People hear with their skin, too!

All our senses work together, so there is something intuitively obvious about this, but it still seems strange:

Observatory - People Hear With Their Skin as Well as Their Ears, Study Says - NYTimes.com

Social Medicine/Public Health

2 points here: First, health and happiness (and success, too, btw) are self-reinforcing -- if you have more of one, you tend to have more of another. And there are many studies to support this.

Second, since this is true, and since my friend's happiness affects mine, then my friend's health affects my happiness, which affects affects my health. This is a great reason for universal health care. Perhaps this is why there are so many first world countries that are happier than the US. -- they have universal health care, and so they are healthier, so they' re happier.

Social Medicine - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com

More reasons to keep exercising

Anyone who exercises regularly will tell you that they 'feel better' for having done it. I know I'm happier when I walk than just about any other part of a normal day. And the benefits are much greater than that -- actual brain changes:

Phys Ed: Why Exercise Makes You Less Anxious - Well Blog - NYTimes.com

Be thankful for the crap in life!

It's getting to be Thanksgiving, a wonderful American ritual, which originated with the Pilgrims holding a feast to thank the natives for their help, without which they would not have survived in the New World. It's common to say a round of very specific thanks before today's feasts. So I started thinking about thankfulness and gratitude.

People talk a lot about gratitude, and for good reason. Since energy follows thought (this is teh Law of Attraction), and your gratitude increases your attention to those things for which you are grateful, then you get more of those (presumably positive) things.

There is a case to be made for being thankful for the crap, as well. Why? Here are a few reasons:

The crap uncovers beliefs you have, which no longer serve you, which you can then heal, so you no longer attract the crap. For example, if you believe that learning has to be hard, you'll attract lots of difficult situations to learn from. This is a belief! If you choose to believe that "learning is easy" or (my personal affirmation) that "I learn through awareness and joy", then life will get easier almost immediately. Try it and see!

The crap uncovers vows or agreements you've made, which you can then heal, so you no longer attract the crap. If, for example, I vowed, either in this lifetime or in another one, "to never be rich", perhaps because the rich people you saw were evil, then you'll always have money problems in this lifetime. Vows can be identified and broken! Break this one and you're likely to have a more positive relationship with money.

The crap helps you locate places where you have disempowered yourself in your own life. If you were brought up always to respect authority, then you will give your power away, always trusting those with external power, such as political power, even when it is against your best interests. The Republican party consciously took this strategy with uneducated whites, especially in the South -- these were people who were brought up to respect authority, whether it had on clerical garb, a police uniform, or a business suit. The Republicans spoke to them in an authoritative voice, and got them to elect representatives who then voted to ship their jobs offshore. (Don't believe me? Please read John Dean's "Conservatives without Conscience".)

It's important to realize that you have give control of some aspect of your life, however small, to someone else -- and then to take it back, to make conscious choices about how you will govern this aspect of your life. You may, in the end, make the same choices you would have in the past, but by making them consciously, you have the freedom to re-choose if the original choices don't work out too well.

A 'negative' event often opens up room for change, for better things to come in to take its place. As with my friend, Joe, last week, divorcing to end a bad marriage opens up the space for a new, better relationship to eventually take its place.

You can look at excrement as crap, or you can be grateful for it and use it as fertilizer!

Telephone Telepathy

For many years, I've suggested to my students that they try guessing who's on the other end of the phone as a way to improve their psychic ability. (Of course, I do it, too!) Turns out that telephone telepathy is one of the most common forms of psychic ability. Watch the video -- then make it a practice yourself!

Manifestation & meaning

I've known my friend, Joe, for about 9 months now. He's a good guy, an ex-Marine, living in the Bay Area, who gushes about his kids given half a chance. He also has psycho-kinetic abilities and converses with some high level discarnate beings. You can tell when he gets angry, because you can sense a steely rage, but I've never seen him do anything but walk away from a fight.

He called about 10 days ago, from AZ, where he was visiting his parents (his Mom had injured her foot, and Dad needed some help), frantic to know where his kids were. His wife, Helen, not American by birth, and with many ties still in her home country, had apparently just announced to him that she had left him, taken the kids, and refused to tell him where they were.

It looked to me like they were fine, and still in the Bay Area, but clearly, this was going to be a very ugly divorce: Helen would do anything necessary to get what she wanted, including perjure herself, falsify evidence, steal from him, hide money, etc. I kept hearing to tell him that 'this is the best thing that could have happened to you'.

The next day he found an attorney, and asked about filing kidnapping charges. But it turned out that Helen had gotten a restraining order, which she hadn't mentioned, based on a fight she and he had 8 years ago, which didn't involve the kids. That makes her hiding the kids completely legal. She kept wanting to know when he'd be back at the house. He wondered if she were trying to trap him into violating a restraining order he'd never been served with.

He drove back here from AZ, only to find the rental house that they'd lived in cleaned out of anything valuable, with a mess left. His wife, who'd been paying the rent, as he had been laid off recently, had not paid it. He was about to be evicted, so he needed to quickly get packed, find a new place and move. As he was going through his stuff, he came upon these:

Obviously, these used to be handcuffs. I say 'used to be' because they are now in 2 separate pieces, and they can't be put back together. You can tell from the photo (maybe not on the internet, but blown up, on my computer) that the serial numbers from both halves match. Joe swears that the last time he saw them, when he put them in the bottom of the file drawer he was cleaning out, they were in one piece. These cuffs are made so that those pins sticking out from the left side go into the slots on the right. The barbs on the pins (and the barbs and pins are machined out of one piece of metal) fit into little indentations you can't see inside the slots. The barbed pins must be fitted into the slots of each side, and then the tops welded to the bottoms of each side, so there is no earthly way to get those suckers apart without major tampering. There are no signs of tampering. You can't see any in the photo, and I examined them myself -- not even a scratch.

Clearly, no one on earth did this. Quite a manifestation!

I take the message to be that he is free of her -- or at least will be soon -- and that all her shenanigans will lead to naught, that she won't be able to entrap him.

In Pig Cognition Studies, Reflections on Parallels With Humans

When I look for an animal in someone's third chakra (power center), sometimes I see a pig. I have always seen this as a good thing, especially about intelligence. Here's proof:

Basics - In Pig Cognition Studies, Reflections on Parallels With Humans - NYTimes.com