Light Times

My Merry Christmas/Happy Hanukkah Gift to You: Hope for the Future of the Sea! by Tina Erwin

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 19:24:00 +0000

Dear Friends,

This is the last blog that will come out using the RSS feed from this Light Times blog. I have migrated my blog to my newly revamped website: http://tinaerwin.com/wp/light-times-blog/

If you want to read the blog below with the photographs that go with it, then go ahead and go to the new website, now.

If you would like to continue to receive these blogs automatically, please send your email to: Tina@TinaErwin.com Then you will be added to an automatic mailing list if you are not already on it. Thank you!

This is supposed to be the season of hope, but all too often it is, at the least, the season of stress and at the worst, the season of depression, grief and despair. But it doesn't have to be. If we look around us, we are going to see innumerable acts of kindness, gentle faces with easy smiles and catch a look at a proud parent, or the delighted smiles of a happy grandparent. Perhaps we expect these things. This season is not only for children.

What we don’t expect is to see something that gives us hope for tomorrow. Despite the commercialism of this time of year, there are ways that we can give back, not merely to each other, but to the Earth itself. Christ’s message was not merely that of resurrection and life everlasting, it was the hope of the inherent goodness of each person, and their desire to make the world a better place for all of us. Hanukkah is about continuing to see the light in the darkness and hoping for brighter times.

If we look around us, we see how we, as the human species, have contaminated the planet. My focus is how we have polluted the oceans on levels that should sicken all of us. This does not mean that we have consciously dumped plastic in among the sea life. Tsunamis, earthquakes, typhoons, hurricanes, shipwrecks and the thoughtless acts of the ships that ply the sea have washed and/or dumped tons of plastics and other debris in the sea.

The world is not flat as was previously thought and by the same token, we have to change our belief that we have no real way to clean up the sickening level of plastic in the oceans of the world. There is a way.

This is really a story of how one person can make a difference and absolutely change the world. That one person is a Boyan Slat from Delft, Holland, and to quote him: “While diving in Greece, I became frustrated when coming across more plastic bags than fish and wondered: ‘why can’t we clean this up?” This young man, at the age of 19 years old, figured out a way to clean the plastic out of the 5 massive islands of swirling plastic on this planet.

But the plastic does not just congregate among these five islands he calls ‘gyres;’ they are all over the world and the concept of cleaning them up looked like an impossibly daunting task. Everyone said it couldn’t be done.

But it can be done.

Boyan came up with a concept of “The Ocean Cleanup Array” and to quote his website: “the Ocean Cleanup Array concept is likely a feasible and viable method to remove almost half the plastic from the North Pacific Garbage patch in 10 years, while being an estimated 7900 times faster and 33 times cheaper than conventional methods.”

So my humble offering to all you is the hope that we can clean this up. Please check out this uplifting story on his website: http://www.theoceancleanup.com/

Participate in some way. Believe that the future can be better than it currently is and that we can each be part of it.

Love to all of you! Tina

Work Life Balance Part 3 by Tina Erwin

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Sun, 20 Jul 2014 22:09:00 +0000

The Challenge of Working from Home
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The Karmic Savings and Loan Chapter 4??: Work-Life Balance: Part 3 The Challenge of Working From Home.

Working from home saves time, gas, and offers the individual a freedom to manage their day. It can be amazing – or it can also be not – so – amazing.

When you work from home, your day can begin at 5:30am so that you can get something done before the phone rings. You can go through all of your email so that you are completely caught up before the day starts.

Once your day starts, you can work through lunch, stopping only for a quick bite to eat. You can work into the darkness and then read email again before you pass out in the wee hours of the morning.

When you work from home, people think you have all the time in the world and they feel freer to impose on your time.

Your family may be confused on what your work hours are and how you handle them because you don’t ‘leave’ and ‘come home.’ Family members may be frustrated that you aren’t giving them more time – after all, your home all day? They may also be far more demanding of your time because they cannot actually see what you do and you don’t leave for an office so they may or may not offer you the respect you deserve from working from home.

You may be the one person who is the most confused of all. Working from home may be the ultimate challenge when it comes to setting boundaries of time management.

You are the CEO of your life here, whether or not you work for someone else. Working from home is perhaps the most challenging work-life balancing act there is.

If you work from home, and you have family members who are at home during the day with you, whether it is a retired spouse, children of any age, it is ultimate test of setting boundaries to insist that your family respect your ‘work’ day.

Here are some tips and tools for managing working from home:

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· Have a beginning and an ending for your day.

· Tell your family what your working hours are.

· End your day no later than 6pm.

· Enjoy business lunches like you would in any off site office setting.

· When you staying home for lunch, stop working. Go to a different room, eat lunch, rest if you must but stop working for a reasonable time, at least an hour.

· If you have family errands to run, then set aside a time to just do those things.

· If you are in the middle of a business phone call, demand, don’t ask, demand that your family respect what you are doing and not interrupt you while you are on the phone.

· Do not let your children answer your business phone. It is unprofessional and it will hurt your business.

· Make sure you can close off your office.

· Do not do email on your phone after working hours.

· Do not have your office in your bedroom because you will be telling your subconscious that your workday never ends. It is also a constant reminder of how much work is left to do. If you worked in a traditional off site office, you wouldn’t be seeing it.

· Keep your office neat.

· When you stop your work day, turn off your computer, turn off your lights and if necessary, close the door.

· Take weekends off. Take holidays off.

· Do not answer business calls on the weekend.

· Do not answer business calls after 6pm Monday through Friday.

· When you are with your family, give them your entire focus.

When you do these things, you will ultimately find that you are more professional, you garner much more respect from your family and your peers will also respect you as a professional. These are the golden keys to work-life balance. It isn’t easy, but you will be physically healthier for the long term and ultimately enjoy your work life and your home life so much more!

Work LIfe Balance Part Two by Tina Erwin

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Sun, 13 Jul 2014 19:17:00 +0000

Email invades our homes. We have it on our work computer, our ipads/tablets, our phones and our home computers. We are tremendously connected, or tethered, or chained or imprisoned – but only if we allow ourselves to be treated this way.

Email may not be the problem. The real issue is boundaries. We need to be able to say no I won’t do this or that. This is my time. Sometimes you have to force other people to respect your time, and your standards of work excellence, and you have to respect yourself.

In a time when so many people are worried about keeping their jobs or having enough money to cover bills, there is a new paradigm that seems to be emerging that demands that our work day never end.

This new paradigm that has slipped into our very bedrooms is making us sick, physically sick. The tension is never turned off. Our bodies never get a day off, to have fun, to laugh out loud, take a hike, sit and veg in front of a good movie or football game.

Our busyness from work has taken over our lives like some creeping mold that is beginning to cover us, overtaking us in our waking and sleeping moments. It’s so subtle, most of us have no idea when or how this even happened, but it did, it’s there.

Perhaps the issue is that we feel that we have all of these timesaving, instant tools that propel us into faster and faster communications scenarios and the expectation is that we will get it done faster and faster until, really, what’s the point? If everything is a fire drill, why care?

The truth is that people cannot be on the professional firing line 24/7 and expect to work at peak efficiency. It’s like never letting a race horse leave the track and then when he does get an hour or two, you only feed him the bare minimum and then you send the poor beast out to run again until he can’t run anymore.

There’s an old Navy saying that there will be no leave until morale improves. The irony is that you need leave, vacation time, days off to be able to come back to work fresh, ready for the week ahead, especially if the work you do doesn’t demand that you are constantly making life and death decisions. So, let’s return to our three scenarios.

Scenario One

The woman who was expected to read her email on Sunday afternoon and show up to an 8am meeting Monday morning may want to take her boss aside and ask for a clarification of working hours. The executive has no need to apologize for missing the email. Work parameters should be clearly defined. She can also tell her boss that she does not work seven days a week and that she does not read email seven days a week, especially on weekends. If there is an emergency, she can ask her boss to please call her. She can also ask that if this is required, will she receive overtime for working over the normal working hours.

This sounds gutsy, but at some point, you have to establish boundaries for yourself, your job, your family and your sanity. Actually, the executive in Scenario One did just that and does not read work email to this day at home. There are also no more ‘flash meetings’ Monday morning. Everyone benefited from one person putting the brakes on insanity, and the constant obsessive control of her boss. Boundaries have to be set and enforced. Also, she didn’t lose her job. She’s still there and now she fully enjoys her weekends.

Scenario Two

You decide to handle the email from this demanding group by keeping it professional. You kindly explain to the boss who hosted the group, on Monday morning, that you have a deep and profound respect for the work-life balance of your entire staff and that none of you read email on Sundays or weekends. You thank him for understanding and promise to get him the edited power point by close of business on Monday. Actually you get it to him by 11am.

The outcome of this true-life situation is that the host of this group was not professional. He never responded to a single email, not the first one, nor the second one where the power point presentation was provided. This man was rude. Perhaps he was miffed that someone stood up to him. Ultimately, it is his loss.

Organizations work with, for and among other organizations, including other companies who may have extremely abusive policies. Each CEO, Manager, Supervisor and Executive has a moral duty to their staff to make sure that no one else abuses their people. People are your most critical resource. It is important that management stand up for them.

Scenario Three

Lets go back to our demanding boss who never takes a moment off and is chronically ill. This is another scenario where it is critical to set your personal boundaries. While it is easy to suggest to all who read this that you have to stand up for yourself and set your boundaries, it is quite another to decide to do this if you are worried about your job. However the bottom line is that you simply cannot keep up the pace of work if you never rest your body.

Ultimately, you won’t be able to keep your job if you are constantly out sick. Remember, if your subconscious thinks that you need time off and you are not taking it, your subconscious will make you sick to ensure you can finally have ‘legally sanctioned’ down time, meaning you get to take a sick day.

It is interesting to note that France has passed a new law that prohibits after-hours emails. Check out this link:

http://beta.slashdot.org/story/200571

Work Life Balance Part One by Tina Erwin

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 19:16:00 +0000

The first time it happens to you, you find yourself a little stunned. How did this happen? When did it change? Did I miss the memo on this? Who decided that this was okay?

Scenario One

You come into work Monday morning and your officemates are not there, they are all in a meeting, a meeting you obviously didn’t know about. You aren’t sure what the meeting is about, but it looks like the entire staff is there and you quietly slip into the back.

When your boss notices you, she embarrasses you by asking you why you didn’t read your email that she sent you. You explain that you didn’t get an email about this meeting on Friday. No, she says, the email I sent out at 4pm yesterday afternoon, you know, Sunday afternoon. Why weren’t you reading your email?

Now you can boldly go where no executive has gone before and observe that you weren’t aware that this organization worked 24/7 or you can mumble a humble apology for missing the meeting.

Leaving the meeting, your officemates look at you like you are a complete failure. What’s wrong with her, you can hear them thinking.

There’s nothing wrong with her! She had no idea she was expected to work seven days a week. There was no memo that discussed office expectations of never having an entire day off.

Scenario Two

You make a presentation to a group on a Saturday. Your entire staff gives up their Saturday to do this special work task that will bring in more business. You have all worked night and day to get this done. The presentation is a wonderful success. Everyone is pleased. Their Saturday workday ends around four. Everyone is exhausted from the tension of the workup and then the successful presentation. You tell everyone to have “a great rest of what’s left of the weekend!”

Monday morning, as you are reading your email, you notice that the Chairman of the group hosting your presentation the previous Saturday, sent out an email at 7am Sunday morning demanding an edited copy of your power point presentation to share with several hundred people. It was due to him before Monday morning.

Your power point will take time to edit, condense, review and then send to him. You had no idea that you were expected to check email all day Sunday, to work all day Sunday, on a serious deadline no less.
You can’t help but ask yourself: why was this such a fire drill? Why was this an emergency?

So, how do you handle this since you have obviously missed his rushed deadline?

Scenario Three

Your boss is tired all the time. She works literally from dawn to dusk and expects everyone else to do the same. She is also sick all the time. She never rests and she sends emails out like there is a quota for how many a person can send and she maxes out that quota every day. She sends them day and night, memo after memo, Saturday, Sunday and holidays. It never ends.

She expects you to read and answer her emails promptly. She has no family, no ties that bind her, only the identity that is her job. She thinks you are a slacker if you aren’t constantly reading and responding to email. Push, Push, Push, get it done.

She’s burning everyone out. Since her day and her week never ends, obviously neither does anyone else’s.

Part two: The devil that is email.

Independence Day by Tina Erwin

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Sun, 29 Jun 2014 18:45:00 +0000

     The Fourth of July is a great summer holiday and there will be lots written about how valuable freedom is to all of us.
    We will hear all about how freedom isn't free. It isn't. We pay for it by the good and bad decisions our elected representatives make.
    The Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights were designed to be the guide through the generations and for generations to come of how to run this country to maintain all of these freedoms that we all hold so dear and for which so many of us have died - again and again. However, not everyone believes this. Some elected officials deny the very rights that we celebrate on the 4th of July. Some elected officials are deliberately putting our country at risk.
   When anyone, including any elected official who wrongly believes that he or she is above the law, seeks to circumvent the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of this country, this person needs to be impeached, removed from office through the correct legal means.
    When anyone, including any elected official who wrongly believes that he or she is above the law seeks to subvert the safety and security of this country, with individuals and governments that wish to destroy these United States and its visitors all over the world, this person and his or her lieutenants, need to be impeached, removed from office through the correct legal means.
      When any elected official seeks to subvert the rights of freedom of speech, denies the truth of situations and lies to the American people and its allies, this person and his or her lieutenants, needs to be impeached, removed from office through the correct legal means.
    When any elected official seeks to destroy the very basis of good order and discipline that define the US military and the safety and security of this country, this person and his or her lieutenants, needs to be impeached, removed from office through the correct legal means.
       American tourists, American personnel working in Embassies, American military personnel and American staffers working for aid agencies all over the globe are now less safe than they have ever been. They have a target on their backs, thanks to the most recent actions taken by elected and non-elected officials. Never in history have Americans been in such a precarious situation put there squarely by those supposedly elected to see to our safety.
All Americans have a duty to stand up and tell their elected representatives how they feel about the most recent actions happening today and demand that those responsible at the highest levels, be removed from office, for they no longer represent the best interests of the American People.
       Either we stand up for freedom or we no longer deserve to enjoy it.
     And yes, sometimes being 'spiritual' means standing up for the right thing and then doing the right thing.

The Second Ghost Story Book is Coming in August!

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Sun, 22 Jun 2014 21:02:00 +0000

Dear Friends,
I am happy to say that Ghost Stories from the Ghosts' Point of View, Trilogy Volume 2 is in the editing phase. Cover design is in progress and we are well on our way to sharing more fascinating stories of assisting ghosts to cross over to the Heaven World.

I have been delighted to hear the stories of how so many of you have used the information in Volume One of these stories that I would like to include your testimonials in Volume Two. I am especially encouraged to know how you have all used The Crossing Over Prayer©.

I am inviting you all to share your testimonials. If you have used The Crossing Over Prayer©, please share what happened. I will be using this information either on the inside of the book, the back cover and possibly in marketing the book.

I so grateful for your help that I will share an advance sneak peak at one of the compelling stories you will read.

I will need your testimonials in the following format:
1. The testimonial needs to be no more than 75 words and it will need to be in Microsoft word as a docx or in an email.
2. Please sign your testimonial using your first initial and last name. 3. Include your state or country.
4. Once submitted, all testimonials become the property of TinaErwin.com
5. I will need them 01 July 2014.

Please email all testimonials to Tina@TinaErwin.com

You never know how much your testimonial can help someone deciding to read or purchase this book. Your words may be the ones that encourage someone to take a chance and see how they can also help those lost and needy souls on the other side find the light of the divine.

Thank you with all my heart. Tina

The Importance of Fathers by Tina Erwin

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Sun, 15 Jun 2014 22:21:00 +0000

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We all know that dads are important, and since there are so many single mom’s out there trying to fulfill both roles perhaps it is a good idea to identify what good dads bring to the family.

A really great dad is a teacher for all his children, offering them the benefit of his wisdom when it comes to people, politics, career guidance, sportsmanship, building things, tools, and life in general.

The dad who just sits in front of the TV and never spends time reading or holding his little kids misses out on an incredible opportunity to teach his children something. When you teach them, it means you are spending time with them. One of my sons noted that some of his happiest times were when he was in the garage working on something with his Dad - the give and take, the patience of learning how tools work. There were the times when they built gigantic lego projects together and the guidance received at those times, enabled our son had to build Lego models on his on as a practice for following written directions.

Dads teach balance in a marriage: doing chores, washing dishes, sharing in the cleaning, yard work and errand running.

         Dads teach consideration when shopping for birthdays, mother’s day and holidays for moms and siblings.
         Dads also teach the importance of evaluating good rules to follow in life. The dad who insists that his son or daughter wear their helmet while bike riding and doesn't wear one himself, teaches the terrible parable: do as I say, not as I do. A seething resentment will eventually result in the child and the seeds of a difficult relationship will follow.
        However, the dad that shops for parent and child helmets shows by his example the importance of safety, of understanding why these helmets are important. This metaphor is critical in a child's life. Kids learn by example as well as by doing.

Dads teach politics when they discuss their jobs with their sons and daughters so that they can understand how the real world functions from a man’s perspective.

Children learn what marriage is like ONLY from watching their parents. Kids will do what their parents do unless they are very, very savvy and can differentiate from what was great about their parents and what required improvement.

Boys learn how to treat women with respect, from watching their dad interact with their mom. If the dad is kind and considerate, then sons learn this. Girls learn how women are to be treated from their dad’s attitude toward their mom. The abusive father creates abusive kids and abusive adults. The disrespectful father creates disrespectful kids. The physically and verbally violent dad creates horrific trauma for kids literally for generations to come.

It is always better to have a single mom family than have a violent family with an abusive dad. The kids never really forgive the mom for continuing to allow the abuse much less the dad for abusing all of them. Why didn’t she just leave him, they ask themselves for the rest of their lives, until they end up in the same type of marriage. It takes quite a bit of courage to leave that life.

So dads are incredibly valuable and families need dads for love and for balance. Families don’t need dads who are never there or who abuse.

Like everything else in human relationships, the father connection is very complicated and incredibly important. Let us hope that more men decide to be really great dads because they are vitally important in everyone’s life.

Time is an Energy Field by Tina Erwin

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Sun, 08 Jun 2014 22:41:00 +0000

Time is multifaceted, multidimensional, and integral to every soul on this planet. We could not live in mortal bodies without time. We require the patience of time and the luxury of physical space in which to experience all the lessons, trials and triumphs of mortal life. The third element required for mortal life after time and space, is gravity. Gravity grounds us, slows us down. Without gravity, we would travel with the speed of thought and everything would happen instantly, essentially, at once. Time, space and gravity offer us the very framework, the template upon which to fashion our mortal life experiences.

It is hard to fathom time but it is probably even harder to imagine time as an energy field. Time is such a part of the nature, fabric and consciousness of our lives that to try to separate it out as an energy field would seem impossible.

However, if we consider that time itself is an energy field, then we can begin to understand how that field affects us. When we are not in physical bodies, time does not exist. When we live on another realm, time, gravity and space do not exist. Gravity and space are fields of energy in and of themselves, and perhaps we can wrap our brains around that fact, but it is much harder to consider time as an energy field because we could no more separate time from the ebb and flow of our days than we could separate the wind from the air. They are each one and the same, yet at the same time they are different.

Fish only know that water is their environment and they use the energy field of time in the form of circadian rhythms. These rhythms govern the seasons of their lives. The time elements for all sea life are literally embedded in their DNA. The DNA can only become operative when living in the energy field of time and space. Water is the environment for fish and this is all they know. Air is our environment and it is what we know, but it is not all we know. We know that we can be in the fish’s environment but we are limited by time. We cannot live comfortably in a water environment because we are severely governed by the amount of time we are there. The same is true of fish. Fish out of water are profoundly limited by time. Literally their survival and ours depends entirely by the amount of time we can spend out of our normal space.

This nuance of understanding time is important because time is also embedded in our DNA. The easiest way to understand time being part of our DNA is that we live various life ‘seasons.’ Some are for growing, or marrying and having children or focusing on a career or doing all of those at the same time. The very timing of those events is part of our DNA. We know this is true, because we hear ourselves say that we “felt it was just the right time to do this or that.”

We also live each mortal life in a particular time period, or stack of time. If we accomplish what we intended to in that stack of time, if we worked through most of our mission, then there is no attachment on our DNA of that past energetic time marker. However, if we lived a life that was unfulfilled, was turbulent, horrific, or particularly wonderful, there is going to be a mark on our DNA. This isn’t good or bad. It just is.

Consider that the loss of the Civil War was so traumatic for the South that there is a whole population of people [mostly men] who continually keep trying to ‘re-enact’ various battles. Of course those re-enactors died in those battles. There is what is called a miasma on the DNA, meaning that this marker is something that still bothers us, is unfinished business, or is a profound hurt unhealed. There can also be a time marker on the DNA of a wonderful life. This is why we try to re-create a life we may have enjoyed in, for example, Italy, France, China or England. Look around our homes. Our most significant lives will be reflected in the art and decor we choose because we remember how much the energy of that time meant to us.

Every thing has an affect on us. Certain energetic fields affect us more than others. Time, however is one of the most profound influences on all of our lives and this will always be so until we no longer are required to reincarnate. When that happens, our spiritual progress will have made mighty strides. Then we will be able to remember the time we lived a mortal life because it will be eternally part of the time stamp of our Akashic records stored in the spiritual hall of records in the Mansion worlds. But wait, there’s more to learn outside of our planet!

The Preception of Memory by Tina Erwin

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Sun, 01 Jun 2014 18:30:00 +0000

Recently my husband was sharing a story of an event that took place in Naples, Italy when we lived there some 37 years ago. He was telling this story with gusto because it was unnerving for him. However for me, the issue wasn’t the story but how he remembered it. I had a somewhat different memory of the event. The point of this story is why we each have such different memories. But let us focus on this one story and then go over why we each remembered one key fact so differently.

In this story, we were returning from a Navy party way out in the country. It took a full 40 minutes to drive back into downtown Naples. We had a top floor apartment on Posillipo hill, right on the bay of Naples. Our apartment overlooked the entire bay of Naples, including Sorrento and the islands of Ischia and Capri. However to get to the final street that would wind us up the mountain to our apartment, we had to drive through a very long tunnel, then turn right, past a traffic circle and then past 12-story apartment buildings that lined both sides of the street.

Normally, as we came out of that tunnel and turned right, we would get our first glimpse of the Bay of Naples, this glorious view tightly wedged between these two 12-story apartment buildings. It was a ‘T’ intersection with a stoplight. Turn left at this intersection and you head for the center of downtown Naples hugging this glorious bay. Turn right and you enter the Mergillina area and begin to head up the mountain on Via Posillipo. Because the mountains that overlook Naples Bay are so populated with gorgeous villas, there is another major road that intersects with Via Posillipo and Mergillina: Via Petrarca.

So here is the scene that should have happened:

We come out of the tunnel,

We turn right toward the stoplight that is 300 yards ahead of us.

The light was green and my husband is accelerating to the light.

We should have flown through the green light and made a slight right turn toward Via Posillipo, past the intersection with Via Petrarca.

But here is what actually happened at 2am in that incredibly memorable moment. It is also important to mention that in 1977, Naples was a ghost town in the middle of the night. We had driven for 35 minutes and had not seen another car anywhere. We felt like we had the city to ourselves, snug in our fast red Fiat MiraFiori. We thought we would be reaching our apartment in a matter of minutes.

But this is what actually happened that fateful night.

We came out of that tunnel.

We turned right toward the stoplight that is 300 yards ahead of us. We can see the slim view of the twinkling lights of the night fishermen ahead of us, and the wine dark sea past that.

But in that astonishing moment, I didn’t see any of that. All I could ‘see/sense’ was that there was something very wrong about racing toward that intersection. The light was green and my husband was accelerating toward that green light. That nagging sense that something was terribly wrong gripped me.

“Troy you have to slow down, slow down now.”

“Are you nuts?” he demanded. “I’ve got a green light.”

“No, SLOW DOWN RIGHT NOW.” I demanded in an ever-louder voice.

“I’m slowing down, but we have the green light? Why should I slow down?”

“Slow down more, hurry, quickly, slow down now! Just do it!” I’m yelling now, as if something has come over me and I can ‘see’ that if we don’t slow down something terrible is going to happen.

Troy applies the brakes more and more and we are now a few feet from driving through that still green light.

“Stop the car!!” I’m screaming at him now. “Stop the car immediately, DO IT.”

And as he brings the car to a full stop, another car comes out of absolutely nowhere utterly ignoring the fact that he has a red light and should stop. But he doesn’t stop, he slows down when he sees us – finally – and then he continues on his way.

Some part of me ‘saw’ him coming. If Troy hadn’t slowed down, we would have been hit and if we hadn’t stopped, we would have killed the man in the other car. Only bringing our car to a complete top saved us both.

As the other car proceeded on, we noted that there was not another car in sight, anywhere, only two cars on a collision course stopped by an unseen feeling that saved us all. Troy pretty much demanded to know in a very loud voice how I could have known that that car was there and how I knew to stop. He freaked out all the way up Posillipo hill.

Needless to say, this was the beginning of a lifetime of remote viewing, because in this case I could ‘see’ past those 12-story apartment buildings to perceive that lone messenger of potential death for us all on the other side of those buildings.

But this isn't the point of the story.

The point of the story is that when Troy is telling the story, he remembers the car coming from the right, down Via Petrarca towards Mergillina. However, I remember the car as coming from the downtown area, coming from the left, not the right.

When Troy told the story I listened and did not correct him. His perception of the event is his alone. I remembered the key element of the story very differently. So who's right?

It doesn’t matter who is right. We see this all the time, especially between couples or family members who are all party to the same event yet have decidedly different recollections of one or more key features of the event. You often hear one spouse or family member immediately correct the other, smugly believing that the other person has to be wrong, that there can only be one correct memory of an event. But what if it is possible for there to be two accurate versions of an event?

Is this why ‘eye witness’ accounts are so routinely suspect? Does our perception of an event color our memory of it? What creates this influence?

I remember an event with both my brothers and my father. It involved a dark colored car. All four of us remembered that the car was dark, but we each specifically remembered a different car color. The cop threw up his hands: if four eye witnesses, standing side by side cannot agree on the color of the car, what is the truth in any situation?

Perhaps the truth is that we each perceive reality slightly differently. This does not make anyone’s perception wrong. It makes it simply their perception and nothing more.

So if you are telling a story and someone corrects you, you have good ground to tell him or her that your version of the story is based on your perception of the moment and is not right or wrong. It’s a perception. Perhaps correcting someone else would also be something that you would want to forgo in the future, especially if you are able to acknowledge and allow that other people are just as equally entitled to their perception as you are.

The Integratron Part 2 by Tina Erwin

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Sun, 25 May 2014 18:03:00 +0000

Acoustic Perfection

My husband is an extremely good sport. I have taken him all over the place, talked him into buying a crystal mine in Arkansas, purchased thousands of crystals and bought jewelry all over the world, so an hour’s retreat with a sound bath must have seemed pretty tame for him.

The Integratron is acoustically perfect in every way. It is an all-wooden structure made without benefit of nails of metal. There is a downstairs entry which is the bottom of the dome. Here you remove your shoes, learn what the directions are and then climb the mostly vertical steps up to the second floor of this Integratron.

Once up there, you find that your mat and pillow have already been laid out for you. Then you lay down. In one slice of the arc space on that floor, are 14 quartz crystal signing bowls perfectly arranged in what appears to be a random order, but nothing here is random, everything here is purposeful. The process begins by listening carefully to the brief directions. They warn you not to snore. I found that rather humorous since once you are that asleep and sawing wood, you are pretty oblivious to the noises your nose and mouth are making.

However, we were given permission to tell the person next to us to top snoring or to at least touch them. They also asked us not to get up and move about, but to be still throughout the entire experience. Please, no cell phone, talking or moving about.

They strongly suggest that you meditate, that you drift into that place of mindfulness and healing.

I own three quartz crystal signing bowls myself. I know how they work. They come in a tremendous range of sizes to correspond to the notes on a harmonic scale and the chakra system in the human body. They are made of pure crushed quartz crystal that is combined with a resin or an epoxy and then specifically shaped into these harmonic sizes.

The bowls are ‘played’ by gently but firmly tapping the outside of the bowl and then caressing or rubbing the side of the bowl with this same rubber-tipped wooden wand. Once the bowls are played, they begin to have a unique and dramatic vibration that seems to penetrate your very soul. The sound is pure, sweet and harmonizing.

Many people are familiar with Tibetan singing bowls, those small metal bowls that sit on colorful silk pillows. Metal singing bowls specifically target the musculoskeletal system while crystal singing bowls directly affect the sensory nervous system. This is probably why you feel so rejuvenated after the experience.

They play the bowls for 25 amazing minutes. The sound is nothing like you can imagine and something I find that I am inadequate to fully describe. The tones penetrate your being, your soul, your mind, heart and the emotional/spiritual basis of your very life. Not bad for a 25 minute session. After the playing session, they have you simply lay there for another 25 minutes absorbing your experience. Then you quietly arise and leave.

Our experience was a little hard to describe. Troy pretty much fell asleep, woke up refreshed as if he had had an extra nourishing nap and had no further description or unique experience.

My experience was completely different. I tried to meditate, really I did, but I found that I was more than mindful of the sound penetrating every cell of my body. In fact, I felt myself pinned to the floor, experienced a tremendous cold wave come over me and could not move even a finger. It was not unlike receiving an acupuncture treatment where you dare not move until the energy has finally settled down in your body. Finally, after the 25 minutes I began to feel warmth return to my body and we made our way out of this magic chamber.

Then we made our way back to 29 Palms and spent the afternoon in Joshua Tree national park and watched the sun set. You can see the San Andreas fault from here. Gorgeous landscape, almost surreal. There are a number of charming bed and breakfast Inn here. We stayed at Roughly Manor. We highly recommend this beautiful place to stay with its private quaint cottages. This is a great get-a-away! Photography by Tina Erwin. All rights reserved.

The Integratron Part 1 by Tina Erwin

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Sun, 18 May 2014 18:01:00 +0000

The Integratron

Several people had told me about this unique place, this place where you could get a sound bath and find that your body was cleared of all kinds of pesky things that come upon you in your day to day life.

So just what is this place, this Inegretron? This is the description they provide in their brochure:

“A fusion of Art, Science and Magic, . . . this world famous, circa 1950’s historic dome is located at an intersection of strong geomagnetic forces in the Mojave Desert. The Integratron’s unique geometry focuses and amplifies sound and energy. Its architect claimed he received the instructions from extraterrestrials and intended its purpose to be rejuvenation and time travel! A one of a kind, all-wood Tabernacle. You can feel it!”

What is a ‘sound bath?’

“The antidote to everyday life,” is how it is described. “The sound bath is a 30-minute sonic healing session in the deeply resonant sound chamber. 14 pure quartz crystal singing bowls keyed harmonically to the body are played live while you recline and relax. Imagine being ‘bathed” in beautiful and powerful sound waves: it’s nutrition for the nervous system. The results are waves of peace, increased balance and awareness, and deep relaxation of the mind and body. It’s kindergarten naptime of the third kind!”

So my husband and I decided to visit this Integratron, this sound bath chamber located in absolutely the middle of nowhere in Landers, California. We wanted a unique get-away for a weekend, to see and experience things that were out of our normal day to day experiences. So off we went to find this amazing place. We made an appointment for our ‘sound bath’ at the Integratron and then set out for the 29 Palms area to spend a couple of nights and also experience the Josuhua Tree national park.

You have to follow their directions to get there pretty specifically because one wrong turn and this weird place in the middle no nowhere can turn out to be a very empty, nothing-for-miles dirt road.

We found it. It looked rather like a forgotten 1970’s hippie retreat with a hammock section in an odd circle, steam punk art everywhere and lightening rods stuck in the ground at odd angles. There is a unique collection of rusting sculptures randomly placed among the desert plants. There are chairs to sit in if you are not hammock inclined and absolutely no shelter anywhere if there is rain other than the two bathrooms and the tiny staff room.

You have to have a reservation because they are booked all the time. This isn’t a place to ‘just show up’ and hope you can get in. They can have 25 people in a sound bath at a time and that’s pretty much it. Although it looks large from the outside, it is not that large on the inside.

Part 2 will discuss what the sound bath feels like!
Photography by Tina Erwin. All rights reserved.

A Mother's Capacity to Love by Tina Erwin

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Sun, 11 May 2014 17:54:00 +0000

There are people who seem to be everyone’s Mom. We have heard of “everyman” but is there such as thing as “every mother?” There has to be. There has to be that person who has such a tremendous capacity to love that they warmly embrace everyone they meet. Their capacity to love is not based on a finite amount. Their capacity to love is based on the cosmic principle that there is an infinite capacity to love within people. If there is such an infinite capacity, then think how much they can love.

This love is based on a feeling of warmth and generosity that lives within them. When you meet them, they are not afraid to hug you. Some of them will even hug you even if you are sick, or have a cold. Some will just love you if you haven’t shaved or done hair and makeup. When you get a hug from them, they really put their heart into it. They hold you close so that you can feel their warmth. Often, they are completely unaware that they love in this way.

What is this love? Is it possible that they are looking beyond the surface and seeking the goodness in every person they meet? Is it possible that this person is looking for the fascinating aspects of every soul to see the hand of the Creator in all of His creations?

If God can love this soul, then there has to be something there for anyone of us to love. This loving person is the one who will give you the benefit of the doubt until you prove to her otherwise. Does this person always have to be female? Of course not, men and women are equally capable of this kind of love. Men can mother. We actually call it parenting, but there is such a gentle capacity to them that in a sense it is mothering. Maybe there are even some men who transcend the gender stereotypes. Maybe these are men who can just love because this type of love lives within them as well.

The definition of this kind of love includes an absence of ego, for to love so completely, you have to be able to see yourself as the same as that person. You don’t see yourself as different from that person. In the eyes of this person, the playing field is completely level. It is the very ordinariness of this loving person that makes them loveable, loving and compassionate. They would have to get a stepladder to stand on ceremony.

The person has to have a global perspective, to love in this way. No matter what country they would find themselves, they would see the sameness, the ordinariness in each person. Isn’t that what Christ did? He was fascinated with all humanity. He loved all of us, no matter what we did and mortals of that time did truly dastardly things to Him and yet, He still loved us. Are ordinary people who love so completely seeking to be like the Christ? Not consciously. They just love. Love lives within them.

Love is its own power. The capacity to love does not weaken a person it strengthens them. The capacity to love creates an infinite power within a person because love is power. People who think they have power but do not embrace love will find that this power is vicious and cruel. People who think they love, but do not understand the power of this love will find it insipid and weak. However, people who love tap into an infinite power. These people use the combination of love and power to change the world.

Usually these people are very down to earth, common sense type of people. Mother Theresa was this kind of person. She considered herself ordinary, she was without ego and she wielded tremendous power. She used her power to change the world. She struggled to know God and to do the will of God, which for her perhaps meant to love, all who crossed her path. She did understand the dark side of humanity for she was ever and always practical. She changed and performed service where she could and she accepted what she could not change.

Most of us will not reach the level of a living saint, but we can love. Our love can change the immediate world around us in our homes, neighborhoods and work places.

There are people who are angry, mean people. These people are a challenge for anyone to love. Even supremely loving people use learning about a negative person as a lesson in love. It may take them a lifetime to learn how to love someone who abused them or who cheated, abandoned or crushed their heart. However, if we are all here to learn these lessons of love, then even the darkest person is a teacher in this earthbound schoolhouse.

How do you begin to love like this? Start modestly. Learn how to hug, or to shake someone’s hand. Be strong in this action. Put your heart into it. Perhaps that is the key - put your heart into anything you do. Don’t hold back. Love lives in our hearts first and then our minds. Love with all of your heart and you will find that love will come to mind as a natural course and will eventually define your very soul.

Animal Vibration by Tina Erwin

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Sun, 04 May 2014 22:42:00 +0000

Recently, I received this question and found it so important, that I thought I would share it.

Dear Tina,

I recently attended an Equine Affaire in Pomona. It’s a wonderful four day event that has all kinds of information about horses and their care. At the event, there are several presentations on Alternative Therapies for Horses. One in particular was on “Improving Your Relationship with Your Horse by Exploring and Understanding Vibration Levels.”

The presenter referenced the book Power vs. Force and stated that Horses naturally vibrate at the level of Serenity (500-Love). And the reason why it feels so good to be around them, is that they raise our vibration during the time we are with them. So, if this is true, then do other animals vibrate at the same level or higher? And, if this is true, does having pets (dogs, cats, rabbits, etc.) raise our vibration and for how long?

My thoughts would be that animals (and children) directly reflect their owners (and parents). The higher the vibration of the owner, the higher the vibration of the animal can be. Horses naturally have a high vibration, but not if they have been abused, that is an entirely different story. They will need someone of a higher vibration to help them recover and ‘return’ to their best frequency. Some animals are so hurt, that they never recover, not unlike people. I would question any generalization regarding vibration/frequency. Each situation is unique.

Animals have different vibrations for a reason. Pit bulls and dogs specifically bread for fighting cannot have the same vibration as a cocker spanial or an Irish setter. Service dogs are service dogs for a reason and that reason is frequency. Doberman’s, German Shepards, and Labs on the other hand very probably start out high because of their exceptional level of intelligence. How they are treated will have a direct affect on their specific vibration.

C.W. Leadbeater did an entire treatise on the vibration of various levels of the animal kingdom and not all animals are created equal. Some cats are higher than others. Some animals come in with karma to work out and they pick specific owners to work them out with during their lifetime. The entire animal kingdom is evolving just like humans are.

Having pets can raise our vibration or they may not have any direct affect. You have certain pets for as long as you need to have them, just like experiences, the same laws apply because owning a pet is an experience in and of itself. If you allow a pet to bring out the best in you, to teach you and your family all the lessons of love, responsibility, compassion and the ultimate, unconditional love and finally sacrifice, then the pet will raise your vibration. But not everyone willingly embraces those experiences. Everything is relative.

An interesting side note is that people with AIDS do better when they have pets, they live longer and are happier in their situation because they have to take care of a pet and they receive unconditional love. In this situation the pet’s job is to raise the frequency of the aids patient and help them through the dying process. That animal earns exceptionally positive karma for that task. The AIDS patient can die having felt unconditional love. These are really wonderful things.

Perhaps I could go on and on, but those are my thoughts - excellent question, thanks for sharing! Love, Tina

Photography by Tina Erwin

Using Essential Oils to Help Depression by David Ford

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Sun, 27 Apr 2014 22:30:00 +0000

Dear Friends,

My sister Andrea Harris sent me this and it is written by David Ford. This is a great way to use esential oils to help sadness or depression. Hugs, Tina

Stressed or Depressed Information

Research has shown that the effects of fragrance and aromatic compounds
on the sense of smell an exert strong effects on the brain especially on the
hypothalamus (the hormone command center of the body) and limbic system
( the seat of emotions). Some essential oils high in sesquiterpenes, such as
myrrh, sandalwood, cedarwood, vetiver, melissa, and frankincense, can
dramatically increase oxygenation and activity in the brain. This may directly
improve the function of many systems of the body.

When a fragrance is inhaled, the odor molecules travel up the nose where
they are trapped by olfactory membranes that are well protected by the
lining inside the nose. Each odor molecule fits like a little puzzle piece
into specific receptor cell sites that line a membrane known as the olfactory
epithelium. Each one of the hundreds of millions of nerve cells is replaced
every 28 days. When stimulated by odor molecules, this lining of nerve cells
triggers electrical impulses to the olfactory bulb in the brain. The olfactory
bulb then transmits the impulses to the gustatory center (where emotional
memories are stored), and other parts of the brain that directly connected to
those parts of the brain that control heart rate, blood pressure, breathing,
memory, stress levels, and hormone balance, essential oils can have a pro-
found physiological and psychological effects.

The sense of smell is the only one of the 5 senses directly linked to the limbic
lobe of the brain, the emotional control center. Anxiety, depression, fear, anger,
and joy all emanate from this region. The scent of a special fragrance can evoke
memories and emotions before we are even consciously aware of it. When smells
are concerned, we react first and think later. All other senses (touch, taste, hearing,
and sight) are routed through the thalamus, which acts as the switchboard for the
brain, passing stimuli onto the cerebral cortex (the conscious thought center) and
other parts of the brain.

The limbic lobe (a group of brain structures that includes the hippocampus and
amygdale located below the cerebral cortex) can also directly activate the hypothal-
amus. The hypothalamus is one of the most important parts of the brain, acting as
our hormonal control center. It releases chemical messengers that can affect every-
thing from sex drive to energy levels. The production of growth hormones, sex
hormones, thyroid hormones, and neurotransmitters such as serotonin, are all
governed by the hypothalamus, thus, the hypothalamus is refereed to the
"master gland."

Essential oils--through their fragrance and unique molecular structure--can
directly stimulate the limbic lobe and the hypothalamus. Not only can the inhalation
of essential oils be used to combat stress and emotional trauma, but it can also stimulate
the production of hormones from the hypothalamus. This results increased thyroid
hormones (our energy hormone) and growth hormones(our youth and longevity hormone).

Through inhalation studies they have found that diffusing essential oils can heightened
level of activity in the hypothalamus and limbic systems of the brain, which can have
dramatic effects on not only emotions, learning and attitude, but also many physical
processes of the body, such as immune function, hormone balance, and energy levels.
High levels of sesquiterpenes occur in melissa, myrrh, cedarwood and clove, vetiver,
patchouli, sandalwood, and frankincense, can increase levels of oxygen in the brain by
up to 28%.

Diffusing or directly inhaling essential oils can have an immediate positive impact on mood.
Olfaction is the only sense that can have direct effects on the limbic region of the brain.
Studies at the University of Vienna have shown that some essential oils and their primary
constituents (cineol) can stimulate blood flow and activity in the emotional regions of the brain.

Clinical studies at the Department of Psychiatry at the Mie University of Medicine showed
that Lemon not only reduced depression but reduced stress when inhaled.

Great Blends to use to help ease depression, anger, trauma, bringing about happiness.

Citrus Fresh:
Stimulates the right brain to amplify creativity and well-being as well as eradicate anxiety.
Works well as an air purifier. University researchers in Japan found that diffusing a citrus
fragrance in an office environment improved mental accuracy and concentration by 54%.
It has been found to be very calming and relaxing especially to children. When diffused it
adds a clean, fresh scent to any environment.

It Contains: Orange, tangerine, lemon, mandarin, grapefruit, spearmint.
Apply to wrist, back of neck, back of ears, feet.
Believe:
Helps to release the unlimited potential everyone possesses, make it possible to more
fully experience health, happiness and vitality, Restores feelings of hope. Elevates the
mind helping to overcome stress and despair.

It Contains: Idaho Balsam Fir Rosewood, and Frankincense
apply to back of neck, temples, wrist, feet

Brain Power:
Promotes deep concentration and channels physical energy into mental energy. It also
increases mental potential and clarity, and long-term use may retard the aging process.
Many of the oils in this blend are high in sesquiterpene compounds that increase the
activity in the pineal, pituitary, and the hypothalamus glands and thereby increase out
put of growth hormone and melatonin. It elevates the mind helping to overcome stress
and despair,. Removes emotional blocks, heightens relaxation, and helps release
feelings of anger.

It Contains: Frankincense, sandalwood, melissa, cedarwood, Blue cypress, lavender, helichrysum
Apply to back of neck, ears, feet, wrist.

RutaVala:
Promotes the relaxation of body and mind, counters stressed nerves and revitalized passion.

It Contains: Lavender, Valerian, Ruta.
Apply to wrist, temple , neck

Stress Away Roll-on:
This blend of oils reduces nervous tension, and encourages relaxation.

It Contains: Vanilla, lime, copaiba
Apply to wrist, temples, and neck thought-out the day and right before bedtime

Tranquil Roll-on:
Provides stress relief and relaxation and with the oils it contains they are known
for their ability to decrease anxiety and induce tranquility. Great for mosquito
bites or bee stings

It Contains: Lavender, Roman chamomile, cedarwood.
Apply generously on wrists or back of neck for relaxation.
Valor:
Balances energies to instill courage, confidence, and self-esteem. and helps open
and release emotional blocks, brining about a feeling of grounding. It also helps the
body self-correct its balance and alignment.

It Contains: Rosewood, Blue Tansy, Frankincense, Spruce.
Apply to wrist, chest, base of neck, feet, spine.

Joy:
Produces a magnetic energy to bring joy to the heart, mind, and soul. It inspires
romance and helps overcome deep seated grief and depression.

It Contains: Rose, bergamot, mandarin, Ylang Ylang, lemon, geranium, jasmine,
palmarosa, Roman chamomile, rosewood.
Apply over heart, thyumus, temples, and wrists.

Hope:
is essential in order to go forward in life. Hopelessness can cause a loss of vision
of goals and dreams. This blends helps to reconnect with a feeling of strength and
grounding, retoring hope for tomorrow. It helps overcome suicidal depression.

It Contains: Melissa, spruce, juniper, myrrh.
Apply to edge of ears, wrists, neck, temples, over hear, or chakra/Vital flex points.

Peace & Calming:
Promotes relaxation and a deep sense of peace and emotional well-being, helping
to dampen tensions and uplift spirite. Reduces depression , anxiety, stress, and
insomnia.

It Contains: Blue tansy, patchouli, tangerine, orange, Ylang Ylang.
apply to edge of ears, wrist, feet, dilute for a body massage. 4-8 drops on a cottonball
and place on a vents for a great night sleep.

Single oils to use are Frankincense,, cedarwood, lemon, peppeprmint, ylang ylang, rosemary,
Jasamine absolute..

Diffuse 20 minutes, 3 times daily. Drect inhalation 4-6 times daily.

Dietary Supplementaion:
MultiGreen, Life 5, Super B, Mineral Essence, and Balance. Complet. Omrega Blue softgels.

I hope this helps when a person is feeling depressed, lost, lonely, sad, unhappy.

_______________________________________________
Yloils4u mailing list
Yloils4u@webmail2.cerzan.com
http://webmail2.cerzan.com/mailman/listinfo/yloils4u

Oil Pulling by Erica Stolman

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Sun, 20 Apr 2014 22:17:00 +0000

Dear Friends,

My friend Ginan Sabri sent me this and it is so fascinating that I decided to share it. I'm still trying it, so perhaps more later. This is a blog by Erica Stolman from FashionLush. Thanks Erica!

Everyone has a morning routine… mine has recently changed. Let me share::
1. First things first, I battle with my alarm (i.e. hit snooze thirty times).
2. Bitzy then wakes me up, I stumble to the kitchen to feed her and let her out.
3. We both get back into bed & snuggle for a bit.
4. I turn on morning cartoons (not kidding).
5. Head to the kitchen & put a spoonful of coconut oil in my mouth.
6. Get back in bed, set a 20 minute timer, start checking emails.
So, you may be wondering about #5. Why the hell am I putting a spoonful of coconut oil in my mouth & then getting back into bed with a 20 minute timer.
Two words. Oil Pulling. One word. Obsessed.
Oil pulling has been around for years, which makes me mad I’ve only just found out about it. It’s an ancient Ayurvedic technique that basically involves you swishing oil in your mouth for 20 minutes (no more no less) & it pulls toxins out of your body through your mouth. The idea behind it is pretty simple stupid- the oil is “sticky” and when you swish it around in your mouth bacteria gets stuck in the oil & dissolves.
It’s easy to do. Pick an oil, you can use ORGANIC coconut oil or sesame oil (I prefer coconut cause it also has anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, & anti-inflammatory properties), put anywhere from a teaspoon to a tablespoon (depending on what you can handle) in your mouth, swish for 20 minutes.
I know, I know you are freaking out about the 20 minute thing, but TRUST me when I say- it flies by. Something about the whole process is relaxing to me. No talking, just swishing. Pull the oil through your teeth & make sure NOT to swallow it. Once you start, that oil fills up with toxins (the ones you’re going to get rid of), you don’t want to swallow!! When your timer beeps, spit out the toxic waste into a plastic baggy or directly into the trash. Don’t spit it down the drain cause the oil will solidify again & mess up your pipes.

Now for the benefits::
I mean… they are pretty much endless & differ for everyone, but some of the big ones are–
+ Whitens teeth
+ Strengthens your gums/teeth/& jaw. It helps with sensitive teeth & even has reported to help TMJ sufferers like myself.
+ Prevents cavities & gingivitis. Some people even reported it HEALED their cavities?! Not sure about that one… but who knows?!
+ Helps get rid of acne/ eczema/ psoriasis/ & other skin care issues.
+ General body detox.
+ Cures a hangover (hallelujah!!!) & a migraine.
+ Helps with sleep issues.
+ Clears out your sinuses & helps allergy sufferers.
+ If you have halitosis, oil pulling has been a big savior for many sufferers & your morning breath will get MUCH better (you can now kiss your S.O. good morning w/o them cringing!).
+ Helps with general pain issues.
+ Manages any weird hormonal imbalances.
+ & so so so so much more. If I listed everything people say, this would be the longest blog post ever. People rant & rave about oil pulling, & I can see why!!!

I have now gotten my best friend, my mom, my dad, & my Dad’s best friend hooked on oil pulling. They’ve all been doing it for a week, so I called them this morning & asked them if they’ve noticed any changes… here is what they said.
+ My Dad says his teeth are INCREDIBLY whiter & his sinuses have improved.
+ My Dad’s bestie said she has had terrible plaque psoriasis on her scalp (nothing has ever worked for her to clear it up), after 2 days of oil pulling it’s nearly gone! She is beyond thrilled.
+ My Mom has pretty healthy teeth, but she did report they are much whiter.
+ Katie, my best friend, says she noticed her teeth have gotten whiter & the whole process is very relaxing to her.
+ As for me, let’s see– my teeth are so so so much whiter (which is great cause I can’t do any sort of white strips- my teeth are too sensitive), I have been sleeping much easier which is a big feat for this insomniac, my teeth have been much less sensitive to hot & cold, & the best result of all- MY JAW PAIN HAS DECREASED TREMENDOUSLY!!! I have major jaw issues & awful TMJ. Last week it started to get bad, lock jaw, spasms, shooting pains– I oil pulled and it all went away. That is enough for me to do this for life. I do have a dentist appointment next week, so I am excited to see if the dentist notices anything!!
I know this all may sound too good to be true, but I have researched Oil Pulling for hours upon hours & there has not been one negative report. See for yourself– one google search & I guarantee you will be at the store purchasing coconut oil in no time.
If you do decide to try it, I am dying to know how it works for you/ what changes you notice/ if you like it/ if you can handle the 20 minute swish/ & whatever else you want to share.
xx, E
// UPDATE //
Sooo… this post has gotten quite a bit of attention, so much so my site actually crashed for a good deal of time ( #stressmeout ).
I am so happy to see this information has proved helpful to so many people. I have been getting a lot of questions though… so I decided I’d add in a little FAQ to help clear things up!!
P.S. Went to my dentist this week & it was the first “GREAT” I’ve heard from her in a long long long time. Yahoo! I am totally contributing it to OP.
Q1: I hate the taste of anything coconut/ I am allergic to coconut. Anything else I can use??:: Absolutely! You can use cold pressed organic sesame oil or sunflower oil.
Q2: I see that you have pictured refined coconut oil, but lots of people are saying you should ONLY use unrefined coconut oil??:: Here’s the deal with this one… unrefined coconut oil is better, but all I had on hand at the time was refined. The main thing that helps with the oil pulling is the Lauric Acid in the coconut oil- the refining process could remove some Lauric Acid & add in chemicals/solvents. Yet, by the time the process is complete, there will still be around 50% Lauric Acid and little to none chemicals or solvents left over- so you will still get the benefits. People will have varying opinions on this, but that’s what I’ve found out about using refined coconut oil.
Q3: 20 minutes?! There’s no way I can put oil in my mouth for a full twenty minutes!!:: My first bit of advice– try it! I was a little frightened by the number at first too, but once you get going the time flies. I personally find the process to be relaxing. If at any time your mouth is too full of oil, spit out a little & keep on truckin’. If you still can’t handle it- do it 2x a day for 10 minutes each.
Q4: Do I NEED to buy organic coconut oil?:: Yes yes yes!! The benefits will be greater with organic oils.
Q5: I gag over weird textures- can I melt it first before I swish?:: Certainly! Many people say no no no to nuking in the microwave cause of radiation, yet if it’s just 10 seconds (which is all you really need) I wouldn’t freak out about it. That said, the better option would be to run the jar under hot water & then pour the liquid into a bowl for swishing.
Any more questions? LMK in the comments section below & I will answer at the best of my ability.
02.21.14 ♡ 156 Comments

Who Gave Them Permission? by Tina Erwin

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 00:28:00 +0000

Who are these elusive people who make decisions that affect an entire planet? Did you ever wonder who they are? Did you ever wonder who gave them permission to do what they are doing?

Who gave them permission to violate our gorgeous blue skies with chemical trails day after day?

Who gave them permission to fill our air with Strontium 90, Aluminum and Boron?

Who gave them permission to control the weather through the use of HAARP?

Who gave them permission to penetrate the ionosphere with massive electromagnetic pulses, which are changing life and the weather on the Earth itself?

Who gave them permission to control the weather such that the drought in California and the massive storms of the East coast economically cripple vast portions of the United States?

Who gave them permission to change the very DNA of seeds with poison?

Who gave them permission to kill millions upon millions of life giving, life sustaining bees?

Who gave them permission to seek to kill every living thing outside of their seeds?

Who said it was even sane to sue farmers because the wind carried poisonous seed on to their land?

Who gave them permission to fill our ground water with massive amounts of chemicals so that less and less water is fit to drink?

Who gave them permission to deny California farmers access to water to water to feed their crops.

Who gave them permission to deny parents the choice to vaccinate their children?

Who gave them permission to fill vaccines with polysorbate 80, aspartame, mercury, aluminum, and animal and insect DNA and aborted fetal tissue?

Who gave them permission to force the HPV vaccine on young boys and girls, thereby crippling them for the rest of their life?

Who gave them permission to force the Hepatitis B vaccine on newborns, only minutes old such that it has become the leading cause of SIDS death in babies?

Who gave them permission to mentally cripple an entire generation of children with autism caused by highly poisonous vaccines?

Who gave them permission to fill our skies with vaccine mists?

Who gave them permission to force vaccines at gunpoint on the children of African families?

Who gave them permission to bully countries of the world, to threaten them with ‘retaliation’ if they do not use these murderous genetically modified seeds?

Who gave them permission to poison all sugar beets with glyophosphate?

Who gave them permission to poison all corn with roundup pesticide?

Who gave them permission to poison all soy with roundup pesticide?

Who gave them permission to poison all papaya with roundup pesticide?

Who gave them permission to try to poison all apples, salmon, rice and other fruits, vegetables and meat with their DNA alternating chemical experiments?

Who gave them permission to poison increasing numbers of grains with their pesticide chemicals?

Why does any company need a patent on ‘aluminum resistant seed?’

Who gave them permission to lie about the ingredients in drugs, the testing of drugs?

Who gave them permission to filter the news?

Who gave them permission to decide what we think, what we believe and what we purchase?

Who gave them permission to grope the bodies of our babies, our elderly and our citizens in their most private parts, in public just to get to ride on an airplane, in the name of safety?

Who gave them permission to issue an executive order to suspend all civil rights in the United States on the whim of any president?

Who gave them permission to increasingly remove Constitutional rights?

Who are these people who are seeking to steal our rights?

Who are these people who are poisoning our skies?

Who are these people who are controlling our weather?

Who are these people who are poisoning our oceans with radiation?

Who are these people who are poisoning our food?

Who are these people who are denying us the right to know what is in our food?

Who are these people who are changing the very earth that grows all living things from acidic to alkaline, thereby destroying our capacity to grow food, for animals to live and for life itself to live?

Who are these people who are destroying bees, butterflies and virtually all insects and who are moving up the food chain?

Who are these people who are poisoning our bodies with drugs and vaccines?

Who are these people who think that you can experiment on human beings without karmic consequences, without catastrophic results?

Who are these people who have no conscience about a 50% cancer, 60% massive obesity and growing illness rates in this country?

Why is the rest of the world trying to resist US companies in their murderous onslaught of polluting the world with their drugs, seeds and atmospheric damage?

Just because any person, company or government has a power to do something does not make it morally, legally or karmically right.

Every single person has to do something to stand up for what is the right thing, before there is nothing left to stand up for in the future before us. If we each call a company and tell them that we are refusing to purchase their product, or tell a politician that we won’t vote for them if they continue to agree to the perpetuation of these terrible things. If we do not stand up for doing the right thing, we will have learned nothing from the past, from that time when people lost their rights to live. Think about history, Germany, what was Soviet Union, China, and now North Korea.

Freedom is never free. Do something that works to bring life, not death, but life back to this planet, to our morals, our ethics, to who we are.

. . . . and start today before there is no recognizable tomorrow.

Pancreatic Cancer and Soy Connection

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Sun, 06 Apr 2014 21:47:00 +0000

Dear Friends,

My friend Laura has been doing some research for a friend who is about 43, with 3 boys, 8, 10,12 in age. She has been having issues with acute pancreatitis and is one step away from pancreatic cancer. Her dad is a midwest farmer who has grown only GMO corn and GMO soy on his fields. I am betting that they are all Monsanto products. In addition the crops are heavily sprayed with horrendous pesticides.

Anyway, I have been doing some research that I can send her about the dangers of soy and have found some interesting articles. I could not remember the name of the inhibitor, but it is called trypsin. Non GMO soy does not seem to cause as much harm. Surprised?

Truth: Soy foods contain trypsin inhibitors that inhibit protein digestion and affect pancreatic function. In test animals, diets high in trypsin inhibitors led to stunted growth and pancreatic disorders. Soy foods increase the body's requirement for vitamin D, needed for strong bones and normal growth. Phytic acid in soy foods results in reduced bioavailabilty of iron and zinc which are required for the health and development of the brain and nervous system. Soy also lacks cholesterol, likewise essential for the development of the brain and nervous system. Megadoses of phytoestrogens in soy formula have been implicated in the current trend toward increasingly premature sexual development in girls and delayed or retarded sexual development in boys.

Myth: Soy estrogens (isoflavones) are good for you.

Truth: Soy isoflavones are phyto-endocrine disrupters. At dietary levels, they can prevent ovulation and stimulate the growth of cancer cells. Eating as little as 30 grams (about 4 tablespoons) of soy per day can result in hypothyroidism with symptoms of lethargy, constipation, weight gain and fatigue.

http://www.rethinkingcancer.org/resources/articles/myths-and-truths-about-soy.php

Also, Asians do consume soy, but not as meals, but rather condiments.

Genetic Modification

In 2007, the GMO Compass reported that soy lecithin, like many food products in American supermarkets, contained genetically modified soy. Genetically modified, or GM, foods are biotechnically changed to increase yields and resistance to herbicides and insects. Some health-food advocates and scientists have concerns with the potential long-term impact from eating genetically modified food. For example, a study published in the "Journal of Applied Toxicology" discovered that mice fed GM soybean developed a decrease in pancreatic function. Although the nutrition of the soy was not altered, the study showed that as few as five days of feeding GM food caused pancreatic cellular changes, which were reversed after 30 days of non-GM foods.

Soy is not your friend and if you are a vegetarian, the truth is that meat, as bad as it may seem is less toxic than the soy you are consuming. Please be sure to read the following articles on soy.

http://www.rethinkingcancer.org/resources/articles/myths-and-truths-about-soy.php

http://www.livestrong.com/article/524606-what-are-the-dangers-of-soy-lecithin-ingestion/#ixzz2LSSH9c7B

http://www.acupuncturetoday.com/mpacms/at/article.php?id=32326

Live long and prosper and to do that, avoid all soy and anything GMO like the plague!

The Bee and Butterfly Meditation by Tina Erwin

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 00:11:00 +0000

Dear Friends,

Our planet is being destroyed, not by nuclear bombs, but by genetically engineered food and the pesticides that are used to grow them.

Thirty million [30,000,000] bees died in Canada last month.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/what-s-killing-canadian-honeybees-1.1312511

Butterflies are dying by the millions.

http://www.mlmp.org/results/findings/Pleasants_and_Oberhauser_2012_milkweed_loss_in_ag_fields.pdf

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/03/130318-monarch-butterflies-animals-science-environment-nation/

30,000 bumble bees died in one day in a parking lot in Oregon several months ago.

There are fewer birds and more vermin.

These are all signs of a very sick planet.

We have to stop talking about these deaths and do something about this! And we all have the power to change the situation.

Here are the steps:

1. Stop buying plants from Home Depot, Lowes, Dixie Line, Target, Trader Joes and any other big box store that cannot absolutely guarantee that these plants are pesticide free. Only buy organic plants. Talk to management. DEMAND WITH THE VOICE OF YOUR DOLLAR THAT THEY STOP CARRYING PLANTS THAT USED GLYOPHOSPHATE AND NEONICTINOIDS. These pesticides kill all insect life.

http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2013/12/01/europe-is-banning-bee-harmful-pesticides-the-us-should-take-a-lead/comment-page-1/

2. Start asking restaurants which foods on their menu contain GMO foods.

3. Buy organic food. Support organic farmers.

4. Vote to label Genetically Engineered food.

5. Write/call your representatives and demand that they label ban these pesticides, that they label GMO food and that they stop the chemical trail spraying in the sky. Aluminum, Strontium 90 and Barium are poisons that kill the soil and life forms. Remember, there is a reason one company has a patent on aluminum resistant seed. Why would you need such a patent????

In your yard:

6. Plant organic seeds to have flowers, fruits and vegetables in your garden.

7. Plant milkweed for butterflies. Butterflies lay their eggs on milkweed, and their larva eat the milkweed. Pesticides and weed killers have eradicated milkweed and butterflies along with it.

8. Get Free SEEDS from: https://www.livemonarch.com/free-milkweed-seeds.htm

10. Get a backyard beehive if you have the space.

11. And if you can’t do anything else, please, please do the bee and butterfly meditation below.

Remember, every third bite of food you put in your mouth is only there because of a bee. The GE companies seem to be DELIBERATELY killing the bees so that farmers will only be able to grow GE food, which will poison and eventually send us all to early graves. We don’t live on this planet alone. There is still time, but our planet is in grave danger. Please share this message with everyone you know.

Please do some or all of these things.

Please do the attached meditation.

Please share this information.

The Bee and Butterfly Meditation

by Tina Erwin

Meditation is an amazing thing. The power of a person’s mind can change the world in a positive or a negative way. I am asking that when you do your spiritual practice, you include a few minutes of this meditation. The bees and butterflies, need our help. These few minutes may be able to change the world. If you have children, help your children to do this a well.

Meditation Steps:

1. Place yourself in a still, calm, peaceful place.

2. Fill yourself with violet flame, that amazing spiritual flame that offers spiritual cleansing of the negativity that often surrounds us. Allow yourself to be cleansed. Never send healing without cleansing yourself.

3. Bring down an invigorating healing white light all around you.

4. Feel yourself being filled with the energy of the Divine.

5. Now imagine that you are sending this amazing energy to all the bees and the butterflies on earth.

6. Visualize that you can see every single bee and butterfly inside a protective healing bubble.

7. Visualize that inside the bubble, the bees and butterflies are receiving healing.

8. Bees share, visualize that all the bees in every single hive on earth are now in this protective bubble and this is a collective healing moment.

9. Give thanks to the bees and the butterflies.

10. Give thanks to God.

Do this every single day.

Thank you!

Countless Uses for Coconut Oil – The Simple, the Strange, and the Downright Odd Part 5 By Dr. Mercola

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Sun, 30 Mar 2014 18:27:00 +0000

14 Surprising Uses for Coconut Oil Around the House

Last but not least, coconut oil can be used for a number of household tasks otherwise relegated to more costly, and potentially toxic, alternatives. Following are 14 creative yet practical uses for this fantastic oil:

1. Clean, condition and sanitize your wooden cutting board. Use whenever the wood starts to look dry.

2. Use when making compost tea¹⁶ for your garden to reduce foam.

3. Use as a metal polish. Make sure to test a small area first.

4. Moisturize and soften leather goods as you would using other leather conditioners.

5. Season your cast iron pots and pans¹⁷ using coconut oil in lieu of lard or corn oil.

6. Lubricate squeaky hinges and sticky mechanisms with coconut oil instead of WD-40.

7. Clean and condition wooden furniture in lieu of furniture polish. Make sure to test a small area first.

8. Lubricate your guitar strings.

9. Clean soap scum from your shower using a small dollop of coconut oil on a damp cloth. Spray the area with white vinegar and wipe dry with a lint-free cloth.

10. Clean your hands and paint brushes with coconut oil after using oil-based paints, in lieu of mineral spirits.

11. Clean and condition the inside of your car by adding a small amount to a soft lint-free cloth. Rub in and wipe off excess.

12. Clean and sanitize your mouth guard by applying a thin layer of coconut oil. Leave the coconut oil on when not in use. Rinse before using.

13. Cleanse and add a glossy finish to indoor plants by wiping the leaves with a small amount of coconut oil on a lint-free cloth.

14. Remove chewing gum from virtually any area, including carpets and hair.

Countless Uses for Coconut Oil – The Simple, the Strange, and the Downright Odd Part 4 By Dr. Mercola

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Sun, 16 Mar 2014 18:24:00 +0000

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Coconut Oil to the Rescue

Besides its usefulness in the kitchen and bathroom, coconut oil deserves a place in your medicine cabinet as well—again courtesy of its antimicrobial and anti-viral activity. For example, coconut oil may be helpful in the treatment of:

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toxins and debris it has pulled out.

Ear infections: Place a couple of drops into each ear canal. If the coconut oil has solidified, you can easily liquefy it by placing a small amount in a shot glass or other small container and placing it into a cup of hot water	Skin rashes and irritations, including chicken pox and shingles: Simply apply a small amount to the affected area
Fungal and/or yeast infections, such as athlete’s foot and ringworm. For fungal infections, you can mix in a small amount of oregano oil or tea tree oil	Bug bites and bee stings
Cold sores: mix in a small amount of oregano oil, and apply at the first signs	Frequent nosebleeds may be improved by regularly applying a small amount to the inside of your nostrils
Thrush	Hemorrhoids and piles: You may add a small amount of lavender essential oil for added healing power
Vaginal dryness	Perineal massage:¹³ Expectant mothers can use it to massage the perineum daily, starting about a month or so before your due date, to help reduce your chances of tearing and/or the need for an episiotomy

Coconut Oil—More Effective Than Permethrin for Head Lice

According to research published in the European Journal of Pediatrics,¹⁴ a combination of coconut oil and anise was found to be nearly twice as effective as the commonly prescribed permethrin lotion for the treatment of head lice. According to the authors:

“We designed a randomized, controlled, parallel group trial involving 100 participants with active head louse infestation to investigate the activity of a coconut and anise spray and to see whether permethrin lotion is still effective, using two applications of product 9 days apart. The spray was significantly more successful (41/50, 82.0%) cures compared with permethrin (21/50, 42.0%...). Per-protocol success was 83.3% and 44.7%, respectively. Thirty-three people reported irritant reactions following alcohol contact with excoriated skin. We concluded that, although permethrin lotion is still effective for some people, the coconut and anise spray can be a significantly more effective alternative treatment.” [Emphasis mine]
Isn’t it wonderful to see how nature provides us with so many effective solutions to so many of our ills? And does so in a way that is oftentimes more effective than our chemical drug concoctions! Another anecdotal Hawaiian head lice treatment¹⁵ is to first soak your hair in vinegar and leave it in to dry (don’t rinse). Next, coat your hair with coconut oil over night. I’d recommend sleeping with a shower cap to protect your bedding. The following day, the nits reportedly comb out easily.

Countless Uses for Coconut Oil – The Simple, the Strange, and the Downright Odd Part 3 By Dr. Mercola

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Sun, 02 Mar 2014 19:19:00 +0000

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Hair’s Best Friend

Coconut oil is also known for its hair benefits.¹² Most women seem to prefer using it as a pre-shampoo conditioner. Simply massage the coconut oil onto dry hair and leave on for about an hour or longer. You could even leave it on overnight. Just wear a shower cap to protect your pillow. Then, wash and style as usual.

When applied in this manner, the coconut oil inhibits the penetration of water into the hair strands, which would otherwise cause the cuticle, or surface of the hair shaft, to rise, making it prone to damage and breakage. Furthermore, when applied as a pre-wash treatment, a small amount of the coconut oil is able to penetrate deeper into the hair shaft during the wash, when the hair fiber swells slightly.

This can also explain why so many rave about the oil's ability to prevent "the frizzies" in humid weather—this is another feature of its hydrophobic activity. More porous types of hair may find coconut oil particularly beneficial, such as African and chemically treated hair, as well as those suffering with any type of scalp problems, including dandruff.

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Oral Health Benefits

As mentioned above, coconut oil mixed with baking soda makes for very simple and inexpensive, yet effective, toothpaste. It’s also a great alternative if you want a fluoride-free toothpaste but don’t want to spend the extra money, since they tend to cost more than most regular, fluoridated toothpaste brands.

Another oral health technique where I believe coconut oil can be quite beneficial is oil pulling. This technique has significantly reduced my plaque buildup, allowing me to go longer between visits to the dental hygienist. (Adding fermented vegetables to my diet has been another game-changer in my oral health.)

Oil pulling is a practice dating back thousands of years, having originated with Ayurvedic medicine. When oil pulling is combined with the antimicrobial power of coconut oil, I believe it can be a very powerful health tool. Sesame oil is traditionally recommended, but it has relatively high concentration of omega-6 oils. Therefore, I believe coconut oil is far superior, and, in my mind, it tastes better. But from a mechanical and biophysical perspective, it is likely that both work.

Oil pulling involves rinsing your mouth with the oil, much like you would with a mouthwash. The oil is “worked” around your mouth by pushing, pulling, and drawing it through your teeth for a period of 15 minutes. If you are obsessive like me and want even better results, you can go for 30-45 minutes. This process allows the oil to “pull out” bacteria, viruses, fungi and other debris. The best time is in the morning before eating breakfast, but it can be done at any time. I try to do it twice a day if my schedule allows. When done, spit out the oil and rinse your mouth with water. Avoid swallowing the oil as it will be loaded with bacteria and whatever potential toxins and debris it has pulled out.

When done correctly, oil pulling has a significant cleansing, detoxifying and healing affect, not only for your mouth and sinuses but for the rest of your body as well. Candida and Streptococcus are common residents in your mouth, and these germs and their toxic waste products can contribute to plaque accumulation and tooth decay, in addition to secondary infections and chronic inflammation throughout your body. Oil pulling may help lessen the overall toxic burden on your immune system by preventing the spread of these organisms from your mouth to the rest of your body, by way of your bloodstream.

Dogma and Ritual Do Not Equal Spirituality by Tina Erwin

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Sun, 23 Feb 2014 23:29:00 +0000

There are endless books about the spiritual path. There are wonderful guidelines about what it means to be spiritual. There are great teachers who demonstrate spirituality by their life mission.

And then there is religion, which is supposed to epitomize the building concepts of control and power. It would appear that the trappings of religion equate to a very profound structure. The pillars of that structure are dogma and ritual.

When the Great Ones walked the Earth, none of them built a church. When the Great Ones sought to show us the way, none of them specifically wrote anything down and demanded that it be followed other than the Koran and the Ten Commandments, which were literally written in stone so they could not ever be edited. None of them demanded dogma or ritual to show their power.

It was the followers of the Great Ones who built the structures, created the dogma and invented the rituals that would define a particular religion based on what the current, second or third generation leader at that time felt was appropriate. Some of the rituals were appropriate for that time and place in history but no one was ever allowed to question them, so they could not ever be revised to accommodate ever-changing times.

Ritual is a specific way of doing something at a specific time with unique tools following unyielding guidelines. Ritual is rigid, uncompromising and unforgiving. Ritual carries with it the energy of power and associated fear. If you don’t perform the ritual in the exact manner, then somehow you have done a terrible thing and ‘God’ will not forgive you. No one is ever allowed to question whether or not the ritual actually ever does anything particularly spiritual for anyone.

There are very profound rituals that create a certain frequency and that have often been corrupted from their original intention. The original ‘Mystery Schools’ back in the mists of time, taught the physics of how these rituals worked and why they worked. They had a very specific purpose and a very deliberate outcome if performed properly. This is where the concept of the hand gestures called mudras came from, the use of essential oils, incense and prayers. However, along the way, many rituals became completely corrupted.

The original Mystery schools also taught the basic tenants of spirituality. These were eventually corrupted into guilt producing, stomach wrenching dogma. Being spiritual was originally believed to be able to take place anywhere, whether it was in a field of flowers, by the bedside of the sick or at your dinner table. Prayer was always appropriate and never limited to a specific grandiose building of wood and stone.

The concept of forgiveness was corrupted into the power to forgive and that power was invested in certain people who lorded it over, literally, the followers of that religion. Believe what we believe or you are not ‘one of us.’ We will require you to confess your sins, and only we can absolve you. Power was and still is the key here. The ritual of confessing sins to another person was a corrupted form of an individual speaking directly to God. The priesthood of all believers was the original tenet, not give your spiritual power to another to judge.

The other problem with this concept, of often dogmatic ritual, especially when it comes to confessing one’s sins to another is the concept that one mortal can transmute the karma of another. Six Our Fathers and Five Hail Mary’s will not transmute anyone’s karma. Lovely prayers each one, but they do not have the power to absolve someone of a terrible karmic act. No mere mortal, no matter how elegantly they are dressed, can absolve the karma of another.

Each individual uniquely defines being spiritual; no one has a monopoly on that definition. Perhaps each of us might wish to look long and hard at the ritual and dogma that often confines us in our belief system. Doing something routinely because you are supposed to without remembering why you are doing it is not being spiritual.

Just for a month, let go of ritual and dogma. Experiment with spiritual freedom. Perhaps then each of us can feel what it must have been like to walk with the Great Ones and know the freedom in the delight in the divine because we could feel that the connection to the Divine genuinely lived within us!

Countless Uses for Coconut Oil – The Simple, the Strange, and the Downright Odd Part 2 By Dr. Mercola

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Sun, 16 Feb 2014 19:16:00 +0000

Coconut Oil Can Replace Dozens of Beauty and Personal Care Products

One of the best personal care products you'll ever find may be sitting in your kitchen cupboard right now. The video above, featuring HolisticHabits ³ blogger and coconut oil aficionado Sarah, recounts many of its beauty uses. The second video includes a recipe making your own coconut oil-based deodorant. A previous article by Delicious Obsessions ⁴ also lists no less than 122 creative uses for this household staple, including 21 DIY coconut oil skin care recipes.⁵ For example, coconut oil can be used to replace the following personal care and beauty products.

Makeup remover: Swipe on with a moist cotton ball. Wipe off with clean cotton ball or wet washcloth.

Facial cleanser: Massage a dollop of coconut oil onto face and neck. Wash off with wet washcloth and pat dry.

Body scrub: Mix equal parts coconut oil with organic cane sugar in a glass jar. Use the scrub on dry skin prior to your shower or bath.

Facial scrub: Instead of sugar, mix coconut oil with baking soda, or oatmeal with a dash of cinnamon, for a gentle facial scrub.

Shaving lotion: Apply a thin layer of coconut oil on area to be shaved, and shave as usual. The lauric acid in the coconut oil will also serve as an antiseptic for cuts that result from shaving.

Face and body moisturizer: You can use it either by itself, or add your favorite essential oil. (Make sure you’re using a high quality essential oil that is safe for topical application.) The featured article ⁶ also suggests whipping the coconut oil with an electric mixer to produce a fluffy moisturizer that stays soft and spreadable even in cooler temperatures.

When applied topically, coconut oil helps to reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles by helping to keep your connective tissues strong and supple, and aids in exfoliating the outer layer of dead skin cells, making your skin smoother.

Eye cream: Apply a thin layer of coconut oil around your eyes to soften wrinkles and counteract thinning, sagging skin.

Cuticle cream: Simply rub a small amount of coconut oil around your cuticles to soften dry areas.

Deodorant: Applying a small amount of coconut oil directly onto your armpits can help keep odors at bay, courtesy of the oil’s antibacterial properties. If you prefer, you can add a small amount of baking soda, or make a homemade deodorant using coconut oil, baking soda and arrow root powder. For directions, see the second video above. DeliciousObsessions.com also lists additional deodorant recipes using coconut oil as the base.⁷

Bath soak: Adding coconut oil to your bath can help moisturize dry itchy skin (Make sure to scrub your tub afterward to prevent slipping!). Make sure the water is warmer than 76 degrees Fahrenheit though, otherwise the oil will turn to a solid.

Soap: Coconut oil is one of the base ingredients in many homemade soap recipes, such as this one by NourishingJoy.com ⁸

Lip balm: You can either apply a small amount of coconut oil, as is, or make your own lip balm using coconut oil as one of the base ingredients. You can find all sorts of recipes online, but here’s one by The Liberated Kitchen.⁹

Toothpaste: Mixed with baking soda, coconut oil can replace your regular toothpaste. The baking soda will gently cleanse while the coconut oil’s antibacterial action may help keep harmful bacteria in check. For recipes using essential oils to spruce up your toothpaste, see DeliciousObsessions.com.¹⁰

Insect repellent: Mixing coconut oil with high-quality essential oils may help keep biting insects at bay when applied to exposed skin. Effective choices include: peppermint, lemon balm, rosemary, tea tree oil, neem, citronella (Java Citronella), geraniol, catnip oil (according to one study,¹¹ catnip oil is 10 times more effective than DEET), and/or clear vanilla extract

The Polygraph Test by Tina Erwin

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Sun, 09 Feb 2014 23:16:00 +0000

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What is truth? How is it defined? Can you test for truth mechanically? Can there actually be a truth machine, something that measures whether or not we are truthful when we answer a question?

Is the truth all relative, based on context? Could you be telling the truth as much as you know it and then the polygraph machine still indicate that you are lying?

Perhaps that is the issue with the polygraph test. This is the test that law enforcement gives people to determine if the accused person is lying. But it wouldn’t have to be someone accused of any crime, polygraph tests are routinely given as a determiner of employment in law enforcement.

Polygraph is an interesting word. Poly, from the Latin, meaning many and graph meaning that whatever you find is being projected as data feed on a visual graph is the term given to the truth machine. However, can any machine ever determine what the truth is for any person? We are increasingly living in a “one size fits all” world. This is a world of critical sameness where a ‘norm’ is that same ‘norm’ for every single person. We’re human, we’re each unique: no mechanism can ever take that from us. It’s what makes us such fascinating creatures.

Which brings us to an alarming statistic: 60% of people who take a polygraph test, fail it.

We require all law enforcement candidates except, ironically Congress (who is charged with upholding the Constitution of the United States) and TSA of course to take a polygraph test and pass it, but if 60% are going to fail it, does that mean that 60% of the population is lying?

Polygraph tests are forbidden in court, because of an odd anomaly: a truthful person can fail it and a deceitful person can pass it. This has been proven over and over. Why? Because a pathological liar has no conscience and one truth or lie is no different from another. This type of liar has no feeling about the lie. However a truthful person can be telling the truth and yet there is a part of him or her that worries that they haven’t either fully understood the question and may be answering it wrongly or there is something in their past that may be haunting them that they are not aware of at that moment. This will then be reflected on the machine as a huge spike indicating that the person is having an emotional reaction to the question.

An emotional reaction is all that the machine registers. It cannot be inside of the person’s mind. Can you tell the truth and yet not have it be the truth? Let’s look at this example: If someone asks if you have ever stolen something. How do you answer that question?

You are an honest person, so you say no but the machine registers a negative reaction. Now you are flooded with guilt. What could be the reason you failed that question? Perhaps it is how your subconscious interprets the question, something to which you have no conscious control.

· If you have ever ‘stolen’ a kiss, is that stealing?

· If you shoplifted something as a teenager, but you made restitution, is that stealing?

· When someone eats grapes in a grocery store and never pays for them, is that stealing?

· If you put coins in the parking meter for a stranger, are you stealing revenue the city might have received from the ticket or are you helping a hapless, hurried out-of-change person?

· What if your parent accused you of stealing something as a child even though you were wrongly accused. What if that parent labeled you a thief and that cruel emotional sticker stuck with you?

· What if you had a relationship with someone but never married the person and he or she accused you of robbing them of the ‘best years of their life?’ Is that stealing?

· What if someone accuses you of ‘stealing their time?’

How will any of these situations be reflected on a emotionless machine as a human being wrestles with the whole ‘emotional truth for them’ concept? If the person is extremely honest, then their struggle to be completely honest as he or she sifts back through time, emotion and experience will be, ironically, honestly reflected as a conflict on a machine. Perhaps this is why polygraph tests are never admissible in court, because when you tell the truth of a situation to the best of your ability, you do not have to reveal the emotional struggle you endure in the process.

Polygraphs will never be completely accurate, because we all have theme and variation in our lives. The truth that lives within us is obviously relative to who we are, the experiences we have endured and the way we each see ourselves. Therefore, no machine can ever accurately measure the human mind much less the human heart or conscience.

Countless Uses for Coconut Oil – The Simple, the Strange, and the Downright Odd Part 1 By Dr. Mercola

noreply@blogger.com (Tina Erwin) — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 19:14:00 +0000

Coconut oil has been a dietary and beauty staple for millennia. It’s a powerful destroyer of all kinds of microbes, from viruses to bacteria to protozoa, many of which can be harmful, and provides your body with high-quality fat that is critical for optimal health.

Around 50 percent of the fat in coconut oil is lauric acid, which is rarely found in nature. In fact, coconut oil contains the most lauric acid of any substance on Earth.

Your body converts lauric acid into monolaurin, a monoglyceride that can actually destroy lipid-coated viruses such as HIV and herpes, influenza, measles, gram-negative bacteria, and protozoa such as giardia lamblia.

This is undoubtedly part of what makes it so medicinally useful—both when taken internally and applied externally.

Coconut oil is comprised of medium chain fatty acids (MCFAs) that are easily digested and readily cross cell membranes. MCFAs are immediately converted by your liver into energy rather than being stored as fat. This is in part why I recommend coconut oil as an ideal replacement for non-vegetable carbohydrates.

Coconut oil is easy on your digestive system and does not produce an insulin spike in your bloodstream, so for a quick energy boost, you could simply eat a spoonful of coconut oil, or add it to your food. In the video above, I also share my recipe for a scrumptious yet healthful chocolate treat, courtesy of the healthy fat from coconut oil.

To get more coconut oil into your diet, you can add it to your tea or coffee, in lieu of a sweetener. It will also help improve absorption of fat-soluble vitamins, so taking a spoonful of coconut oil along with your daily vitamins may help boost their effectiveness.

Coconut oil is ideal for all sorts of cooking and baking, as it can withstand higher temperatures without being damaged like many other oils (olive oil, for example, should not be used for cooking for this reason).

Furthermore, coconut oil does not go rancid, which is a huge boon when you’re making homemade concoctions. Coconut oil that has been kept at room temperature for a year has been tested for rancidity, and showed no evidence of it. Since you would expect the small percentage of unsaturated oils naturally contained in coconut oil to become rancid, it seems that the other (saturated) oils have a powerful antioxidant effect.

General Health Benefits of Coconut Oil

In all, coconut oil offers a truly impressive array of health benefits when included in your daily diet. In addition to its antimicrobial properties, coconut oil is beneficial for:

Promoting heart health	Supporting proper thyroid function
Promoting healthy brain function	Strengthening your immune system
Providing an excellent “fuel” for your body and supporting a strong metabolism that can aid in weight loss	Maintaining healthy and youthful looking skin

While coconut oil is an ideal food for fostering health and beauty from the inside out, it also has a staggering number of other uses, from topical beauty applications to first aid treatments, to general household cleaning.¹^, ² Once you’re done reading through this article, you’ll probably be inspired to stock up for all eventualities!

Stay tuned for Part 2!