College grads: whether you're looking for a traditional 9-to-5 office gig or hoping to travel the globe, a meaningful future is yours to create. 

This post originally appeared at Shareable. 

Not too long before graduation, I lay in my room, reflecting on how my food, school and my apartment was paid for with money that doesn’t even exist—loans. I had been living in a fantasy world for four years. None of it seemed real because I wasn’t yet monetarily supporting my living expenses. I sat up and imagined holding a 9-to-5 job to keep this apartment, this city, and keep my material possessions upon graduation.

While reflecting on this, I asked myself if I valued my apartment, if I valued my possessions, and if I valued living in a city. Was I willing to work a full-time office job to uphold these luxuries? When it came down to it, I absolutely did not find any value in working just to uphold any of those things. It was an easy decision to make, but now what?

A January report from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity found that “about 48 percent of employed US college graduates are in jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests requires less than a four-year college education.” That number included 37 percent in jobs requiring no more than a high school diploma. According to one Pew Research Center report, “a record one in five households now owe student loan debt.” It’s apparent that college students are not left with many obvious options. You get a degree, to maybe get a job, to make a living and try to pay off your loans—that’s it. A flow chart on Shareable explains this phenomenon further. I thought, “There HAS to be another way.”

To allow ease of transition is to identify personal life values. If it helps, make a list of your core values. Knowing your values will help shape the path you take. It begins to make things a lot clearer for you, college graduate, to really make a plan. Your values will turn into aspirations and dreams, aspirations and dreams will turn into goals, and in-between is the fun part. A few of my values can be summed up in one quote by Ghandi: “Be the change you wish to see in the world."

When talking about skills, let’s face it: many people tend to limit their skills to their degree. However, growing up in the digital era and being fresh out of college is advantageous. Every post-college individual can write, effectively use social media, speak publicly, critically think, and problem-solve. Add this to the plethora of skills gained through your major and any hobbies you have. Brainstorm a list of every skill you can think of to help you craft your dream.

Skills + Values + Goals = Success

As you begin to explore your post-college opportunities, remember it’s just a fun game to play. Just like school, it’s a test for us to figure out how we are most happy so we can enjoy life to the fullest. Explore some interesting things you can do after college to fully utilize your values, strengths, opportunities, passions, and resources.

Ask a Friend
If you decide that getting a job to pay your bills is the first road you want to take, reach out to your employed and recently graduated friends or colleagues to see if they can refer you for a position. If the job isn’t interesting, do what you can to lower expenses and save so you can have the freedom to create a new adventure for yourself.

Work in Nature
On the other hand; being in nature, traveling, learning survival skills, and wilderness exploration could also define your immediate future. Apply to work for the National Park Service, which offers opportunities in 379 national parks. Emily Lawlor, college graduate, WWOOFed on almost 20 farms while taking the summer to work in different national parks all over the United States as a wilderness ranger or trail worker. Emily explains her passion of experiential living and learning: “I have valued experience as the most influential learning tool in my life.”

Emily Lawlor hiking the Continental Divide Trail, March 25, 2013. (Photo: Anthony Aiuppa)  

WWOOF
WWOOFing allows anyone to securely explore the globe through experiential learning on sustainable farms by trading a full day of work for food and accommodation. WWOOFing is a viable way to spend a week, a month, a summer, or a year or more learning, trading time, and traveling. Andrew Fair, an experienced WWOOFer in Italy, offers his words of WWOOFing wisdom: “It changed me in ways I can't explain, forcing me to take a step back and reevaluate everything I believed to be true, both about myself and the world.”

Volunteers work in the garden at Emerald Village Organization in November, 2012. (Photo: Love Bus Community) 

Become an Entrepreneur
Maybe you’re the type of person who desires to be your own boss, start a revolution, or change a paradigm within an industry. It could be your calling to pursue a business venture. Check out Under 30 CEO for excellent tools for young entrepreneurs, or join the Under30Experience community, to meet other ambitious entrepreneurs. These pioneers have learned to break away from their comfort zone, get creative, and meet potential business partners or launch projects.

Start an EcoVillage
Rally up a group of forward-thinking, business-minded, garden and green innovation-savvy people to start an EcoVillage. An EcoVillage is “a model for a truly sustainable community. It’s an intentional village and farm created by people who want to acquire a better quality of life by holistically integrating innovative ecological, economic, social, and cultural dimensions of sustainability,” says Ecotivity. To start an EcoVillage, look at land to purchase and split the cost with a group of people. Activated Villages is an organization created to help groups of people find and learn how to purchase land to start an EcoVillage.

  
Sieben Linden EcoVillage in Germany held three kinds of meetings: feeling meetings, thinking or “idea” meetings, and business meetings. (Photo: EcoVillage Newsletter)
 

Join or Volunteer at an EcoVillage
Join an EcoVillage and create a cottage industry that benefits you and the village. Through IC Directory and Ecotivity, you can find opportunities for exchanging, volunteering, renting, or buying in at an EcoVillage. A few examples of cottage industries are food production, holding workshops, tinctures, and art or other natural products. Like WWOOFing, you can often exchange services from a wide range of trades like gardening, land work, natural building, marketing, event planning, and IT. This is a wonderful way to create your own job and live an experiential and wholesome lifestyle.

Volunteer Abroad
Work overseas in a fun and collaborative way by lending your time to help out with disaster relief or social work. Burners Without Borders (BWB) began spontaneously as a collection of people who instinctively met gaping needs where traditional societal systems clearly failed after Hurricane Katrina. Now BWB is a community-led, grassroots group that encourages innovative, civic participation and creates positive local change. Nick Heyming, a three-year volunteer with BWB, explains: “I learned during my disaster relief experiences that it’s not just about how many houses you build, or how many gardens you plant. The most valuable part was the exchange with other volunteers, with the local people, and the skills and knowledge that is shared. I feel like those types of experiences are much more accessible than most recent grads are aware of, and much more valuable than they would expect."

 
Burners Without Borders in Pisco, Peru in 2010. (Photo: Ignite Me)  

Get Paid to Roadtrip!
Applications are open now to “Hit the Road,” through Road Trip Nation’s program, that empowers you to define your own road in life instead of traveling down someone else's. Travel in a Green RV to interview inspiring leaders from all walks of life who have defined success in their own terms, and people who wake up and love what they do every day. Also, look into getting sponsored to travel, or create an influential social media presence around your travels for income. Mike’s Road Trip is a great example of a marketing professional who took road tripping to the next level.

Roadtrip Nation’s Green RV. (Photo: Steve Hargadon)  

We live in exciting times. The possibilities abound as to what we can accomplish in this era. Dream big, take risks, follow your heart, and don’t let student debt burden you: everyone has it. Whichever path you take, whether it is EcoVillages or disaster relief work, starting your own business or getting sponsored to travel, the experiences you will have are priceless. Collaborating on radical projects with others, traveling, and experiential learning will help you grow and take you farther in life than you can ever imagine.
 

Top image: "A crowd of college students at the 2007 Pittsburgh University Commencement" by Kit, licensed under Creative Commons. 

When Katie Haegele finds a 1970s Ideabook at a yard sale, it unveils a world of meaning behind her own fashion choices and those of women in the past. 

Vintage clothing is a Post-Modern genre, "a highly visible way of acknowledging that its wearer’s identity has been shaped by decades of representational activity, and that no cultural project can ever 'start from zero.'"—Kaja Silverman, 'Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse'

One time at a yard sale I found this weird book called Ideabook. A child of the 1970s, I was drawn to this outrageous-looking thing like a moth to a lava lamp. On the cover was a photo of a smiling woman in full seventies regalia: long shining hair and big, round, yellow-tinted sunglasses, her head tilted glamorously to one side. She’s raking that healthy hair back from her face with one hand and smiling with all her teeth. In the background is her little brood, a rugged lumberjack-poet dude with a kid on his shoulders. The family is standing in a grassy field, but the photo’s color wash is so weirdly golden it looks like the Serengeti. I find this scene hideous and appealing to almost exactly the same degree, and if I could climb inside the book and inhabit it I would. Since I couldn’t do that I bought it, as I have bought so many old things that can no longer be used for their intended purpose.

Ideabook’s intended purpose was as a catalog, from which you could order S&H Green Stamps items. I didn’t know what Green Stamps were so I asked my mom. She told me that in the seventies (and for forty years or so before that) you could get these stamps when you bought certain foods at the grocery store. You then pasted the stamps into a booklet, and when you’d collected enough of them you could redeem them for household items and clothing. When she got married, my mom told me, her new mother-in-law gave her a stamp book with some of the stamps already in it, to put toward a vacuum cleaner.

My Ideabook, published in 1971, has tons of great-looking photos in it, all of them full to the brim with goofy “vintage” charm. There’s a picture of a few young guys playing guitars under a tree; you could order the guitars as well as any of the clothes the guys were wearing. There are pictures of little girls in knee socks, women lounging catlike on the floor to talk on phones, and the family from the cover walking toward a picnic lunch on the Serengeti, which was being served in clear Thermalene casserole dishes. You could order space-age table lamps, shaggy rugs, stereos and refrigerators, all of them pictured in super ugly rooms done in beige, orange, and avocado green. To my mother, though, the things in Ideabook do not look ugly or funny; she got a little misty, looking at them. To her I think they still represent a lush lifestyle that she and my dad could not afford in 1971, the year they got married.

So why do I love this stuff so much? And how about you, reader of a blog post about old catalogs and ladies’ fashion from the seventies? What do old things mean to you? I can tell you that I first learned to dress myself as a young teenager at the Salvation Army, where the few bucks I had in my pocket could buy me a whole outfit. It really opens up your imagination, looking at clothing from so many different decades. The thrift store was where I first learned to envision myself as one of many possible things: a tough girl in a leather jacket, a summertime hippie in a long skirt, a party girl in party dresses. Back then, in the nineties, my friends and I mostly came across polyester tops and bell bottoms from the seventies, but we sometimes found older things too, like the bead-encrusted cardigans from the fifties that had held up beautifully, even if the yellowed lining under the buttons showed the garment’s age. These were gorgeous, but they were funny too. We weren’t fifties ladies! We listened to Hole and gave people the finger! Sometimes we even found (and bought and wore) secondhand men’s clothes, like the gas station attendants’ jackets you used to be able to find with the employee’s name embroidered in cursive on the breast. Does anyone still wear those? Gosh they looked good.

Not too long ago I was reading an old issue of WORN, an indie fashion magazine from Toronto, Canada. WORN looks at clothing from a feminist perspective, and in one especially insightful essay author Emily Raine wonders if feminism can be practiced through fashion. Sometimes, she writes, and quotes scholar Kaja Silverman, who has argued that wearing vintage clothing is a positive feminist practice because wearing clothing that another woman once wore “plays up commonalities between women of different eras.”

That idea lit me up like a light bulb. What a good way to think of it! Some of the smart feminists I know have called out the nostalgists among us, reminding us that the good old days weren’t always good, that imagining a simpler time is reductive and inaccurate, and it’s unwise to romanticize the times when, for instance, Jim Crow laws were still in place and abortions were illegal and dangerous. They are right about that. But the clothing, oh, the clothing. There’s something electrifying about channeling the past by dressing up like it; by mimicking the women I have looked at in photos all my life, I get to be them for a minute. And why not? If it weren’t for fate or luck or whatever, I would have had a life like theirs, like anyone’s. The cat eye glasses of old family photos, a Donna Summer-looking sequined top, the punky, printed heels that put me to mind of a musical and cultural moment I dearly wish I’d lived through: filling my closet with clothing from different eras has allowed me to piece myself together into some version of today’s woman, which is a person who surely couldn’t exist without the women who went before her and is in some sense a pastiche of them all. If I thought I could pull off the Ideabook lady’s get-up I would wear those fugly sunglasses in a minute.

I once read a good zine with a funny name—I Love Vintage (but I wouldn’t want to live there)—by a writer named Holli Mintzer. In it Mintzer gives instructions on how to make a circle skirt from an old bedsheet, and she does a fabulous little deconstruction of the social meaning behind the clothing worn by a white female civil rights protestor in the mugshot that was taken after she was arrested for participating in a Mississippi Freedom Ride in 1961. But the things Mintzer wrote that had the biggest impact on me had to do with how she reconciled her aesthetics with her politics. On a checklist titled “Why Vintage?,” the bullet point “Because women should dress to suit their shape, not change their shape to suit the dictates of fashion” appears just before “Because I want to reclaim vintage styles without their racist, sexist, homophobic, patriarchal bullshit baggage.” How do you separate the old styles from their historical baggage? By mixing them up and wearing them knowingly, with a little wink (or “quotations marks,” as Silverman would have it) for whoever’s looking.

Finding the Ideabook made me feel closer to my mom, for sure. It gave her a reason to tell me about Green Stamps, which as far as I know she hadn’t thought about in years. I enjoy thinking about her setting up house and home with my dad —they also had a tiny pet turtle named Ted, and an injured blue jay they rescued and nursed back to health, called BJ— and even though I’m not married with kids like she was at my age, I care about vacuuming my place and keeping it nice, just like she did. She probably didn’t feel the need to dress up in costume to do it, but she wasn’t postmodern like me.

Katie Haegele is the author of White Elephants: On Yard Sales, Relationships, & Finding What Was Missing . Read more of her blog posts here . 

Image: "Parade Pattern Ad" from ionascloset, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Most of us long for greater community feeling and action, but in our hyper-individualistic culture, community can be hard to find. Here are 16 ways to build and strengthen yours.   

This article originally appeared at Huffington Post.

Over the years I've watched people struggle to build community and community organizations in a culture that has become more and more hyper-individualistic. "What's in it for me?" trumps "What's happening with us?"

I've founded organizations from scratch (The International Documentary Association, aprofessional organization for documentary filmmakers) and served on the board of others. I've been a member of still more. Some have been more informal and/or countercultural (a Voluntary Simplicity Circle, a local permaculture guild, the early National Organization for Women) and some more traditional (our town's rose society). Some have survived and thrived; others have fallen away.

Most of us long for greater community feeling and action. And as we wake up to the enormity of the challenges we face in an era of degrading environmental, economic, political and social conditions, we instinctively know that unless we can come together to effectively create constructive change, we and our children may not survive.

So what does it take to build and sustain an effective community or organization? Humans have understood and used this social technology since we gathered around the campfire in the Paleolithic, but we in modern Western and westernized industrial cultures seem to have forgotten many of the basics.

For anyone planning on pulling something together effectively, I offer this simple checklist for community-building success.

1. Build a campfire. Sometimes we want to literally build a campfire to gather a crowd and sometimes we need to create another kind of clear, focused attraction that draws us into the circle.

2. Connect with nature and the seasons. Our community programs and activities can either connect us to the rest of nature or they can further separate us from the Earth and universe that make life possible. Tying whatever events we hold into what's happening seasonally to all beings (human and otherwise) is a traditionally effective way of creating community.

3. Take the time to welcome each person. Some groups have designated "greeters." Other groups take time to go around the circle welcoming and acknowledging each participant before proceeding with the event's main activity. This isn't a frill. It's basic to building community. People who feel seen and known are more likely to continue their involvement than people who remain unwelcomed and anonymous.

4. Provide food and drink. Again, so basic. Traditional societies always took hospitality seriously. Having people bring things to add to the collective feast is better than mere catering.

5. Ceremony, ritual and even a sense of spirituality or the sacred. If we've tied our event or meeting to the seasons we've already added a sacred dimension. And every culture throughout history has created its own form of ceremony and sense of occasion for various community purposes. We can get great ideas from them all. Deep in our collective human memory lie countless spring or harvest festivals, ceremonial or religious events, meals and celebrations that included a strong sense of passage, initiation and the sacredness of all life.

6. Collective problem-solving. I've found that we can't create community for community's sake. People bond into a community when they can come together to participate in solving a real-world community problem or heal a person, group or situation that demands a community solution. In our society we tend to deny our need for a community until our interdependency becomes painfully evident, and that's the teachable moment when people are fully motivated to participate! We also need some agreed-upon method of solving internal disagreements. For some groups, it's Robert's Rules of Order. For others, it's discussion and community consensus. And everyone in our society needs to learn the techniques of nonviolent communication, because we've been brought up knowing how to complete but not cooperate.

7. Storytelling. Humans are a storytelling species. This goes way back to those Paleolithic campfires. We learn best when see and hear stories told by storytellers or acted out in theater or other visual media. Literacy is a latecomer in human culture, important as it is. And rational science is later still. As our brain structure reveals, facts don't arouse us as much as stories and full-body experience do. We need all of these, of course, but too often would-be community builders make the mistake of thinking that bombarding people with facts will create change. It doesn't. Most of us now "know" the facts about global climate change -- but few are inspired to act on this knowledge.

8. Elders. In every functional tribe or culture, the elders have been valued for their storytelling. How else do we know where we've been and how things worked out in previous efforts at change? Who else can share the lived lessons of birth, life and death? Even people who can no longer participate in the hunt or the barn-raising or the harvest can provide valuable service to the community by sharing stories. Adults in high-stress industrialized culture tend to find elders' stories slow and boring, but they are a critical resource for our collective survival. We also need to beware of the "Star From Afar Syndrome" where we bring in outside professional or celebrity storytellers from some other community rather than honoring and developing our own community's storytellers who don't abandon us at the end of the evening.

9. Gifts and sharing. As we focus on creating a sharing society (as opposed to our current "gimme gimme" culture), it's nice to give small gifts (plants or flowers from our garden, seeds, passalong gifts, etc.) to those who attend our events, as a way of helping everyone feel valued and appreciated. Also it's critical to de-monetize community organizations and activities. Like their corporate counterparts, too many modern non-profits have become obsessive money-charging and money-generating machines, losing sight of their higher purpose. Expensive events and fund-raisers destroy community, creating the sense that the moneyed few are the valued guests. True community welcomes everyone, wealthy or not. The key is keeping events local, simple and created by the community for the community. "Many hands make light work." Some of the best community-building events I've ever participated in cost nothing and involved everyone bringing their own chair, outdoor blanket and food utensils, plus food to share.

10. Shopping. Yes, we're trying to recover from being mindless consumerists, but we also need to remember that humans have been bonding through meeting others in the marketplace since ancient times. This is why the sales or silent auction tables are perennially popular at many events. And again, the money is a gift to the community.

11. A little excitement. At each meeting, our local rose society holds popular raffles of donated plants, rose-themed items or useful gardening objects. Archeological evidence shows that humans have been gambling since prehistoric times and many of us seem to enjoy a little flutter to add some fun to daily life. And of course whatever money is raised goes into the common coffers, so is a "gift" to all.

12. Child care. Traditional community events were always multi-generational. If all of us are not welcome, we're reinforcing the generational segregation that is destroying modern society. Besides, children provide a critical source of untamed energy and entertainment for every gathering. A society that no longer enjoys the sound of children playing is a sick society indeed. And banning children from adults-only events deprives them of the role modeling and true education they crave. Those of us who remember being at local community events as children now realize how these gatherings formed and shaped our adult lives, even if at the time we didn't understand what was going on or were bored or distracted.

13. Transportation. In tribal or village society, this wasn't such a big problem, as people lived close together. But now, even in smaller communities there is always the question of how to get everyone to the event. Helping people travel together and providing transportation for those without cars or unable to walk is a great way of building community even before the event starts.

14. Music. Our amazing ears are portals to the soul and spirit of the human psyche. Even a simple drum can bond individuals into a coherent group. And community singing can be extraordinarily powerful medicine, as our churches and temples have known for millenia.

15. Dance and body movement. Modern society makes us sit, sit and sit. Bringing the body into action connects us the way nothing else can!

16. Beauty. Those of us focused on changing the world can often forget to appeal to humans' inherent love of beauty. We want action, not aesthetics! And then we wonder why few come to our meetings. Our eyes, like our ears, are portals to the inner life. Too often we forget that our species has been painting on rock walls since we gathered in caves. A simple flower on the table or painting on the wall brings powerful archetypal energies to bear as we gather in community. And a meeting held outdoors brings all of nature's magnificence to our senses, adding extraordinary power to our community activities.

The bottom line? Any community gathering, organization or event that engages body, mind, soul and spirit has a far greater chance of surviving and thriving.

Linda Buzzell is a psychotherapist, ecotherapist, and co-editor of "Ecotherapy: Healing With Nature in Mind."

Image by Quinn Dombrowski, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Our livers, kidneys, lymph glands, and skin often work overtime to keep us healthy. An occasional break from the daily grind of food preparation and digestion can give them a chance to do even more.  

This excerpt from  Coming Clean: A Conscious Guide to Food Cleanses  originally appeared at Reality Sandwich. The book, which offers information on various cleanses, was released by Evolver Health e-books, a new series of novella-length digital titles. 

The Oxford dictionary definition of “cleanse” is “to make something thoroughly clean or to rid (a person, place or thing) of something seen as unpleasant, unwanted or defiling.” You can think of it as a clean-up, a tune-up or even a clearing out. A cleanse is simply meant to free your body of the unwanted accumulation of food, toxins, etc. It’s an opportunity to do right by your body, especially if you don’t treat it well on a daily basis.

One way to look at toxic accumulation is from the perspective of a car. You would never put soda in your car engine and expect the car to run. So why would you put junk food in your body day after day and expect it to stay healthy? When you use the wrong fuel, eventually you will need to clean out the system. 

A cleanse can bring attention to areas of your life that you’ve been neglecting. When you lighten up on food and beverages, you ease the digestive process, allowing for more time to rest and reset. With this extra time and freedom, the body can work on a deeper level to cleanse, heal and give you more energy. It’s a way to help your body run better and feel cleaner.   For many detox enthusiasts, cleansing is considered routine maintenance. We put all kinds of crazy foods, drinks and chemical into our bodies knowingly or unknowingly and more or less hope for the best. The body may not react initially but with time it speaks out through an array of health problems ranging from weight gain to exhaustion to disease. And even for those on a healthier kick with food, you may still be struggling with caffeine, alcohol, sugar or other drug-like substances in your diet. How’s it going with sleep and stress levels? Is your water from a fresh spring or from a plastic bottle with a picture of a fresh spring? Even before the world was so toxic, fasting and cleansing were part of the human experience. In Siddhartha, Herman Hesse wrote, “When a person has nothing to eat, fasting is the smartest thing he could do.”

Hunter-gatherers fasted between feasts. Jesus, Gandhi, Plato and Socrates all fasted for greater peace and awareness. Ancient cultures around the world, especially in India and China, have used detoxing to rest and relieve the body from illness for centuries. Most spiritual traditions have fasting rituals, especially during high holy days or at certain times of the year like Lent, Ramadan and Yom Kippur. Mormons fast on the first Sunday of each month to feel closer to god or to ask for help on a specific issue. Hindus typically fast on the New Moon and during festivals like Shivaratri and Durga Puja. 

Before we had modern medical techniques, we had to rely on the body’s natural healing system. Detoxing is one way to enhance the system. Our bodies are already designed to detoxify every day. Our colon, liver, kidneys, lymph glands and even skin work hard to keep everything moving through. But an overload of foods, chemicals or some combination can clog the natural process. So while it might look more extravagant these days with expensive juice programs or ads for fancy supplements, we have a long history of helping the body detoxify. But the need for cleansing has never been greater.

Read the rest of this article at Reality Sandwich. 

Suzanne Boothby is a health writer, speaker and regular cleanser. Her first e-book, The After Cancer Diet: How to Live Healthier Than Ever Before, empowers cancer thrivers to improve their health through simple and sustainable diet and lifestyle changes. She also co-wrote Integrative Nutrition: Feed Your Hunger for Health and Happiness with Joshua Rosenthal, founder of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.

Our true feelings might not be politically correct, but getting past them means admitting them to ourselves.

This article originally appeared at Reality Sandwich. 

It's a typical Bioenergetic healing session. My client in his late 20s (we'll call him Dave here) shares how a female colleague, Sarah, is constantly begging and bothering him to complete her tasks for her. I ask Dave to sink into his feelings each time this situation arises and share what actions he would like to take based on his own emotions. A sense of anger and resentment immediately charge the space between us and, strangely, I end up whispering to myself, "Please say you want to hit her, say you want to hit her." As awful as it might sound (especially given its violent nature), from several years of therapeutic spiritual practice, I have come to recognize this powerful psychological shadow material is exactly what needs to be acknowledged and expressed for real healing to occur, and to avoid future unconscious aggression.

Knowing Dave, I'm fairly sure that, like most of my clients, he is too polite and "kind" to express such unsavory thoughts, but then Dave's eyes widen brightly, his shoulders relax, and his chest opens proudly as if suddenly relieved and empowered by an unseen force. "Oh, my God," he smiles, shaking his head in disbelief, "I totally want to punch her!"

Now that Dave has courageously uncovered (and connected with) the 800-pound emotional gorilla in the office cubicle, we can help guide the gorilla out of the corner so that he can move and transform. Examining the scene closer, Dave suddenly realizes that he can never look Sarah in the eyes when she annoys him.

We have now successfully tracked down gorilla No. 2: the shame Dave experiences from holding anger toward Sarah. As I had initially suspected, potent emotional force impregnates this seemingly small office interaction. Dave is suffering from what we in Bioenergetics call a "double bind." While Dave is incapable of exhibiting his anger toward Sarah because he, and society at large, view that emotion as shameful or unworthy (and also potentially dangerous), he also can't free himself from those guilty feelings without first expressing them.

Rather than either/or solutions, the healing response usually offers unexpected both/and possibilities, where a "miraculous" third way emerges, one that egoic thinking and societal conditioning normally miss. In this alternative scenario, Dave grants himself permission to experience 100 percent of his anger, free of guilt, while still holding love for himself and, ultimately, for Sarah. This third path heals and unifies rather than divides and punishes.

Through some brief exercises, I share with Dave how to allow the charged energy to circulate safely up and down his spine, flowing forcefully and naturally, without him ever projecting it back on Sarah or internalizing it into his own body as guilt. By letting his anger move, instead of pushing it down, Dave is able to temporarily feel the power of his anger while simultaneously holding a space of love for both of them. Given this freedom, he soon lands at a place of personal empowerment where he can even thank Sarah for teaching him an important lesson about his own wounding and its emotional healing.

The main purpose of this kind of Bioenergetic process work (my spiritual and healing practice) is to unblock stuck or crossed energies in the human energy field, much like the holistic practices of yoga, acupuncture, thai chi or qi gong. At its finest, Bioenergetics is staggeringly improper, unwaveringly un-PC, wonderfully iconoclastic and warriorfully liberating. It asks clients to leap into emotional terrain they falsely believe to be off-limits, to move beyond their fear threshold ("the death layer" as Bioenergetic pracitioners call it), to connect with, and own, their own emotions as unredeemably dark as they might appear to be; thus, enabling them to reclaim unintegrated aspects of their lost self.

Read the rest of this article at Reality Sandwich. 

Image: "scream" by mRio, licensed under Creative Commons.  

  
Why does passion ebb over the course of a long-term, committed relationship? Love and sex specialist Alex Allman investigates that question, proposing ways to short-circuit the phenomenon.  

This article originally appeared at Reality Sandwich. 

The challenge for so many loving and committed couples is in keeping desire, attraction, passion, and presence in their sex lives.

It can feel like your sex drive is betraying your heart. You wish that you could be consumed with mad attraction for the person you love, and yet all too often, familiarity actually kills libido. You might even begin to feel shame around the simple truth that you are often more sexually aroused by thoughts of complete strangers than thoughts of the person who is so dear to your heart.

Yet it would be naive, or worse, self-deceptive, to not acknowledge that this is the way humans are built, and in absence of some intentional action on your part, this is likely the way your relationships will evolve.

A big part of the problem is that most people define "making love" simply as "sex with someone you love."

The danger with that definition is that it assumes that love is passively to be enjoyed during sex, rather than something that you DO.

However, if you examine the phrase "making love," you might notice that it is not grammatically passive. There is a powerful action term in there. "Making" is creating -- perhaps the most demanding of all actions. One can watch, listen, or even walk quite passively, but making or creating requires attention, intention, and presence.

In my definition, making love is in doing the work of surrendering the mind (or the ego) in service of relating. It is being present with your shared desire rather than being wrapped up in your unconnected mental or emotional experience.

One of the unexpected consequences of this definition is that it is possible to engage in profound love-making with a total stranger in a didn't-even-catch-your-name one-night-stand.

Being "in love" is not required for "making love." Rather, what is required is an openness to love itself and a willingness to "do love" by being present. Further, it is often easier for some individuals to do this with a relative stranger than with someone they deeply love and respect, with whom they have shared many of life's trials and rewards, and with whom they've developed a deep and trusting relationship.

There are two reasons for this counterintuitive experience:

The first is that for a couple who have not practiced and worked at "doing love" while "making love" throughout their relationship, the path to being truly present with each other during sex becomes overgrown with all of the accumulated disappointments, minor betrayals, grudges, wrong-makings, and resentments of the years living together as partners in the business of life.

Eventually, for many couples, they wake up one day to discover that their life partner is the single most threatening person in the world for them to become sexually vulnerable, present, and real with.

Their partner is the person they are most likely to feel judged by, and the person they most fear judgment from. There is simply too much at stake.

Read the rest of this post at Reality Sandwich. 

Alex Allman will be a guest on the Evolver Intensives course " From Sex to Super-Consciousness: The Future of Love ." For this live, interactive video course, host Adam Gilad has assembled 7 remarkable experts on the ways that sensuality and intimacy provide an ecstatic path to profound spiritual experience. Joining Alex will be Annie Lalla, Sera Beak, Michael Mirdad, Marc Gafni, Carol Queen and Reid Mihalko. It all starts on February 10.  

Photo by Camdiluv ♥, licensed under Creative Commons. 

This article originally appeared at Reality Sandwich. 

Razzle, dazzle, drazzle, drone, time for this one to come home 

Razzle, dazzle, drazzle, die, time for this one to come alive 

And hold my life until I'm ready to use it 

Hold my life because I just might lose it
Because I just might lose it  

--from Paul Westerberg's Hold My Life


An essay I've recently published in Reality Sandwich, "An Esoteric Take on The Big Lebowski," has been very well received. There are a few works out there, be they novels, movies or even pieces of music, that manage to make the esoteric, exoteric. Such works rarely surface, though, because the shallow machinery of the publishing, movie and music industry is mostly allergic to them. As I was re-reading Lin Yutang's masterwork, The Importance of Living, I found so many passages that seem custom-made for the Dude that I thought it might be fun to explore the points of departure and arrival of both works, in tandem. To do that, I need to start from the not-so-distant premises that prompted Lin Yutang himself, back in 1937, to write his book.

Even today, despite the West having gone through an unprecedented process of secularization, the numbers are staggering: there are 2.1 billion Christians worldwide; 1.6 billion Muslims; about 900 million Hinduists; and 350 million Buddhists. Therefore, almost 5 billion people follow the four largest religions, which have one common trait -- they are life-renouncing.

In a nutshell, the Abrahamic religions -- Judaism, Christianity, Islam -- see life as a period of probation in which man, by acting virtuously according to the doctrine set out by each religion, will earn for himself a place in heaven. The focus, therefore, is on the afterlife. Life on earth is a series of tests that must be passed and temptations that must be resisted. Again in a nutshell, Hinduism and Buddhism, the two major Indian religions, are similar in that both hold that life is suffering and the only way out is freedom from the endless chain of reincarnations. The ultimate goal of life, referred to as moksha and nirvana respectively, consists of liberating oneself from samsara, thus ending the cycle of rebirth. Union with God can then be attained.

Recently an old friend of mine, for years a convert to Buddhism, suffered an aortic dissection, a life-threatening tear in the aorta that I am familiar with because my father died of it. When he began to feel sick a friend who was with him, a medical doctor, rushed him to a hospital, where he was operated on within minutes. For days his life hanged by a thread in the ICU. His anguished wife, back at home, organized reunions with fellow Buddhists who would pray and chant together for him to be spared and then recover. As I followed from a continent away, my heart went out to him and his family and friends, but in the back of mind I couldn't stop hearing a nagging voice. It asked: "What business do Buddhists have in asking to prolong one's life?" It was incongruous. The followers of the most life-renouncing religion known to mankind were fervently praying for this one man to cling to life. Mercifully, the surgery was successful and my friend pulled through, but I still wonder if his Buddhist wife and friends behaved consistently with Buddhism?

Of course they didn't, and this incident is meant to make a point: almost five billion people living on this drinkable, edible, and breathable planet of ours follow religions that, I fear, go against our nature. Normally, we want to live, not to let go of life. It is only natural, so natural, in fact, that it seems very strange that this would need to be stated in the first place.
Lin Yutang's world was less populous than ours, but in proportion more religious yet, especially in the West. Back in his day some pioneers were exploring the "occult", that more than vague definition that has been since subdivided into many fields: the Royal Art, Alchemy, parapsychology, extrasensory perception, dream interpretation, lucid dreaming, out-of-body and near-death experiences, not to mention humanity's penchant for the most varied psychoactive substances in the hope that altered states will lead in the exploration of parallel or otherworldly realities. From all this and the four major life-renouncing religions I'm bound to infer that by and large we don't like our lot on earth. Lin Yutang started from the same premise.

Like early man, do we envy the birds for being able to fly? The fish for being able to breathe under water? Cats for seeing in semidarkness? The list goes on and on: from a physical standpoint, we're inferior to so many species. But not to worry, modern man has come up with a number of flying contraptions, scuba diving equipment, night vision goggles, and many other gadgets that mimic the abilities of more physically gifted species. And yet the premise stands: either our adherence to a life-renouncing religion, or, more recently on a large scale, our multifarious attempts at transcending our very nature and condition. 

That we feel distinctly uncomfortable in our own skin is not a supposition but a statement of fact. Do we feel so chokingly uncomfortable because the first time we realize that, sooner or later, we are doomed to die, our natural impulse is to cry? My wife and I have witnessed this reaction in two of our three boys. When, around five years of age, they understood that life doesn't last forever, they cried inconsolably, out of disbelief, then anger, finally fear. This tragic cognizance we carry inside ourselves for our whole life. It's our congenital memento mori, which kicks in the moment the concept of time ceases to be a present-tense continuum, as it is during early childhood, and becomes one of duration, with a precise beginning and end.

For the materialists, those not interested in religions or attempts at transcending human nature, there are the following bits of ancient wisdom: Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius's "Live each day as if it were your last;" the ancient Roman poet Horace's Carpe diem, seize the day, which was reprised during the Renaissance by Lorenzo De' Medici in his famous poem Canzona di Bacco, Bacchus Song, which begins: "Youth is sweet and well / But does speed away! / Let who will be gay, / Tomorrow, no one can tell;" even the ancient Chinese proverb: "Enjoy yourself; it's later than you think." Many agnostics, atheists, and skeptics have no better guideline than this to live by, and accordingly try to feast on life, which, they perceive, is "here today, gone tomorrow." 

Lin Yutang offers an approach that goes beyond life-renouncing religions, daring transcendental explorations, and clichés such as enjoy yourself, it's later than you think. One thing was clear to him as it must be to so many of us: being alive, living, matters. The Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke suggests why in the ninth of his Duino Elegies, written between 1912 and 1922, and excerpted here in the translation of A. Poulin, Jr. To the question, "Why, then, do we have to be human and, avoiding fate, long for fate?" the poet replies: "Because being here means so much, and because all / that's here, vanishing so quickly, seems to need us / and strangely concerns us." And a few lines down: "To have been on earth just once -- that's irrevocable."

How are we to celebrate, then, the plain yet miraculous reality of being alive? The poet surprises with "Praise the world to the angel, not what can't be talked about. / You can't impress him with your grand emotions. In the cosmos / where he so intensely feels, you're just a novice. So show / him some simple thing shaped for generation after generation / until it lives in our hands and in our eyes, and it's ours. Tell him about things. He'll stand amazed (...)"

So there it is, straight from the pen of one of the most mystical poets in western literature: an exhortation to speak to the angel not about grand emotions but about the world, about things. Some years after Rilke finished his elegies, Lin Yutang wrote in The Importance of Living: "As for philosophy, which is the exercise of the spirit par excellence, the danger is even greater that we lose the feeling of life itself. I can understand that such mental delights include the solution of a long mathematical equation, or the perception of a grand order in the universe. This perception of order is probably the purest of all our mental pleasures and yet I would exchange it for a well prepared meal." Years ago, when I first read this passage, I laughed out loud. It was liberating. But where is Lin Yutang coming from? In another book of his, The Wisdom of China, he remarks: "The Chinese philosopher is like a swimmer who dives but must soon come up to the surface again; the Western philosopher is like a swimmer who dives into the water and is proud that he never comes up to the surface again."

I'd tend to agree, but there probably is a linguistic reason for this. The Chinese never developed a proper alphabet, but rather ideograms, or Sinograms, or better yet, Han characters. The Kangxi Dictionary contains the astonishing number of 47,035 characters. Compared to the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet, the 23 of Classical Latin and the 30 of the German alphabet, it's evident that writing and reading in Mandarin is an effort in itself, which explains the emphasis placed by Chinese on calligraphy.

Ancient Greek, Latin and German have been used by most of the greatest philosophers of the western tradition, with Latin being the lingua franca of European scholars for centuries. Inevitably, intellectuals would be tempted to play around with words -- and they did! Western philosophy is immensely more voluminous than its Chinese counterpart, but its value should always have been considered from an historical perspective. No one in his right mind should have argued over, say, St. Thomas Aquinas's five proofs of the existence of God -- but that went on for centuries. The history of Western (theoretical/discursive) philosophy ought to have been read like the history of architecture: philosopher so-and-so built that castle in the air, while his opponent built this other castle. Western philosophy should be appreciated aesthetically rather than intrinsically.

Again in The Wisdom of China, Lin Yutang writes: "The Chinese can ask . . ., ‘Does the West have a philosophy?' The answer is also clearly ‘No.' . . . The Western man has tons of philosophy written by French, German, English, and American professors, but still he hasn't got a philosophy when he wants it. In fact, he seldom wants it. There are professors of philosophy, but there are no philosophers."

So, what exactly does Lin Yutang prescribe as a philosophy of life? And how does the Dude, our hero (I haven't forgotten him), happen to behave in accordance with so many of the philosopher's ideas?

Read the rest of this article at Reality Sandwich. 

Image by Sleeper Cell, licensed under  Creative Commons.