Toxic

The person in the photo is my father. Obviously if I'm including him in a blog entry on things Toxic  there isn't a good relationship....in fact there isn't a relationship at all. However, with that little piece of family history out of the way, let's return to the main point.

Toxic Things are something that we all have in our lives. Some of the most toxic things can be people. Toxic people are tough, often they're hard to identify and because of emotional attachments often harder to remove from our lives. I guess in a way that I was lucky. My relationship with my father never really happened. There are no happy memories of the man, and in no way shape or form can I describe us as ever being close. Rather the exact opposite. This made him easy to identify and in my 30's easier to remove. One of my brothers on the other hand adored my father and spent almost his entire adult life trying to please him. My father on a good day is a self centred, self pitying, hypocritical, racist  bully.

Toxic people are the ones who undermine you, which is what my father spent 55 years doing to my brother, and then spent the same amount of time telling everyone what a loser my brother is. Yet every time my brother tried to make a move towards overcoming his benzodiazapine addiction my father undermined him by buying him more benzo's or providing excuses when what my brother needed and now admits this quite freely, was a serious kick in the bum and being made to get his shit together and deal with the addiction. These days apparently he is "supporting" another brother of mine who amongst other things had incest with his 10 year old daughter and took a shitload of drugs for his adult life.  Toxic people are the people who encourage addictions, who mistreat you, who make you feel bad about yourself, who cause obesity and keep you fat. They can be people who treat themselves appallingly with drug addictions, bad relationship or simply bad attitudes. Toxic people can be our parents, our spouses and even our friends.

By one measure my ex-wife was a toxic event for me. I reached 130 kg at my heaviest...up from 80 kg when she met me. Now the ex isn't a toxic person...she has no say in my life. There were "friends" at the time of my first marriage who in retrospect were clearly toxic. They were the ones who spent 20 years basically patting me on the head. They also were the ones who when the marriage was clearly sinking insisted that my ex was wonderful and my remarkably "on message" complaints were nonsense....people who knew more about what my ex was like when we were alone than I did. Because I respected them, I listened and the marriage lasted five unhappy years longer than it should have.

Then when I began my relationship with Selina, these "friends" were openly hostile to it. Making predictions about the likely outcome. Rather than embracing my happiness, they ended the friendships because in one case I had the audacity to not only ignore his advice, but when given the exercise of making up a list of the pro's & con's of staying with my ex and another one of being in a relationship with Selina, of actually producing the "wrong" lists.

Yet another engaged in some serious projection. He had been in a relationship for 20 years where his boyfriend had climbed the academic ladder and achieved the not unexalted status of professor at the Australian National University. He'd also bled this guy for every cent he could, been seriously in love with cocaine and party drugs, been fucking his drug dealer...and shared a house with him which my friend had been paying for and then to complete the joy, he dumped him on Christmas Day.  I was, of course, engaging in exactly this behaviour with my ex and Selina was not only wrong for me, but was going to be a brief event that I would regret dumping my ex for. You can understand where these people were clearly toxic.

Another "friend" from that period is comprehensively bullied by his wife. He's a professional in the mental health care field and she utterly dominates him to the point where he couldn't resume a friendship with me "because Jessie wouldn't like it".  Mind you, I had ended the friendship precisely because he wouldn't stand up to the cow and have a spine.

I use these stories  to provide examples of toxic people. With the toxic we have to accept that letting them go will often hurt. We have to make the first step of sober self evaluation and acceptance. The acknowledgement "this person is bad for me" has to happen. As Tantrics, we have to do this. We need to create lifetime where only the positive exists. We need to look at every person in our lives and see clearly their place in it. If someone is being toxic and thereby preventing you from being your best, then it is time to show them the door.

There are also toxic places. For me the simplest example of this was the Theravadin Buddhist scene in Melbourne. Once I had won my fight with depression, the scene became toxic. It is seriously conservative, dominated by the Sinhalese and almost imagination free. I outgrew Theravada. The frustration at being denied what I felt was my rightful place in the leadership grew and when they reacted badly to Selina, I had my final straw. It was toxic because it prevented my growth as a person. I was pigeonholed and when I no longer fitted, they refused to accept the change in me. To deny or to actively prevent spiritual and emotional growth is to be toxic.

For you, your toxic place could be a pub you go to. It could be the footy club you play at that refuses to embrace your sexuality, or it could be the group of friends you've always had who haven't really grown up. Whoever and whatever is toxic to you....it's time to leave.

Junk Food & Other Pollutants

This morning whilst engaging in the visualisation that I wrote about in my last entry something utterly wonderful occured to me: We eat almost no junk food. Even our consumption of the one marginal junk food that we do eat...fish & chips has been in steady decline.

Junk food is a pollutant, it is just that simple. Every study that has been done into obesity has shown that there is a clear causal link between the consumption of this pollutant and obesity. There are absolutely no positive outcomes from polluting ourselves with refined carbohydrates, fats and sugars. It  tastes bad, it's toxic for you and it's expensive.

As Tantrics...or just simple adults...we are engaged in a healthy lifestyle. We are making conscious decisions to do the hard thing. Thus the consumption of a known pollutant makes no sense. Junk food undermines every decision we make. You can't be beautiful and eat this shit on a regular basis.

Realising this and the fact that I don't consume this pollutant...and I walk past a McDonalds ten times a week...it's sited directly across the Princess Hwy from Monash Uni...led to a very big smile on my face. Take joy in your ability to say no to pollutants. Take joy in your increasing health.

The other pollutant can be media. The Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh has an interesting take on the Five Trainings. In the Fifth Training he goes beyond the usual and quite limited interpretation and adds media to the list of intoxicants. For the Venerable Nhat Hanh consumption of things such as horror and splatter movies, extremely and explicitly violent actions movies is as toxic as the consumption of hydroponically grown cannabis, ecstacy and other narcotics.
 So is over consumption of "news". Think about it. So very little "news" actually makes us feel good. How many horror stories in the form of massacres, transport accidents and drug mules do you consume every day? Something interesting happened yesterday...the first sky dive from 21 km. It never made the mainstream news. I found it on space.com http://www.space.com/14931-man-skydives-capsule-71-581-feet-video.html  As people wishing to cultivate the beautiful, it is patently obvious that if we fill our minds with the horrible, then that is what we will give out. Read instead. Read the beautiful. Take the time to read poetry, the great works of literature and indulge your intellect. The more you fill your heart and mind with the timeless, the beautiful, the more you will become timeless and beautiful.

Visualisations

We were reading about Tantra last night and came across a visualisation. It wasn't anything overtly sexual. What it was was very smart. The visualisation was all about viewing yourself as being the toned, fit, utterly gorgeous piece of eye candy that you want to be.

And that's pretty well what it does. You sit in your usual place of worship, close your eyes and visualise what you want to be, make a very clear mental image of your goal. Then move onto yourself,  feel the changes already happening within you, notice the increase in energy, vitality and virility resulting from your exercise and diet regime. Feel and rejoice in how healthy you have become or are becoming. Even if you've only been losing weight and exercising for a short time, when you go looking for these things they will be present.   Take the time to congratulate yourself on your efforts...especially if you are doing all the right things and seem to be getting precisely nowhere.

Reaffirm your goals. They most likely to involve getting naked with people built like the ones in this blog entry. Remember...people like these NEVER play with the fat, the sloppy, the ungorgeous. Eye Candy plays with Eye Candy.

I found this meditation to be wonderful, but then I'm quite a long way towards achieving my goal.

Tantric Event

We had the pleasure of worshipping with another couple last night. I was amazed at the joy and satisfaction to be gained in giving someone else pleasure. It helped that we find the other couple attractive. Actually we flatly refuse to worship with those we find unattractive.

 I learnt last night just how potent massage is. Pretty well any part of the body can be massaged and last night the massaging was sexual. In massaging someone we can get to see the pleasurable places we can take them. Often coitus is done with our eyes closed and is very energetic. However massaging and teasing with light strokes and touching every where but where you know the person increasingly wants to be touched is done with the eyes very much open. It makes for a wonderful sight.

Also women, and I know this will come as a surprise, like having their labia stroked with an erect penis. It is perfectly enjoyable to use a nice oil and then effectively engage in coitus without ever actually entering the woman. The stimulation is all external and once a woman is having her labia and clitoris massaged with a nice hard erection the bells and whistles tend to go off. Any position where the woman can have her legs closed works. So missionary, spooning and having the woman lying on her stomach and then mounting from behind all work. With the spooning and rear entry you can periodically enter her for increased lubrication. Also rear entry stimulates the clitoris. Do it for long enough and some astonishing orgasms happen.

And in Tantra orgasm is both the culmination of worship and one of the most personal of gifts. Give orgasms to your fellow Tantrics and you can guarantee that there will be return invites. Part of the worship was also letting the other person know just how beautiful they are. In my case not a tough job. She is beautiful.
Slow, purposeful worship. Slow, beautiful worship.

Tantrayana: Thoughts

The last two weeks have been interesting. We have been studying and practising and integrating Tantra into our lives. Our text has been "The Everything Tantric Sex Book". by Bobbi Dempsey. We are now in the  region of Chapter 14 and Dempsey is talking about how to live a Tantric life. Our response to what we read was "we've been doing this for ages". It makes such sense to treat people well, to be non-judgemental and to take care of ourselves physically and emotionally.

Today marks the beginning of our third week of yoga practice. Traditionally if you pursue a new direction for three weeks or more, the change is permanent. So at the end of the week if we are still doing our Sun Salutations... which is almost guaranteed, then we will have made the change. We find the Salutations to be very invigorating and the perfect transition between meditation and weights. I said to Selina this morning that with the regime of meditation, Kegel exercises, yoga and weights very much in place, that for her, the nice thing in 6 months will be watching the play of muscles across my body as I go throught the sequence of asana.

There is a goal for me to be at 90 kg by my birthday on May 7. I feel that I won't make this. It's a kilo a week and that simply won't happen. What I do feel will happen will be an increase in muscle tone. I am doing the above programme in the morning as well as walking about 20 km a week as well as drinking the protein shakes. I will be down from my current 97 kg, but I'll be wearing a surprised look if I'm at 90 kg. I will however give it my best shot. One of the saving graces of Aspergers Syndrome is that once a goal is set upon we will generally go through Hell & high water to achieve it.
My meditation continues to be Metta. The Tantra practice is deepening it. We changed our altar to entirely Goddess of Mercy (Avalokitesvara, Kwan Yin, Kanzeon, Kannon) yesterday and the change in the  energy is palpable. A nice change for the better we feel.
Must go. Part of Tantra is keeping your environment pleasant...lawn to be mowed. Scented candle lit, then cooking Milk Rice followed by most like a version of this morning....yoga, weights, Kegels.