A sacred space for everyone
The following is a full length video teaching offered by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo at Kunzang Palyul Choling:
Using the attitude of gratitude we can make the best use of our precious human rebirth – which goes by faster than we could ever imagine. OM AH HUNG BENZAR GURU PEDMA SIDDHI HUNG.
© copyright Jetsunma Ahkon Norbu Lhamo All rights reserved.
The following is a full length video teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo offered at Kunzang Palyul Choling:
Jetsunma examines the various ways that the Judeo-Christian thought field in which we were raied has affected our thinking. We think we understand the concepts but often miss the point through our confusion.
© copyright Jetsunma Ahkon Norbu Lhamo All rights reserved.
Everything seems hidden today, or else you want to hide out and avoid the world. You need privacy, time to work things out on your own. A bill is coming due, and you would love to duck it but you can’t. Debts are on your mind as well as how to allocate resources. A partnership is the stabilizing force now, despite the fact that you’re in the mood to run away and avoid responsibilities. The partner keeps reminding you of what must be done. The need to work hard solving detailed problems is continuing, and the urge to pull back and relax is strong. Avoid overdoing things, or you will get sick to escape. There is a special need for “down time” now, so adopt a pattern of work and rest, work and rest. You’ll find yourself sleeping more. The good part is that when you re-emerge to face the world, you’re refreshed and full of new ideas! Francisco de Goya said “Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.”
The daily astrology post affects everyone. Because individual charts vary, the circumstances outlined in the post will affect people differently. Some will feel this energy in the personal arena, some in finances, some with children or family, some in work and so forth. There are many departments of life. Look to see where the dynamic affects you!
The following is respectfully quoted from “To Have or To Harm” by Linden Gross:
Joseph Blackstone, a fifty-three-year-old lab technician, describes himself as a hereditary obsessive-compulsive and his thirty-year marriage as a business partnership rather than a relationship. For two years he had an affair with a waitress from the local country club. Then she broke off their relationship. “I went insane over it. Literally and irrationally insane over a period of five or six years, ” he recalled. “I felt this need to drive by her home in the daytime and sit outside her house for hours at night. I’m not sure why, even now. I phoned her incessantly. I sent letters saying, ‘You did me wrong. Why? Why?’ For those years, I couldn’t eat or sleep. My life was a black hole.
Work had always been sacred to Joseph. He’d always held two or three jobs at once. The stalking of his former lover put an end to that practice. He didn’t have time for both. Gaining power over his ex-lover took precedence. In the meantime, his work, his relationship with his wife and family, and his physical health suffered.
His obsession ultimately ended him in a sanatorium, where he underwent extensive therapy. The cloud he’d been operating under began to lift. “I thought I wanted her back. In retrospect, I guess I couldn’t let go. In the process, I ruined two lives,” he said. “I saw her as my emotional fulfillment. I’d invested all my eggs in that little basket. When she left, my basket was empty. I felt a void within myself.”
Some mental health authorities hypothesize that the need to possess someone who is unavailable stems from childhood feelings of rejection and abandonment. The idealized or fantasy relationship is subconsciously perceived as a way to rewrite history, to fill all of life’s deficits. “There is that magical quality that feeds the fantasy of the stalker and makes him feel that this person can fulfill his emotional needs…and make him feel lovable,” says Orange County psychiatrist Bruce Danto. Denial of the opportunity to make up for the damage suffered during the early years can lead to feelings of desperation and panic as well as a sense that the imagined connection must be preserved at all cost.
The following is respectfully quoted from “To Have or To Harm” by Linden Gross:
What compels some people to become obsessed with others, to hound, threaten, injure, and sometimes kill them in the name of love?
As with most research into criminal behavior, explanations range from the biological to the environmental. Physiological studies, for example, reveal that sexual attraction and the onset of feelings of love often trigger a surge of natural amphetamine like substances in our bodies. Some professionals in the field theorize that higher than usual levels of these chemicals may lead to the aberrant behavior of love-obsessed individuals.
That’s a tantalizing notion. It would explain the incomprehensible and even offer the possibility of a biochemical solution. Other behavioral scientists, however, postulate that some event or series of events during the formative years provoked the deviant behavior, especially in view of similarities between repeat stalkers and serial rapists and killers.
The fact is that the stalking phenomenon is too new and the studies are too few to determine what causes these obsessive behaviors. There aren’t enough physical and social scientists exploring the issue. So, all they’ve been able to ascertain are the traits that these people share.
Here’s what we know:
Stalkers are above average in intelligence. They usually read a lot and will engage in considerable research — as well as expenditures that reach into the thousands of dollars — in pursuit of their objectives. They know just how far they can go without breaking the law. And they refuse to take no for an answer.
Lack of a core identity also ranks high on the list of stalker characteristics. In an effort to make up for this inherent deficiency, love-obsessed individuals psychologically latch on to another person to validate their own worth. “If I could just be with her, I would have accomplished something,” reasons the stalker, whose identity almost immediately becomes submerged in the other person’s.
Should the obsessed individual fail to make a connection–whether from the outset or after a relationship has been attempted–he or she has no well-developed sense of self upon which to fall back. Without the coveted liaison, they have nothing. Since that emotional void is intolerable, the obsessed person can’t afford to accept the rejection, whether overt or implicit. As long as the stalker continues the pursuit, he can convince himself that he hasn’t been conclusively rejected.
When rejection can no longer be denied, the emptiness and humiliation cause obsessed individuals to act out in ways that destroy them as well as their victims.
Good fortune comes through friends and groups, and a stable organization or focus is being developed. Two approaches to a situation have appeared. One side is emotional, sensitive and imaginative – the creative part. The other side is hard working, detail oriented and wants results it can see – the pragmatic part. This dichotomy continues to grow throughout the week. It is a mistake to think either side is unnecessary. You will tire of each other, but you need each other. You won’t agree, but that doesn’t matter. Together you’ll come up with the perfect product or solution. Which role are you playing? Be flexible, willing to change. A bouncy sense of fun that seems out of sync with everything else is here too. Let it bring some joy into the mix. Colin Powell said: “Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.”
The daily astrology post affects everyone. Because individual charts vary, the circumstances outlined in the post will affect people differently. Some will feel this energy in the personal arena, some in finances, some with children or family, some in work and so forth. There are many departments of life. Look to see where the dynamic affects you!
The following is respectfully quoted from “To Have or To Harm” by Linden Gross:
Chicago, Illinois, August 5, 1989
After violating a protective order three times, Sheila Gallo’s former husband kills her. Their divorce had been final for just two days.
Richmond, Virginia, February 9, 1989
Deborah Frost’s old high-school boyfriend kills her while out on bond. The young man, who came from a “nice family” according to the victim’s mother, had never gotten over her. Eleven encounters with the law over a ten-month period did nothing to change his intentions or the outcome.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, March 9, 1992
Shirley Lowery waits in the hall outside a courtroom where she’s applied for a restraining order against the man with whom she’d once lived. Before she makes it inside, Benjamin Franklin stabs her nineteen times, fulfilling his promise to make Shirley pay for leaving him.
Boston, Massachusetts, May 30, 1992
Eleven days after Kristin Lardner gets a permanent injunction to keep Michael Cartier away from her, the twenty-two-year-old bouncer walks up to her in the middle of a busy street during daylight hours and shoots her repeatedly in the head. He was on probation at the time, for the beating of a previous girlfriend. “If the courts had checked his record or spoken to police when she sought help, he would have been locked up rather than set loose to kill her,” Kristin’s sister Helen Lardner, a Washington lawyer, testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.
Statistics on stalking are limited, principally because the cases wind up being classified as the crimes into which they usually escalate, such as assault or homicide. But most authorities agree that the overwhelming number of stalking victims are women. In fact, 90 percent of the fifteen hundred women killed by their current or former mates each year in this country were stalked before being murdered. However, that doesn’t mean that most stalking victims are killed. But “there’s a far greater chance that an ordinary -citizen case is going to result in a tragic conclusion than the celebrity,” says Lieutenant John Lane, who heads the Los Angeles Police Department’s Threat Management Unit, created especially to deal with stalking cases.
Stalkers don’t prey just on their individual targets. In cases involving family units, children frequently wind up as the victims. In October 1992, for example, Andrew Taylor made good on a prior threat. After his attempts at reconciliation — and his intimidation campaign — failed, he kidnapped his one-month-old daughter from her mother, a respiratory therapist. Authorities found the bodies of the unemployed actor and baby, whom he’d strangled, on a nearby bench. Eight months later, a South Dakota man shot his estranged wife and their two children just before their divorce was to become final.
Obsessed pursuers will frequently harass a third party to whom the actual target is attached in order to gain the intense impact and reaction they seek. “The easiest way to get me is to get to the people I love,” says Sarah Jane Williams, whose grandmother wound up in a nursing home after being knocked over by a prowler — presumably Sarah Jane’s stalker — when he broke into her home.
How did he know where to find the ninety-eight-year-old woman? or for that matter Sarah Jane, whom he continues to harass by phone even though she changes her number so often it takes her a few seconds to remember her current one?
Today’s easy access to informaiton has made us all potential victims. In his book Privacy for Sale, Jeffery Rothfeder explains how the proliferation of computerized records containing information about personal, private lives (5 billion records to date in the United States alone) means that a person with the right skills or contacts can find out virtually everything about us, from our whereabouts to our finances to our purchasing habits and family ties.
Why would one person obsess about another to the point of craving this sort of intimate information?
Anyone who has ever fallen in love or been infatuated knows how close the experience can be to a spiritual or drug induced high. Suddenly, our thoughts are consumed with one single being. Everything we see or do seems to bring him or her to mind. We find ourselves doing things we wouldn’t under any other circumstances. Like calling and then hanging up or using a fake voice just to see if anyone is home. Or driving by the house or apartment again and again for a glimpse.
The truth is that, for most of us, we’re in love not just with the person but with our projection of what kind of couple we’ll make, the needs that he or she will fulfill, and the idealized notion of love in general. Before we’ve even gotten to know what we’re really dealing with, we’ve fallen in love with what this person could represent to our future.
The individual whose life is a void waiting to be filled, however, takes those feelings and amplifies them. The person with whom he’s infatuated becomes his reason to exist. Any contact is better than no contact, any information a way to feel more intimately involved even if no relationship exists. That emptiness also helps explain the explosions that take place during the separations or divorces of many couples, when those who have used their relationships to define their identities simply can’t afford to let go.
In a culture where male violence is highlighted daily in the press and glorified nightly on television, the inability to accept rejection can easily mutate into dominance — particularly if it’s the man who’s been cast aside. “It has been sanctioned in society for a thousand years that a man has control over his woman,” says Michael Faymar, training coordinator for the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project in Duluth, Minnesota.
The social conditioning that most American men receive feeds this distorted view of relationships as ownership and love as a predestined occurrence. Even when they have targeted women who don’t return their affections, the socially accepted notion that men choose women, rather than the other way around, feeds their sense of righteousness. “She’s the only one for me,” says the ardent suitor, as if that should be the determining factor in her decisions.
Emotional harmony and happiness characterize this day. Friendly contacts are mutually beneficial, and groups and others are supportive. Women and children are loving and inclusive. Men are in an escapist, creative mode. Hidden matters are being negotiated, and it’s important to keep your eye on people around you. A temptation to engage in criminal or escapist behavior is prevalent. A tempting opportunity presents itself, and some people won’t be able to resist it. Criminals will be caught. New medications are developed that heal previously fatal conditions. Two paths diverge – one leads to compassion and the other to easy, dishonest solutions. H.L. Mencken said “There is always an easy solution to every human problem – neat, plausible and wrong.” Take the ethical solution to your problem and no harm arises.
The daily astrology post affects everyone. Because individual charts vary, the circumstances outlined in the post will affect people differently. Some will feel this energy in the personal arena, some in finances, some with children or family, some in work and so forth. There are many departments of life. Look to see where the dynamic affects you!
Game change! A technology-based braininess has been replaced by intuitive sensitivity, and you’ve got it! Follow your hunches, your intuitions. They are right, and the next couple of weeks will prove this out. Avoid sharing secrets today, the listener won’t understand or else will pepper you with so many questions you’ll lose heart. But don’t forget your idea. It’s a quiet time, for a change. Take advantage of a peaceful environment. Engage in activities that inspire and calm you. Water is excellent, as are films, music, all medical treatments, meditation and dreams. Mellow out! A dream or fantasy is pointing the way to what comes next, if you’re paying attention. Oscar Wilde said “Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”
The daily astrology post affects everyone. Because individual charts vary, the circumstances outlined in the post will affect people differently. Some will feel this energy in the personal arena, some in finances, some with children or family, some in work and so forth. There are many departments of life. Look to see where the dynamic affects you!
The following is a full length video teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo offered at Kunzang Palyul Choling:
In this final part of the workshop, Jetsunma goes through the practice she developed of Supreme Generosity (called Chod by Tibetan Buddhists). Through this she was able to deepen in her practice. We hope you will too.
© copyright Jetsunma Ahkon Norbu Lhamo All rights reserved.