WHO (World Health Organization) has just declared that the Swine Flu (H1N1) has reached pandemic proportions¹. This means that health experts believe that it is now an unstoppable virus. This new virus can be transmitted from human to human and causes influenza and the symptoms related to it.

Many are very worried that this will kill many people, cause global panic, and economic downturns. With this in mind, we hope that this article will shed some light on possible preventions and how you can fight back so that you don’t feel so powerless in this coming storm.

First and foremost, please don’t panic. Things are not nearly as bad as they might seem. The symptoms of this flu are not as severe as you might believe; most healthy people that get it have reported that it feels like a very intense flu. The reports indicate that most healthy people are knocked off their feet for a couple of days when they are first infected, which can be intense, with headaches, nausea, and fatigue. These symptoms usually go away after a few days and are followed by coughing, nasal congestion, soreness of throat, vomiting, and headaches.

Most people have very little to fear from this current version of the Swine Flu. Whether you are old or young, you can easily overcome this flu by being smart and taking good care of yourself. In the Northern Hemisphere we are deep into spring which brings with it Hay Fever or Rhinitis (as it is known medically); many who suffer from these extremely common symptoms might think that they have been infected by the H1N1 virus. Please don’t jump to quick conclusions and stay positive.

Do go see your doctor if you experience any heavy symptoms as mentioned. But also take cold/flu and allergen medication like normal.  The worst that can happen is that people begin to panic and act irrationally, endangering themselves and the lives of others. It has been reported for example that Argentina has brought its emergency health services to the brink of collapse due to panic. As thousands rushed to hospitals fearing the worst, the Buenos Aires medical centers have received a massive blow that makes treating actual patients nearly impossible. It has been also reported that people began stoning a bus because they believed that it contained a person infected with Swine Flu ². This is definitely what you want to avoid doing.

Do take all of the precautions that you can:

•    Buy some hand sanitizer with large alcohol content and use it on a regular basis. Use it after you get home from work and whenever you have been in public, especially after touching things like public door handles or using ATM machines. Or wash your hands on a regular basis, with good soap and making sure to scrub for a good minute.
•    Keep a stock of simple surgical face masks. If things do get bad in your area, like they did in Mexico City for example, these handy little masks can give you good protection from air-born viruses. Recycle them on a regular basis, making sure to bag and throw away used masks properly.
•    Stock up on some household supplies: Water, food, toiletries, batteries, etc. Nothing crazy, a good three week supply would be perfect. The biggest threat is a panic or a governmental shut down of public works, like Mexico, which will mean that access to supplies, might be limited.

The WHO has asked that the immunization campaign be speeded up and it is believed that this can begin as early as September. Until then there are some medical and some natural medicines that you can use to help yourself:

A.    Number one on the medical list is Oseltamivir (Tamiflu) which seems to provide some resistance to the H1N1 virus. You can also use Zanamivir (Relenza) which can also help. Most developed nations have a large supply of these medical agents and a visit to the doctor will allow you access to these.
B.    If you don’t have access to the above or are inclined to take more natural cures, then we recommend the following:
•    Garlic; this is an amazing herb that has been used for thousands of years to fight off just about anything. Get the real stuff, not pills, and take up to twelve cloves a day if necessary.
•    Juniper
•    Lemon Balm
•    Tannic Acid; Pine trees (Pine needle tea) or really concentrated tea are great sources of this.
•    Oregano Oil; Fantastic stuff. Will kill just about anything. Make sure that you get some with the highest carvacrol concentration possible. A few drops under the tongue twice a day is all you need.
•    Spicy food; do you think that it’s a coincidence that spicy food is popular in all countries that have hot tropical weather? Food that is spicy, with high concentrations of hot peppers, will kill most intestinal bacteria.

All of the natural stuff can be gotten at a grocery store or a health store. Get one or all of these if you like and you will be well prepared. Do some research on your own or ask a person at a health store and they will give you plenty of information. There are other herbs out there that can help but these are the only ones that I am willing to bet on.

Finally stay positive. Many health studies have reported that there is nothing more powerful than a positive mental attitude. Use visualization and relaxation to fight off those nasty little viruses. Know that you are healthy and that you will stay that way, and you will be surprised by the results.

1.     http://www.who.int

2.    news.yahoo.com 200611

Are you one of those really shy types? The kind of person that just can’t seem to bring himself/herself to talk to a new person or group? Perhaps you are a bit of a wallflower and it all has to do with the fact that you just can’t get the courage to go up to that interesting/hot person that you have been dying to meet.

Actually I think that most of us suffer from shyness to one degree or another. You can remember back to the days of the old school dances when you were a kid and how it was so hard to do anything because all the kids were clumped together for protection likes schools of fish, and there was no way that you were going to cross the entire gym floor, and face the scrutiny of the other kids to ask somebody to dance.

It’s possible that this is where mean comes from; all the kids trying to protect themselves from all of the perceived evil out there. They clump into little groups that lash out at others so that they can rally against their own internal fears.  A fear born of shyness?

But there is one simple cure to the shy bug and it doesn’t take much effort. All you have to do is to learn to refocus your attention a bit so that you’re not so focused on that which is scaring you silly at the moment.

This technique is not going to fix the world woes and it won’t end the evil predation that goes on in most school environments but it can allow you to do those things that you found socially impossible before. If you know what you are doing and you have made up your mind that you will be going to put yourself in a very socially difficult situation, or you are going up to that very hot person and break the ice, then I have just the little bit of help that might make that incredibly fearful moment a lot easier to bear.

This technique actually won’t just allow you to do the impossible, it will also help you so that you will be less clumsy and a lot more dashing. The basic premise as I have stated is that you will be focusing some of your attention on something besides the act of the moment and in this way allow yourself to relax and to act in much more capable manner.

What I want you to do is to focus your attention on your thumb.  Just as you feel the pangs of fear that come from your upcoming social interaction, I want you to begin to make an effort to focus less on that event and more on your thumb. Focus your attention on your thumb.

We could use percentages; for example I want you to focus about 20% of your attention on your thumb and the rest on your social interaction. If you find that you are still a bit nervous, I want you to increase the focus to your thumb to 35%. The less that you focus on the social interaction that you are involved in, then less that you will worry and the less fear and nervousness that you will feel.

Trust that your body will carry on without your intense focus and that it will in a sort of automatic pilot like way do all the things that need to be done and it will say all that  you need to say. This will help you if you are one of those people that gets those terrible nervous shakes. Just trust in yourself and keep your focus on that magical thumb. It will be up to you to regulate how much focus you wish to give to your thumb and how much focus you want to give to the interaction that you are having.

Of course you don’t have to focus on your thumb. Any part of your anatomy works pretty good; just try to make it an outer extremity. I like the thumb because if you are having trouble focusing on it, you can grab it with your other fingers and hold on to it, this helps your attention and your focus. Don’t panic and squeeze your thumb though, just Hold on to it lightly, since this is all the help that you need with your focus. Definitely don’t squeeze tightly because this will be a sure sign to others that you are nervous, and  you might end up hurting yourself. If you want, the feet are an awesome thing to focus on instead of the thumb.

As a rule of thumb :), I would recommend that you focus about 20% of your attention on your on the extremity of choice and then increase the percentage of focus until you are feeling comfortable. Never go to over 50% focus on the extremities though as this might not allow you to focus enough on the social interaction; you don’t want to start babbling or all the sudden start looking at your thumb or feet for no apparent reason. Play with it as you see fit and try using the idea of giving your focus percentages so you can stay clear as to how much you are focusing on any one thing.

Next time you find yourself in a difficult situation, just focus your attention as outlined above and you won’t have any more problems with shyness or nervous anxiety.

We all have huge amounts of stuff running through our heads all the time. If we are not thinking about what just happened then we are thinking about what we are going to do.  Our brains are constantly jabbering away about one thing or another and try as we might, there seems to be no way to stop this incessant noise.

Internal dialogue as it is commonly called, can bring all sorts of grief, and is the little evil voice that seems to bring us nothing but misery. What all meditative practices are really out to accomplish is to bring this nonstop dialogue under control.

The reason is that it is this dialogue that creates the boundaries that shape your reality and your world. This internal dialogue keeps you focused on the dumb things when you are unhappy and screams in your ear that you can’t do something, that people hate you, that you are an idiot or whatever. Sometimes of course this voice goes on about how great you are and tells you that you are doing great and things are only getting better. Unfortunately it seems that for most of us, that dialogue of ours is usually quite negative and for the most part it’s more of a hindrance than any kind of help.

Some types of meditative practices and new age exercises focus on trying to wrangle this internal dialogue so that you can become ‘more positive’. Really the whole positive movement is the act of trying to turn this voice into your ally so that you can reap the benefits of a supportive internal talk. But more often than not, the little voice goes back to the doom and gloom and no amount of will power can win out over our little talkative devil.

A better approach to this problem and one that will help you far more in the long run, is to just stop the internal dialogue for a while. You can’t walk around without thoughts in your head, unless you are Paris Hilton of course, or else you are going to get into deep trouble. But what you can do is to stop your internal dialogue for a while so that you give yourself a rest from yourself and all of the worries and anxieties that the little voice brings your way.

The best way to do this is to just stop talking and start listening. Just listen; don’t try any mysterious posture or mantra, no need to learn the 56 ways of yogic breathing. All you need to do is to listen to all of the things around you. Engage your hearing and begin to pay attention to all of the sounds around you.

The act of listening is very special because for some odd reason it can stop the internal dialogue that you are engaged in right now. As you listen to all of the things in your environment, you will notice that the voices in your head have stopped, and the more that you can focus on what you hear, the easier it will be for you to let go of the incessant part of yourself that insist on thinking and talking about everything.

If you happen to catch your little voice going on about something, it just means that you lost the focus on paying attention to listening; all you have to do is to once again begin to pay attention to all of the noises around you. Of course if you are able to get back to nature, this exercise becomes pretty easy because there are so many beautiful sounds to pay attention to when you get out there.

But even if you find yourself in a crowded city, make it a point to stop and to listen to the world around you for at least fifteen minutes every day. The longer that you can go on just listening and nothing else, the easier it will be to let go to your internal dialogue.  And in very short order you will find that the relief from your internal talk will remove a lot of the misery and crap that is going on in your life right now.

The world without thought, which you can attain trough listening meditation, opens up a number of wonderful benefits and possibilities. Perhaps in future articles we can discuss some of these.

We have all experienced traumatic events. These events are a natural part of life on earth. I suppose you could say that the act of walking presupposes that you will fall down every once in a while.

Some of us though, perhaps not as lucky as others, have encounter personal trauma that has left incredibly deep scars. These traumatic events, whether they are a personal loss or abuse for example, can leave scars so deep that it becomes almost impossible to carry on with our lives in the same way again.

People that are plagued by traumatic events in their past, can find that the smallest thing might bring about a full memory recall of this past hurt. Like a taped video in their minds, any number of things can cause the brain to hit play on this old recording and the victim is forced to live through his old trauma again and again, all in full spectrum color and surround sound.

What is most debilitating is that these personal events or trauma can stop a person from doing normal things; perhaps you were walking down the street at night after a party and for no apparent reason, a man attacked you. From that moment on, you find that you can’t be alone much less go for a walk at night. A person suffering from such trauma would find that they have lost all their freedom and no longer trust others in any way.

What a person in this situation needs to do is to learn as much as possible from this past event and then learn somehow to move past this disability so that he/she can once again begin to live a normal life.  Much easier said than done of course but I hope that the following helps:

•    Anything that has happened to you or will happen to you is not your fault and even if it was directly your fault, then it was a mistake and we  all make mistakes.
•    No one is perfect, we all fall down.
•    There are no guaranties and what happened once might happen again but we can learn from those things in our past so that if similar things arise, we are prepared and forewarned.

To begin to understand those traumatic events that have happened to you, you need to be able to see the experience that caused your trauma in the most objective way possible. This of course can be incredibly difficult since the real power of these old traumatic memories is the intensity, fear, and pain that they provoke.
But we must understand the cause of our failures or else we are doomed to repeat these failures for the rest of our lives;
Begin by sitting or lying down in a nice quiet room where you are sure that you won’t be disturbed for a while. Close your eyes and imagine in your mind’s eye that you are seated on a nice comfortable couch in a nice living room. This place does not have to be a real place of any kind; just make it a nice cozy living room in your mind. In front of you, as you are seated in this incredibly soft couch, there is a large television and in your hand you hold the remote control to this television.

This television can broadcast anything that you want it to, but what you are going to have it project, is the old traumatic event from your past. So get comfortable and take a deep breath and when you are ready, hit the power button on the remote. The tv will instantly start broadcasting the event that you must relive. But realize that this event is happening only in this tv, you are completely detached from it and your are holding the remote so that at anytime that you choose, you can either turn off the tv, fast forward or hit pause so that the event stops instantly.

You are not in the event but you are watching yourself partaking in this event. It’s just as if someone had secretly recorded this event on a video camera and you are now watching this video.

If you think that this event, even on a television screen, which is totally detached from you becomes too much, I want you to take a real close look at the remote; on it there is a button that has the letters BW on it. If you press this button, you will notice that the movie that you are watching instantly turns into a black and white show.
Not only are you watching a detached you perform on the screen, this movie is now black and white. So in this way, continue to watch and objectively see all that happened to you. Look at the actors on the tv and try and see what it was that led them all to this event. What happened to the protagonist of the show(namely you)? what led this protagonist to this place?

Could he/she have avoided what is happening? Is there a mistake that he/she made? How could the protagonist avoid this from happening in the future? If there was nothing that the protagonist could have done to avoid his/her fate, is there a way that he/she can help others so that it never happens to those that he/she cares most for?

Keep watching the video. Hit repeat and watch it again and see if it has the same intense effect on you? If it does, then turn down the volume on the show so that you can barely hear it. If that helps but not enough, I want you to look at the remote in your hands again so that you become aware of another button on it that you had not noticed before. This button has the letter B on it. If you hit this button, you will notice that the television in front of you will actually start to move backwards. The wall behind it will actually open up and the tv will begin to move away from you so that it becomes harder and harder to see it as it gets further and further away.

If you keep hitting the B button, the television will actually go so far back that it will actually disappear from sight.

When you are done with this, open your eyes and return to your real world. Hopefully you will have learnt many things about yourself and hopefully you will be armed with ways in which you can help yourself and others so that what happened to you will never have to happen again.

If you find that you are still feeling all of the trauma and pain just like before, redo the above exercise. Return to the living room in your mind and use your remote control  to remove the color, the sound and finally to move the tv back and away from you until it disappears from your site.

The more that you do this, the more that you will find that painful past events will lose their hold and power over you.  I hope that this will help you to end any trauma that you might have, forever.

Have noticed that the world seems to be getting freakier; The American Presidential race is incredibly odd this time around. You have one candidate that is doing everything to emulate the great JFK himself and he even seems to be making his wife dress like Jackie. He has a name that is derived from a word that means blessing in many languages but, to those in the know, it means a man in black who would beguile you with his tongue (just before he takes you straight to hell by the way). While the other candidate is an ex-POW that might have left a part of himself in the jungles of Vietnam.Spooky.

The mighty CERN has powered up and we have particles smashing into each other with a power and potency that rivals the supposed Big Bang. Many a scientist in that project has received death threats and most people fear that CERN will do too good a job, and turn our planet into the Big Bang.

Well, fear of CERN might be a bit presumptuous but people have a right to wonder and doubt. I have one word about that; Tunguska.

The stock markets have just gone belly up for the umpteenth time this year and the American government has announced that it will bail out a number of lending institutions in an effort to save its, and the world’s economy.Americans have been borrowing money on bad credit for decades now and the shoe finally dropped. Whether you should blame those late night, “ no money down”, commercials or George Bush’s lack of an exit strategy in Iraq is any ones guess. One thing is for sure, somebody has to penny up and take responsibility for the lack of forward thinking and its not going to be the bankers.

Terrence Mckenna proposed, using his model of the I-ching, that the world after 2008 would get very weird indeed, and a number of authors and visionaries have postulated a possible quantum shift in the beginning of this century. The Mayan calendar as we all know ends this 2012 and probabilities as we approach this date seem to be increasing. Probabilities are possibilities and new things are very scary indeed.

To think that evolution has stopped is silly and a child’s dream and to think that when the rapture comes, you will be one of those that will be saved is just as silly. Things are getting weird. The world is freaking me out and I don’t think that I am alone. Or I am just caught in a belief system and a reality structure that makes me think that. Most likely everything is just B.S. You decide.

I do propose one thing though; maybe we should all look within ourselves a little more. Maybe we should look inward as much as we look out at this crazy world.

This site is our version of the great door in. Enjoy and ride and in the famous words of Dorothy and her cool canine pal,” Toto, I don’t think that we are in Kansas anymore.”

The world is changing very rapidly. We are being bombarded by new bits of information everyday, at a rate that would have driven our ancestors insane. TIME has just made YOU, that’s you and me and everybody else, person of the year. YouTube has created a universe that we might not have pondered just a few short years ago, and who knows what is on the horizon in the years to come.

Information, information everywhere! Introspection, self absorption, personal development, self motivation, personal growth, and internal development. The World Wide Web has opened our eyes to things that would make a demon’s toes curl. You can watch Saddam being murdered or you can watch the miracle of a new birth. You could buy a book on anything that you might wish to know about…That’s anything! What a miracle, or are we doomed because we live in such interesting times?

As any decent Taoist would tell you, all things are made of positive and negative furies. There is a positive and negative to all of this information overload; the positive is that we live in a time where many of the mysteries of our universe are being revealed to us, a time when we have more potential then we have ever had before. The negative is that we have too much information, and a big majority of it is BS, or worse yet, partially BS.

This Site will help you with what we see as some of the most negative aspects of our information age. Firstly it is a central bank of varied and helpful information. Here you will find information on all aspects of self development, information on self gratification, and information that will allow you to appreciate the vastness and the mystery of the world at large.

Secondly it is a BS free Zone. Now, all things are relative and what might be truth to a Christian might be BS to an atheist. But there is a big difference between Belief System and BullShit, I hope that this Site will also help you see the difference in that.

Look, enjoy, mark as favorite. It will take time to go through all of the information contained here. Just think of this site as a refuge and a coach

In an earlier article I introduced you to a method that would show you How to Beat Insomnia. This article introduces you to the method of keeping completely still in order to willfully put yourself to sleep.

This article will focus on the same technique but the outcome this time will be slightly different. I am going to teach you a very simple method that you can use to attain deep meditative levels. Essentially it is a method that you can use to get almost asleep and in this way be able to attain a greater understanding of your psyche and your subjective reality.

This meditative technique is incredibly simple and if it is done with diligence, it can open up incredible new vistas for you. These vistas that I speak of are inner ones; I hope that through this method you will begin to realize the depth of your inner reality, a reality that exists all the time even while you are wide awake.

This is such a simple way of meditating that there is no reason why you can’t put it into practice right now. It will require only one thing : Will Power. But even this is the simplest of things. It is so simple and so natural as a matter of fact that that you could actually say that it’s not really doing anything at all.

To begin, I want you to take a very comfortable sitting position. You must be seated to do this meditation because there is a natural tendency to want to fall asleep and this is not the goal that you are after now.

Therefore take a seat perhaps in a very comfortable chair or you can sit cross legged as you prefer. I personally recommend reading the article on how to sit properly. The reason is that as I said there will be a natural tendency to start falling asleep so you will want to sit in a way that will allow you to sit for a long time with minimal or no physical effort at all. You will see what I mean when you start to nod off or when your back start to bow and you lose your posture.

Once you have a good seat and you are confident that you can stay seated like this for a long time, I want you to completely stop moving. This is the basic core of this meditative technique; you need to sit for fifteen minutes to half an hour without moving in the slightest.

You must keep your physical body completely immobile. If you get an itch, you can’t scratch it. If parts of you start to fall asleep from lack of blood or discomfort, you can’t move them. Your body must become a statue just not a tense rigid one. This is why I advised you to find a very comfortable sitting posture; a posture that you don’t have to hold but a posture that is quite comfortable that requires little or no effort from you at all.
If you can stay completely immobile for fifteen minutes to half an hour, you will have helped yourself immensely because this exercise takes will power. To train your will is one of the greatest, if not the greatest things that you can do for yourself. It might actually be good for you to get an itch just so that you can see if you have the will power to go for the allotted amount of time without scratching it.

Try to increase the amount of time that you can go without moving. As I said, you can begin with fifteen minutes but see if you can increase this to half an hour, then forty five minutes and so on.

But we are not done…
What is your mind supposed to be doing all this time you might ask?

Well let your mind do whatever it wants. Do not try to do anything. Do not focus on anything. Do not focus on the here and now, do not focus on your breathing or any imagine. Do not focus. Let your mind do whatever it wants and think about whatever comes to mind.

The only thing that you have to do, is to BE AWARE of whatever it is that you are thinking about. Whether it is good or bad, whether it is pleasurable or painful; pay attention to what you are thinking about. Let your thoughts flow on their own and watch them as they interconnect and link together. Perhaps ponder what they might mean or follow a line of thought and see if you can use this time to solve some problems but DO NOT MOVE.

Eventually you might notice that you moved. You might suddenly and involuntarily jerk in place from the surprise, but once you regain your external senses, you will realize that you had not moved at all and what you thought was physical movement, was actually internal. That is you moved subjectively in a daydream but your body was perfectly still (unless your jerked in place before in surprise). If you begin to explore these feelings of subjective movement, you might begin to understand how your consciousness can move without moving. Experiment with this.

Because your body is so completely still, you will be able to focus all of your attention on your thoughts and your subjective experience. Your subjective reality is the window to your psyche and by exploring and understanding the thoughts, ideas and emotions that fill your head; you will begin to understand yourself.

The exploration of your inner environment is actually the exploration of your outer one. Perhaps it is better to say that your outer environment is colored by the makeup of your inner reality. In order to understand who you are and where you find yourself, you will need to focus on what you are inside.

Practice, practice, practice; doing this bit of nothing and I guarantee you that you will find a world that you never thought existed through the power of Inner Space Meditation.