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Former teacher at Boulder's Shambhala accused of sexually as
The impulse to believe the absurd when presented with the unknowable is called religion. Whether this is wise or unwise is the domain of doctrine. Once you understand someone's doctrine, you understand their rationale for believing the absurd. At that point, it may no longer seem absurd. You can get to both sides of this conondrum from here.
Re: Former teacher at Boulder's Shambhala accused of sexuall
by admin » Fri Aug 02, 2019 3:00 am
CU's [Colorado University's] expertise in Tibetan and Buddhist studies is unusually deep
by Clay Evans
Holly Gayley, assistant professor of religious studies at CU-Boulder, takes in the view near the Amne Machen Range in Tibet. Photo courtesy of Holly Gayley.
We have three tenure-track, full-time specialists in Tibet, and that's three more faculty specializing in Tibet than you find at most universities. It's not a huge group … but it's an incredible opportunity (for research) and also for students.'
Belly up to a bar, drop by a café, or sit down at a bus stop and mention Tibet in most any American city, from Baltimore to Boise, Phoenix to Philadelphia, and the ensuing conversation will be short.
"I would say that in general Americans who pay attention to global events will know something about Tibet, but they might not know much," says Holly Gayley, assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.
"They know something bad happened there that might involve China, and that's where the Dalai Lama comes from," says Carole McGranahan, associate professor of Anthropology, who specializes in contemporary Tibet. (See YouTube interview, at right, about her research on the CIA and Tibet.)
But that isn't the case in Boulder, a small island of Tibetan and Buddhist culture and home to a thriving community of immigrants and exiles from the Himalayan nation that was invaded by China in 1950.
Tattered, fading Tibetan-style prayer flags flutter from eaves throughout the city and many a Subaru, Volvo or SUV sports a "Save Tibet" bumper sticker. Buddhism, considered exotic and mysterious in much of America, is just another belief system in Boulder.
The city also has become a center of academic research into Tibetan religion, culture and the environment. Naropa University, started by the late Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche in 1974, was the first Buddhist-focused university in the United States.
Emily Yeh, associate professor of geography, interviews members of a grassroots environmental protection group about their traditional environmental practices on a sacred mountain in Chamdo, Tibet Autonomous Region, China. July 2005. Photo by Kunga Lama (Center for Asian Studies)
Of course, Tibet is a real place, not just a subject of academic research and study. The nation continues to struggle under Chinese occupation. The 14th Dalai Lama, who escaped from his homeland to become a global leader for peace, is now 78, and China has signaled its intention to choose his successor. It's doubtful many Tibetans in exile would accept such a choice: Some 130 Tibetans have set themselves on fire in the last five years in acts of protest against China.
All that sounds dire. But, says McGranahan, the exile community refuses to give up.
"The one thing the Tibetan refugee community is most defined by is the politics of hope," she says. "They hold a real belief that Tibet will be Tibetan again. … No state or empire … has existed in a consistent shape or form without end. … But I think change needs to come in part through change in China, the Chinese making demands on their government."
Benefactor: Mahinder Uberoi
by Uberoi Foundation for Religious Studies
Accessed: 8/1/19
-- Mohan Singh Oberoi, by Wikipedia
Mahinder Uberoi was born in Delhi, India on March 13, 1924. He earned a doctorate degree in engineering and lived for most of his adult life in the United States, primarily in Boulder, Colorado. Professor Uberoi passed away in 2006 as a retired academic having chosen to live with very little pretense and ostentation. His wealth, however, was considerable, and his assets today help to raise awareness of Dharmic religions in an effort to promote understanding, communication, tolerance and peace in the world.
Mahinder Singh Uberoi grew up in Sialkot, India, and received a bachelors of science degree from Punjab University in 1944. Subsequently, he studied in the United States, earning a masters degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1946 and a doctorate degree in engineering from the Johns Hopkins University in 1952.
Professor Uberoi began his academic career on the faculty of the Department of Aeronautical Engineering at the University of Michigan from 1953 until 1963. During that period, in 1958, he earned early professional distinction as a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
In 1963, Professor Uberoi moved to Boulder, Colorado, where he lived for more than forty years until his death in 2006. From 1963 to 1975, he served as the chairman of the Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado. Four U.S. astronauts graduated from the Department during those years, including Ellison Onizuka who died with other members of his distinguished crew aboard the space shuttle Challenger in 1986.
Mahinder Uberoi
As chairman, Professor Uberoi added faculty and advanced basic research in the fields of fluid mechanics, modern control systems, and the biological sciences. Adolf Busemann, the father of supersonic aerodynamics, joined the department in 1963. Much of Professor Uberoi's academic career involved research and teaching far from his adopted city of Boulder, Colorado. In 1966, he was an exchange scientist with the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Between 1972 and 1974, he was an invited professor at the University of Quebec, followed thereafter in 1974 as a visiting scientist at the Max Plank Institute of Astrophysics in Munich. From 1975 to 1976, Professor Uberoi was an honorary research fellow at Harvard University, and he returned to the University of Colorado between 1981 and 1982 as a Croft professor.
Scientific Achievement
Professor Uberoi made innumerable contributions to scholarly literature during his career, on topics such as turbulent flow, magneto-hydrodynamics, and combustion. He was the editor of Cosmic Gas Dynamics by Evry Schatzman and Ludwig Bierman. He served on the steering committees associated with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics from 1966 to 1969 and with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences from 1967 to 1969 at the University of Colorado. He organized the all-university Seminar on Environment and Public Policy from 1970 until 1975. He directed and organized a science of flight program of High School Honors Institute from 1968 to 1974, directed the Summer Institute for Disadvantaged High School Students in 1969, and directed and lectured in the Pre-Engineering Program for many years.
Posthumous Orientation
Mahinder Uberoi passed away on November 25, 2006. He never married and had no children. In 1986, twenty years before his death, he signed his last will and testament. In that document, Professor Uberoi ordered that his assets be used to establish a foundation "for the scholarly study of Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism, and other related religions and their music and arts." In implementing his mission, he made it clear that his intent was not to proselytize. "Scholars need not have any particular faith or beliefs," he wrote. To carry out his mission, Professor Uberoi intentionally left much judgment to the men and women who would be named as trustees of the foundation. Nevertheless, by way of example, he wrote, "Obvious candidates for support are persons who are regularly engaged in scholarly work, such as universities, institutes, and religious centers."
Deploying the assets of Prefessor Uberoi upon his death, the Uberoi Foundation for Religious Studies requested and subsequently received authorization as a tax-exempt private foundation by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service on December 13, 2007. The five founding trustees of the Foundation wish to express particular gratitude to a former student of Professor Uberoi, Mr. Randy Nishiyama, for his tireless and selfless work in helping to lay the groundwork for the Foundation. Along with founding trustee Parveen Setia, Mr. Nishiyama provided a most thoughtful and invaluable service in memory of the man who was once his educator.
Suresh Oberoi Marriage: Love And Mutual Respect Conquers All
by Rohit Garoo
Suresh Oberoi was barely a year old in August 1947 when his family fled the mayhem in Quetta in Pakistan. It was a bitter-sweet time – India gained independence, but at the cost of a bloody partition – leading to a mass, chaotic exodus both ways across the new border.
The Oberoi family settled down in Hyderabad, India, where they established a flourishing pharmacy business. But Suresh's interests lied elsewhere. After starting out as a radio talk show host – owing to his amazing voice, he went on to become one of the most successful supporting actors in the Hindi film industry.
Suresh's career was still in its nascence when he had an arranged marriage with Yashodhara, who was eight years younger to him. Despite coming from an affluent family, Yashodhara happily lived with her struggler husband in a single room flat and did all the household chores. Even after four decades and more of togetherness, the couple share the same rapport which they had in the very beginning.
Let's take a closer look at the Suresh Oberoi marriage with Yashodhara, and the secret behind their successful marriage!
Suresh Oberoi – From Radio Shows To The Big Screen
Suresh Oberoi was born on 17th December, 1946 in Quetta, then part of British India (now in Pakistan). After the partition, the family moved to Hyderabad, India, where Suresh's father established a pharmacy successful business. Suresh was one among eight children, and received all of his education in Hyderabad.
Suresh always had a keen interest in the performing arts but never considered it as viable option until he was in high school. But due to his father's death at the same time, he had to postpone his plans. He later joined the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII, Pune) in 1974 and graduated in 1976. He, subsequently shifted base to Mumbai, where he began his career as radio talk show host and an advertising model.
In 1977, Subhash made his Bollywood debut with the film Jeevan Mukt in which he played a supporting role. He played the lead character in the film Ek Baar Phir (1980), which unfortunately bombed at the box office. Thereafter, Suresh stuck to playing well-written supporting characters, and is counted amongst the most popular supporting actors of the 1980s.
This was around the same time that Subhash changed his surname from 'Uberoi' to 'Oberoi.' In the 1990s, he also worked as a dubbing artist and was the voice of Mufasa in the Hindi version of The Lion King (1995).
Although he limited his work in cinema after 2010, Suresh Oberoi continues to be active as a dubbing artist and a TV talk show host, and is popularly known to possess one of the best voices in showbiz, perhaps second only to Amitabh Bachchan.
Yashodhara – An Arranged Marriage Based On Selfless Love
By early 1974, Suresh Oberoi had taken an affirmative decision to become an actor – much to the disappointment of his family. The Oberois had a booming business in Hyderabad, and Suresh's elder brother Jagmohan was keen on having him on board. But nothing could deter the young Suresh from his goal, and he joined the prestigious Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune for a two-year acting course.
The family thus decided to wed him off before he sets foot into the film world. Suresh agreed to it but on the condition that the girl needs to be a Punjabi but settled in South India for a long time. Through their research, the Oberois zeroed down on Yashodhara – a Punjabi girl settled in Chennai (then Madras) with relatives living in Hyderabad. She happened to be one of the relatives of a close family friend of the Oberois. The match was fixed. Suresh went down to Chennai in April 1974 to meet Yashodhara and assented to the marriage. The very next month the couple got engaged and the wedding date was set for 1st August 1974.
"We were not allowed to speak even on the phone because it would mean a disgrace to our families. Hence for months, we just waited for D-day in separate cities."
– Yashodhara about the phase between engagement and wedding
Suresh tied the knot with Yashodhara on 1st August 1974 – the same day when he was beckoned to FTII, Pune. He sent a request letter to the institute with an appeal to permit him to join a week later. Suresh lied to Yashodhara that he will be off to Pune for a three-month direction course whereas he had applied for a two-year acting course.
Exactly a week after his wedding, Suresh left Hyderabad for Pune to pursue the acting programme.
The Initial Years
At FTII, Suresh would wait for a long weekend to make a trip to Hyderabad to meet his wife. Some months through his course the institute faced a strike and Suresh made the most out of it and returned to Hyderabad to take his wife for a honeymoon trip to Bangalore. A few days after their arrival back to Hyderabad, Yashodhara spotted an acting course form in Suresh's belongings and it is when it dawned on her that Suresh had lied to her and that her husband will be away for two full years. She hid the form and later mailed it to Suresh when he had left for Pune.
"After we returned, she found a copy of the acting form at home and sent it to me, filled with her own details and 'suffering wife's course' written in the space for subject!"
– Suresh Oberoi on his wife learning the truth about his acting course
Yashodhara was a committed life partner – supportive to her husband's choices and goals. In 1976, Suresh and Yashodhara were blessed with a son, Vivek. A few months after Vivek's birth, Suresh completed his acting course, and shifted lock, stock and barrel to Mumbai with his family.
By Each Other's Side Through Tough Times
The initial years in Bollywood were not easy. Yashodhara who enjoyed the luxury of maid servants – both at her marital and maternal home, was suddenly expected to bear all the work single-handedly. The couple had their second child, a daughter, in Mumbai, and now the entire responsibility of the house, their son, and now their daughter, Meghna, was on Yashodhara's shoulders.
"We stayed in a small room with no fridge or T.V, no bread or cheese. She even washed clothes and utensils, something she never did her entire life, but she never complained."
– Suresh Oberoi about his wife during his struggling years
Despite all the hardships, Suresh strived to keep his wife and children happy. He made it a point to fulfil his responsibility as a breadwinner by helping his wife with all the shopping and outdoor activities.
"I remember during his days of struggle, he would work in shifts and return only in the morning. He would bring vegetables in a suitcase so that people didn't know he was 'vegetable-shopping' for me!"
– Yashodhara on her husband Suresh
Suresh and Yashodhara are a couple with high moral values, and it was their faith in the institution of marriage that helped them glide through the difficult times. Suresh Oberoi went on to become a successful actor, and eventually his son Vivek followed his footsteps to meet success himself. Yashodhara later took to social work and even today is known to be an active social worker.
Together Because Of The Respect For Each Other
In an interview, the couple once shared that the reason they had a smooth marriage is because they based their relationship on the strong foundation of faith, respect and mutual dependence. The couple always made it a point to share whatever they experienced in their lives – be it their biggest victories or their greatest losses.
"Marriage is no competition. To be committed and to sacrifice is not an easy task. A relation needs a lot of commitment and respect for each other's views. It is in doing little things for each other that a relationship becomes strong."
– Yashodhara Oberoi about marriage
Suresh stated that in today's modern era, marriage is more based on sexual compatibility rather than tolerance towards each other's incompatibilities. "Today's youth finds it convenient to break up rather than walk along," added Yashodhara.
Respect and commitment has been at the core of the Suresh Oberoi marriage with Yashodhara, and it is no wonder that the couple went through so much yet excelled at their relationship for more than four decades. It seems everyone can learn a lot from their relationship! On that note, we'll leaving you with these adorable words by Yashodhara and wish the couple many more decades of happy togetherness.
"If I read something I make him listen. We go for evening walks. We talk, discuss and spend time with each other. After so many years we can read each other's mind without having to say anything!"
– Yashodhara Oberoi about her marriage with Suresh Oberoi
by admin » Thu Aug 08, 2019 4:59 am
Joining Heaven and Earth
by Reggie Ray
Dharmaocean.org
In order to understand the shape of the Dharma Ocean community, its configuration of teachers and mentors, and its work in the world, it is necessary to understand Chogyam Trungpa's Shambhala teachings about Heaven and Earth, the process of joining them, and the Sakyong and Sakyong Wangmo principles. It is sometimes thought that these teachings apply in a practical way only to individuals at the top of the hierarchy, but this is not the case. In fact, Trungpa Rinpoche emphasized that each of us plays the role of Sakyong and Sakyong Wangmo in our individual lives, and that we all need to understand Heaven and Earth and how to join them in order to live our lives in the Shambhalian way. Because there seems to be much confusion today as to what Trungpa Rinpoche actually meant by these aspects of his Shambhala teachings, some explanation is in order.
Heaven is the realm of vision and view. Earth is the realm of phenomena and practicality. Heaven's task is to overarch and protect Earth. Under the vastness of Heaven's love, the task of Earth is to give birth, to nourish, heal, and grow all things, to nurture them and make them live.
Vision, as Trungpa Rinpoche presented it, is seeing what is with complete openness, clarity, and impartiality; it is thus utterly non-conceptual and non-judgmental. To see things as they truly are is the same as loving them, and so just as Heaven sees Earth's plethora with perfect clarity, its love for Earth is infinite. In Vajrayana terms, this is known as seeing the sacredness of all things—the phenomena of Earth and all she gives birth to—in all their beauty, power, and life.
Interestingly, each of us seems called more toward either the function of Heaven or the function of Earth. There is a tendency for men to be more disposed toward the Heaven role and women more toward Earth, but not always. In any case, as we grow spiritually, each of us learns how to embody and speak for both Heaven and Earth.
The word Sakyong means "protector (kyong) of the Earth (sa)." This means protecting the isness, the true or essential being, the life force, the inner purpose or mission for being that marks each of Earth's children, from sub-atomic particles, to people, mountains, and stars—"all the realms of being," as we say. It is assuredly not the role of the "Earth protector" to dictate to Earth or to humans what they should be; the sakyong's role is to see what is in all its purity and sacredness and protect that within the realm of Earth. This means protecting and making clear the inner integrity, life force, and sacredness of what is, so that it is not covered over, misrepresented, polluted, or destroyed on its journey. For example, the sacredness of each person—their individuality, creativity, and unique journey—is an end in itself; in the Shambhala world, people are not a means to achieve some other higher purpose, sacrificed for some more noble end. Heaven's role, in short, is to protect the life that Earth bears, the integrity and inviolability of all that is.
When it does not unite with Earth, Heaven remains aloof, disconnected, and ineffectual. Earth, for her part, loses her sense of sacredness when she does not unite with Heaven, becoming purely mundane and susceptible to being taken over by conventional values.
When Heaven and Earth are joined, the vision of the sacredness of each person, of all phenomena, is made clear within the mundane, practical, earthly sphere: Heaven gives teachings, practices, and social forms to protect that sacredness among the people of the Earth. When Heaven and Earth are joined, then Earth is able to carry out her mission of manifesting the vision: she heals, nurtures, and loves, guided by the true compass of Heaven. Heaven and Earth must surrender to one another. Heaven must surrender to what Earth bears without judgment or partiality. Earth must surrender to the sacredness of what Heaven knows and reveals, the sacredness of what is, beyond concept and conventional values.
We are a Shambhalian community in holding Chogyam Trungpa's lineage of the four yanas and seeking to practice, realize, and transmit to others his teachings of sacredness, the dignity of each human soul, and the mission of bringing the Shambhalian view and practices to the rest of the world. In any Shambhalian community, those at the center of the mandala—in the case of Dharma Ocean, Caroline and I—are charged with representing the Sakyong and Sakyong Wangmo principles, and joining Heaven and Earth.
At present, I am mainly responsible for representing Heaven, Caroline is mainly responsible for representing Earth. Although everyone in our community is involved in the process of giving birth to the Shambhala vision and its application, Caroline and I together bear ultimate responsibility for developing, presenting, and activating the teachings within Dharma Ocean and the world. Beyond this, we have the charge of training everyone in the vision and maintaining its integrity in ourselves, our leadership, our community, and all the ways the teachings are manifested in our world.
Within that collaboration, my particular area is the view and practice. As I come to deeper understandings through my own meditation, and through ongoing explorations and discussions with Caroline, my job is to develop appropriate language for the teachings and practices which help people gain direct experience of it in their lives and benefit from the transformations that follow. Teaching, writing, and recording programs that express the view and practice are all parts of my job as well.
Caroline's particular role is expressing, manifesting, and activating the view or vision in the realm of activity, both within the Dharma Ocean community and the world beyond. For example, as chair of the Dharma Ocean board, she oversees our board of directors, our operations, and all of the people who contribute to our organization, so that everything we do reflects the values of our lineage—the precision, responsibility, compassion, and integrity of the sacred world. She has also taken the lead in developing the teachings on relationality and intimate partnership, and looks after the areas of family life and children's Dharma education at programs.
As a healer herself, in her teaching Caroline is helping all of us to understand how healing and spirituality are not separate domains. It is the process of healing itself that makes the spiritual journey possible, providing the continual foundation for the path. As head Desung (protector of well-being or bliss), she helps the kasung perform their function of protecting the health and well-being of participants and staff at programs. In this area, she has also worked with the kitchen mandala so that it is sane, wholesome, uplifted, and supportive of the journey of everyone at programs, both participants and staff alike.
Caroline also attends to the sign-lineage expressions of the teachings, having been instrumental in funding, designing, and decorating our retreat center and other physical spaces. Her own practice as a photographer, as well as her exploration of Trungpa Rinpoche's teachings on Dharma art, inspire the increasing presence of visual art in our community spaces. In short, through her many ways of developing, activating, and manifesting the teachings, Caroline is responsible for overseeing the life of our community and beyond, birthing, nurturing, teaching, healing, and mentoring as needed, encouraging all of us to bring the teachings into our everyday existence and make them real in all the details of our lives.
by admin » Tue Aug 13, 2019 10:24 pm
Chris Chandler's Expose of Shambhala as a Mind Control Cult is Required Reading
by Tara Carreon
Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism, by Christine Chandler, M.A., C.A.G.S.
The Shambhala organization is in crisis, and Chris Chandler is perhaps the most fearless and best-informed of its critics. Shambhala's spiritual leader, the "Sakyong Mipham," has been outed as a sexual assaulter and heavy drinker with a bad habit of assaulting his female followers, and even the internal investigators hired to sanitize the problem ended up by confirming his bad behavior. Revenues from new students and book sales have fallen off the charts, and local centers have stopped sending the required 25% of revenues to the mothership. Numerous old students have left the fold, and compromising pages on the Shambhala.org website are regularly being scrubbed. Two senior Shambhala teachers have been arrested for child sex abuse, and the organization has issued denials of corporate knowledge eerily reminiscent of the Catholic Church's approach to its own pedophile crisis.
Chris Chandler's qualifications to write an expose of Shambhala are unmatched. She devoted the better part of her adult life to serving the group, became a member of the "Kasung" corps of uniformed disciplinary officers who patrol the premises when teachings occur, and ultimately was so trusted by the Mukpo Family that she became the full time caretaker for Taggie Mukpo, the autistic son of bad-boy lama Chogyam Trungpa, whose own proclivity for alcohol and cocaine drove him to an early grave and may have cursed Taggie with fetal alcohol syndrome. Chris reveals how the Mukpo Family failed to provide for Taggie's care, and entirely abandoned him to the care of the State of Vermont, even as his mother indulged a familial taste for the finer things in life, including international travel, multiple homes, dressage horses, lavish parties, fine food, drink, and apparel.
Chris and her husband were both part of the group, and due to their insider status, were able to attend all manner of secret ceremonies and initiations that were altogether inaccessible to the public, and available to insiders only after meeting study prerequisites and shelling out lots of cash. Chris explains how the Shambhala system of "mindfulness meditation" forms the basis for cult indoctrination, fostering a blank, uncritical mind-state and an attitude of childlike dependency among followers, even as they boast that they are developing "warrior confidence," and an ability to confront the challenges in life with the "energy of basic goodness."
Perhaps most important for those who are dabbling in "Shambhala training," Chris reveals that this veneer of "secular spiritual" that supposedly does not endorse any faith-based beliefs, is actually the entryway to a supernatural view of life that focuses on weird practices like visualizing oneself as a Mongolian warlord astride his white charger, hacking down legions of heretics in order to establish an "Enlightened Society." Once Chris's book opened the door to this revelation for me, I was able to find other Shambhala apostates posting online about this "bait and switch" approach. Shambhala Training, it turns out, gradually pushes the trainees towards the doorway of cultic fetishism, and when the student gets to "Level 5," they are given a very persuasive shove through the portal, whereupon they find themselves in a place they never intended to go -- the "Kalapa KIngdom."
What is this Kalapa Kingdom? It is the pure, fanciful invention of Chogyam Trungpa, the inventor of the entire Shambhala system, that he constructed out of a hodgepodge of belief systems, relying especially heavily on the Japanese cultural traditions of calligraphy, flower arranging, and martial philosophy. Trungpa, it turns out, was fascinated with militarism, and in a master stroke of "reconciling the opposites," conjoined the sanctimonious mystagoguery of Tibetan Buddhism with the toxic heirarchicalism of Japanese Imperial Buddhism to create a bizarre hybrid that, surprisingly enough, held considerable appeal for a core group of believers.
Having come to the land of democracy, Trungpa found himself free to set up a monarchy, and surrounded himself with a "Court" of sycophants who fostered ever-grander delusions in his alcohol and cocaine-charged brain. His word was absolute law, all of his relatives were deified, and his servants catered to his every wish, believing that they were thereby paving their own path to enlightenment. Within this "Enlightened Society of Shambhala Warriors," no one could draw an independent breath, and everything went according to Trungpa's wishes. When he died at the age of 48, his body destroyed from drug and alcohol abuse, and his son took the "Kalapa Throne," the party continued unabated. But in his attempt to fill his father's shoes, the Sakyong Mipham laid down a trail of drunken misconduct that now, in the era of #MeToo, has become the bane of this imaginary monarchy.
You will, inevitably, be hearing more about the collapse of the Shambhala Empire, because its rotten foundations have begun to give way, and the entire superstructure is tilting. If you want to understand the faulty architecture of this cult, that gives itself the name of Buddhism, but deserves to be shelved next to Hubbard's Scientology and Moon's Unification Church, you can find no better guide than Chandler's compelling tome. While at times she repeats thematic conclusions that have already been well-expressed, I did not find that it impeded readability, although I occasionally skimmed over some paragraphs that presented ideas with which I had already become familiar. Those who think that she draws too many unwarranted inferences of worldwide conspiracy from the evidence would do well to research the various actors whom she implicates in the plot to take down American independent thinking -- the Dalai Lama's publicity army exists for a reason, and that reason is entirely political.
by admin » Wed Aug 14, 2019 6:58 am
The Anatomy of a Common Tibetan Ritual: The Lhasang
Excerpt from Indestructible Truth: The Living Spirituality of Tibetan Buddhism
by Reginald A. Ray
The lhasang—literally ''higher purification offering,'' which may be glossed as ''invocation of the higher beings''—is one of the most common rituals in traditional Tibet. While some rituals are performed strictly for temporal ends and others for spiritual ends, the lhasang is interesting because it is performed for both mundane and supermundane purposes. And, while most rituals are directed to a particular being, the lhasang is a broad invocation that calls upon all the various ''good spirits'' and well-intentioned deities, as well as upon the various buddhas, bodhisattvas, protectors, and departed teachers of the buddhadharma. Because of its broad conception, the lhasang is multipurpose. On the one hand, it is performed by laypeople: in times of duress or special need, the male head of the household will do a lhasang on behalf of the entire family. On the other hand, lamas will also perform the lhasang on various special occasions, before a journey, on a special holy day, to support the construction of a building, to bless an important object. In the Western practice of Tibetan Buddhism, the lhasang is a popular and often-performed ceremony both because it is applicable to almost any situation and because it is simple and accessible.
The purpose of the lhasang may be described as twofold. First, it is a ritual of purification, cleansing people and places of any obstructions, obstacles, or negative forces. The fire and the purifying smoke are held to embody a powerful energy that dispels the defilements and negativities of those present. Second, the lhasang is an empowerment in that it brings down blessings in the form of wisdom, efficacy, and power. Juniper is typically burned in the lhasang fire, and the fragrant smoke travels up to the heavens, attracting the higher beings of samsara and the enlightened ones; thus the smoke becomes a kind of passageway or lightning rod down which their blessings can descend, filling participants with a sense of well-being, understanding, and happiness. Many different lhasang rituals were used in Tibet, depending on locale, lineage, and specific purpose. The following summarizes the general format typically possessed by lhasang ceremonies.
Prior to the actual lhasang ritual, a hearth or fire pit is constructed, usually out of doors. The green boughs of juniper are collected and laid out by the ritual site. Juniper is typically selected—sometimes along with other aromatic woods such as cedar—because its smoke is especially fragrant and pleasing to the gods. The fire is lit and allowed to burn down so that the heat of glowing coals predominates, rather than open flame. The juniper may be doused with water, as wet juniper produces a heavier and more aromatic smoke. When the officiant is prepared to begin the invocation, the boughs are laid on the coals, and, within moments, the white, fragrant smoke begins to billow up to the sky.
The ritual now begins with an invocation to all-powerful and helpful forces, both those within samsara and those beyond it. The invocation is a way of calling these beings to attention and inviting their presence at the liturgical performance of the lhasang. The invocation will usually address general categories of beings and also more specifically particular protectors, bodhisattvas, departed teachers, local deities, and so on. On the general level, then, the lhasang might call upon the three jewels (Buddha, dharma, and sangha), the three bases of Buddhist practice (gurus, yidams, and dakinis), and whatever gods and sages there may be. More specifically, one might invoke certain protectors, the three bodhisattvas most important to Tibetan Buddhism (Avalokiteshvara, Manjushri, and Vajrapani), Guru Rinpoche, other lineage figures, and the like.
Once the invocation has caused the multitude of helpful beings to gather, offerings are made. The offerings consist both of actual physical substances and those that are conceived with the imagination. The actual or material substances that are offered into the fire vary depending on the intentions of the ritual and the elaborateness that is desired. The juniper, of course, is already being offered, and this consists of the basic offering ingredient. Other material substances may include different kinds of grains, other desirable food substances, varieties of alcohol, and other things that may be deemed attractive to the invited unseen guests. At this time, mental offerings are made, consisting of the visualization of all the good and fine things that the world has to offer. Sometimes to Westerners, the imagined offerings seem less consequential and important than those that are physical. In a Buddhist context, however, the act of holding precious things in mind and then offering them can be equally powerful, whether they are material or not.
The Supplication for Assistance
The invocation has gathered the unseen beings, and the offerings have formed a link between those beings and the human practitioners of the ritual. Next follows the request for assistance, which usually includes two parts. In the first, one supplicates for protection against obstacles and other forms of negativity. This negativity itself is both inner and outer. Inner obstacles or obstructions might include illness, emotional disturbances, resistance, and any other inner impediments to well-being and successful dharma practice. Outer obstacles—as articulated in Tibetan tradition—include the enmity of others in the form of curses, lawsuits, warfare, and other forms of attack, as well as disasters such as failing crops, plague, or famine.
While the first kind of request made in the supplication is for purification of oneself and the removal of external obstacles, the second is for empowerment. Now one requests that one be filled with both mundane and transmundane power and well-being. On the mundane level, one asks for health, material prosperity, and happiness. On the transmundane level, one supplicates for the increase of successful dharma practice, insight, compassion, and a closer relation with one's lineage. In Buddhism, it is of course believed that all things occur based on causes and conditions. However, the beings of the unseen world, each in his or her own way, are powerful participants in the realm of causality. Worldly deities represent critical, vulnerable points in the way things transpire in the world. By invoking them, making offerings, and supplicating them to provide assistance, it is as if one were relating to a worldly monarch who is all-powerful. Though still within the web of causality, he is able in a unique way to bring about effects and respond to one's needs.
When it is great bodhisattvas and enlightened beings that one is supplicating, their power is that much greater. Particularly within a Western context and with our ''otherworldly'' religious heritage, one might question whether it is appropriate to ask buddhas for help with, for example, sickness. Aren't they only interested in enlightenment? It is the same as asking whether a realized master would care about our physical suffering and have any interest in helping us recover. For Buddhism, physical and emotional obstacles, while they are with us, can be powerful teachers. But they can also prevent us from engaging in the practice of dharma and from helping others. Poverty, political oppression, and other obstacles can similarly be impediments to the ultimate welfare and spiritual progress of oneself and others. In the traditional Tibetan context, it is believed that the buddhas and bodhisattvas, as well as the human teachers and gurus, look with kindness upon human woe and its relief. They will help where it is appropriate and where they can. At the same time, in every human life, there are sorrows and sufferings that remain our companions; these the practitioner is to regard as expressions of the compassion of the awakened ones, who are holding us closely to teach and train us.
Mantras That Bring Down Power
Typically, the supplication is followed by the repetition of various mantras, series of syllables often with no rational meaning. These are often in Sanskrit, considered the original language of Buddhism and thus particularly holy and efficacious. These mantras are mostly drawn from various powerful sources within Tibetan Buddhism. For example, at this section in the lhasang one might find the syllables om mani padme hum, the universally known and revered mantra of Avalokiteshvara, or om ah hum vajra guru padma siddhi hum, the most important mantra of Padmasambhava. In Vajrayana Buddhism, the mantras embody in sound the essence of particular buddhas, protectors, or departed gurus. In saying them, one is directly and powerfully connecting with those beings to whom one is making the supplication.
As the mantra section of lhasang is being chanted, participants may circumambulate the fire, circling it in a clockwise fashion, allowing the juniper smoke to wash over them and bring a more tangible sense to their purification. At this time, it is also common for people to pass various objects through the smoke to purify them, such as clothes one might wear on important occasions or implements used in religious work, such as paintbrushes, sculpting tools, and so on. Trungpa Rinpoche comments, however, that it would not be appropriate to include in this process ritual implements such as malas (rosaries) or bells, which are already pure by their very nature.
The lhasang now concludes, perhaps with a restatement of what is desired, perhaps with a particularly powerful mantra. The following particularly sacred Sanskrit mantra might well form part of this coda:
om ye dharma hetu-prabhava hetum tesham
tathagato hyavadat
tesham ca yo nirodha evam vadi mahashramanah
This mantra represents one of the oldest statements of Buddha Shakyamuni's teaching, found in the Pali canon and elsewhere. Roughly translated, it means, ''Whatever phenomena (dharmas) arise from a cause, the cause of them the Tathagata has taught, as well as the cessation thereof. Just so has the great ascetic declared.'' The coda puts the finishing touches on the lhasang liturgy and seals its intentions.
Rituals are performed in Tibetan Buddhism for many different purposes, both spiritual and temporal, and the atmosphere surrounding them obviously varies depending on the situation. General rituals, such as the lhasang described here, are occasions for enjoyment and celebration. This is a natural result of the character of ritual as festive and social in the broadest sense. In the lhasang, the usually invisible powers that undergird and transcend our world are invited as guests of honor. The offerings that are made to them represent a kind of feast that reestablishes one's connection with them and invites their participation in the life of the community. Through the ritual, one is led to take a larger view of one's life and one's world. In Tibetan ritual, one experiences a shift in perspective—sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic. This shift feels like a diminishing of one's sense of isolated individuality and an increase in one's sense of connectedness with other people, with the nonhuman presences of our realm, and with purposes that transcend one's usual self-serving motivations.
In the lhasang, the shift in perspective can often be quite tangible. Perhaps as the smoke rises up to the sky, the wind abruptly picks up; perhaps a bank of clouds suddenly comes over the mountains or a cloudy sky breaks up and a brilliant burst of sunlight appears. Perhaps an eagle is suddenly seen overhead or the air abruptly becomes more sparkling. Whatever the signs, if the ritual has been done with a whole heart, some kind of confirmation from the nonhuman world may be expected. The shift is also atmospheric, giving birth to relaxation, humor, and expansive joy.
Ritual is a way of reconnecting with the larger and deeper purposes of life, ones that are oriented toward the general good conceived in the largest sense. Ironically, through coming to such a larger and more inclusive sense of connection and purpose, through rediscovering oneself as a member of a much bigger and more inclusive enterprise, one feels that much more oneself and grounded in one's own personhood. Through ritual, one's energy and motivation are roused and mobilized so that one can better fulfill the responsibilities, challenges, and demands that life presents.
The Wiccan Calendar: Litha (Summer Solstice)
by Wicca Living
Accessed: 8/14/19
While he was in Boulder, His Holiness attended another Shambhala holiday that we held each year: Midsummer's Day, which was celebrated appropriately enough on the summer solstice [June 20].
For a number of years, the Shambhala community used a large acreage south of Boulder for this occasion. Ken Green, the director and minister of internal affairs, and a staff of many dedicated volunteers (and a few paid staff members from Vajradhatu) organized this spectacular festival. A raised viewing platform was set up for His Holiness, Rinpoche, myself, our family, the Regent, Lady Rich, and their children. The members of the Shambhala community lined both sides of the broad pathway that led up to the platform.
At the beginning of the day, Rinpoche and I rode in together, he on his horse Drala and I on a gray mare that a sangha member loaned me for the occasion. Rinpoche and I were both dressed in white, and our horses had beautiful saddle blankets and colorful pennants on their bridles. Behind us, other members of the Court and the Vajradhatu administration and staff marched in, followed by members of the Dorje Kasung and many other groups, such as the Nalanda Translation Committee, teachers at Naropa Institute, students of Alaya Preschool, Vidya School, and their teachers, and all manner of other groups in the community. Many groups carried banners with the name of their organization, and many carried decorative flags and other banners. People would cheer as each new group passed by. Almost everyone in the community was in the parade. People lining the sides of the road would leave their place in the audience to march in with one or more groups and then return to view others as they presented themselves.
After Rinpoche and I rode in, we assumed our place with His Holiness on the viewing stand. As groups arrived at the platform, they would bow and present themselves to all of us and then go off to the side. After the opening parade, there was a large lhasang to bless the occasion and then skydivers, hired for the occasion, landed in the field and presented themselves to His Holiness. Following that, there were many entertainments, some in front of the viewing platform and others in locations around the property. There were games for both children and adults, and everyone had a picnic. It was quite a glorious celebration of summer and wonderful to share with His Holiness.
-- Dragon Thunder: My Life with Chogyam Trungpa, by Diana J. Mukpo with Carolyn Rose Gimian
When is Litha: June 20-22
Litha pronunciation: LEE-tha
Themes: abundance, growth, masculine energy, love, magic
Also known as: Midsummer, Midsummer's Eve, Gathering Day, St. John's Day, St. John's Eve, Summer Solstice, Alban Hefin, Feill-Sheathain
"Litha" is the name given to the Wiccan Sabbat celebrated at the Summer Solstice. This is the longest day and shortest night of the year, marking the pinnacle of the Sun's power to fuel the growing season. From here on out, the Sun will set a little earlier each night until Yule, and so we recognize and give thanks for its warmth.
Though it's typically celebrated on June 21st, the exact moment of the Summer Solstice varies from year to year. This is due to a slight misalignment between the Gregorian calendar and the actual rate of the Earth's rotation around the Sun. The Solstice also occurs at differing local times, so depending on where you live, it may fall the day before or after the date listed on any given calendar. For this reason, a date range of June 20-22 is often cited in sources on the Wheel of the Year.
As the Sun reaches its highest point in the sky, the God is now in his full power, and the Goddess of the Earth is bringing forth the greatest abundance of the year. The crops are reaching their full maturity and the forests are bursting with lush growth. In just a few short weeks, the harvest season will begin, but for now we pause to celebrate the manifestation of what was planted in the early weeks of Spring. The warm sunlight is a welcome contrast to the cold and dark of Winter, and we bask in its comforts. There is a focus on the Element of Fire in honor of the Sun God, but recognition is also given to the Horned God of the forest and its wild animal life.
Ancient pagans celebrated the Solstice with torchlight processions and giant bonfires to ritually strengthen the Sun. Another tradition found among European cultures was centered on the need for balance between the Elements of Fire and Water—large wheels were set on fire and rolled downhill into creeks, rivers or lakes, perhaps as a charm against summertime drought. This is also the traditional time for gathering wild herbs for medicine and magic, as most are fully grown by Midsummer and the power of this particular day will add to their benefits. For this reason, Litha is known as Gathering Day in Wales.
To celebrate this Sabbat, you can decorate your altar with summer flowers, herbs and fruits, and summer colors like yellow, green and blue. This is a traditional time for rites of re-dedication to the God and Goddess, as well as divination related to love and romance. Keep at least one candle lit throughout the day to honor the Sun, and if possible hold your Litha rituals at noon, when the Sun is at its highest point in the sky. Have an outdoor picnic feast to bask in the warmth of the day, and eat fresh fruits and vegetables—ideally from a farmer's market or harvested from your own garden. This is a good time for magic related to masculine energies and any situation that needs to be "fired up" in your life.
Litha was long known as Midsummer, an older name for the Solstice that emphasizes the actual course of the warmer months in the Northern Hemisphere. Summer was considered to begin around May 1st, when Beltane (or May Day) is celebrated, with June 21st marking the midpoint of the season. The name "Litha" is traced back to an old Anglo-Saxon word for the month of June, and came into use as a Wiccan name for this Sabbat in the second half of the 20th century. However, many Pagans continue to use the more traditional "Midsummer."
The Wiccan Calendar: Samhain
"It came out that the end of this sitting period we were going to have Vajrayana (they had gone through Hinayana and Mahayana). So ... Rinpoche ... not only did he command to have a Halloween party, but he also commanded that every one attend and wear a costume. It was very definitely set up as a kind of pre-Vajrayana feast, because the idea of Halloween, with all these bizarre costumes, and putting on masks -- it's kind of like admitting your neurosis -- like, who you come as, Halloween, on our scene, has been ... adopted as our Tantric holiday: because there's so many contradictions in it: the idea of unmasking and putting on masks, and dressing up: it's kind of getting totally samsaric, in other words.
"Vajrayana has a good deal to do with totally connecting with Samsara. So, the word was out, and everyone was quite shocked that we were going to have a party, that Rinpoche announced he was going to attend, that there was going to be very formal -- that Rinpoche had something in mind: that he wanted to have kind of a 'courtlike' atmosphere, and that every(one) had to wear a costume.....
Trungpa arrived around 10:30, looking baleful. Butch haircut. Flanked by guards -- fortunately, because he was very drunk, and they caught him twice, when he fell. He whispered with the guards. Something was said to be brewing: one of the secrets he'd been preparing. A few minutes later a woman student in her sixties was borne in, naked, held high by guards. She let them carry her around the room, then struggled to be let down. Finally she was released and ran out. Trungpa giggled, did a strip tease, was carried around, in turn. Dressed again....
Regarding the actual stripping, Persis McMillen recalled, "It happened so fast." She remembers the guards surrounding her, and it took them two minutes to take off her clothes. She was shocked: she didn't resist. The guards hoisted her while nude, aloft. Being a dancer, at first she took a poised dance pose, but after a few seconds felt differently: felt, in her words, "really trashed out." She ran upstairs. In her own words, she "felt sick," and "literally stripped," and " ... very, very upsetting."
-- Behind the Veil of Boulder Buddhism: Ed Sanders, The Party, by Ed Sanders
When is Samhain: October 31 or November 1
Samhain pronunciation: SOW-in, SAH-vin, or SOW-een
Themes: death, rebirth, divination, honoring ancestors, introspection, benign mischief, revelry
Also known as: Samhuin, Oidhche Shamhna, Halloween, Third Harvest, Day of the Dead, Feast of the Dead (Félie Na Marbh), Shadowfest, Ancestor Night, Feile Moingfinne (Snow Goddess), Winter Nights, Old Hallowmas, Calan Gaeaf
The third and final harvest festival on the Wheel of the Year is Samhain, observed on October 31. This Sabbat marks the end of the growing season and the beginning of Winter, which must be prepared for now in earnest. Herbs are dried for winter storage, fruits and vegetables are canned and preserved, and root vegetables are dug up and stored so they may nourish us through the cold months. The word "Samhain" comes from the old Irish and is thought by many to translate as "Summer's end."
While the cycles of life and death are implicitly recognized at every Sabbat, Samhain is when the necessary role of death is formally honored. The nights grow noticeably longer with each day. The God retreats now into the shadows of the dark season, symbolically dying back to the Earth before being reborn again at Yule. Many Wiccans and other Pagans consider this to be the most important day on the Wheel, a time when the veil between the spirit world and the mundane world is at its thinnest. Our ancestors and loved ones on the Other Side are said to be more easily able to visit with us and make their presence known at this time.
Samhain is arguably the most visible Sabbat in the mainstream world, thanks to the parallel holiday of Halloween. Many of the Halloween traditions celebrated in contemporary cultures today have grown out of customs dating back to pagan times. As far back as ancient Greece, people were leaving offerings of food to their ancestors, which is echoed in the modern tradition of trick-or-treating. The practice of leaving root vegetables, hollowed out with lighted candles inside, to guide spirits visiting on Earth ultimately led to today's jack-o-lanterns. Witches, of course, have always been part of mainstream Halloween lore. And although they have almost always been presented as "evil" caricatures with no resemblance to the real thing, there's still a lingering association between the spirit of Halloween and the real power of a Witch.
Samhain rituals will honor the God's passing and give thanks to both God and Goddess for the abundance and well-being experienced over the past year. Feasts featuring the foods of the final harvest are a wonderful way to celebrate. We also honor our ancestors and invite them to visit with us. You might decorate your altar with pictures of your deceased loved ones in addition to fall foliage, apples and nuts, dried herbs and even jack-o-lanterns. Many people will leave a plate of food and drink out for any spirits who happen to wander by. Often called the Feast of Hecate, this is one of the most popular Samhain traditions, and it stems from the worship of this goddess of the underworld in ancient Greece.
Samhain is one of the most powerful nights of the year for spellwork and divination. Magical workings related to just about anything will receive an extra boost, but waning-moon work will have the most potent effect. Banishings, protection spells, clearing of obstacles and astral projection are particularly favored. Scrying, tarot reading, rune casting and any other form of divination you practice will bring you very clear results, as well as possibly a visit from an ancestor or spirit guide. Be open to doing inner work as well—reflecting on what you'd like to let go of and what you'd like to improve in yourself over the coming year.
For the ancient Celts, Samhain was the end of the old year and the start of the new. Rather than having four distinct seasons marked by the quarter points of the solar year, the Celtic year was divided into a dark half and a light half. The year began with the first day of the dark half, which is November 1st, but because the Celtic day began at night, Samhain falls on October 31st. Many, if not most Wiccans begin their Wheel of the Year on this day as well.
Your Body Knows the Answer: Book Preface
by David I. Rome
-- Purity in the Peace Corps, Excerpt from The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross
October 7, 2014, is the official "pub date" of Your Body Knows the Answer: Using Your FELT SENSE to Solve Problems, Effect Change, and Liberate Creativity (Shambhala Publications). Here is an excerpt from the book's Preface describing the decades-long personal journey that led me to develop Mindful Focusing, a new integration of Buddhist and Western contemplative practices for the 21st century.
In the summer of 1971, shortly after I had returned to New York from two eye-opening years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya, my high-school friend Alex invited me to bum around Europe for a couple of months. Starting in England, we took in the primordial megaliths of Stonehenge, the soaring cathedral at Salisbury, the legendary Glastonbury Tor where King Arthur came in search of the Holy Grail. I was duly impressed by these sights, yet they had the curious effect of making me feel lost, unmoored, empty. I couldn't connect my own existence to these marvels. For that matter, I couldn't really seem to connect with anything in the world around me at this time.
Alex, a Gandhian political activist, had recently spent time in India and as our next destination had his heart set on a "Tibetan monastery" in Scotland. With little enthusiasm I accompanied him on the long drive to a barren, windswept countryside where a former hunting lodge was now in use as a Buddhist meditation center. Feeling even more out of my element than before in this odd place, but also intrigued, I dutifully sat on a low cushion, joined in the strange chanting as best I could, and followed the simple instructions for silent meditation. And as I sat there uncomfortably, and the minutes grew longer and longer, almost imperceptibly at first I began to touch something new in myself. There was no flash of light, no altered state of consciousness, but a different quality of awareness dawning in me. I had no words for it, but knew I was experiencing something that had a rightness or realness, an actuality, that had been missing from my life.
Samye-Ling was the name of the meditation center and it included a small bookstore with a selection of the few books in English on Buddhism available at that time. One in particular caught my eye, a slender volume called Meditation in Action, by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the young Tibetan lama who had started the center a few years earlier and who, I learned, was now living and teaching in North America. I read the little book on the plane returning to the States and in October, that magical month when New England is aflame with multi-hued foliage and bright blue sky, I drove to northern Vermont to Tail of the Tiger, the new meditation centered established by Trungpa Rinpoche's first American students (now called Karme-Choling). There I met my teacher, collected windfall apples and pressed them into fragrant cider, and began in earnest a lifelong study and practice of Buddhism.
The next summer I moved to Boulder, Colorado, the old mining town and seat of the University of Colorado at the foot of the Rocky Mountains that Trungpa Rinpoche had made his new home and headquarters. In January 1974, after participating in Rinpoche's first annual three-month advanced-teaching Seminary, I had the extraordinary good fortune to become his private secretary, a role in which I served for more than nine years. This period marked the floodtide of Trungpa Rinpoche's extraordinary range of creative contributions, starting that summer with the founding of Naropa University, which have had such a profound effect on the development of western Buddhism and contemporary contemplative practice in general.
These were also years of significant personal growth for me. I met and married my wife Martha, our daughter Rebecca was born, and I made fast friendships that endure to this day. We left Boulder in 1983 to live in New York City where I went to work at Schocken Books, the small but distinguished publishing founded by my grandfather Salman Schocken. During this time I edited books, found and renovated new offices for the firm, and learned much about the challenges of the for-profit business world, including serving as president of the company for two years before its sale to Random House in 1987. There followed six years in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Trungpa Rinpoche's new seat and today the headquarters of Shambhala International, the worldwide network of meditation centers under the guidance of Trungpa's son Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche.
In 1993, I accepted an invitation from the pioneering Buddhist social activist Bernie Glassman, a Jewish-American Zen Roshi, to join the Greyston Foundation, a mandala of for-profit and non-profit organizations in Yonkers, New York devoted to inner-city community development and human services. This was a refreshing return to the kind of service that had begun during my Peace Corps years in East Africa, now blended with my Buddhist contemplative path. The twelve years I spent at Greyston were a time of real fulfillment—yet somewhere in me, at a level I was only fitfully aware of, a sense of something missing was stirring, not unlike what I had experienced as a young man twenty-five years before. I wanted deeper access to my own feelings. Also, at this time I experienced my first serious, prolonged illness.
While browsing aimlessly one day in a rural Vermont used bookstore, I happened upon a little mass-market paperback. Filling its entire cover was a slightly abstract photograph of stones of different colors, shapes, and sizes, seen through the surface of a gently rippling stream. The title was a single word, Focusing. The name of the author, Eugene Gendlin, was unfamiliar. Curious, I paid two-and-a-half dollars for the small volume.
As Meditation in Action had done years earlier, Focusing opened up for me a whole new territory of self-understanding. While mindfulness-awareness practice had illuminated many mental, physical, and emotional subtleties in my life I might not otherwise have recognized, core aspects of my make-up remained hidden. Meditation is wonderful for stepping away from the speed and complexities of everyday lives and finding refuge in a calmer, more spacious quality of mind, but it can be insufficient to bring to light the deeper roots of feeling, memory, and belief, including sources of emotional and creative blockage. Also, given its emphasis on "bare attention"—merely noting what arises in present-moment experience, then letting it go—it is not the best tool for practical problem solving (the Buddha, after all, was a monk who renounced worldly life in order to penetrate to the root of human suffering and realize the ultimate nature of reality). Focusing supplied the link that had been missing for me: a simple but powerful means to bridge from the cushion of sitting meditation to the nitty-gritty of everyday life. It was a contemplative method for uncovering and working with my deeper feelings and solving specific, real-life challenges of work, marriage, parenting, and much more.
Mindful Focusing, the method for problem-solving and inner cultivation introduced in this book, reflects the personal journey I have described. I offer it as a new integration of a powerful introspective technique from modern western philosophy and psychology with ancient mindfulness-awareness practices that originated in India three millennia ago.
Salman Schocken
Salman Z. Schocken (Hebrew: שלמה זלמן שוקן) (October 29, 1877, Margonin, Province of Posen, German Empire (today Poland) – August 6, 1959, Pontresina, Switzerland) was a German Jewish publisher and businessman. He lived in Germany until 1934, when he first emigrated to Palestine, and then in 1940 to the United States.
Salman Schocken ("S" in Salman pronounced "Z") was the son of a Jewish shopkeeper in Posen.[1] In 1901, he moved to Zwickau, a German town in southwest Saxony, to help manage a department store owned by his brother, Simon. Together they built up the business and established a chain of Kaufhaus Schocken stores throughout Germany. Schocken is best remembered for commissioning German Jewish architect Erich Mendelsohn to design strikingly Modernist style branches in Nuremberg (1926), Stuttgart (1928), and Chemnitz (1930, the only one to survive). By 1930 the Schocken chain was one of the largest in Europe, with 20 stores. After his brother Simon's death in 1929, when his friend Franz Rosenzweig also died, Salman Schocken became sole owner of the chain.[2]
In 1915, Schocken co-founded the Zionist journal Der Jude (with Martin Buber). Schocken would support Buber financially, as well as other Jewish writers such as Gerschom Scholem and S.Y. Agnon. In 1930 he established the Schocken Institute for Research on Hebrew Poetry in Berlin, a research center intended to discover and publish manuscripts of medieval Jewish poetry. The inspiration for this project was his longstanding dream of finding a Jewish equivalent for the foundational literature of Germany, such as the German epic poem The Niebelungenlied.
Wagner's magnum opus, the four-part opera cycle based on Teutonic mythology and legend, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), powerfully expresses the alleged Germanic capacity to negate the will to live heroically as compared to the Jewish drive for earthly power. Wagner wrote of his work, "Here everything is tragic through and through, and the will that wanted to shape a world according to its plan can in the end attain nothing more satisfying than to break itself through a dignified downfall." [10] In the Ring, Wotan, the chief god, seeks to transcend "divine splendor's boasting ignominy." He exclaims: "I renounce my work. I only want one thing more: the end, the end!" [11]
In his quest for a "dignified downfall," Wotan arranges for his daughter, the Valkyrie Brunnhilde, to work a "world-redeeming deed." She carries out this mission by riding into the funeral pyre of her dead lover, Wotan's heroic grandson Siegfried, while wearing the ring of the Nibelung, which grants earthly power. Brunnhilde's heroic self-negation purifies the ring of its dread curse and allows Wotan to destroy Valhalla, his splendid castle in the sky, with its assembled gods and heroes. [12] After this conflagration, a purified new world arises from out of the old order's destruction. [13]
Wagner's Ring portrays heroic Germanic self-abnegation in contrast to the Jewish lust for earthly power. The Germanic deities Wotan and Brunnhilde destroy themselves to redeem the world. The fiendish Alberich, on the other hand, who crafts the accursed ring in the first place, and his son Hagen, who dastardly stabs Siegfried in the back, remain slaves to their material desires. They exhibit no redemptive spiritual tendencies. Hagen meets his doom in an ignominious manner. He leaps to his death in a final grab for the ring "as if insane." [14] Wagner intended Alberich and Hagen to represent what he regarded as the worldly and corrupting Jewish essence. Alberich symbolized the menace of purebred Jews and his son Hagen embodied the threat inherent in the bastardized offspring of Germans and Jews. [15]
Der Ring Des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), by Richard Wagner
-- The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Emigres and the Making of National Socialism, 1917-1945, by Michael Kellogg
In 1931, he founded the publishing company Schocken Verlag, which printed books by German Jewish writers such as Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, making their work widely available; they also reprinted the Buber-Rosenzweig translation of the Bible. These initiatives earned him the nickname "the mystical merchant" from his friend Scholem.[2]
Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research (New York: Schocken, 1968).
Peter Washington, Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America (New York: Schocken, 1995)
Critchlow, Keith. Islamic Patterns: An Analytical and Cosmological Approach. New York, Schocken Books, 1976.
Blair, Lawrence. Rhythms of Vision. New York, Schocken, 1975.
Sholem, G., Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Schocken, 1961
E. M. Sinclair, Spinoza's Critique of Religion, New York: Schocken, 1965
Hill, Christopher. Puritanism and Revolution. New York: Schocken, 1964.
Schocken Books, Inc.: The following material from Israel and the World, translated by Olga Marx and Greta Hort, copyright © 1948 by Schocken Books, Inc.: "The Love of God and the Idea of Deity"; "And If Not Now, When?"; "The Faith of Judaism"; "The Two Foci of the Jewish Soul"; "Nationalism"; "The Land and Its Possessors"; "On National Education"; "Teaching and Deed"; "Biblical Leadership"; "Plato and Isaiah"; "The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible"; "Hebrew Humanism."
Heinrich Harrer, Return to Tibet (New York: Schocken, 1985)
-- Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, by Jean-Paul Sartre (1944), © 1948 by Schocken Books Inc.
In 1933, the Nazis stripped Schocken of his German citizenship. They forced him to sell his German enterprises to Merkur AG, but he managed to recover some of his property after World War II.
In 1934 Schocken left Germany for Palestine. In Jerusalem, he built the Schocken Library, also designed by Erich Mendelsohn, was a board member of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and bought the newspaper Haaretz for 23,000 pounds sterling in 1935.[3] His eldest son, Gershom Schocken, became the chief editor in 1939 and held that position until his death in 1990. The Schocken family today has a 60% share of the newspaper. Salman Schocken also founded the Schocken Publishing House Ltd. and, in New York in 1945 with the aid of Hannah Arendt and Nahum Glatzer, opened another branch, Schocken Books. In 1987 Schocken Books became an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group at Random House, owned by widely diversified media corporation Bertelsmann, since 1998.
Schocken became a board member of the Jewish National Fund and helped with the purchase of land in the Haifa Bay area.[3]
Schocken became the patron of Shmuel Yosef Agnon already during his years in Germany.[4] Recognizing Agnon's literary talent, Schocken paid him a stipend that relieved him of financial worries and allowed him to devote himself to writing. Agnon went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966, not without the support of the well-connected Schocken.[4][5]
In 1940 Schocken left Palestine with his family except for one son, and settled in the United States.
Schocken died in 1959 while vacationing in Switzerland.
In 1910 Salman Schocken married Zerline (Lilli) Ehrmann, a twenty-year-old German Jewish woman from Frankfurt. They had four sons [Gustav Gershom Schocken, Gideon Schocken, Theodore Schocken, and Micha [Michael] Joseph Schocken] and one daughter [Eva Schocken (Eva Chava Rome, Eva Chava Glazer, Eva Chawa Glaser)]. Their eldest son, Gustav Gershom Schocken, succeeded his father at the Schocken publishing house in Tel Aviv and at the Haaretz newspaper. Another son, Gideon Schocken, became a Haganah fighter and later a general and the head of the Manpower Directorate of the Israel Defense Forces.
Schocken house in Jerusalem
The home of Salman Schocken is at 7 Smolenskin Street in Rehavia (aka Rechavia), a neighborhood of Jerusalem.[6] It was designed by Erich Mendelsohn. The building, constructed of Jerusalem stone between 1934 and 1936, was originally surrounded by a spacious 1.5-acre (6,100 m2) garden. In 1957, the property was sold to the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, which invited another architect, Joseph Klarvin, to design an additional front wing of classrooms facing the street. Klarvin also added a third story, dispensing with the pergolas and blocking over the oval pool in the courtyard.[7]
Schocken also had a library built in Jerusalem for his significant book collection. The building was also designed by Erich Mendelsohn and was built at 6 Balfour Street. Today, the historic building is home to the Schocken Institute for Jewish Research of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. The Institute houses the Salman Schocken Library and other important archives and collections of Jewish and other books.[8]
On June 12, 2014, a court in Berlin awarded 50 million euros to Salman Schoken's surviving heirs in Israel as part of reparations for the seizure of Schocken AG by the Nazi regime in 1938.[9]
•	List of German Jews
1.	"Man of the Book: Reading a Life of Salman Schocken - Forward.com"
2.	Asian Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: the lost and found world of the Cairo Geniza, New York: Schocken books, 2011, p. 113 ff., citing the biography of Schocken by Anthony David, The Patron (New York, 2004).
3.	'Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken: Israel's settlers have won', Haaretz, June 24, 2015
4.	https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... 59_(review)
5.	National Yiddish Book Center - A Simple Story by S.Y. Agnon Archived 2007-08-09 at the Wayback Machine
6.	[1]
7.	Sustainable Jerusalem: Schocken residence
9.	Karin Matussek (12 Jun 2014). "Jewish Family Awarded $68 Million for 1938 Nazi Store Seizures". Bloomberg. Retrieved 12 Jun 2014.
A Conversation About Schocken Books [3]
•	Anthony David, The Patron: A Life of S. Schocken, 1877–1959, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003. The book is well-written but contains numerous factual errors (see http://www.hannaharendt.net/index.php/h ... ew/106/178).
•	Brocke, Michael (2006). "Besserungswürdig (Book review of the Hebraic edition of A. David's 'The Patron. A life of S. Schocken 1877-1959')" (PDF). Kalonymos. Beiträge zur deutsch-jüdischen Geschichte aus dem Salomon Ludwig Steinheim-Institut (in German). Duisburg (Germany): Salomon Ludwig Steinheim-Institut für deutsch-jüdische Geschichte an der Universität Duisburg-Essen. 9 (1): 6f. ISSN 1436-1213. Retrieved January 30, 2016.
•	http://kuenste-im-exil.de/KIE/Content/D ... alog=1&x=1
Return to Religion and Cults


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Browse > Home / All Financial News, Company News / E-clear placed into administration
E-clear placed into administration
Kay Mitchell | January 19, 2010 | 0 Comments
Card-payment processing company, E-Clear, has been placed into administration.
The company was responsible for online ticket sales at Scottish airline Flyglobespan, which collapsed in December.
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), which was appointed administrator for Flyglobespan, had been investigating E-Clear to establish why the company held back £35 million owed to Globespan Group, which operated Flyglobespan.
E-Clear was also understood to have processed Allbury Travel Group's credit card payments, the company which was also placed into administration just before Christmas.
However, following a request from PwC, a High Court judge granted the administration order.
However, PwC said it had no explanation as to why the millions of pounds had been held back by E-Clear but Bruce Cartwright, administrator at PwC, said that the company will endeavour to recover as much money as possible for Globespan's creditors.
He comments: "Those who bought services on credit card or visa debit, that have not been supplied, will continue to be protected by consumer card legislation and should contact their credit card issuer."
Tags: High Court, PricewaterhouseCoopers, PWC
Jane Norman enters administration
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Rail company Jarvis goes into administration
Van maker LDV files for administration
Ethel Austin enters administration for second time in two years
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UK consumer spending higher in September
Consumer spending increased by 3 per cent in September compared with August, as people spent more on clothes and in hotels and restaurants. The figures, from Visa Europe's UK expenditure index which is compiled by Markit, represent the biggest increase since May 2009. The increased spending follows improvements in the job market which have boosted [...]
Jan Harris | October 5, 2012 | 0 Comments
HSBC to close UK Islamic banking operations
HSBC Holdings is planning to stop offering Islamic financial services in the UK as part of a global restructuring strategy which will see non-core businesses shut down. Along with the UK, it is closing its Islamic banking operations in United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Singapore and Mauritius. HSBC will offer Islamic banking only in Malaysia, [...]
Nationwide stops offering interest-only mortgages
From 11 October new borrowers will no longer be able to take out an interest-only mortgage with Nationwide building society. Nationwide is following the Co-op bank, which pulled out of interest-only mortgages in May, while Santander and HSBC only offer this type of product to house-buyers with a 50 per cent deposit. Nationwide also previously [...]
PayPal resolves technical glitch
PayPal, the internet-based money transfer service, has resolved the technical issues that delayed transactions for UK customers. The problem started on 29 September when a new system was introduced to speed up transactions. Unfortunately it had the opposite effect, with large numbers of transactions being sent for security checks, causing substantial delays in funds being [...]
Insurers call for one-year minimum L-plates
With an 18-year-old driver three times more likely than a 48-year-old to be involved in an accident, the Association of British Insurers (ABI) says restrictions should be placed on new drivers in order to save lives. The ABI is calling for a number of changes to the way youngsters learn to drive in the UK, [...]
Business owners unable to save for pensions
Nearly half of business owners have no private pension savings, according to research by the Prudential. The insurer found that 46 per cent of one-person businesses have no private pension, representing 1.3 million people. Fifty-four per cent of this group said they were unable to afford to set money aside for a private pension, 18 [...]
Mortgage payments rise for Santander customers
Santander has increased its standard variable rate (SVR) from 4.24 per cent to 4.74 per cent, adding an extra £26 per month to monthly repayments on a £100,000 mortgage. The move, which was announced in August, came into effect today. The increase will affect existing mortgage customers who are on the SVR rate, including customers [...]
British Chambers of Commerce forecasts end to recession
According to the British Chambers of Commerce's quarterly economic survey gross domestic product will grow by 0.5 per cent in the third quarter, marking an end to the recession. The BCC is optimistic for growth in the third quarter despite the UK's continuing weak economic performance. It says that data released by the Office for [...]
Nationwide suggests house prices will remain flat
Nationwide building society has reported a 0.4 per cent fall in house prices in September, following a rise of 1.1 per cent in the previous month. However, the building society suggests that the annual rate of house price change is a more accurate indication of the state of the housing market, as monthly figures have [...]
A documentary by the BBC, to be screened tonight, claims that payday loan company Provident Financial has made multiple loans to a vulnerable woman diagnosed with mental health problems. The Panorama documentary, Debt on the Doorstep, claims that Provident Financial loaned thousands of pounds to the woman, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. During the [...]

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


It seems like Play 'n' Go are looking to end 2018 with their highest variance slot to date, having given it a 10/10 volatility rating in their pre-release information for Battle Royal. A December 2018 release with a House of Tudor theme, 'Battle Royal' pitches the legendary English Monarch King Henry VIII against his six wives in a fun take on one of the most infamous periods in British aristocratic history.
The backdrop to the game board is set within a royal castle, with high arched ceilings, long and imposing corridors, and the royal red lion flags hanging from the ceiling either side of the game board. At other stages in the game, the game board might be flanked by dusky images of the outside of the castle, and one of the features takes you down into the castle's dungeon with its big padlocked doorway, stone floors, and even manacles chained to the walls. All the background graphics and animations are both spot visually and historically accurate. As to the board itself, the low value symbols are the card suits; clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades while the more valuable symbols are depicted by Henry's 6 wives.
As there are no names attached to the wives we can't say which is which but in ascending order of value we'll call them; blue, purple, green, red, orange, and gold – with the highest worth 30x bet size for 5 on a pay line. The wild in the base game is Henry VIII himself and the scatter symbol is of the Battle Royal Coat of Arms. Both the wives and Henry III symbols can cover the entire reel if they land fully in view.
Royal Flush is a randomly triggered base game feature whereupon after any random spin all the low value symbols (card suits) will flash simultaneously and transform into an identical low value symbol which will always result in a win of some sort.
If you land the Battle Royal scatter symbol on reels 1 and 5 then you will be presented with a choice of two scatter symbols to pick from. One reveals free spins, and the other reveals the pick feature Long Live the King. We'll start with the free spins. Prior to the spins starting you will be shown a line-up of all Henry's wives, each with a monetary value attached to them and you must pick which of the 6 wives will survive the free spin round the longest. Once that's done the free spins will begin, and the first thing you'll notice is that a guillotine blade has been added to the top of each reel.
With each spin, one of the guillotines will drop, and if any Queen's head is in view on that reel then she will be beheaded and turn into a head-carrying ghost. That Queen will also become wild for the remainder of the free spins and her value increased to equal the highest value symbol. There is no set number of free spins but they continue until 5 of the 6 wives have been beheaded.
As just described above, you can reach this feature by correctly predicting the beheading of Henry's final wife after free spins, but as it is also one of the two picks at the start of the scatter bonuses it is very possible to trigger this bonus straight away. Henry is down in the castle dungeon where his wives had spent their final hours and your job is to help him plunder their loot, which is kept in the 6 surrounding treasure chests, without being set upon by the ghostly spectres of his late wives which whizz by overhead. You must pick the boxes one at a time, hoping to extract the treasure without getting in the way of any ghosts.
If you get in the way of a ghost at any point the round ends and you're awarded whatever you have won so far. If, during your plundering exploits you find a key among the treasure then you can choose to leave the round and a multiplier will be added to your total winnings. If you so desire you can continue to loot and plunder in the hope that you don't run into a ghost.
If you have come from the free spin round it is advisable to leave as soon as you get the key as both your treasure and free spin winnings will be multiplied. If, however, you only have your treasure winnings to worry about then you ought to continue plundering until you have successfully opened at least 4 treasure chests before leaving (if you've uncovered a key by this point of course).
Battle Royal has a lot to offer as far as a fun romp through British medieval aristocratic history goes! It takes a well-known theme and successfully turns it into a decent slot with some great features. The design is neat and there is enough going on in general to counter to inevitable periods of dead spins you'll have to sit through while playing a volatile slot.
That said, although Play 'n' Go have given it a 10/10 volatility rating, it never seemed nearly as volatile as say, a Merkur slot, for example so whether true high volatility fans will take to it is still up in the air. As someone who sits on the fence a little and prefers a medium/high volatility slot, Battle Royal seemed more in that wheelhouse which is possibly why I enjoyed it as much as I did. The free spin round can be superb if you manage to get a few spins in with all those expanded wilds in play, and if you manage to both correctly guess the last Queen to fall AND also unearth a multiplier key in the subsequent 'Long Live the King' feature then you can end up with a very big win indeed! Another corker from Play 'n Go.


Oslob tour Philippines Cebu, When you visit the beautiful queen city of the south, Cebu City you might ask, Where can we go for the nearest and best adventure for the family or for the barkadas. And surely the first suggestion that you will get from the locals here is head of South and visit the beautiful place called Oslob.
Oslob is located about 120km South from Cebu City. It would take about 3 to 4 hours of land travel to reach the destination.
Oslob is one of the two destinations in Philippines famous for Whale Shark watching. It is a tourist magnet and over a hundred thousand tourists come here every year to swim with the whale sharks. The activiy also has risen protests from nature cause oriented groups for feeding the whale sharks thus changing their natural migration patterns and behaviours. But the government of Oslob is making all means and ways to preserve the safety of both tourists and the oslob whale sharks or butanding.
Oslob whale shark watching and swimming activity can be done in Tan-awan. Tan-awan is a a small town near the beach about 10 Kilometers from the town center. It has become a popular tourist attraction. Local fishermen feeds the whale sharks by hand and to the amazement of tourists while they swim and snorkel with the oslob whale sharks. It is strictly implemented that tourists are not allowed to touch nor feed the oslob whale sharks. Tourists are given a limit of about 30 mins. to swim with the oslob whale sharks unless otherwise arranged for a longer dive. Best place for Oslob tours.
Only about 10 – 15minutes away from the Oslob whale site you can already visit a beautifully wide waterfalls called Tumalog Falls. Tumalog falls is another must-visit destination in Olsob. It has a natural beauty. You can see century old trees surrounding the place. The cascading jump off rock walls makes the water in the falls drop like gentle raindrops. You can enjoy the view and dip in its very cool nature spring waters. Best place for Oslob tours.
One of the most frequently visited island in Oslob is the beautiful Sumilon Island. Sumilon Island boasts one of the longest widest pure white sandbar in the country. It is only a 24 hectare coral island. It is already maintained as a marine sanctuary. Sumilon means "take refuge" as it is an island where you can relax with its serenity and rich marine life. Diving is also a good activity in the area because of its untouched and beautiful coral reefs. Best place for Oslob tour.
The structure tells you about the Spanish power and its regime in our island. It is part of Spain's colonial structures that were built during their decades of Spanish rule in our country. It is said that it was constructed on the year 1898 and was left unfinished due to the arrival of the americans. The walls are made of coral stones. This structure is one the heritage site in Oslob. Best place for Oslob tour.
Part of the Olsob tour is a visit to the "Baluarte" is a Spanish workd for the "Watchtower". The Baluarte which can also be found at the Heritage Park of Oslob was built way back 1788. The Baluarte is used for guards to see and observe the surrounding area against any invasion via ship/war boats. It is also near the Oslob Baywalk. This is perfect place for relaxing and even watching the sunset. Best place for Oslob tours.


For our April talk, we're pleased to welcome Alys Tomlinson and Liz Hingley to PhotoForum. Their work shares a strong anthropological focus, exploring the connections between people and place, belief and belonging, and has been published and exhibited widely around the world.
As always, PhotoForum is free and open to all. Doors open at 7:00PM for a 7:30PM start.
Alys Tomlinson studied English Literature and Communications at the University of Leeds and photography at Central Saint Martins. She recently completed an MA (Distinction) in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. Alys is most interested in the relationship between people and place, exploring themes of environment, belonging and identity. Her work has been included in over twenty international exhibitions, most recently at Somerset House, HackelBury Fine Art and National Portrait Gallery, London. She was named Sony World Photographer of the Year 2018 and her long-term project Ex-Voto has just been published by GOST Books.
Liz Hingley is photographer, anthropologist and curator working on multi-platform projects that explore systems of belief and belonging around the world. Her publications include the books Under God' (Dewi Lewis, 2010), End of Lines, Shanghai (Be-Poles, 2013), Home Made in Smethwick (Multistory, 2016) and Shanghai Sacred (Washington University Press, 2018). Her photographs and writings feature in global media publications such as Time, Le Monde, Financial Times, The Guardian, and New Scientist as well as in academic journals. Liz has received numerous awards including The Photophilanthropy Award, Prix Virginia and the Getty Grant. Between 2013-16 she was a Visiting Scholar of the Academy of Social Sciences and based in China. She is a trustee and curator at SIDE gallery in Newcastle and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham and University College London.


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Sinks and drying racks are pretty practical essentials for every kitchen – but practical certainly doesn't have to mean boring and ugly, as these gorgeous numbers prove.
There are numerous sink styles to choose from – be it country, traditional or modern – and there are loads of options for every style, along with some pretty nifty space-saving sink solutions on the market.
Injecting bold colour into a classic shaker kitchen will stand the test of time. Choose natural wood to create a warm tone, then add pops of red and grey to bring the scheme up to date. Positioning a wooden peg rail above the white tiles not only breaks up the white backdrop, but it also provides much-needed storage space.
Create a cool Fifties vibe in your kitchen with serene mint green. Keep objects within easy reach by installing open units, then break up the colour with fresh white worktops and a pretty roman blind to soften the style. Why not plant a mini herb garden to complete the look?
Go back to basics and create a traditional country kitchen feel with a deep butler sink, classic white metro tiles and a farmhouse-style curtain on a runner. Bring the look up to date with a smart stripe fabric, and opt for red accents to lift the scheme and add a French feel.
White walls, units and accessories help keep a compact kitchen light and airy. To give a country scheme a contemporary update, team a butler sink and real wood worktops with modern units and appliances. Add charm with potted hydrangeas and sweet bunting.
Go for retro style with jazzy colour and bold curves. Here, an integrated sink blends into the quartz worktop, allowing the Italian units to take centre stage. A chic poppy red roller blind adds to the drama, while Fifties-inspired appliances complete the look.
Combine high-gloss units, shiny quartz worktops and a reflective glass splashblack for a stylish and modern kitchen. A taupe colourway will add warmth, while a smart patterned roller blind streamlines the look. You'll find it easy to clean with no grout lines to worry about, too!
This light-filled, all-white kitchen creates stress-free style that is perfect for family living. Quirky lighting adds splashes of colour and interest, and a handy, wall-mounted shelf looks very Skandi cool.
This bespoke basin unit fits snugly in a small area, and a reclaimed post office sorting shelf provides plenty of storage space. Displayed red and white mugs brighten up the scheme, while mismatched ceramic tiles along the wall make a pretty, changeable backdrop.
Simple, stylish fittings create a well balanced Skandi feel. Less is more with a single floating shelf with integrated lighting below. Eye-catching accessories stand out against the white palette, and graphic details add a sense of humour.
If you're lucky enough to have two sinks, design a tidy laundry area with clever storage solutions and stylish accessories. Choose a simple colour palette with sage tiles and white open shelves, then add practical storage tins to stow away odds and ends. A tradional roller towel set adds texture and colour.