religious or otherwise that we may have some connection with in our lives for the simple reason that – at some time or another – we have had a charged experience in relation to that set of teachings. In relation to them, we have had an ‘aha!’ moment where our perception finally melted and we experienced true being.

Sogyal Rinpoche calls it the true nature of mind, Eckhart Tolle the ‘Now’. In a new teaching (to me anyway) the notion of non-duality can help us, in a few simple steps, to remember that perfection is an illusion, and that we are simply ‘reality’ experiencing or exploring itself.

As Eckhart Tolle says in his short autobiography in the Power of Now, the first trickles or gaps in his perception, were when he thought a thought along the lines of, ‘I just can’t live with myself any longer.’ The idea that there is a separate ‘I’ to ‘my-self’ brings about the realization that we live within this world of separation, and that actually, we are not separate from our experience at all.

Water is a basic necessity in order to maintain a healthy body and a clear mind. Since the human body is two third water, hydration affects almost all functions of the body – temperature control, cognitive functions, kidney function, physical performance, energy levels, gastrointestinal function, heart function, headache, skin and other chronic diseases.

If we were to ask you, whether you are hydrated right now or not, most of you would not know the correct answer to that. The general tendency to connect physiological thirst with water, is what makes us miscalculate the hydration levels. But to say how much water one should drink is a difficult thing, as it is a subjective measurement depending upon one’s lifestyle, physical activity level and energy expenditure.

Significance of water in our system