Showing posts with label Nature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nature. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 6, 2026

Buddhist Radio LA: Alan Watts (Sun, Thurs)


Alan Watts: "Man and Nature"
Being in the Way Podcast, Episode 8 – Hosted by son Mark Watts
Alan Watts: Being in the Way (amazon.com)
Be Here Now Network(Be Here Now Network) Alan Watts - Being in the Way. In this intimate two-part session, Alan Watts shares distinctive philosophical vantage points outlining humankind’s relationship to the nature all around us.

“All music is purposeless. Is music getting somewhere? If the aim of a symphony were to get to the final bar, the best conductor would be the one who got there fastest. When you dance do you aim to arrive at a particular place on the floor? The aim of dancing is to dance, is the present. It’s exactly the same with our life.” – Alan Watts
  • Man & Nature, Here & Now (0:00)
  • The Three Theories of Nature (11:53)
  • The Undefinable Order of Nature (35:30)
  • Trust, Play, & Purposelessness (45:00)
Buddhist Radio
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Monday, September 28, 2026

Japan's secret to beauty, youth, longevity


Japan's One Secret to Health, Beauty, and Longevity
Samurai Matcha
Will I be turning Japanese? I really think so
(Samurai Matcha) ✪ Members first on Sept. 21, 2026. I’m filming this in one of the many empty houses in my Japanese neighborhood. I’m staying here for a month just to try it. ☺️ 

For anyone interested in R's KOSO, here's the link ✌️ dpbolvw.net/click-1011103... Use code SAMURAIGUT for 15% off (works on first subscription order, too). Subscribe and become a friend today: samuraimatcha.

GET IN TOUCH: If you’d like to talk, feel free to email me at samuraimatcha.japan@gmail.com. I try my best to reply to things, but there sadly aren't enough hours in the day to respond to everyone all the time, so please be patient or reach out again.

Go minimal like Blue Zone Okinawa
The Japanese secret to vitality

Youthful, thin, pretty, long-lived? *Giggle*
What if there were ONE secret to Japanese healthy weight, youthfulness, beauty, and amazing longevity? Westerners rush to say, "It must be genetics" because in that way, they can give up. There's nothing we can do about genetics (as if the West never heard of epigenetics), so let's do nothing.

In the age-old debate between Nature (genes) and Nurture (karma, our actions now), there's much more to be said for karma. First of all, the way most people use the word "karma," they mean both the intentional actions being willed and carried out AND the results of those acts from the past (vipaka, phala). Looked at that way, karma accounts for a lot of (but not all) nurture and a lot of (but not all) nurture.

Nurture is our environment and what others choose to do. How it affects us, that is greatly due to the habits, states, and traits we have built up over many past lives and all of this one. (Karma is vast and touches just about everything).

Nature is not limited to genetics, our innate nature, but all of the biology. In this way, we can see that how we nurture determines if it works well or to our detriment.
Hollywood secret? My grandma knew it!
The Japanese one secret, which the West used to know and respect, is called chokatsu or "gut health." The West used to know this? Before researchers, scientists, and the medical field gave us terms like probiotics and intestinal health, our grandmothers were well aware of the benefits of fermentation. It's an ancient practice of cultivating good (usually lactic-acid producing) bacteria to preserve food and up bioavailable essential minerals, the unknown key to human health.

Minerals are the essential micronutrients (criticalhealthnews.com). Dr. Joel Wallach says that, sadly, minerals are no longer in our depleted soil because we no longer regularly throw ashes into the ground from wood burning. The sea still has those 92 trace minerals, and maybe seaweeds like the thickener Irish sea moss, and vegan sushi nori leaves, salty kombu, and other sea plants can still provide them. 
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Saturday, August 8, 2026

Buddhism, Shinto, atheism East and West

If one billion Chinese Buddhists are not counted and there are only six choices, here's breakdown
(No Nonsense Spirituality | Britt Hartley) What Japan told me about atheism and belonging
Man confronted by the Fox goddess
Shintoism is a religion from Japan classified as an East Asian religion by scholars. It is often regarded by its practitioners as Japan's indigenous religion and as a "nature religion." Religious scholars sometimes call its practitioners "Shintoists," although adherents rarely use that term themselves. With no central authority in control of Shintoism, there is much diversity of belief and practice evident among practitioners. A polytheistic and animistic religion, Shinto revolves around supernatural entities called the kami (神), who are believed to inhabit all things, including forces of nature and prominent locations.

Shinto: The Kami Spirit World of Japan
These shapeshifting kami are worshipped at kamidana household shrines, family shrines, and jinja public shrines staffed by priests, known as kannushi (those who deal with the kami), who oversee offerings of food and drink to the specific kami enshrined at that location. This is done to cultivate harmony between humans and kami [shapeshifting spirits, apparitions, ghosts, genies, poltergeists, elementals, ghouls, monsters, tricksters, fairies, gargoyles, or other invisible beings] and to solicit their blessings. Other common rituals include kagura dances, rites of passage, and kami festivals. Public shrines facilitate forms of divination and supply religious objects, such as amulets, to the Shintoists. The religion places a major conceptual focus on ensuring purity, largely by cleaning practices such as ritual washing and bathing, especially before worship. Little emphasis is placed on specific moral codes or particular afterlife beliefs, although the dead are deemed capable of becoming kami. The religion has no single creator or specific doctrine and instead exists in a diverse range of local and regional forms.

History of Japan through housing

What are kami?

Yoshitoshi ground spider yōkai
Yōkai are also referred to as ayakashi (あやかし), mononoke (物の怪), or mamono (魔物). Some academics and Shinto practitioners acknowledge similarities within the seeming dichotomy between the natures of yōkai and most kami, which are generally regarded as relatively beneficent by comparison. Shintoists classify the two as ultimately the same type of spirits of nature or of a mythological realm [3]. Their behavior can range from malevolent harm or mischievous trickster pranksterism to benevolent towards humans. More: yōkai
  • Joe Smith, John the Baptist, Oli Cowdery
    Mormonism    : the theology and religious tradition of the Latter-Day Saint movement of Restorationist Christianity started by Joseph Smith in Western New York in the 1820s and 1830s. As a label, it has been applied to various aspects of the movement, although since 2018 there has been a push from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) to distance itself from this label [1]. A prominent feature of the theology is the Book of Mormon, a 19th-century text that describes itself as a chronicle of early Indigenous peoples of the Americas and their dealings with [the white man's] God [2]. This theology combines mainstream Christian beliefs with modifications stemming from belief in revelations to Smith and other religious leaders.
The atheist symbol is an atomic whirl
Atheism: knowing that there are no Gods (theos); in the broadest sense, an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are certainly no deities. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which is the belief that at least one deity exists.
Nontheism is not atheism
The "whatever" religion
NONTHEISM: The position that whether there is a God(s) or not, that has no bearing on an individual's enlightenment, liberation, deliverance, salvation, emancipation. (Why? The gods/Gods are caught in this samsaric rounds just as other beings are). It is a range of both religious [1] and non-religious [2] attitudes characterized by the absence of espoused belief in the existence of a God or gods.
How much do we care what the Truth is?
It has generally been used to describe silence towards the subject of gods (deus, theos, dīvus) and differs from atheism, which is an active disbelief in any gods. It has been used as an umbrella term for summarizing distinct and even mutually exclusive positions.

Some of these are default atheism, the ever-popular agnosticism (not knowing), apatheism (apathy), egotheism [not to be confused with messiah complex, egoism, egotism, narcissism, Trumpism, or solipsism], ignosticism, ietsism, pantheism, deism, pandeism, 🌈 transtheism, skepticism, or the greatest bunco-religion ever invented, at least so far, Flying Spaghetti Monsterism (aka Pastafarianism).

Religion with most believers is the right one
Science: As pirates go down, temperatures go up (misleading graph)
 
Believe and be saved or deny and go to hell
(We apologize in advance if our statements have offended any FSMists; it is never our intention at WQ to offend, diminish, mock, or otherwise find fault with the religion or nonreligion of anyone's choosing. Do carry on believing and never mind our backwards ways. In fact, everyone should convert to this religion and/or make up their own, such as George Costanza Sr.'s Festivusism. We ourselves are nontheists, Buddhists yes, but nontheists.)

FSM Pastafarianism
One day the eternal Creator Deity blessed humankind with starch but cursed it with gluten
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Impale the shorthaired nonbelievers!
The Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) is the supreme deity of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster [of the latter-day tortellinis], an ironic, satirical, and parodic new religious movement that promotes a light-hearted view of religion [3]. The parody originated in opposition to the teaching of intelligent design in public schools in the USA. According to adherents ("Pastafaris"), Pastafarianism (a portmanteau of pasta and Rastafarianism 🌬️) is a "real, legitimate religion, as much as any other" [4]. It has received some limited recognition as such [5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. More
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Thursday, August 6, 2026

Nude Poetry with Füde, NY to LA (8/7)

Now I'd like to bring out Leehee Bee, a hot piece of asymptote on our stage for the first time.
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Reading my poetry is a new kind of "naked"
What performing poetry reveals about language, vulnerability, the fear of being (mis)understood
 
Could I stand in front of people fully nude?
A few months ago, I [Lihi Be] stood on a stage in New York City and performed slam poetry for the first time. The scene was hosted by Nuyorican Poets' Cafe at the Bowery Poetry Club, a small, legendary room where decades of poets have stepped up to a microphone and turned their inner worlds into sound.

It's the kind of place where language has history, where words have weight, where the air feels charged from voices that came before.

Enough with old white male writers! Sit down!
Gigi luxury nightwear (Schweitzer Linen)

lihi be, the i in mi, this breath and body
I remember standing there, waiting my turn, feeling my heart beating in my throat, which surprised me. I’ve spoken in front of rooms before. I’ve guided workshops, taught movement, led breathwork journeys where people open parts of themselves that are tender and alive.

Holding space for others doesn’t scare me. But this was different. This time, I wasn’t holding material space; I was the material. A poem I wrote alone earlier that morning was about to leave the page and hit the stage, entering a room full of strangers, not through dead ink, but through my living breath, my voice, my body.
New York City as seen from high above Central Park, a kind of Griffith Park, Los Angeles

(Married with Children) American skin: Al Bundy's high school girlfriend shows up at the beach
White men can't dance, but women can (KP)
What is The Füde Experience? Naked eating, social bonding, courageous self-inquiry together
The Füde Experience: naked eating with Lihi Be at FÜDE LA (thefudeexperience.com)
Does anyone here need a bath to wash away dirty thoughts of body image negativity?
Holiday hosting: rosemary ritual cleanse (The Füde Experience)
We said nobody wants to see it, Shake Spear! OK, a quick flash then sit down and shut it!

Lihi Benisty poetry: Self
Until that moment, "poetry" was something I wrote, never something I performed. When I published my book, The Self, Reframed, it felt like a big step outward. Suddenly the poems were technically "public." Someone, anyone, could order the book, underline a passage, carry a piece of it into her own life.
 
Butt even then, there was still distance. The page protected me. Readers meet a poem alone. They can pause, reread, close the book, throw it in the garbage disposal, flip the switch, make acid-free wood pulp that washes out to sea... That meeting happens quietly, inside their own interior worlds.

Shame? We refuse to limit ourselves
Slam poetry is different: Spoken word removes the distance. When one performs a poem, there is no safe distance, no page between the room and the I performing. My breath carries my language. My nervous system becomes part of the delivery. My voice, my pauses, my trembling chest -- all of it becomes part of my poem.

In some ways, it feels easier to be naked than to perform one's own poem, in the woods, with someone you love, in front of Mother Nature, playing pretend it's Adam and Eve in a Sumerian garden.


Look, it's the real me!
I was in New York for a series of gatherings -- one of them a nude experience I was hosting with the Füde Experience: a roomful of naked people exploring embodiment, mindful presence, the simplicity of being in our bodies without the usual layers of social armor.

Standing naked in a room with others didn’t feel nearly as vulnerable as standing on this stage. In fact, being naked felt surprisingly simple. Source: a poem is a different kind of naked (seeds of the self)

We're bringing it to Los Angeles
"No bikinis! Cover up those shameful bodies...or you are headed for hell!" - Loving Christian
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Lihi Be (Benisty)
AUTHOR: Lihi Be (Benisty), teacher of somatic self-inquiry, breathwork, movement, teacher, mentorship, poetry, summer retreat leader, author of The Self, Reframed. She leads a dynamic blend of somatic practices to navigate emotional landscapes. She is profoundly committed to the poetic art of self-inquiry through breathwork and movement. Her teaching is distinguished by her ability to weave these elements into a cohesive practice that respects the complexity of the human experience. Her poetry serves as a reflective mirror, deepening the themes she navigates in her somatic work and offering an additional avenue for connection and self-discovery. She lives in Los Angeles, California. (Substack, Instagram, FÜDE in LA, Amazon, Facebook, Omega Institute, lihibe.com)
Nuyorican Poets' Cafe Poetry Slam at the Bowery Poetry Club Mondays (@bowerypoetry
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