May 10th, 2013
Bring heightened awareness and an expanded capacity for pleasure into every aspect of your daily life.
Mark A. Michaels and Patricia Johnson are a devoted married couple who have been teaching traditional and contemporary approaches to Tantric sexual practices together since 1999.
Michaels and Johnson are multi-award-winning authors of The Essence of Tantric Sexuality, Tantra for Erotic Empowerment: The Key to Enriching Your Sexual Life, and, most recently, Great Sex Made Simple: Tantric Tips to Deepen Intimacy and Heighten Pleasure, which just won the 2013 Gold Medal from Independent Publisher Book Awards in the Sexuality/Relationships category.
They’ve also produced instructional DVDs and a meditation CD set: all of these and more can be found on their website tantrapm.com
Michaels is a lawyer, playwright and translator. He translated and adapted Goldoni's The Mistress of the Inn for the Roundabout Theatre Company, and co-wrote The Thrill of Victory, The Agony of Debate, which premiered at New York's Primary Stages. Johnson is a retired professional operatic soprano who toured as a performer throughout the United States, Europe, and South America.
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February 29th, 2012
Hankering for a whole new world? Well, Dr. Marcy Axness' Parenting for Peace: Raising the Next Generation of Peacemakers is your ticket: it highlights all that's amiss in how we currently raise children in America and models an emerging holistic worldview in which human beings can blossom into confident, benevolent people.
Dr. Axness reminds us that "we are the soil in which our children grow." Are we spiritually developed and psychologically mature enough to provide the conditions that truly nourish our babies and children?
Discussing every aspect of parenting from how biological life unfolds to how teenagers can be respectfully supported in their pressures, challenges and growth, Axness' brilliant synthesis makes it clear that parenting must be front and center in any successful movement for widespread social wellness. By "taking responsibility for how we invite in, welcome and incarnate our next generation" we engage in social action, and put ourselves in charge of change.
This witty, poetic, fact-loaded and wise book reveals and exposes all the ways people are currently damaging youth, specifically in contemporary Western-style society. It also suggests just how swiftly and comprehensively mothers and fathers who are parenting for peace can revolutionize our world through a conscious, concerted approach.
You'll also understand the details of why we must revise the way we carry, birth, and engage with children at every stage of their development and, to do so, how we must swim against strong social currents that have deliberately undermined the holistic health of children to make for good workers and consumers, to ensure social stability for a corporate state.
Dr. Axness' deep, comprehensive and effective questioning of contemporary medical, educational, and ideological social mores and establishments calls upon parents to turn the tide.
Axness acknowledges that parenting for peace is the most important and challenging job of your life; "this ideal of parenting for a generation of peacemakers is so demanding, so sophisticated, and demands such a level of maturity, we are culturally only now barely up to the task."
And yet, in many ways, this daunting and demanding task calls upon us merely to be more loving, aware, easeful and natural. Axness teaches us how to gauge ourselves in the midst of our greatest challenges. At the end of each chapter, there are age-specific tips for embodying and practicing the central principles of her teaching: presence, awareness, rhythm, example, nurturance, trust, and simplicity (P.A.R.E.N.T.S.).
By the end of this paradigm-busting book, you will know that every opportunity to bring physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual security and well-being to a child is a powerful action in service to the living world.
Listen to our interview with Marcy (September 2008) here.
She also appears in our special program Where's the Imagination?
©2012 Jari Chevalier
Paperback: 443 pages
Publisher: Sentient Publications (January 30, 2012)
ISBN-10: 1591811767
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February 28th, 2011
There is tremendous hypocrisy among people who claim they want fundamental change. If able people who consider themselves progressive would use the time they currently spend on complaining or entertaining themselves or drinking or smoking pot and doing other drugs; if they would work diligently to get themselves healthy in body and mind; if they would refuse all but simple, wholesome, unprocessed foods they cook at home; if they exercised hard; and if they would have nothing to do with banks and investment firms, which are the very torsos of the behemoths they claim to abhor; we’d be off to a pretty good start.
If people who claim they want fundamental change would clear the smoke and mirrors of their own minds and lives and look reality squarely in the eye, would stop buying products that come in packages, which are hyped through advertising (you’re paying for that hype!), would put all their TVs into their cars and drive their cars to their nearest state house or public square, lock them up and walk away, never to return for them; we’d be getting somewhere.
If people would put the energy they put into raging against the machine into ridding themselves of their bad habits of consumption; for example, consuming ridiculous quantities of sugar, which is poison for the human body . . . and would stop buying the next gadget, stop exposing themselves to advertisements, stop consuming all non-durable, disposable, mass-market items, in fact, stop all their self-destructive activities; we’d see marvelous moves in the right direction. In short, if people would give up their own bullshit, we’d have a very different picture before us.
Look, real progress now requires a healthy integration of intellectual, creative, psychological and spiritual progress, not mechanistic, technological progress, fueled by ignorance, narcissism and greed.
When people make it their jobs to break their own addictions and bad habits, and rid themselves of hypocrisy; when they strengthen and mature, when their minds are no longer puerile, we’ll be looking at progress. Because from that kind of personal authority, there is really no end to what can be overcome and achieved in changing the macro level. As J. Krishnamurti said, you are the world.
©2011 Jari Chevalier
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July 7th, 2010
Ellen Bryson is the author of The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno, a novel about being different, being human, and finding redemption. She holds a BA in English from Columbia University and an MA in creative writing from Johns Hopkins in Washington DC.
Ellen Bryson began as a professional modern dancer, working in Cleveland Ohio and Boston Massachusetts during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, then shifted her focus to the philanthropic field where she worked for over a decade in both private and community foundations, culminating in national work for the Council on Foundations in Washington DC. A world traveler, she has lived in the middle eastern country of Bahrain and in Argentina South America, where being an outsider both in language and culture, helped inform the message of this, her first novel. She currently lives in San Diego, CA with her husband and is considering a move to France.
We talked about:
The world's thinnest man, Bartholomew Fortuno ● Working back from the ending ● The dream that prompted the book ● The perception of beauty ● Freedom or captivity ● Maternal impression ● Iell Adams, the mysterious bearded woman ● P.T. Barnum's Fiji Mermaid ● The symbolic birds ● What art does for us ● The will to change ● The comic layer of a strange, dark world ● The author's future plans
Enjoy the show! (The interview is about 28 minutes.)
Listen at your convenience!
Click through to buy The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno right from this site in the Amazon sidebar widget to the left.
Visit:
Ellen Bryson's website.
jari consciousness, creative arts, interviews, insight, wisdom, philosophy, creativity, love, body, mind-body, addiction, values, art, composition, freedom, America, childhood development, civilization Comments |
March 1st, 2009
Integrative medicine as a creative force! The Living Hero program is delighted to present an interview with holistic health advocate, homeopathic practitioner, and healer, Dr. Lauri Grossman. Originally trained as a chiropractor, Dr. Grossman is an expert in integrative health care, specializing in homeopathic medicine.
She is a graduate of Cornell University, the New England School of Homeopathy and the prestigious Hahnemann College of Homeopathy in Berkeley, California, and is well-known and respected as a practitioner and educator. She has taught at Sloan Kettering-Memorial Hospital, the Hospital for Special Surgery and Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and at New York Medical College.
Lauri Grossman developed the curriculum in homeopathy and has taught in the holistic departments of the graduate schools at New York University, the College of New Rochelle and the New York Chiropractic College.
She will serve as Chair of the Department of Medicine and Humanistic Studies at the American Medical College of Homeopathy, expected to open in Arizona in 2009.
Her film, Natures, produced with the assistance of the National Geographic Film Archives, highlights the philosophy of homeopathy and its connection with the order found in nature.
Visit her website at homeopathycafe.com for more information.
We talked about:
• Lauri's life-defining emergency introduction to homeopathy
• how homeopathy differs from other natural therapies
• how a homeopath takes a case, makes a diagnosis and treats illness
• how homeopathy heals
• the scientific method and energy medicine
• the politics and history of homeopathy in America
• homeopathy on the rise
• the disorders for which homeopathy is most effective
• homeopathy, creativity and sensitivity
Enjoy the show! (The program is 54 minutes)
Listen at your convenience!
jari holistic health, interviews, future, wisdom, creativity, body, mind-body, values, health, America Comments |
October 1st, 2008
The Living Hero podcast welcomes our distinguished guest, clinical psychologist and bioenergetic analyst, Scott Baum, Ph.D.
Dr. Baum is a licensed Clinical Psychologist and a Diplomate in Clinical Psychology. He is also a certified Bioenergetic Therapist, and a member of the Faculty of The International Institute for Bioenergetic Analysis. He has been affiliated with the DiMele Center for Psychotherapy since 1994.
Scott Baum views psychotherapy as an experiential, problem solving process. He believes that the deepest, fullest, and most complex understanding of a person’s problem yields the best, most creative and enduring results.
We talked about:
• The premise that underlies bioenergetic analysis
• A more refined view of stress
• How human beings are biologically organized
• What goes on in a bioenergetic session
• Males, fathers, patriarchal society, power and the unknown
• The disparity between mothers and fathers
• Why men don’t ask for directions
• Healthy narcissism, narcissistic disorders and the true self
• A dividing line among therapists
• What’s possible with therapy
• How to learn more about Bioenergetics.
Visit the website for the New York Society for Bioenergetic Analysis
Enjoy the show! (The interview is about an hour)
Listen at your convenience!
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August 1st, 2008
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At an old-fashioned soda-pop style lunch counter in Bowman, North Dakota, I met Scott Parsons. He was eating pie in black, white and pink spandex with a smattering of corporate logos across his chest. After he had learned that his friend's daughter Mikyla had been diagnosed with Rett syndrome, Scott quit his job as Western VP of Sales with Georgia Pacific to ride his bicycle from San Francisco to Boston to help raise money to fund medical research for Rett Syndrome.
Our conversation covers:
• Scott’s motivations to ride
• Information on Rett syndrome and the hope of a cure
• Highlights of the great American landscape
• Impressions of the American people
• The goals for the ride and beyond
Learn more about Scott, his trip, and the cause for which he’s riding at
Mikyla-Cure.org
Enjoy the show! (The interview is about 25 minutes.)
Listen at your convenience!
jari interviews, future, human potential, culture, financial reward, creativity, meaning, body, environment, values, empathy, heroic, enthusiasm, money, solitude, solidarity, vision, freedom, Native American, America, fitness Comments |
January 28th, 2008
In our language, we have two similarly named thresholds of awareness. One is the subliminal, “that which lies below,” that which we generally refer to as the subconscious. The other is the sublime, which we speak of mostly at times when we have briefly transcended that upper limit, when we are momentarily sent “over the top” with feeling, with awe, surprise or beauty, surpassing our usual realm of sensation and awareness. People have been known to faint from being unable to sustain the sublime.
We would not know these boundaries if we didn’t, in unusual states and circumstances, access what is beyond them. Symbols, metaphors and buried memories do break into consciousness from the unconscious. And we do have wondrous and sublime experiences in nature, through love, in beholding our own newborn child, in moments of discovery, and through the experience of insight.
These thresholds of awareness frame not where you have been and what you have done, but the range of perception and feeling you were fit to bear, whereever you went and whatever you did.
Our ability to access both the subliminal and the sublime is integral to our capacity to accept and bear their truth and their gifts. These thresholds in the self are not fixed. They can go from brick walls to accessible doorways to a mere change in the landscape within yourself. As you develop yourself as a human being and become someone more psychologically mature, of greater spiritual fortitude, your range of awareness and capacity to feel into both the subliminal and the sublime will grow. You will be able to experience more feeling without fear, awkwardness, overwhelm or discomfort. You will also be much more in touch with the tremendous creative and integrative forces that are within you.
How do you open the range of your awareness and enlarge your capacity to feel and know more of your own life’s forces and riches? The best ways I know involve yoga, creativity and meditation.
©Jari Chevalier, 2008
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January 23rd, 2008
Control. Constraint. Inhibition. Constriction. Fear. Tension. Anxiety. Angst. Anger. Angina . . . these last four all share the same Latin root, angere, which means to strangle or choke.
Do you know how to release the grip, to relax, unbind, let go, let down, and "uninhibit" your mind and body? Let me ask this again: do you know how to relieve and relax your own mind?
I have discovered that we can learn to relax right in the midst of fear or pain and, in doing so, more permanently influence and change the state of our minds and bodies.
In the early 1990s I suffered from acute sciatica. The sciatic nerve is the largest bundle of nerves in our bodies and mine was severely inflamed. This ranked right next to childbirth in intensity of pain. I had to ice the area constantly and I lived on Vicodin (Tylenol with codeine) for days.
I had two of these severe attacks before I learned how to use yoga on a regular basis to prevent them, and also how to completely relax both my mind and my body whenever I first started to feel the nerve clenching up. Prior to this time, the nerve would tend to tighten up even further, then go into spasm and have me close to screaming.
But I taught myself to apply consciousness, awareness and intention to muscles and nerves. Then, having experienced the success of this in relation to the sciatica, I began applying this same technique, whenever anxiety and worry started tightening its debilitating grip on me. And I’m here to say that it works quite well.
I do credit this ability to the kind of awareness that develops through the practice of meditation. Meditation develops one’s sense of aliveness and attunement to mind-body processes to an extraordinary degree. We can catch ourselves thinking and feeling with quite a different sensibility than we used to have, or that non-meditators have. This provides a greater freedom of choice, moment to moment, on how life will go for us and those around us, and what we will experience.
In her book The World I Live In (which was out of print for nearly a century and published again just in 2003) Helen Keller says: “The sense of smell has told me of a coming storm hours before there was any sign of it visible. I notice first a throb of expectancy, a slight quiver, a concentration in my nostrils. As the storm draws nearer, my nostrils dilate the better to receive the flood of earth-odors which seem to multiply and extend, until I feel the splash of rain against my cheek. As the tempest departs, receding farther and farther, the odors fade, become fainter and fainter, and die away beyond the bar of space.”
I believe that just as Helen Keller could sense the coming of a storm through her sense of smell, we can sense the coming of anxiety through our awareness. And, before it comes on full strength, we can dissipate it so the storm doesn't happen, or if it does, it may rain, but not be torrential.
Whenever you first sense anxiety’s presence and its encroachment into your mind and body processes, acknowledge it, take a full breath and, staying with yourself, let it out, relaxing completely. This, of course, will not remit the inner or outer conditions that may be giving rise to the anxiety or pain. But, you can head off the intensity of the debilitation in the moment and be better able to function, so as to discern, and then remedy or remove the inciting causes and bring yourself more peace of mind.
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