Mud Ghecko

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...

   I wish the sun would come back! And small wonder they worshipped Him in Egypt, Greece and Mesopotamia and killed for Him in South America, what with sacrificing virgins yada yada.- I keep wondering what it would take to get rid of all that drippy weather - it really gets to me this time. Yes, it is that time of the year when you wish you were anywhere else but damp, sticky, moldy-smelling Sri Lanka- officially monsoon time- or to use less exotic terminology "gloomy weather predicted in Colombo"   My cats are frozen into catatonic lumps the whole of this week- you can see them lurking like watchful gargoyles, on sideboards, in the ceiling ornaments, on cupboards, too cold to shake a limb but occasionally blinking balefully at the podgy geckos they are too lazy to catch.  The half Persian has swollen to twice her size because she is cold and her bristles are sticking out, and taken to answering the calls of nature indoors, ie, in th...

October is the month of my wonderful liberating divorce, and I remember it with such mellow happiness, you might consider it rather shocking.  The truth is, hardly any anniversary makes me so inexplicably happy!!  Perhaps obscenely, I have many times wanted to propose divorce parties and I know if I was a minister or something I would host large-scale nationwide celebrations with free butterscotch ice cream dansal, pole dancers and/or fireworks, which ever is more fun... I want to tell you because I trust you not to judge me… sometimes divorce can be a really good happy thing, and people really should do it more often - and with more kinds of things (not necessarily your spouse) that are just not working out- you can divorce your job, your daylight robbing trishaw man, your insufferably nosy aunt next door, your current vocation if you don't like it, your motherland if its taxing you too much and you cant take it anymore.... theres so much to be said about simply not taking it any ...