Yoga Music at Bedtime Good for the Heart

Listening to yoga music at bedtime is good for the heart, according to new research.

Listening to yoga music at bedtime is good for the heart, according to research presented today at ESC Congress 2018. Read more

Touching Can Save Lives

Touch is not only pleasurable, but healing. Suzie Heumann explains how touching can save lives.

I'm a sensual kind of person. My body informs me. As a species, we humans have generally forgotten to pay attention to the information our bodies are revealing to us. We're a thinking species and by being thus we think ourselves through situations rather than feeling through situations. This leads to a systematic demise of our abilities to recognize bodily functions that can lead us to healing modalities we used to know about back when our brains weren't so big.

Scientists, with the aid of new tools and resources, are leading us back to an understanding that will help us reincorporate this deep and ancient knowledge. For instance, recent studies have revealed an incredible healing facet through touch. These studies have come about through the curious representation of whiskers and the understanding that some parts of our bodies take up larger areas of our brain matter than other areas do. Remember the homunculus? This is that odd looking little "man" that is superimposed over the brain with big hands, lips, genitals, feet, head and other features that are out of proportion to the rest of his body. He is a representation of our brain parts and an illustration of how they are mapped on our brain. Some parts have much more sensory input than other parts hence the bigger representation on the homunculus.
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Tantra as Therapy: Was Osho Wrong?

I recently corresponded with an Indian doctor on the subject of Tantra as "therapy," so Mark Michaels and Patricia Johnson's critique of Osho's promotion of that idea is timely for me.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho) had a profound influence on what is now known as "Tantra" in the Western world. Rajneesh came from an academic background, did not have traditional training in Tantra and was not part of a lineage-based system. He had an extensive textual knowledge and was a very effective popularizer. He fused cutting-edge, Western psychotherapeutic techniques of the 1960s and '70s with Tantric texts and used the phrase "neo-Tantra" to describe his system. He was a controversial figure throughout his life, and he remains one today.

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Many contemporary Tantra teachers were trained by Rajneesh or his disciples, and others have embraced his ideas, at least in part. Rajneesh helped inspire the widely held notion that Tantra is a form of therapy; sometimes this belief extends to Tantric sexual practices and includes the idea that "sexual healing" can be effected through various practices designed to produce emotional release and purge traumas that are often thought to be stored in the genitals. We view these ideas with skepticism. Read more

I disagree with the classical Tantra notion that only healthy, well-integrated people are ready for Tantra, but, on the other hand, expecting Tantra alone to make one healthy and whole is probably unrealistic as well.