Got a bad back? Live in London? Ever tried inversion? Hanging upside down from your ankles creates traction through the hips and pelvis and neck helping relieve the intervertebrael and parapspinal muscles.
Buy an inversion table from me 
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Kate, a regular reader of freedomforall.net wrote “I have long been struggling to let go of the need to look for others for help and/or approval, for them to say I’m OK.” in the comments to my recent post Inside Out and Back To Front”. That post was about the difference between a life directed from inner resources and a life directed at satisfying externally percieved desires and threats.
When Kate writes “struggling to let go” she is emphasising another key obstacle on the path to realisation. In trying to get from “here” to “there”, in exerting effort to “achieve” peace, we are unknowingly setting in chain a causal process which will preclude us from our goal. We are taught in early childhood that we are not OK. We learn to run around looking for the things and experiences and behaviours which will make us OK. They do not exist yet we are busy all our lives seeking them out. Similarly we try to seek out our own peace.
Meditation, the path to peace, is fundamentally the opposite of this process. Yet in trying to find peace we bring our hunger, our thirst, our craving for it to the fore. By doing so we ensure we will never find it because the satisfaction of this lack of peace can not be found through seeking which is the opposite to peace. The only way to satisfy it is to ignore it, to ignore all contents of mind, to sit.
Not to hypnotise oneself into not noticing but to notice and then laugh, let go and ignore: to develop, to cultivate, “the watcher” - that part of oneself which sits on the sidelines taking notes but not actively doing. Peace is a state of mind in which the current states of mind you inhabit have been worn out by their own activity. When they stop there is peace. You can’t use them to find their own absense, you can use the watcher.
Breath by breath, if you are sitting in the right way, peace descends upon you, or grows up from the ground to inhabit you. Sitting is just about letting peace be. Recovery can be a struggle but at some point it has to become an outbreath. It has to become a realisation that the dangers of the past have gone, that the habituated responses to them are a self maintaining pattern of fight/flight. That the struggle of recovery has become the thing you are strying to recover from. The knowing has to be incorporated - it has to be a bodily knowing. And for such a bodily knowing to happen, the thinking mind has to stop struggling and settle down first.
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The BBC news anchor asked the man in Washington “George Bush spoke very openly about any mistakes he may have made in Iraq. Were people surprised by that openness?”. George Bush said his gung-ho talk sych as “wanted dead or alive” was not helpful and that the biggest mistake was Abu Ghraib pronounced “Abu GaReb”.
I somehow doubt the people of the world consider that an open or full enough apology for their purposes. especially as he said it was still right to have faught the war and toppled Sadam. Mr Bush does not understand it is the deliberate lies and constructed false justification of war that means everything he has done since has been so disliked and distrusted. And the BBC reporter needs a slap with a wet fish, a la Monty Python, to raise her awareness of bias. There is a fishy smell of Government compliance about BBC morning television.
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Flower
You are not dirty
You are purer than snow
What you did to survive
Allowed you to grow
Now you are growing
Brighter each day
Shining a light
Following the way
Sometimes it will feel
Like there’s no end in sight
Just remember that truth
Will always win out
Be careful and safe
While you travel the path
Your beauty will draw men
Like moths to a flame
But they’ll never see you
For the girl that you are
Until you can see you
And know who you are
So welcome home friend
It’s good to know you
To help you to flower
And grow into you
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Two weeks ago I underwent the final round of testing at the London Chest Hospital. The radiologist confirmed that my diaphragm now does not move at all when I breathe standing and is obstructed on the right side when I am laying down. The Respiritory Registrar I saw suggested the cause is neurological and I should see a neurologist.
Meanwhile my hips are shot to buggery and the chances of my making a full recovery seem to narrow by the day. My spine is doing an impression of a snake being charmed. The radiologist at the London Chest made two comments of particular interest, given the history. Firstly he said he saw “nothing psychosomatic” before him. Secondly he said it was “a good thesis” that my breathing problems were caused by the musculoskeletal problems I am suffering.
I write this as, after nineteen months under the “care” of the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in Stanmore, Middlesex I have no appointments to see where we go next, no diagnosis, no care plan - in fact nothing but hot air and bullshit. The last doctor I saw there was a nice man who said he would be “interested” in the results of these examinations and recommended I keep seeing my Osteopath. Personally I am more than interested as they show the RNOH lot up for the unscientific stories they have been feeding me in the name of medicine.
I am spending £100 a week on Osteopathy (which I will require refunded as it was the RNOH’s medical recommendation) and have spent a total of nearly £2000 on MRI scans over the last three months which I will also require refunded. More importantly I require and will get from the RNOH a full analysis of my musculoskeletal problems and appropriate assistance in re-aquiring as much use as possible of my body and halting further decline as much as possible.
After two years of decline following injury the following Musculatures are seriously affected: Right side no function: Trapezius, Psoas, Glut. Max, Glut. Min., anterior Scalene, almost everything in my back from my knees to my head. Right Side in Spasm: Clavicular attachment of the Sterno-Clyno Mastoid, posterior and medial Scalenes, Pec (major and minor), Diaphragm, Glut Med, more muscles in my leg than I know. Left Side no function: Glut. Med, Medial and posterior Scalenes, many muscles in my back. I can not be bothered to conbtinue … its enough. …. time to crack heads instead.
The RNOH’s clinical and legal leads need to work out between them how (a) they get themselves out of this stupid hole, and (b) do so before I am caused more permanant damage. I would suggest the clinical governance team take a look … but this is the same as the clinical team in any case so why waste time?
With compliments, Matthew Jee aka Freedom
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A quick search on Google for the words ‘freedom for all’ places freedomforall.net first followed by a CNN report on the second inauguration of President George Bush. ‘Bush called on the “force of human freedom” to “break the reign of hatred” and “expose the pretensions of tyrants” in the world.’ says the report.
Bush has no idea what freedom is. He has not escaped his own appalling childhood or the consequences of his alcoholism, let alone faught off the “mind-forged manacles” of his culture and society. The biggest war of propoganda and hatred ever waged is Mr Bush’s “War on Terror”.
In short, Mr Bush is a pretentious tyrant.
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I live my life inside out and back to front. I think we all do. I think that is what the Buddha and Christ discovered. I think it is a consequence of our warped societies that upbringing raises generation after generation of inside-outers.
We look to the outside world to satisfy our inner sense of inadequecy. We tell ourselves dreams of the future and recount historical hallucinations to maintain our lack of presence in the eternal now. We do not discover ourselves and live our lives from the inate felt sense of OK-ness at the root of being. Most of us never feel that feeling.
The inducements and coersions to comply with norms of family and society beat out of us early our sense of ourselves as OK and as justified in ‘existing without doing’. We must be the right thing to fit in and it is seemingly not what we are in ourselves. So we do as we are told and put our feelings, thoughts and wishes to the side. We repress our felt sense of self.
“Spare the rod, spoil the child” may have passed away as a norm of childrearing but the domestication of our children is as complete as that of our own dogs and cats. And we would not do it to them if our own domestication was not so total. Which means for most of you what I have written here will appear to be completely incomprehensible nonsense at best.
Put simply, forget all your sense of social obigation and find out from inside what is the right thing to do. It will probably take years of practice before you can recognise, let alone master, the stages of this process.
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S C Johnson manufacture amd sell household products. Glade airfreshener is second in the UK market place to Airwick. Around the world millions of households use Johnson’s air freshener products.
If you spray air freshener in your home on a daily basis your children are five times more likely to get Asthma than if you do not. Scientists believe that every 10 microgram increase in atmospheric levels of particles result in a 1% increase in deaths from respiratory conditions like asthma.
When I grew up air freshener was sprayed in the loo if you made it smell. That was in posh houses. Now, everyone sprays air freshener all over the place. That and and car use account for much of the increase in Asthma. Toxic compunds are formed when the fumes react with ozone in the environment.
S C Johnson are a family company. Still owned by the family who founded the firm. Business has been good to the Johnson family. It doesn’t mean their products are good for your family. In fact many have hidden dangers. The chemical soup in which we live has never been thoroughly researched - even if thousands of puppies and the like kicked the bucket ensuring individual elements were “acceptably” and not “unacceptably” dangerous. But that is all they died for. Now we are paying the price for our chemical warfare.
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