Posts

OUR UNCONVENTIONAL ORGANISATION

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- thoughts from the Library  I first heard about the Centre for Policy Alternatives in 1999 through a friend of mine from accountancy class. She said CPA monitored elections and was a kind of research organisation that kept an eye on policy formulation. I was intrigued by the name:Policy Alternatives..? Suited me because I don't believe in the mainstream. I wanted to find out who they were and what they were about. I began work in Admin, and then overheard these other fascinating words - Democracy, governance, human rights, pluralism. What do those words mean? Why was CPA called a “watchdog”? I told Dr Sara that I would like to shift from Accounts to the Library/Documentation,  hoping I would have more time to read about what we do! CPA is unique . Here, we challenge conventional ideas, we think out of the box, we ask why, and why not. We don’t accept the status quo merely because it is widely accepted or always happened to be like that, we ask for reason and for justi...

The Brilliance of Holotropic Breathwork

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What is this Holotropic Breathwork? People lying in rows on the ground breathing fast while some strange loud music goes on and they start to go into a trance of some kind. That's what it looks like to the casual observer. To be frank it looks like new age nonsense or a psychedelic episode or people being possessed by the devil. And these people start to twitch and cry and writhe and scream and of course they must be making this up or they must be on something. Or this must be some marketing gimmick like those exorcisms that you find two a dozen on Facebook… Must we spend time and membership fees on this kind of nonsense when we can very well breathe oxygen in our own home on our couch? What is the big fuss? And yet here I am six years into Holotropic breathing, trying to tell you that this changed my life the way absolutely nothing ever has. No amount of regular meditations, counselling therapy, DBT, EFT, NLP, hypnotherapy, you name it — absolutely nothing BEGINS TO COMPARE. What ...

The Golden Ankh

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Epilogue: The Exodus of the Misfits  It began with an uprising no one saw coming—not from the royal court, not from the dusty temples of Amok, and least of all from the bureaucratic dung heaps of Sakkara's lower archives. Mussa, once a slouching, poetry-quoting, sandal-shuffling nonentity, and Princess Naynah, a royal rebel with more brains than patriarchal tradition would ever allow, made a break that would alter history. With the help of Kephri the scarab—who'd rerouted a labyrinth of guards using nothing but strategically placed dung balls—and the ever-snide Serious, the talking dead cat, they fled Egypt under cover of a lunar eclipse. They navigated through forbidden tomb tunnels, bribed border guards with embalming coupons, and rode atop a stolen sacred ostrich named Marvin. In the land beyond the desert, on the shimmering shores of the Unnamed River, they founded a city called *Sekhem-Ubasti* —"The Strength of the Forgotten." There, cats were not sacrificed but ...

From Invisible to Illuminated: My Reiki Awakening

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It's eleven in the night and my ears are buzzing, my fingers are tingling and I feel like I want to dance in the living room. I've had a tiring day which started at 3:33 with my meditation alarm going off and I've even just watched a movie and had a massive dinner (unusual) but none of that is slowing me down. As I type my latest generation laptop has a hard time keeping up: I have been initiated as a Reiki Healer today.  Me:  This ordinary dowdy retired ex-librarian, a character I felt was so gawky and gray that I sometimes have to ask people who cut ahead of me in queues, whether they actually cannot see me.  At the start of this year I was unseen, unheard, shy, fifty-five and ready to fade away into obscurity. And now, I feel supernatural. I've just been told that I have powers.  That we all do.  Whatever you believe in, whatever you think is real- the fact remains that we live in a world far more magical than we've been led to believe. And today, something ancie...

From Invisible to Illuminated: My Reiki Awakening

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It's eleven in the night and my ears are buzzing, my fingers are tingling and I feel like I want to dance in the living room. I've had a tiring day which started at 3:33 with my meditation alarm going off and I've even just watched a movie and had a massive dinner (unusual) but none of that is slowing me down. As I type my latest generation laptop has a hard time keeping up: I have been initiated as a Reiki Healer today.  Me:  This ordinary dowdy retired ex-librarian, a character I felt was so gawky and gray that I sometimes have to ask people who cut ahead of me in queues, whether they actually cannot see me.  At the start of this year I was unseen, unheard, shy, fifty-five and ready to fade away into obscurity. And now, I feel supernatural. I've just been told that I have powers. That we all do. Whatever you believe in, whatever you think is real- the fact remains that we live in a world far more magical than we've been led to believe. And today, something ancient...