Why I Disagree With Louise Hay

I often get clients coming through to me with a backache who lift an eyebrow meaningfully at me and say, “financial stress at the moment”. Or who come with a bladder infection and shrug resignedly saying, “I know this is because of my fear of letting go” (obviously after having dutifully gone to page 154 of their copy of ‘You Can Heal Your Life’ by Louis Hay and looked their ailment up in the book’s long list of emotional correspondences).

I know that these clients are trying to take some responsibility for their disease and this is understandable, since the popular view is that  physical disease has its root in negative emotions and assumes that true healing starts at an emotional level.

The problem with this philosophy is that it tends to place the client under undue stress; logic dictates that if your emotions are causing your disease, you need to change them before full healing can take effect. But emotions are not something that we do. They are something we feel, they are our natural responses to our environment and as such, provide a healthy yardstick for assessing events in our lives.

We only know that we are being mistreated when we start to feel bad in an unhealthy business or personal relationship. We only know that we have mistreated someone else when we get that creeping sense of guilt. Balanced positive and negative emotions are a valuable, valid part of our being; they teach us how to live.

Coming from a New-Agey background in healing, I struggled terribly with this concept of emotional causality while I was studying acupuncture and repeatedly *ahem* needled my teacher with questions such as “Will acupuncture help if the cause of disease is emotional?” and “What if someone has relevant grief – should they receive acupuncture to balance it?” I just couldn’t seem to put it all together in my head.

In his ineffable patience, he would give me the same answer every time. “Everything comes from chi (energy)”.  Eventually I understood, but it took me damn near my whole acupuncture course to truly grasp it.

Which is why I was quite amused to find that another healer had also butted heads with this idea. The healer in question is one Dr David Servan-Schreiber, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and author of the fascinating book, ‘Healing without Freud or Prozac’ in which he explores alternative ways of overcoming depression without psychoanalysis or drugs. In the book, he tells the story of how, in his process of discovery, he visited a Tibetan acupuncturist in Dharamsala to ask how depression and anxiety are treated with acupuncture.

“You Westerners,” (said the Tibetan healer) “have a vision of emotional problems that’s all topsy-turvy. You’re always surprised to see that what you call depression or anxiety or stress has physical symptoms. You talk about fatigue, weight gain or loss and irregular heartbeats as if they were physical manifestations of an emotional problem. To us, the opposite is true. Sadness, loss of self-esteem, guilt feelings and the absence of pleasure can be mental manifestations of a physical problem. In truth, both of these views are wrong. Emotional symptoms and physical ones are simply two sides of the same thing: an imbalance in the circulation of energy, the chi.”

As I read this, I thought of how often my teacher had repeated his minimalistic version of that same answer to me. We always want to find some kind of reason for disease - much as we do in an office where some process has gone wrong. We want to know who didn’t send the fax, who spilt the coffee on the contract or who took the call that lost the business. But when we think in this way, we develop a false sense of a division in ourselves. It’s not one part of the being that makes the other sick; it is the whole being that lives in a state of harmony or becomes disharmonized. 

The Buddha explained it eloquently and gracefully when he said: "In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true."

The Problem of Marriage

So what is it these days, with the divorce rate?

According to enrichment journal on the divorce rate in America:
For first marriages the divorce rate is 41%
For second marriages it’s 60%
For third marriages it’s 73%

You’d think they’d learn. Wait a minute...what am I thinking… these are human beings we’re talking about.

Snide remarks aside, looking at these statistics, you have to wonder; do these people really want to be married or do they just like weddings? Or do they just have some vague piece of glitchy preschool programming that compels them to marry when deep down they are simply not cut out for it? And (considering the high divorce rate) how many of us are really cut out for it?

Marriage as an institution cannot be ignored; every known culture has some form of legalized marriage proceeding, whether it involves banana leaves and a goat or lots of cake and a ring. Anthropologists have had many bitter and book throwing bitch-fights over the attempt to find a universal explanation for why human beings marry each other. The one who summed it up most neatly was Kathleen Gough who defined marriage as "a union between a man and a woman such that children born to the woman are the recognized legitimate offspring of both partners." Later, she modified this to "a woman and one or more other persons."  Because… you know… people are weird and complicated.

A look at the marriage traditions of various cultures over the ages seems to bear her theory out to some extent. Marriage arrangements historically, appear primarily to have involved making sure your children were your children. It didn’t pay to be bringing up someone else’s brats in the bad old days of bloody hard work and nothing but a donkey to show for it. Without paternity tests at their disposal, no one knew what those lusty hussies were getting up to behind the cow shed while their virtuous men toiled in the wheat fields. So, it became a common (if euphemized) practice to “buy the rights” to a woman’s body (*cough* uterus) with some kind of offering to her family (goats) or to give the husband exclusive sexual access to her in exchange for financial support. In effect, marriage was all about buying secure breeding real estate.

This observation is strongly supported by the fact that adultery was universally seen as a gross violation of marriage terms, but only when performed with or by a woman. In Greco-Roman culture, it was not considered at all criminal for husbands to indulge themselves with pretty handmaidens or slaves, but being caught in flagrante with a married woman would lead to a whole world of trouble. This nonchalantly self-important quote attributed to Demosthenes gives some insight;

"We keep mistresses for our pleasures, concubines for constant attendance, and wives to bear us legitimate children and to be our faithful housekeepers. Yet, because of the wrong done to the husband only, the Athenian lawgiver Solon allowed any man to kill an adulterer whom he had taken in the act”. (Plutarch, Solon)

Coming forward in time, we see that many cultures started to lock women into their function as submissive breeding heifers by progressively diminishing their social status. Two telling examples are the Chinese tradition of foot binding which impeded women from leaving their homes, making them largely useless for anything but bearing children, and the Victorian ideal of the submissive, domesticated wife, denied higher education and presumed too hare-brained to vote. This deliciously draconian quote from Queen Vicky illustrates the attitude of the day;

"I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of 'Women's Rights', with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feelings and propriety. Feminists ought to get a good whipping. Were woman to 'unsex' themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection."

Well we’ve certainly come a long way. Nowadays no one tries to tell women what to do anymore… not twice anyway. They can don pencil skirts, look svelte, crack the corporate whip and marry whoever they like; and as much as they might want to, they certainly no longer need to be married – especially not on anybody else’s terms. Women these days have choices, and they’re using them.

A quick Google for statistics shows:

From 1975 to 1988 in the US, in families with children present, wives file for divorce in approximately two-thirds of cases.

In 1988, 65% of divorces were filed by women.

(The National Center for Health Statistics)

Among college-educated couples, the percentage of divorces initiated by women is approximately 90%.

(American Law and Economics Review)

From these statistics we can deduce that marriage works a lot better for men that it does for women (I’m guessing that was true five hundred years ago too). They also suggest that more educated (independent) women are less likely to stay married. Evidently, the low divorce rate of yester-year had precious little to do with good Christian, Hindu or Pagan fidelity and a whole hell of a lot to do with having options.

Perhaps it’s time to re-examine our motives for a moment and think about whether lifelong institutionalization of our romantic partnerships is still a relevant choice. Yes, we are social beings. We like to live with others. We like to have children and cuddle and talk. We like falling in love, staying in love and making contracts to run our relationships by. Over some two thousand years, marriage has become our norm, our expectation and our final rite of passage into adulthood; but let us not fail to acknowledge that in these days of radical technological, social and personal change, ‘til death do us part’ might be a little much.

In 2007 Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) party candidate Gabriele Pauli, proposed that marriage contracts become subject to active renewal after seven years or be terminated. She was ridiculed and rejected by the German public. Federal food and agriculture minister Horst Seehofer, called her idea absurd, adding; "We are not in a circus; with ideas like that, she should give up her candidacy." Granted, it’s a kooky sounding arrangement, but it is also a forward-thinking and elegant solution to the 45% German divorce rate. While Pauli’s chief objective seems to have been saving people the probable expenses, from a personal point of view, her proposal would have provided a baseline from which one would have been able to engage in marriage by continual choice (and anyone who’s been there knows that those choices can change). One might argue that the more sensible option is not to marry at all, but as long as there are little girls who dream of walking down the aisle in tasteless white dresses (and lots of cake and a ring) marriage will be with us. The “seven year contract” model allows for re-assessment of what ‘for better or worse’ really means to us by adjusting the rigid structure of marital vows to one that accommodates the reality of our ever changing lives and our ever changing relationships.

Incidentally, Ms Pauli’s principal adversary, Seehofer, later came under pressure to surrender his own candidacy after it was publicized that the married father of three had impregnated his (much younger) girlfriend. (Just sayin’).

Seven year contract or not, with the financial, sexual and social independence; high powered jobs, crèches and 4x4’s that women now enjoy, there is a new mode of existence that no longer fits into the antiquated cast of happily ever after. The critical requirement for a long term support partnerships is gone; drifted off into history along with the job you started at 18 and left at 60, shoe fashions that stayed in vogue for fifty years and living in the house your dad built with his own hands. Once the pheromones have cleared, we may come to a place where we realize that it would be a healthier option to acknowledge marriage as a quaint but outdated custom that some engage in by choice, rather than a norm that we repeatedly fail to succeed at because it no longer fits the animal we’ve become.

The Changing Rules of Sex

1956. The chronological bulls-eye in an era of stodgy conservatism. Dean Martin was still a hot item, although not as hot as Elvis who had just shimmied onto the stage, shocking the older generation out of their diligently starched corsets with his wildly elastic legs and blatantly seductive stage presence. Rock Hudson was still makin’ the ladies swoon, but not so swoonily as they swooned for James Dean who brought the petulant male anti-hero home in ‘Rebel without a Cause’. Change was a-brewing. The well ironed zeitgeist had hit an ideological midlife crisis and was shopping for a second hand Porche. It was the year that Grace Kelly married her prince, that Autherin Lucy faced a hostile mob trying to prevent her from attending the University of Alabama as their first ever black student and that Science Magazine published an article informing readers of the possibility of a new hormonal oral contraceptive pill; one that would work. 

In 1957 ‘Evonid’ was approved by the FDA for the treatment of menstrual disorders, and made available on prescription packaged in uncharismatic bottles with a bright red warning: “will prevent ovulation”. Perhaps ‘warning’ was not quite the term they were looking for. The next two years saw a suspiciously sudden rise in menstrual disorders reported in every doctor’s office in every small town in America. By 1960, pretenses had been dropped and Enovid was being sold unabashedly, as an oral contraceptive. The sexual revolution had started.

‘Sexual revolution’ is, of course,  really just a stuffy feminist academic’s euphemism for hundreds and thousands of women thinking “Yaay risk free sex” and hurtling joyously into this newly opened carnival with bouncing abandon. A quick look at women in the spotlight over the last six decades exposes the memes through which women’s idea of their own sexuality have developed.  The 1950’s gave us the peachy and professedly naïve Marilyn Monroe, lifting her skirts coyly to give her public a peek of her milky thighs. The magazines of the 1960’s gave us page after page of lean, expressionless girls showing mile after tiresome mile of leg. In the 1970’s and 1980’s the zeitgeist settled down for a nice cup of tea and got comfortable with the female sexual status such as it had become. The 1986 sex thriller ‘9 ½ Half Weeks’ starringMickey Rourke and Kim Basinger portrayed it’s lead female character as being in control of herself and sexually active, but still completely overcome by her domineering mate so long as she was a willing participant.

In the 1990’s a new female archetype exploded into being. She was a woman with no desire to settle down and a rampant sex drive; a self-determined tramp, domineering and permissibly perverse. She was expressed by Sharon Stone as the psycho-killer female sex maniac in ‘Basic Instinct’, Madonna as she lived the dream dancing around on stage in her underwear with symbolically penis-esque breasts jutting bizarrely from her chest and has reached its peak with Lady Gaga repeatedly portraying herself as a man-poisoning femme fatale. The new woman is sexually aggressive and emotionally unavailable; a man dressed in suspenders and heels.

In the system of spoken and unspoken rules by which we poke, shag, fondle and hump, female chastity has long been considered a desirable trait. This was a view largely prescribed by the famous book ‘How to live slowly and die old for Dummies’ (otherwise known as The Bible).

When asked “Why are religions so concerned with sex?” by bigthink.com, Lionel Tiger, professor of anthropology at Rutgers University said: “Men and women have different reproductive strategies because the costs of sex (unprotected sex) for females are infinitely different than for males, so there always has to be, in any community, the basic mammalian contract, which is, somebody has to take care of the mother child bond. Chastity is usually respected only to the point of marriage, and with marriage suddenly it all changes. You’re supposed to be chaste and then at marriage suddenly you have sexual obligations. So the system is very aware of the relationship between sexual license and responsibility”

Naturally the oral contraceptive pill can be expected to have changed all that. After centuries of oppression, women seem happy to adopt an increasingly masculine sexual agenda and moreover, are being expected by men to do so. In a sense, without the risk of pregnancy to create balance, the male sexual agenda (plant as many oats as possible) can realize a completely uninhibited (though impotent) expression of itself. The female sexual agenda on the other hand (yes, I’m talking about being swept off your feet by a strong capable man with manicured fingernails) seems to have been locked in the trunk of that 1956 Buick.

In her books, ‘The male brain’ and ‘The Female Brain’, Dr Louise Brizendine, neuro-psychiatrist at the University of California outlines the differences between men and women. She reveals that “men have two and a half times the brain space devoted to sexual drive in their hypothalamus” while women have larger parts of their brains devoted to centers for communication, observation, processing of emotion and emotional memory.

According to Dr Brizendine, the structure of our brain has a profound effect over our values, priorities, perceptions and behaviour. “Baby girls are born interested in emotional expression. They take meaning about themselves from a look, a touch, every reaction from the people they come into contact with. From these cues they discover whether they are worthy, lovable, or annoying. But take away the signposts that an expressive face provides and you've taken away the female brain's main touchstone for reality.”

These needs, processes and reactions happen below the level of our conscious thought.

“Ho Hum” I hear you say, “we’ve known this all along… relationship and nurturing is more important to women and sex is more important to men blah blah… what’s new?”

Here’s what’s new: Considering that the sexual revolution was ostensibly about women coming to terms with their sexuality, they are suddenly doing the most extraordinary things to themselves in the name of sexual liberation. Things that offer no enhancement to the biologically built-in female sexual agenda. Things that in fact, betray a disquietingly strong presence of the female ‘need to please’ in view of the fact that they seem to cater primarily to male pleasure enhancement.

In typical “do whatever pleases your man” style, women are having Brazilian waxes to look like a porn stars (no one’s idea of an afternoon picnic) becoming more willing to experiment with anal sex, which, according to AskMen.com is a perfectly reasonable request since it “only really hurts like a bitch the first three or so times” (Eh?) having labia reduction surgery (excuse me?) and being more willing to engage in increasingly frequent casual sex (not exactly in line with the female emotional agenda) to name a few. For the first time in history women are experiencing sexual performance anxiety (the inability to achieve orgasm after 30 thrusts) and feeling anxious enough to have their G-spots enhanced with Hyaluronic acid (so that it sticks out so much you don't have to look for it). These expressions of ‘female sexuality’ don’t come any where near the natural feminine desire to find a loving, caring mate who is sensitive to your needs not to mention being largely defunct of things that are naturally valuable to us; communication, nurturing and emotional bonding. 

The ancient contracts of sex are clearly no longer being honoured.

There is also a growing, subtle assessment of women who want to be in love with their lover and establish long term meaningful relationships as clingy and naïve. By extension, single motherhood is on the rise. The ‘Tinbergen Institute discussion paper on Marriage Markets and Single Motherhood in South Africa’ reveals a whopping 46% of women between the ages of twenty and forty have at least one child out of wedlock and are bringing up their children with no access to the father’s resources. Census figures from Britain show that the proportion of single parents has more than doubled since 1986.

While certainly a lot of women are comfortable in this new sexual territory, many of us can’t help but cringe a little and the saner among us have to be asking themselves “why in the seven hells would I want to cut my labia off?”  

Wherever you are on the proverbial fence, there is a distinct possibility that women have taken their “man pleasing” exercise to a ridiculous level. It might be time to sit back and ask ourselves whether this behaviour is really an expression of our sexual self-worth and independence or whether we have conned ourselves into a new echelon of self-imposed sexual compliance (mistaken for self-determination) causing us to engage in behaviour which essentially denies our needs under the guise of feminine equality.

Stealth Acupuncture

Names have been changed for privacy purposes:

So a funny thing happened the other day. Granted, as an acupuncturist, awkward situations, and hysteria-peppered-hilarity are things you get used to; after all, your job involves sticking needles into people. It’s not like being an accountant.

But this incident can be chalked up as a first.

I got my first call on from Mary’s husband on a Friday. He wanted to know if acupuncture could help with Sciatica (painful inflammation of the sciatic nerve which begins in the lower back and runs through the buttock into the leg). This is the largest nerve in the body and if something goes wrong with it can cause excruciating pain (as you can imagine). After a fair amount of backing and forthing about where and when we were going to set up an appointment, I ended up tootling through to Mary’s place in the Beetle with a set of needles packed in my bag.

When I arrived, I found her pretty much confined to her bed from pain. She had visited the doctor a number of times but gotten no relief. On her latest visit, she had been told that she would need x-rays to check if her disks were collapsing but after a couple of hours waiting for a radiologist, she had been so sore that she’d thought ‘bugger this for a lark’ and gone home.

Seeing a new client is always a little awkward. There’s normally a faint aura of suspicion (acupuncture is not exactly mainstream) and clients will frequently try to lock you into some kind of guarantee. Acupuncture works extremely well, but even the most brilliant surgeon essentially fumbles along with the mystery that is the human body as best he can, unable to guarantee anything. I normally start with a new client by asking them if they’ve ever had acupuncture before, and if they haven’t, giving a short introductory brief to manage expectations, familiarize them with the procedure and let them get an idea of who this strange person is who will be … well, stabbing them repeatedly.

In Mary’s case, I skipped this step.  She was obviously in too much pain to be having a casual pre-session chat; the priority here was getting her comfortable as quickly as possible.

The first challenge was to get her on top of the covers so that I could reach the acupuncture points I needed to work on. The acupuncture fix for sciatica involves inserting a two inch long needle into the point ‘Haun Tiao’ (GB30) and shaking it around a little to unblock the energy flows in the area. Huan Tiao is parked (brazenly) smack bang in the middle of the human buttock.

Mary slowly and painfully got out from under the covers and hobbled around the bed, trying to help me straighten it out. I felt really sorry for her. Every step she took was accompanied by an “ooh” an “ah” or a grunt of pain and her movements were severely restricted.

Eventually we got her lying face down (not comfortable) with her buttocks proudly jutted towards the heavens through her pj’s for me to have my evil way with them. I palpated her glutes to find the exact spot and then swiftly inserted the long needle through the thin pajama material. I was rewarded with mild exclamation of surprise from the direction of Mary’s face, now buried firmly in her pillows.

I unwrapped the second long needle from its sterile packaging and inserted into the other buttock with no reaction – so far so good, and then inserted a couple of other needles behind her knees, and in her ankles to support the action of Haun Tiao.

It was at this point that she suddenly pulled her face out of the pillow and said; “What are you doing to me?”

Now the tone of voice used by a person tells you a lot about what they actually mean when they ask you a question like that. This wasn’t an enquiry for explanation of process or the response of someone who feels a lot of energy coursing through their body from the effects of the treatment. She was in that “what the hell is going on here???” place. She wanted to know what I was up to. Immediately.

“Um” I said. “acupuncture?”

“Yes but why is it pulling like that?” she asked.

Ok that explained it. She was just feeling the “de chi”, a sensation often experienced by acupuncture patients, which feels like their muscles are contracting independently of their will. It’s a little weird, but not painful.

“Oh that’s nothing to worry about” I said, “It’s just energy moving in your body because of the needle”

“Did you just stick a needle into me?” she asked incredulously.

Well of course I had. What had she been expecting?

It was at this point that I realized that Mary and I had something of a severe communication breakdown. We’d missed each other as gracefully as Hailey’s comet misses the earth every seventy odd years.

“Um…” I said uncertainly, “this is acupuncture… um it’s sticking needles into people for um… pain relief”

Yes, I was completely aware in that moment how wacky that sounded.

“Oh my god!” she said “I though you were just going to massage me or something!”

Well.

The deed was done, so the only thing left was to let the needles take effect. I sat down on the corner of the bed and dutifully performed the previously omitted preliminary chat. From her reaction, I could see that Mary thought this acupuncture malarkey was simply the kookiest idea she’d ever heard. At the end of it, she asked, “well what do we do now?”

“We wait” I said. And we did.

Considering that she’d had no idea what was going to go down, she took it extremely well. Or maybe she thought I was mad and she had better behave before I started throwing things around the room. Either way, she lay still and gave me good feedback about the sensations created by the needling. Every now and then, I asked her to stretch towards her nightstand to assess if and how fast her pain was clearing, and quickly, the movement became more comfortable for her. She started relaxing and talked to me about her family and her work. By the end of the session I think she’d decided I was OK.

Then it was time for the acid test, otherwise known as “ok I’m going to take the needles out now and let’s see if it’s worked”

It had.

Brilliantly.

I know this because Mary kept on saying so. Granted she was a little more flabbergasted than I’d have preferred, but it was good to see her marching up and down her bedroom and telling me “look it worked!”, bending down and touching her toes and saying, “look here! It actually worked!” and leaning from side to side with her arms out and saying… you get the picture.

I didn’t hear from Mary again. Weirdly, that’s a good thing when you’re an acupuncturist, but sometimes it would be nice to have a phone call or so, just to confirm that the results have held. I got my little reward a week later from a friend of hers who told me Mary is still absolutely fine and not suffering any lasting trauma from the strange goings on in her bedroom that Tuesday night.

Energy Vampires Baffle Brains

There’s a lot of talk these last few years about a very odd phenomenon.

You’ve probably heard it… someone will say something like; “I’m avoiding Joe at the moment, he drains my energy.” And then everybody will nod sagely and someone in the company will mutter “energy vampire”.

A quick Google search for the term reveals a high level of paranoia about energy vampires; a lot of websites imply darkly that they are a “different breed from the rest of us, difficult to recognize with the untrained eye” and have a “modus operandi” by which they deliberately seek out victims for the express purpose of consuming their positive energy. Some sites go so far as to suggest that energy vampires suck out your very life force and give tips for recognizing them, avoiding them and protecting yourself against them (interestingly, none of these involve just telling them to bugger off).

The “how to recognize energy vampires” lists generally define these ethereal aura suckers by a relatively loose collection of (in anyone’s book, extremely irritating) character traits: These are the people who don’t respect your time boundaries, who are passive-aggressive, who perpetually attempt to elicit pity, and whose conversation articulates circular pessimism leaving you bored, frustrated and emotionally flat-lined. I don’t dispute for a moment that people like this can tire you out, but are they really draining your energy? All things being fair in love and psychic war, let’s have a look at this in context with the rest of the commonly held belief system that gave rise to the labeling of these poor shmucks as “vampires” in the first place.

The same people who tell you that Joe is an energy vampire also hold an axiomatic view of an energetic universe. That is to say, our whole universe, our bodies, our minds, the chair you’re sitting on and everything in between is manifest from an abundant presence of energy which simply expresses itself in different forms (of which you and Joe happen to be two).  

There’s an obvious conflict here; how on earth does one conclude that energy has been “sucked out” of one if there is only energy in our universe?  It’s hardly as though there’s a scarcity of this stuff; we move in it, play in it, are born from it and live in it. We are it… Joe is it. We couldn’t get away from it if we tried. There is not “Joe’s energy” and “your energy”. There is just energy.

So why do we get so unbearably tired when Joe drops in for tea?

While most of us accept the precept that our universe is made up of energy, we tend to be aware of this only in vague terms, not realizing how profoundly it permeates our every endeavor. Taoist thought elucidates the principal with spectacular clarity. The well known idea of man at one with nature (not so much about tree hugging) refers to the eternal cycle along which the universe ineffably meanders. This profoundly simple yet mystic cycle is called “tao” or “the way”. It is understood that this ineffable “way that the universe executes” or this “nature of the universe” is so woven through us, that we are so much part of it, as to validate definition as one in the same thing; “man is nature”.

Armed with this wisdom we can start to see the elegant sagacity in the principal of “wei wu wei” translated as “doing without doing” or “non-action”. This is a state of being in which one is so aligned with the “way” that your actions are “no longer”. Instead they become an effortless ride on the wave of energy that is already present; already moving. This is a co-creative process in which the human, in full capacity of free will performs his work using the most abundant natural resource in the universe, energy, for support, and does so in harmony with the “way”. It is a state of being characterized by relaxation, adaptability, effortlessness, and spiritual, physical and emotional health. One who has mastered it is considered to be “in his natural state”.

Conversely it is understood that performing work in an ego-state that is not in harmony with the ‘way’ creates blockages in the human energy field and body; in essence, it indicates that your existence has become “unnatural”. This state of being is characterized by egocentrism, frustration, fatigue and poor mental, spiritual and physical health. This is why the Taoists defined health as a state of free-flowing energy, and disease as a state of blocked energy.

But back to gormless Joe the energy vampire. Judging by his personality as a whining, passive-aggressive, boring, time-wasting pain in the neck, or alternatively what various bits of wisdom on the internet define as a “positive vampire” … the guy who’s having such a fabulous time that you eventually become lobotomized by his mind-numbingly monotonous bliss-talk, Joe is probably someone who you think should change the way he runs his life. The Tao Te Jing explains why this is an inadequate view:

When people see some things as beautiful,

other things appear ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things appear bad.
Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.

Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn't possess,
acts but doesn't expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.

-Lao Tsu

Holding the view that Joe should not be so negative / critical / boring, is not part of your “natural state”; it is simply a comparative reaction based on your limited point of view, or to an attachment to your idea of what Joe should be instead of what he is. The “natural man” doesn’t mind how Joe has chosen to manifest. He lets things arise and lets them go without possession.

The next part of the mechanism is the one that stops you telling Joe to leave you alone and be done with him. You feel that on some level, it is ‘less good’ not to like Joe - or ‘less good’ not to engage with him. This messes with the concept that you have of yourself as a nice, positive, loving human being. Of course, the nice, positive, loving human being that you conceive yourself to be is really just an ego construct; you are none of these things, and all of these things and far beyond. It is your inability to adapt yourself to the situation, your attachment to being nice, positive, loving human being that keeps you locked in conversation with Joe, feeding him endless cups of tea and cake when you really wish you were watching telly instead.

The conflict between these two unnatural states creates an “energetic knot” which crunches your energy flow, over and above which, the effort of keeping both of  them going at the same time (since they are both your own creation) takes a hell of a lot of work. By the time Joe has eaten all your cake and left, you are bound to be exhausted.

This is not to say that Joe’s behaviour is A-OK, but it is important to understand that Joe is not causing blockages in your energy field anymore than what he sucking you dry. You are.

Of course, there is a contrasting scenario where we feel that we “get” energy from another. These are usually the people that allow us to express ourselves with complete freedom, and give us the attention that we need in order to do so. While we’re aware that we might be wearing their patience a little thin, the flow seems unstoppable. This is not because we’re sucking energy out of them. We’re simply surfing on the free energy wave that they have created for us by psychically getting out of our way. Funny thing is, it never occurs to us that they might be doing their own angel meditations for protection as we hoot goodbye on our way down their street.

It is interesting to note the similarities in thought pattern between the old concept of blood sucking vampires, or even the sequence of events that led to the 15^th century witch-hunts and our thinking about energy vampires today. Too often, a concept is born from the writing or commentary of a single persuasive speaker. Despite having no grounding in or connection to our known reality, the concept is extrapolated upon and gives rise to myths which are eventually accepted as truisms when in fact they are no more than superstitious fancy.  It is terrifying to think that we are no less gullible now with all our apparent advancements than we were then. It is a healthy and enriching exercise to step away momentarily from that which we have accepted, and to judge it against a little bit of common sense, critical observation and experience. Doing this, we can perhaps tumble into the next millennium calling ourselves enlightened.

Hell Hath No Fury

Women in Love       

In his poem Don Juan, Byron said; “Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, 'Tis woman's whole existence.”

For many women, this statement is mildly offensive. Sick of being branded as irrational, over-emotional and easily swayed by love, any woman who reckons she’s got her head screwed on straight will deny it in the interest of preserving what scraps of gender equality are available to her (not to mention keeping her dignity intact). The sad fact is any woman who reckons she’s got her head screwed on straight is wrong.

 Even the most rational woman will find herself at home (mooning about) relaxing (waiting for the phone to ring) with a glass of wine (drinking away the sharp edges of her anxiety) and listening to Kate Bush CD’s when she falls in love, her normal assured level of sanity (considering PMS, bra’s and the other miscellaneous complications that every woman deals with) reduced to the level of neurotic obsession.

Women Scorned

On being jilted, the same rational woman will find herself in a black night of the soul that leaves her unable to concentrate on work, unable to eat or sleep and unable to stop crying or thinking of her absent lover. With the right set of stimuli, Sensible Sue will turn into a crazed jackal-brained bitch who will stop at nothing to take revenge on her ex. We’ve all heard the stories.

Dr. Louann Brizendine neurobiologist and author of ‘The Female Brain’, explains that "the state of early romantic love can be reignited by being dumped, which actually heightens the phenomenon of passionate love in the brain circuits." That is to say, a woman will often spin out into an agitated, obsessive state in which she loses all sense of context and becomes hell-bent on getting her lover back.

This is not because the poor thing has nothing better to do with her time. It’s because of the way that Mother Nature (not all that sane Herself) designed her; for the survival of the species.

The Biology

Dr. Brizendine explains how, by its very structure (bigger emotional memory center, greater ability to read cues, different chemical composition) the female brain is a completely different kind of engine from that of the male, elegantly designed to function primarily for the purpose of relationships, emotion and nurturing.

This has a profound influence over her priorities. When love comes to town, the coolest ice queen is driven by her biology to become warm, supportive, psychotic and dedicated to her mate.

Yes, that did say psychotic.

Hey man, got any Dope (amine)?

The chemistry of the human brain is remarkably similar to those science lab experiments that involve a rat, a maze, some cheese and a nerd. Rat presses red button, cheese. Rat presses green button, electric shock. Except in our case, the maze is our lives and we don’t get cheese we get dopamine, a neurotransmitter which turns on our pleasure centres, reinforcing positive responses to stimuli like food and sex. Dopamine is part of our fundamental survival mechanism. But when our dopamine level gets too high, things can get a little weird.

Eros and Psychotic

In March of this year, Nature Neuroscience published the results of a study that linked psychopathic behavior to elevated dopamine levels in the brain. Joshua Buckholtz, lead author of the study was quoted as saying that a hyperactive dopamine reward system "may be the foundation for some of the most problematic behaviors associated with psychopathy, such as violent crime, recidivism (yeah I had to look it up too, it means “chronic tendency toward repetition of criminal or antisocial behavior patterns”) and substance abuse."

The other nerd on the team, associate professor of psychology and psychiatry David Zald, added, “These individuals appear to have such a strong draw to reward—to the carrot—that it overwhelms the sense of risk or concern about the stick.”

There is also evidence linking high dopamine levels to schizophrenia.

 “Yes,” you say, “but what has that got to do with women in love?”

Madly in Love

Well, this. After conducting MRI studies on the human brain, Rutgers University research professor Helen Fisher observed “When our subjects look at a photograph of their sweetheart, one of the main parts of the brain that lights up is the ventral tegmental area, a tiny little region that makes dopamine and sprays it around the brain.”

Hang on a second… did she just say “sprays dopamine around the brain?” Isn’t that a little reckless?

Well… yes… but so is breeding when you think about it; getting us to bypass the common sense that tells us it’s dangerous and stupid to give birth takes some powerful chemical convincing.

Addicted to You

According to Fisher, Dopamine is associated with “arousal and, at very high levels, anxiety and fear (as well as) addictions. When you take cocaine, dopamine soars. Alcohol, Nicotine, Morphine – they all elevate levels of dopamine.”

Put in plain English, when we fall in love, we literally become irrationally addicted to object of our affections. We are rewarded with secretions of dopamine (among other feel-good chemicals) in the presence our lover, and experience the biological equivalent of withdrawal when he’s not around.

Depending on how of this neurotransmitter you secrete, you may not experience this as a gentle hormonal nudge in the right direction. In some women it is more akin to an overriding instinctual drive which turns us into dumb dopamine puppets for bonding to a mate and procreation. This has nothing to do with our common sense, intelligence, code of conduct or diet. It is not something that we can control or switch off. It is blinding, and uncompromising. In short, under its influence, we are crazy.

Hell hath no fury

Bearing all this chemical warfare in mind, it’s not surprising that women hardly ever come out of a breakup intact. We all have coping mechanisms be they downing a bottle of tequila and doing a striptease on the bar counter, guzzling a litre of rum ‘n raisin in front of telly or emptying a bottle of sleeping pills.

We have all been on one or other side of that grief-stricken six-hour conversation about how your heart feels like it’s got a knife stuck through it and you just don’t know how you’re going to live without him.

Some women snap a little further under the influence of the hormone screwdriver served up by the brain. They scratch “Manwhore” into the paintwork of their ex’s Beemer, burn his clothes, drive the car over the postbox and through the front door and run screaming into the night. They vandalize, stalk, leave abusive phone messages and harass in the name of love.

We label them “psycho-bitches”. We laugh and say “Hell hath no fury” but considering the cocktail of crazy juice sloshing around in their systems, it’s surprising that these extreme reactions aren’t more common.

Withdrawal

In effect, asking a woman to react rationally to a highly emotional breakup is like asking someone going through their second day of heroine cold turkey to please behave nicely at your tea party.

And dammit, the miracle is that we actually manage it most of the time. We go on with our jobs keep our commitments and perform our chores. We force ourselves to cope even though we’re up against formidable chemical odds. We despise ourselves for loving so deeply, we lock our feelings down for sake of female dignity and we swear that we will never, never fall in love again.

We probably will (Mother Nature didn’t get where she is today by giving up that easily) and once we have, there’s a passing chance that we will find ourselves in that place where we want to tear the tiles off the bathroom wall and set flame to the curtains when he leaves… but next time a woman goes off the rails over you, cut her a little slack.  It’s hardly like nature plays fair.

Don’t reduce, Don’t re-use, Don’t recycle

They say if you put a frog in boiling water it’ll jump out. Put a frog in cool water and set him on the stove with a low fire under him and he’ll boil to death slowly. Maybe frogs are really like that, maybe not. Human beings on the other hand - human beings are definitely like that.

April 20, 2010 gave us a boiling pot with the explosion on the BP operated Deepwater Horizon oil rig causing a massive oil spill that vomited out from the bowls of the earth covering ten thousand square kilometers in its toxic slick. The event burst into the headlines generating worldwide outrage, a hurricane of hate mail and tens of thousands of law suits. Hating BP CEO Tony Hayward became a global hobby amidst a mardi gras of finger pointing, explanation demanding and general bitching about the greedy oil merchants and the evil empire.

All this is merely evidence that we humans love ourselves a good scapegoat.

There is no denying that the gulf oil slick was and is a horrific ecological disaster and that BP’s blind self interest and incompetence is criminal. However, it is a not the worst ecological disaster we are facing presently. Yes I hear your amygdala popping in preparation for a rage-fest in its hot hormone soup from all the way over here, but bear with me for a second.

Natural Sea floor oil seeps are common; so common in fact that they are used to locate wells underwater. A satellite survey published in January 2000 and a National Academies study from 2003, show that approximately 980,000 barrels of oil seeps from some 600 locations on the ocean floor of the Gulf of Mexico alone every year. These slow leaks are broken down by bacteria and physical and chemical mechanisms inherent in the ocean which action complete disappearance of the oil by breaking it down into harmless organic components.

Because the gulf gusher generated an oil to water ratio which outweighed the ability of these natural processes to break the slick down by several orders of magnitude (some 4.9 million barrels) toxic goop ravaged the area killing dolphins, blackening beaches and polluting marshlands. The tragedy is, nevertheless, isolated to a relatively contained area which, in a couple of hundred years, barring other stresses to the ecology would have been restored and repopulated.

Not so with the untold tons of plastic floating around in our oceans. The North and South Pacific gyres presently house an insidiously growing area twice the size of the United States filled with plastic beverage bottles, condoms, bits of disposable diaper, severed barbie doll limbs, medical gloves, and shopping bags all through the water column down to the ocean floor, killing an average of one hundred thousand marine mammals annually.

Samples taken from the area by the Algalita Marine Research Foundation reveal that this part of the ocean contains six parts of plastic for every one part of zooplankton; it is, essentially an enormous plastic slick created by huge numbers of us not behaving all that badly.

While many of us who sport a shade of green tend to think that consuming plastic responsibly (a.k.a. reduce, re-use, recycle) will protect our environment from the onslaught of human trash, this is unfortunately not the case. Firstly, plastics are difficult to recycle since their molecular structures change when heated. After being “downcycled” a few times, most plastic products will inevitably end up in landfills or in the ocean where they never, ever biodegrade. Recycling plastic (while certainly not as bad as using new) is not a solution to the amount of plastic we pump out. It is merely a delay.

It’s a numbers problem. For example, using a disposable cup on your flight to Cape Town (and we all assume that it will be properly disposed of by the airline) is an innocuous act. However when you learn that one million plastic disposable cups are thrown away by the worlds airlines every six hours as depicted in Chris Jordan’s series of photographs ‘Running the Numbers’  (worth a Google if you don't know it) the picture starts to change. Buying a litre or two of milk packaged in plastic once a year is really not all that bad. But when one billion of us do it, inconceivable amounts of trash are generated. When three billion of us do it every day, the problem becomes unimaginable. Multiply that by toothpaste tubes, dishwashing liquid bottles, food packaging and the thousands of other applications for plastic, and the reason for the existence of the Pacific gyre nightmare becomes clear.

The Pacific gyre is our slowly boiling pot; our unwavering cumulative death sentence passed not only on the creatures whose natural habitat the ocean is, but, if we don’t turn this around, on ourselves. This is not about hugging trees or being eco-chic anymore; it’s about the preservation of the ocean's delicate balance and consequently, our continued capacity for survival.

For years we have been living by the slogan “reduce, re-use, recycle”. Perhaps where it comes to plastics, a more suitable motto would be don’t use, don’t use, don’t use.