In kabbalah each day on the Jewish calendar has its own energy. In our kabbalistic search for meaning, what then can we discover for today, June 16, or the third of Tammuz on the Jewish calendar?
Today, Joshua stopped the sun, the and the former Lubavitcher Rebbe was released from prison and last Lubavitcher Rebbe died.
So what?
It is also the date that links Victor Frankl, founder of logotherapy and author of Mankinds Search for Meaning, to the Rebbe.
After enduring the Nazi final solution, Frankl concluded that even in the most severe suffering, the human being can find meaning and thus hope. In his words, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’” wrote Jacob Biderman, Chabad Shliach in Vienna, Austria.

It’s not that Frankl was an overnight success.

Frankl had been a young colleague of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. However, Frankl rejected the view we are driven by the need to gratify physical needs, a "will to pleasure." Frankl taught we are driven by a "will to meaning," possessing free choice and the capacity for self-transcendence. "Between stimulus and response . . . is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
Loyal Freudian ridiculed him and his lectures shunned. In incredible emotional turmoil he had decided to give up and move to his sister in Australia.He had been sitting and drafting his immigration papers, when he was disturbed by an unexpected visitor, Margaret Chajes.

Margaret was a little taken back by the cross emblazoned on the wall, (Frankl second wife was a devout Catholic) and perhaps wondered why she was sent to Dr Frankl with a brief message from the Rebbe, who had been described in the Press as ultra Orthodox.

Her message was simple, "Rabbi Schneerson, known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe, sent a message for you: Remain strong! Continue your work with complete resolve. Don't give up. Ultimately you will prevail."


Frankl was astonished. He decided not to emigrate and his work did prevail. His ideas would influence writers from Scot Peck's "Road Less Traveled" to Steven Covey's "Seven Habits."

Many years later, at age 90, Frankl recalled the message from Rabbi Schneerson.
"Ah... of course! Can I ever forget it? The Rabbi came to my aid during a very difficult time in my life. I owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude!"


How in the world did this Rebbe know about his situation? And why should this chassidic rebbe care about him or the perpetuation of his philosophy? asked Jacob Biderman.

Indeed why?

Viktor and Elly Frankl’s biographer, Haddon Klingberg, wrote:
"...after his death I asked Elly if he actually made these prayers every day. 'Absolutely. He never missed a day. Every morning for more than fifty years. But nobody knew this.' As they traveled the globe Viktor took the phylacteries with them, and everywhere, every morning, he prayed. He uttered memorized words of Jewish prayers and Psalms...
"(After Viktor died I saw his phylacteries for the first time. Elly had placed them in the little cubicle with his few simple possessions...)"
Indeed, Frankl's non-Jewish son-in-law confirmed this fact to me: "My father-in-law would close himself off in a room every day for a little while. Once I opened the door and saw him with black boxes on his head and hand. He was annoyed about my intruding on his privacy. When he was taken to the hospital, however, his practice of putting on tefillin became public."
What inspired the Rebbe with a vision that went beyond strict Jewish orthodoxy to a Jewish man who had married ‘out.’

The Rebbe wrote (free translation):

…I would like to take this opportunity to add another point, that the medical condition of ..... proves (if proof is needed in this area) the awesome power of faith – especially when applied and expressed in practical action, community work, observance of mitzvot, etc. – to fortify a person’s emotional tranquility minimizing and even elimination of inner conflicts, as well as complaints one may have to his surroundings, etc.
This is in spite the theory that faith and religion demand the discipline to restrain and suppress natural instincts and drives, and is, therefore, generally undesirable, and particularly in the case of a person who requires treatment for emotional issues.
I particularly took interest in the writing of Dr. Frankl (from Vienna in this matter. To my surprise, however, his approach has apparently not been appropriately disseminated and appreciated. Although one can find numerous reasons as to why his ideas are not widely accepted – including the fact that is related to the personal lifestyle exemplified by the treating doctor – nevertheless, the question still remains…
When was the letter written?
June 19, 1969, or in the Jewish calendar the 3rd Tammuz, 5729.
(Adapted from The Rebbe and Viktor Frankl)

The power is in your passion and values, not your cheque book. An example of living his passionn, the son of billionaire Warren Buffett tells how to raise successful kids.
Don’t spoil them!
Musician and now author Peter Buffett claims he became a "normal, happy" person instead of a spoiled instead of a spoiled rich kid because he has valuies andself respect.
"I am my own person and I know what I have accomplished in my life," he said. "This isn't about wealth or fame or money or any of that stuff, it is actually about values and what you enjoy and finding something you love doing."
Bufferts kids could be upset their dad gave billions away rather than give it to them –but they know there is somehing even more important.
It’s inspiring to see thwe son of one of the worlds richest men speak of following your passions.
Being born with a silver spooncan result in sense of entitlement and a lack of personal achievement that dad, Warren Buffett called a "silver dagger in your back,"
Dad may headsBerkshire Hathaway, consistently ranks on the Forbes List of the world's richest people and bcalled investing s "Oracle of Omaha"but he is the son of a man who gave billions to charity and not his kids.
"I was not only not handed everything as a kid, I was shown that there are lots of other people out there with very different circumstances," he said.
"Entitlement is the worst thing ever and I see entitlement coming in many guises," he said. "Anybody who acts like they deserve something 'just because' is a disaster."
What matters is self-respect and pursuing one's own passions and accomplishments rather than buying into society's concepts of material wealth.
Given gave him $90,000 in stock when he was 19, after studing at Stanford he lived in a a studio apartment with just enough room for his musical instruments
"I was really searching," he said, adding that he began his musical career by working for free writing music for a local television station.
"I was kind of lost, but trying to find myself. It was definitely this strange period where I didn't really know where I was going," he said.
As he grew older, the financial world "was not speaking to my heart."
Toring for his recently released new book, "Life is What You Make it: Finding Your Own Path to Fulfillment", is as creative as his music.
"Concert & Conversation" tour in which he plays the piano, talks about his life and warns against consumerist culture and damaging the environment
What if we taught our children to pursue their passion with the technical skill of a Warren Buffet and the expressive flair of hois son?
Will you take up the challenge – or force them off to medical school against their will?

Volunteers were asked to learn the layout of a 3D computer maze so they could find their way within the virtual space several hours later, reports the BBC. Those allowed to take a nap and who also remembered dreaming of the task, found their way to a landmark quicker.


The researchers think the dreams are a sign that unconscious parts of the brain are working hard to process information about the task.


Dreams may be a marker that the brain is working on the same problem at multple levels, saidstudy coauthor Dr Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School.


"The dreams might reflect the brain's attempt to find associations for the memories that could make them more useful in the future" he said.


While we know that postlearning sleep is beneficial for human memory performance, human and animal
studies show that learning-related neural activity is re-expressed during posttraining nonrapid eye movement (NREM) sleep


NREM sleep processes appear to be particularly beneficial for hippocampus-dependent forms of memory


This suggests that learning triggers the reactivation and reorganization of memory traces during sleep not expeirenced in wakefulness, claimed the report, a systems-level process that in turn enhances behavioral performance.

Afternoon Nap for Afternoon study?


The study suggests our non-conscious brain works on the things that it deems are most important, stated Dr Erin Wamsley in the BBC.


"Every day we are gathering and encountering tremendous amounts of information and new experiences," she said.


"It would seem that our dreams are asking the question, 'How do I use this information to inform my life?"


Perhaps we can take advantageof a simple afternoon nap to improve the results of some afternoon study.

Its pouring rain as autumn continues to drift toward a cooler – but still warm Queensland winter.
A bright reflection of peeking sun glare up off by back deck, pooling with water.
My house overlooks Bramble Bay which feeds eventually into the pacific. Most evenings, rain free, theres a pastel quality about the horizon.
A kind of translucency, is how I would describe it.
I have just been talking – online to Rachana – and business has been like the weather.

Dark times and yet wonderful and encouraging prospects reflect back in the opportunities of adversity.
Light dissolves darkness, and a small reflection can bring can alter our perspective of the darkest gloom.

When life seems dark, a spark of light can offer so much hope.

In difficulty, we may even fear to lose it. Or we hang onto what we know, afraid of the consequences of being true to our own inner light.

As Vishen Lakhaini reminded us at Richard Branson’s Engage Today conference, sometimes we have to let go if we are to live our passion.

In the door way of life, light becomes visible as it streams through the dust that it reflects off.

Carl Jung invited us to examine our shadow – our dark side, if we borrow from Star Wars Buddhist inspired ideas.

It is when we dwell in the darkness – by simply letting go of its emotional hold – that the light of opportunity begins to reveal itself.

Our eyes adjust to the darkness, reveal small hints of light that lead us forward to find the distant, and far brighter source of opportunity.
I know that in today’s pragmatic world, this sees a little magical.

Although I am reminded of Sigmund Freud’s reaction when first exposed t o a 16th century kabbalistic text of Rabbi Chayyim Vital (1542-1620), one of the most important students of Isaac Luria.

Luria taught that is man's divinely appointed task to help restore the broken vessels of a shattered cosmos.

Freud reportedly described this as “Gold” and later Jung was fascinated with this as a psychological archetype.

Of course, tis idea does not just rest in any one tradition.

For me, what counts is finding light in the darkness. But most of us are afraid to lose our light and risk chasing passing light beams that lead to nowhere.

Panic in adversity can cause us to focus – as long as we focus on the right things.

It reminds me of an old Disney movie “The Moon Cussers”, the story of men who tedsjipsto their destruction with false lights – making what appeared to be lighthouses and confusing a captains navigation.
If we keep fearing we will lose the light, then our ego takes over – we panic – and
We can of course develop skills that help us to listen to our inner voice. Most of us are so out of touch with it, that we think our second guess – thrust forward in rapid succession from the first – is our intuitive hunch.
Or when we fear losing that light, we can cherish it.
It is as if that inner voice invites us “Do you want to feel me?” or will you run off and follow yourself made story?
After a while we learn to look in the shadow, stop listen and look. Gradually we train ourselves to find in any challenge another opportunity to serve, to give and to share.
There are those who are fortunate enough to have developed this special; state that ascends beyond the egos individual calculation.
Hey value the flow of life and, to use a common pop psychology phrase live in a state of infinite possibilities.
However, I am not talking about emotional hype.
I am talking more of a cold objective look at the soul.
A daily analysis, of the type Gandhi used in daily recording his actions and results over decades.
Slowly you begin to see patterns see patterns hidden in the darkness as you perceive even lower levels of light. Then follow its path to greater revelation.
Of the many successful people I have met, they all built on what was real – and not on what they wished would be.
However, they also trained themselves to follow their hunches and to not live in their head alone.
As psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis of the University of Amsterdam demonstrated that after gathering all thefacts, people make more accurate choices when they follow their gut.
Success stories have learned to listen to their body and ask why they felt a certain way – was it valid? An ego trick? Or was it some past fear not wanting to tread the path less followed?
THe intuition is like conscience - untrained it can lead you a stray. (How many jave claimed G-d spoke to them and suddenly realsed they were wrong?)
Once able to listen properly, life patterns formerly ignored begin to be revealled in the darkness.
The dust of life’s experience reveals the light in the doorway…..
…. and then possibilities flow in abundance.
So would I change my last year? No.
The highs were high and the lows were low.
… er let me rephrase that.
What I would change is listening more in the silence.
More beach walks in the sunset.
I would delve more within the darkness, notice life’s puddles and see what values, meanings and messages life reflected back to me.

“Our hypothesis was that psychopathic traits are also linked
to dysfunction in dopamine reward circuitry,” Buckholtz said.

“Consistent with what we thought, we found people with high levels of psychopathic traits had almost four times the amount of dopamine released in response to amphetamine.”

Individuals with elevated psychopathic traits the dopamine reward area of the brain, the nucleus accumbens, was much more active while they were anticipating
the monetary reward than in the other volunteers.

“It may be that because of these exaggerated dopamine responses, once they focus on the chance to get a reward, psychopaths are unable to alter their attention until they get what they’re after,“ Buckholtz said.

As Professor Zald said “It’s not just that they don’t appreciate the potential threat, but that the anticipation or motivation for reward overwhelms those concerns.”

In the past, substance abuse has been associated with alterations in dopamine responses and psychopathy is strongly associated with substance abuse.

Conversational Hypnosis is an art that takes a certain set of skills in order to master.  These skills are quite attainable when the correct instruction and study of hypnosis has been focused on. 
Conversational Hypnosis is the practice of inducing hypnotic trances through the focused skills learned in language, speech and suggestion.  The primary objective is to induce a trance in order to accomplish a motivated outcome or reach a specific purpose; for example ease emotional pain, enhance health, and lead a happier life. 
The skills most required of you as the hypnotist are to master a signal recognition system, develop a relationship with your subject beyond rapport, learn the foundations of hypnotic language and advanced hypnotic language, develop authority strategies, recognize emotional triggers, destroy resistance as well as become skilled in conversational induction, conversational trance formulas and advanced frame control. 
All of these skills will help you attain the highest level of success in conversational hypnosis and achieve a better life for your subjects as well as for yourself.
           
Signal recognition systems are the foundation in hypnosis training from which you will start to see when a subject is entering a hypnotic trance.  These skills will aide you in opening your senses to the signs given by your subject when becoming hypnotized. 
Signal recognition will save you time in that you will be able to quickly asses when your subject is in trance instead of using unnecessary time to talk you subject into hypnosis.  You will learn to see, hear and feel when people are responding to you hypnotically. 
This skill will also allow you to see those around you moving in and out of hypnotic trances produced everyday by their environments.  The signal recognition system is important to master and continue to study as it is a core fundamental skill you will use throughout your study and practice of hypnosis.
Everyday we develop rapport with people, friends, family and strangers.  In conversational hypnosis it is important to learn to move on beyond the normal constraints of typical rapport and to develop deeper relationships with your subjects. 
In hypnosis you and your subject are developing an intimate relationship that allows you as the hypnotist into your subject’s mind, to understand and ultimately control certain thoughts through suggestion and language. 
In order to accomplish this you must go beyond rapport and embody an intense connection that allows your subject the unconscious freedom to do something simply because it pleases them to please you. 
This can be considered an abnormal or skewed relationship in that the subject allows you into their world and will follow your lead through the conversations, language and suggestions you give to them.  This is a very powerful and unique connection.
           
Conversational hypnosis is just that, there is an art to the language you as the hypnotist need to master.  Part of this skill is found in hypnotic language foundation and advanced hypnotic language.  The main idea is that conversational hypnosis is attained through language. 
You need to learn how to shape the conversation you are having with your subject in a way that makes the words you speak themselves hypnotic, causing your subjects mind to set off into hypnotic state that responds to you in hypnotic ways. This skill should get strong focus from you as you master hypnosis techniques.
In the language you use for hypnosis you will also want to develop your authority strategy.  Authority strategy is a tactic that is required in order to be a successful hypnotist. 
It allows you to phrase suggestions in a way that the conscious mind of your subject responds, without this skill you will not be able to attain your goals as a hypnotist. 
The authority strategy gives your subject the will and wants to carry out your hypnotic suggestions, if you are not the authority within their trance the subject will not listen to your suggestions.  This skill is fundamental as it will be a large piece of the puzzle that will aide in your success as a hypnotist and allow you to achieve your goals in hypnotism.
Emotional triggers are the way to your subject’s unconscious responses, once you learn to control emotional triggers you will have the power to control the pictures and feelings that govern a subjects mind and ultimately change their life. 
This skill will give you access to pictures and feelings from within your subjects mind.  As you perfect this skill you will be able to be able to alter feelings that lead to a healthier, happier, and more fulfilling life for your subject.  This will aide in your objective to create rewarding and wonderful happiness for those who attain your services.
In conversational hypnosis there is often resistance and this brings us to the next fundamental skill you will need to acquire.  How you as the hypnotist will destroy this resistance, the most popular way being through the telling of stories. 
Destroying resistance through story telling involves you becoming the story teller to bypass the minds usual filtering systems that tell a person, “this is not right”, or “this can’t be happening”.  Once you have mastered story telling that will create a hypnotic trance you will be allowed into your subjects mind to place new ideas, perceptions and thoughts dealing with their lives and how they ultimately live them. 
Conversational hypnosis will require you to also learn how to deal directly with the unconscious mind; this is done through conversational inductions.  This concept is a way to formulate how to induce a trance through conversation, the real core of conversational hypnosis. 
Conversational induction will provide you with the skill of moving from normal speech into a conversational hypnotic induction with ease.  In doing this you will then be dealing directly with the unconscious mind of your subject which is what your job as a hypnotist is ultimately all about. 
This technique will teach you to mold conversation that sounds completely ordinary to others into something much more intense for you and your subject; this in itself will take a grand amount of understanding and skill.
           
Conversational trance formulas are paramount in the art of hypnosis.  These are formulas that will get you exactly where and what you want from your subject.  Getting your subject into a trance come very easily to you but then where do you go from there, this is where conversational trance formulas are required. 
The formulas consist of the P-CAT formula, which is used for personal change in a subject.  This is handy for those rough days, bad times in relationships and even when ending a relationship. 
The COMILA formula is used mainly for persuading and influencing people.  This formula is helpful to people in their professions such as influencing an individual to want to learn, sales, education, management as well as for general inspiration.
Next in the list of helpful formulas is the LIFE checklist.  This is a checklist developed to help you know you are actually engaged in a hypnotic conversation.  The LIFE check list consists of four steps that will help you identify quickly and efficiently that hypnosis is underway.
Conversational hypnosis will also require you to master such techniques as “future memories” and “stacking realities”.  Future memories are memories you place in your hypnotized subject’s mind that have not taken place yet. 
The goal is that they will become memories as the subjects unconscious brings them to their conscious mind as events that have already happened.  The art in this is to make the future memory so compelling that the unconscious mind will want the memory to have happened and eventually follow your suggestion to make the memory a real instance that has happened in the past.
“Stacking realities” and “accidental trance identification” are other techniques that help hypnotists to slip past the resistance and interference within a subjects mind that prevent hypnosis. 
Advanced frame control will also be paramount to master.  This is the art of leading all your hypnotic interactions in the direction you desire.  Without this skill you will not be able to control the direction of conversation, hampering your goal of creating a more peaceful, happy, healthy mindset for your subjects.  All of these strategies, once mastered, will help you in the ease of your conversational hypnosis.
There are many exciting and great skills involved in becoming a successful conversational hypnotist, while this information may seem overwhelming at first it is just a taste of the powerful skills that you will enjoy perfecting as you assume your role as a hypnotist.
 Once mastered many of these skills will provide you with a life time of learning and development personally and professionally, as well as help you to change lives for the better.

A new study suggests a trend toward developing hyperactivity among typically developing elementary-school-aged siblings of autistic preschoolers, reports Jim Barlow in Medical News Today. The study suports belief that mothers of young, autistic children experience more depression and stress than mothers with typically developing children.

While the impact on older siblings was not statistically significant, the trend may indicate the presence of symptoms associated with broader observable autism characteristics seen in previous studies, states Professor Laura Lee McIntyre, director of the University of Oregon's school psychology program.
The study was published in the March issue of the journal Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities.

Previous research has had mixed results, but many suggest that families dealing with autism, especially siblings of an autistic child, also experience autism like symptom including widespread abnormalities of social interactions, communication and behavior.

The study compared control and experimental groups whose ages, education and socioeconomic situations were virtually identical. Twenty families had a preschooler (ages 2-5 years old) diagnosed with autism and a typically developing older elementary school sibling (6-10); the control group of 23 families did not have an autistic child. Older children with diagnosed learning or mental disabilities were excluded.

"We know there are risk factors, but we don't know if they result from having a child with autism, or if there are genetic predispositions as part of the broader autism picture," McIntyre said. "Are these difficulties the result of child-rearing challenges, or are they negatively impacted because of shared genetic risks? Our sample was very clean, and that's good for science but not necessarily as good for generalizing our findings, but I'm confident with the results we found in this particular sample."

McIntyre, while a professor at Syracuse University, and her doctoral student Nicole Quintero studied families chosen in New York. They looked closely at sibling adjustments, involving social, behavioral and academic performance as recorded by both parents and teachers, and at the well- being of the mothers, whose average age was 36 and 94-95 percent of whom were married. The median age of older siblings was seven and most were first- or second-graders.

"Contrary to what has been found by many researchers, we found that older siblings were pretty well adjusted, with no significant differences in parent-reported or teacher-reported social skills," said McIntyre, who joined the UO's department of special education and clinical sciences in 2009. "These are all typically developing kids."

Teachers, however, reported slightly more behavioral problems for the siblings of children with autism than control siblings. "There was a trend toward significance," she said.

The problems resembled hyperactivity but not at levels generally attributed to attention-deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD). Teacher reports noted that these children exhibited slightly more fidgeting, movement and attention problems.

"Children with siblings with autism may be experiencing some sub-clinical symptoms of hyperactivity or attention problems," noted McIntyre, an affiliate of the UO's Center for Excellence and Developmental Disabilities, Education, Research and Service. "Parents didn't report seeing such things at home. Teachers see these children in a more structured environment. Siblings of children with autism may be at heightened risk for developing problems, potentially over time."

Siblings of children with autism probably should be watched with appropriate academic supports in place, she said. "Our findings are rather positive overall, but these kids should be on our radar screens. These kids may start school OK, at least those from healthy families, but they may demonstrate difficulties over time. However, it has been shown that around 30 percent of siblings of autistic children have some associated difficulties in behavior, learning or development."

The finding that moms with children with autism were more stressed and depressed in comparison to moms of typically developing preschool children "was not surprising at all," McIntyre said. "That finding is robust in existing literature, so even though this sample involves highly organized, motivated and willing mothers, in comparison to other moms with two or more children, they are reporting more stress and more depression."

Mothers of autistic children, she added, need assistance for day-to-day child-rearing activities to give them some time to be individuals. As part of her research and clinical work at UO's nationally recognized Child and Family Center, she is looking at interventions that support parents and help kids with their daily living skills and behavior management.

The research was partially funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Quintero is now a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Institute on Disability and Human Development.

Mindfreak


“One of the most striking and surprising things I observed among traditional Hindus was how bright, happy, and psychologically healthy their children are” said American Robert A.Johnson, a Jungian analyst who lived in both India and Japan.


“ Children in Hindu families are not neurotic; they are not torn within themselves as so many Western children are. They are bathed constantly in human affection, and they sense a peaceful flow of affection between their mother and father.


They sense the stability, the enduring quality of their family. Their parents are commited permanently; they don’t hear their parents asking themselves whether their marriage is “going to work out”; separation and divorce do not float as specters in the air”.


He is of course, describing the traditional Hindu family.


Here he contrasts the West – a West though that has made inroads into the sexual mores of India:


“Dr. Jung once said that medieval man lived by either-or, but that modern person cannot go off to a convent or the Himalayas exclusively to search for spirituality; nor can she /he pour herself/himself exclusively into the family, profession or practicality” said Johnson.


“It is a true task of a truly modern mind to endure both the spiritual and practical as the framework for the life.”


Of course, this more family oriented focus that balances both masculine and feminine dimensions of the psyche is not limited to Hinduism. It is found in torah and Quran, from Taoism to the Hawaiian Islands.


However, in say Islam and Christianity, as in other religions, masculine control of institutions easily crushes the spiritual soul of some.


We are always chasing something in the West and forget that the word for happiness comes from the Scandinavian hap which relates to luck.


“Happiness steams from the the root verb to happen, which implies that our happiness is what happens” wrote in He: Understanding Masculine Psychology.


“Simple people in less complicated parts of the world function in this manner and exhibit a happiness and tranquility that is a puzzle to us. How can peasant in India wich so little to be happy about be happy? Or how can the peon in Mexico, again with so little to be happy about, be as carefree as he appears?”


He criticizes what the calls the Western “misconceptions” of happiness as something external.


Johnson mentions that Alexis de Tocqueville, who came to the early USA to study its democracy.


de Tocqueville “said that we have a misleading idea at the very head of our Constitution: the pursuit of happiness. One cannot pursue happiness; if he does he obscures it. If he will proceed with the human task of life, the relocation of the center of gravity of the personality to something greater outside itself, happiness will be the outcome.”


The point is that it is already there – not waiting to be chased down.


In casing things down we risk being an archaeologist of the soul. In seeking the depth within, we risk partly destroying the very thing we seek to discover.


When it comes to marriage the external approach to love and happiness has Western couples looking in two different directions, neither seeking their united spiritual soul.



“One may view a marriage as two people standing back to back , each protecting the other in a particular way” wrote Johnson in She: Understanding Feminine Psychology. (She? Whenever I addressed someone as she my mother corrected me – “She is the cat’s mother”)


“When a marriage begins the partners are like two discrete circles overlapping a little. The division between the two is great and each has a specific task. As the marriage partners grow older, each learns a bit of other’s genius, and finally the two circles overlap more and more.”


Consider the spiritual direction of the feminine psyche:


“It is the feminine task to protect not only herself but her man and her family from the dangers of inner world; moods, inflations, excesses, vulnerabilities, and what used to be called possessions.



“There are the things a woman’s genius can manage much better that a man’s. Usually he has his own task in facing the outer world and keeping the family safe” he said.



“There is a particular danger in the modern attitude in which both people face the our world, both spend their time in outer things. This leaves their inner world unprotected and many dangers creep into the household through this unprotected quarter.”


It is for this reason I am concerned that Indian youth is, for the moment at least, bent on chasing Western freedom as sexual mores.



The dynamic masculine energy of the West seems al conquering.



The delicate flower of the sensitive soul is crushed waiting for an opportunity of regrowth.



Let us not forget the advice of Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee:



“This is why the wisdom of the feminine is so important, because the feminine understands the dynamics of relationship, how to listen and be receptive” he said.



“Feminine consciousness is more attuned to the life of the body, and so knows the rhythms that belong to the cycles of life, rather than the systems imposed by will that are presently strangling our world. The feminine is more instinctively and naturally attuned to life, its patterns and powers. And feminine consciousness is less dominated by reason, more open to the mystery of the symbolic inner world. The feminine is vital in this work of awakening”


- Alchemy of Light: Working with the Primal Energies of Life





Perhaps we can again reflect on Robert A. Johnson from hisbook We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love


So much of our lives is spent in a longing and a search – for what, we don’t know. So many of our ostensible “goals”, so many of the things we think we want, turn out to be the masks behind which our real desires hide; they are symbols for the actual values and qualities for which we hunger.

They are not reducible to physical or material things, not even to a physical person; they are psychological qualities; love, truth, honesty, loyalty, purpose – something we can feel is noble, precious, and worthy of our devotion. We try to reduce all this to something physical – a house, a car, a better job, or a human being – but it doesn’t work.


Without realizing it, we are searching the Sacred. And the sacred is not reducible to anything else.