Educating Ourselves to Thrive

Today we’re going to witness a powerful example of what it means to start leading ourselves to thrive. There’s more in that little sentence than meets the first impression.

If you’re receiving the Deep Freedom Now newsletter and reading it attentively, you discovered something about how our health, biology and intellect degenerated once we started consuming cereal grains which are the seeds of grasses, in our article Modernity: Neolithic Trickery 2.0. This may have come as a bit of a shock. It certainly did to me. Biologically, in terms of height, brain capacity and overall health, we moderns are still playing catch-up to our Paleolithic ancestors.

Industrial Foods for Post-Industrial Humans

For a while, our ancestors learned that by prolonged fermentation of cereal grains, they could reduce a lot of their toxicity and improve their health. Most of those gains have been reversed with the advent of industrially-processed foods, chock full of cereal grains, wheat flour, high-fructose corn syrup and genetically modified foods. Right now we are seeing an explosion of neurological and auto-immune disorders along with diabetes and obesity rising exponentially.

Norman Borlaug, an agronomist hailed as “the father of the Green Revolution” and a Rockefeller scientist for corporate agriculture, worked on the genetics of wheat and corn and developed dwarf varieties of both. Wheat has gone from a plant with 14 original chromosomes to 42 in these dwarf varieties, now genetically modified to be soaked in Roundup at all stages of growth and replete with more than 20 different proteins that are highly-inflammatory and severely toxic to humans.The dwarf wheat varieties has a yield 4 to 5 times greater than the older varieties.

Perhaps not so curiously, the Rockefellers funded the medical schools promoting pharmaceutical medicine. They built global profit centers not only in biology-altering agriculture, but in the pharmaceutical “remedies” to treat the diseases that dietary changes and inflammation cause in the entire human biology. As we saw in Modernity: Neolithic Trickery 2.0, that’s already a ten thousand year game with a fascinating history. What we call “civilization” is a human livestock domestication, degradation, and exploitation system. Civilization is applied art and science designed to not only diminish you, but to makes us content to live diminished. Study it! You are not only in it, it is in you, all the way to how you “think” that you are “thinking.”

I was surprised, in traveling around the world since 2009, giving courses at a level which I had to continually lower, at what is happening with people neurologically, intellectually and health-wise, worldwide. Don’t kid yourself, all along the whole process I, too, began learning things at such a basic yet fundamental level that I’d marvel that how such basic things had escaped me so long. The Chinese say “to teach is to learn twice.” I wish I were that bright, but most of my teaching experiences challenged me to re-examine my presumptions many more times than that.  Perhaps I can spare you a few dozen detours.

Neurological and auto-immune conditions are on the rise, and for a whole host of reasons. It’s up  to each one of us to start leading ourselves to thrive and not just “get by.”

Beware of Experts

For a very long time I used to think that “medicine just had to catch up.” My research into health changed when I got increasingly ill, starting in 2001. I ended up on the receiving end of critical care in 2008. I was doing everything “right”, at least according to the mainstream and “New Age” recommendations, and my health was just going downhill. I knew something about my “understanding” of health was dead wrong. I knew all about “healthcare” and I thought I knew about “health,” not just from allopathic medicine but Oriental medicine and health practices as well. In those seven years I had tried everything I knew, both in allopathic and alternative terms, with devastating results.

As a critical care nurse specializing in trauma and neurological illnesses and injuries for twenty years I could help you with excellent interventions in a healthcare setting. Outside the hospital I would have been glad to share a morning doing Tai Chi and Chi Gong together, or cook you up a rich miso stew at my place. I did Tai Chi daily for twenty years. But what was “health”? Was it another recipe, exercise or formula to follow?

What about “health,” no additives, just health? I spent eight years seeking “health,” as if it was some abstract.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” George Orwell

What I was most “sure” about and the kind of “expert-approved” dietary advice I had given daily to stroke, heart and diabetic patients as a nurse, since 1989, was precisely what was making me ill and destroying my health. But I didn’t get that until I asked such simple questions as, “what is a cell made of, as its primary ingredients?”

I was shocked to discover that much of the “officially approved” advice I’d given on a daily basis has been disproven countless times over the last 150 years, often based on poor studies that serve the interests financing them, unbeknownst to us “experts.” Let’s be real, it’s not like every doctor or nurse pulls out every study, on the health recommendations we dispense to our patients, and reads them. We presume that what we learn in our studies, both at the university, and with our ongoing certification requirements, are being taught to us in good faith, competently, with dedication, excellence and care.  That is a deadly presumption, but I was absolutely unaware of that fact during my career in critical care, and during my eight years of struggling to get my health back.

After more than a decade of study, I was amazed to discover how simply I could have restored my health, if I had actually taken the guidance that several indigenous elders had given me thirty years before! But I was certain that their understanding of health was primitive and that mine was much more sophisticated.

I was absolutely correct: their understanding was Primitive, mine was Sophisticated. As is typical of sophisticated people, I did not understand the very words I used on a daily basis.

Primitive or Sophisticated?

If I had only understood the sense of “primitive” and “sophisticated,” I would have quickly corrected my course to go to the essence of my problems, by looking at first things first, the Primitive approach. Primitive comes from the Latin primus: “first” and a Primitive Intelligence looks at first causes FIRST.

When I got ill, I did not take the primitive approach. I already had twenty years under my belt of practicing critical care nursing in a very sophisticated form of “medicine” and had, all on my own, sophisticated myself even further with the “pearls” of other traditions.  It took me the better part of a decade trying to recover my health, spinning around in circles with my very sophisticated Western and Oriental medical “knowledge” and “practitioners” to realize where my blind spot was.

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” –Mark Twain

I added my allopathic medical understanding to my twenty-year studies and practice of Oriental medicine, to my thirty years of macrobiotics and then added more and more Qigong practices to the mix, a very sophisticated approach, indeed, with devastating results to my health to match.

As I gave workshops around the world and came face-to-face with a very different population than those I served in my 25 year nursing career, specializing in Neuro-Intensive Care and Trauma I.C.U. in some of the best hospitals in the United States, I was called to question everything I knew about learning, education, medicine, politics and history.

The Sophistry of “Scientific Society”

What we are seeing is not a failure of science but the perfect application of science, and not in our favor. Here’s what Bertrand Russell wrote back in 1953:

“Scientific societies are as yet in their infancy. . . . It is to be expected that advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries. Fichte laid it down that education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished. . . . Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. . . .” [emphasis added] Bertrand Russell,1953

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) was the architect of the Prussian “public education” system, designed to cripple the intellect of the rising class of small-scale, free-market, self-educating German entrepreneurs, merchants and craftsmen who were developing a culture of autonomy and responsibility as they emerged from European feudalism. Prussian “education” was designed to make a “machined man,” a military and industrial “soldier,” a “proletarian,” content to spend his days in other peoples’ factories, and given to impotent “protest,” rather than capably pursuing his own interests in his own community from his own resources, capacities and relationships.

“In our society, when we talk about raising children, we are really talking about driving them crazy. What education is about is conditioning people to be irresponsible and stupid. It teaches them to be skillful technologists and useless people… At the end of the “educational” process we have become technically semi-competent human machines, and as creative human beings we have turned into morons.” Stewart Emery Actualizations: You Don’t Have to Rehearse to Be Yourself

All so-called schools of “education” in the United States and most in Europe were started by people who earned their doctorates in the Prussian schools of education and with the same objectives in mind. Although Fichte and the Prussians improved the means of “standardizing” a national population’s intelligence to its most “useful” form, the idea and the practice of doing so are already explicit in the writings of Plato and many others before and since.

In ancient Greece the Sophists were a gang of tutors and philosophical “guns-for-hire,” who used Greek liberal education to help rulers mystify their subject with sophisticated rhetoric and logical fallacies so that their audiences would confuse words with reality. A sophisticated person is one whose mind has fallen prey to the Sophists, confusing words for reality. My experience with health, as a sophisticated healthcare “professional” served as a warning to me as to what kind of “expertise”

Since 2009 I have had at least ten students with degrees in so-called “education,” many of them with doctorates. Not a single one of them could tell me what the etymology of education is or how to educate oneself. This exemplifies how well the “schools of education” have achieved their stated goals which are carried out by every generation of “experts” that graduates out of them. The habits which allow us to earn university degrees cripple intelligence, literally, as they crippled mine and replaced it with memorizing and parroting other peoples’ foregone and “expert knowledge.” My “expert knowledge” from around the world, no less, had me spinning in circles and ill-health for eight years, unable to come to a coherent appreciation of what health is and how to restore it.

Scientific Neolithic

What Bertrand Russell described as one of the goals of “totalitarian scientific societies” over 60 years ago has been achieved precisely as Russell described it; by diet, injections and injunctions. Here are several of the injunctions that guarantee that your health and intelligence will remain profitably (for corporate overlords) impaired and “any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.” :

• Eat Lots of Whole Grains.
• Don’t eat red meat.
• Reduce consumption of saturated fats
• Use vegetable oils, especially for cooking.
• Trust the “experts.”

Place Frogs in Cold Water and Bring to a Slow Boil

One of our great capacities and shortcomings as human beings is that we are highly adaptable. If we have no connection to any greater context or continuity in our ancestry and human legacy, we will normalize anything in our experience, no matter how degraded we become. Working for several decades with neurologically-injured and ill patients, very few of them are consciously aware of their neurological deficits if the degradation is gradual, especially the more subtle intellectual and emotional aspects. Regardless of our condition, every one of us is “normal” to ourselves, unless we come up against glaring and sudden deficits like being physically impaired or suddenly not being able to do simple math.

Our “identity” is a continual recreation. We integrate whatever changes we undergo in our capacities or incapacities, at any given moment, as part of our “normal.” Our “normal” is reinvented every day yet seems constant, unless the changes are abrupt.

For people wanting to stupefy and exploit entire nations or continents of people, it pays to “ease” populations down into degraded states health. Russell’s diet, injections and injunctions are the perfect recipe for making a transition that will be unnoticeable to most people undergoing them. For as chilling as such thoughts may be to people who haven’t delved into the deeper aspects of so-called “modern,” post-Neolithic cultures, it has a very, very long history, readily available to anyone interested, and laid out very plainly and explicitly.

 

Over the next few weeks, along with essays, I’ll share resources that give potent, focused keys for restoring health. Each gives powerful guidelines for leading ourselves to thriving.

To educate comes from the Latin ex: “from inside to outside” + ducere: “to lead.” It means: to lead out. It does NOT mean to read words and memorize them and do nothing else. That is not leadership nor is it education. It is programming. Education is profoundly different from instruction.

Over the years, I have had countless clients, when asked “What did you do with what I offered you in my course?” repeat to me what I had said or suggested they read. “No, what did you DO with that for yourself, in your life, what did you lead yourself out of and into?”  Many quote me verbatim something that I said that was of significance for them. Few can tell me what they have done, on their own, for themselves, with what was pointed out. Few actually observed what was pointed to. They never looked beyond the words. They were very enthusiastic about what I said to them. They expected me to be flattered that they could quote me verbatim.

“If some men do not choose to think, but survive by imitating and repeating, like trained animals, the routine sounds and motions they learned from others, never making an effort to understand… they are the men who march into the abyss, trailing after any destroyer who promises them to assume the responsibility they evade: the responsibility of being conscious.” –Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness

I remember my teacher pointing out to me for years that I couldn’t learn what he was teaching me from what he was saying, I had to actually SEE it. I had to look beyond what he was telling me. I had to lead myself out. When I finally did that I realized the treasure that he had invited me to. Until then, my gratitude meant nothing to him. It was hollow. I hadn’t actually received the treasure he offered me. But the Nature of that Treasure is that one has to receive it from oneself. There’s a profound conundrum there. It took me over a decade to resolve it.

For those who SEE, their EYES speak. For those who don’t see, other mouths are talking. –Wisdom of the Takelma People

To “lead oneself out” does not mean “to escape.”  It points to coming into a different relationship to the world, making sense of it with our senses. For someone in the medical profession, it means actually coming to a coherent comprehension of how Life unfolds, how it heals itself and not just memorizing, repeating and “practicing” formulas learned by rote. Before doing things to Life, we are well-served to get a profound grasp of how Life does Life FIRST.

Nature heals. The doctor’s task consists in strengthening the natural healing powers, to direct them, and especially not to interfere with them. -Hippocrates

There is no truth in words. The truth is who you are, how you are and where you are. One either directs one’s attention to what the words point to, or simply remained mystified by the spell of words.

“When the Wise Point at the Moon, Fools Study the Finger.” -Chinese Saying

YOU decide if and how to apply what you is pointed out. But this is not how we have been instructed.

I am putting information into your hands with which you can  MAKE an incredible difference in your health, family life, relationships and all aspects of your abundant well-being – in the measure that you exercise your WILL and intelligence in studying them and putting them to use by actually making the choices. It’s up to you. Your Life is YOUR responsibility. So is your health and intelligence.

You Become Expert

Deep Freedom Now is not dedicated to the proposition of me becoming your expert. I am dedicated to giving you tools and maps to develop your own mastery, creativity, responsibility, and expertise. We become expert through our own experience. We start Educating Ourselves to THRIVE by leading ourselves out of our programmed, habituated states and experiencing how we thrive and how we don’t! It’s up to each one of us! There is no freedom without practice until our experience leads us to expertise.

Today’s offering is a talk by Dr. Terry Wahls, a medical doctor diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis who was attended to by the foremost medical “experts” on Multiple Sclerosis in the United States, with absolutely devastating results. Her condition deteriorated rapidly until her life was reduced to spending her days mostly immobile in a zero-gravity chair.

Self-Education Heals Our Neurology

What Dr. Wahls did to cure herself of Multiple Sclerosis is she educated herself OUT of the sophisticated medicine she had been instructed in through medical “school” and in her years of “practicing medicine.” She then began to re-examine the first premises and realities of her illness. This is exactly what I did to discover how to restore my health years before coming across her work. Dr. Wahls realized that her reliance on “experts” was destroying her health.

For the better part of twenty years I cared for many patients, like Dr. Wahls in Neuro Intensive Care and at the end-stage of degenerative neurological diseases. I remember some physicians and nurses in really bad shape. Of course the entire medical team did everything “in our power”  to help them as best we could. I never questioned the basis of our  practice. 

But Dr. Wahls did. She didn’t just surrender to the ” experts”  and their ” expert conclusions.”  She took responsibility for developing her expertise and her ability to respond to her difficulties, instead of expecting or trusting others to be responsible for her life. She wasn’t a “neurologist” or a “Multiple Sclerosis Specialist.” So what! That doesn’t mean she couldn’t study and come to a comprehensive understanding of her health challenge. She realized that it’s up to each one of us to start educating ourselves to thrive. She did!

Within thirty days she was mobile again and riding her bicycle. This is the power of the education which we did not receive; not doctors, not lawyers, not “educators” (sic.), not even most scientists.

A Curious Kind of “Expert”

Ours is a culture that builds nuclear power plants in earthquake zones, flood plains and right on the coast of places that have had tsunamis since the very formation of that coastline, all with approval from a whole gaggle of “experts.” Please remember that next time you listen to an “expert” on any topic. The medical, economic, political and educational “expertise” directing our society is just that brilliant.  Empire is a culture of “professionals” who debase their science and absolve themselves of any responsibility for doing so, as long as they get a paycheck.  To call it a culture of “whores” is an insult to sex workers who are far more honest and ethical than most so-called “professionals.” Whether you like to think of that or not, it reveals exactly the disoriented, if not psychotic, nature of the “expertise” that is leading “modern” societies and has been since the Neolithic.

“Since the power of all the professions that [ostensibly] serve the public rests in large part on their loyal members’ ability to confuse and thus dominate the public, it should not surprise us that not only the languages of medicine and psychiatry, but also those of education and law, are composed mainly of what Orwell called “ready-made phrases” whose function is to “anesthetize the brain.”  [emphasis added]
-Dr. Thomas Szasz M.D. Heresies

Dr Wahls’ talk is much richer than her personal story and how she recovered her health. It is an amazing testament to what liberal education, the education of free people, is and does.

The reason that our entire society is in crisis is because we have no education , except for a handful of schools serving the power elite. Education comes from the Latin ex: “from inside to outside” + ducere: “to lead.” Education leads us out so that we can grasp, contextually, whatever it is that we want to comprehend.

Comprehension vs. Understanding

Com: “with, in the presence of” + prehendere: “to grasp, to grab.” There is a profound difference between comprehension and understanding, even though we sophisticated, yet uneducated, people have learned to use them as synonyms. Think of it in very concrete terms: what is my relationship to something I grasp? What is my relationship to something I under-stand? Explore it for yourself. In order to grasp something, I must be outside of it. This is precisely what the word education, or to be led out does.

If you’d like to apply this practically I have just given you profound clues as to how to do it. Did you catch them? To read is to connect ideas to realities and to rely on reality for our realizations. To spell is to spin in the mental cotton-candy of words and ideas that keep uneducated people spell-bound.

To comprehend requires education, it requires leading oneself outside of whatever the challenge we face so that we can then grasp its Nature, with our sensible intelligence -that’s the one that’s actually connected to our senses.

What “the public” gets today is instruction, a literal “penetrating with a heap” that has us in a very sophisticated, mystified state of being blind to primary realities, while continually rewarding us for our sophisticated under-standing and never asking ourselves who it is that we are standing under. This is intentional. The word instruction comes from the Latin in: “to penetrate, from outside to inside” + struere: “to heap up, to pile up.”

“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
― U.S. President Woodrow Wilson

The Free Get Educated, Slaves Get Instructed

The Ancient Greeks formalized the education of the free by liberal education. Young people are initiated so that we know how to lead ourselves as free and responsible individuals. Among such people it is clearly understood that those who do not receive initiation will remain lifelong dependents and permanently-infantile. The ancients simply called these people slaves. We call them “citizens.” For the very few who know precisely what a liberal education is and how to engage it, Woodrow Wilson’s words are chilling, to say the least. He is talking about the creation of a permanent slave underclass.

Woodrow Wilson flooded the United States with Prussian-educated “deans of education.” His intentions, with regard to the “general citizenry” is further made clear by his treasonous role in creating the privately-owned central bank, the Federal Reserve, which he had vowed to oppose during his presidential campaign.

Few Americans or Europeans have any idea of what their rulers’ intentions are for them; the perfect result of the type of instruction doled out to the masses. It makes them immune, if not allergic, to true education and to self-leadership for the remainder of their lives. Most are convinced that education is what they received in so-called “schools” and were so glad to come to the end of.

Even those of us who “like learning” have so-called “learning” habits  that cripple our intelligence for the remainder of our lives, unbeknownst to us. I, for example, have loved “learning” for my entire Life, but I had no coherent comprehension of how to engage it until my illness challenged me to recognize my incoherent way of cobbling together my “ideas of health” out of ideas I had collected along the way. That is not intelligence.

I grew up with a father who always encouraged us to engage in “critical thinking.” He was a voracious reader with encyclopedic knowledge about many things but, aside from hammering us with “critical thinking” as a catch-phrase, he never actually taught us how to think critically.  He was certainly very “critical.” But “being critical” is not “critical thinking.” And critical thinking is  essential to being free.  There is a whole article of resources for doing just that.  If you would like to learn how to think from reality, expect to devote at least two years to beginning to achieve basic competence.  People with a passion for freedom will and do.

In ancient Greek society, people who did not receive or refused liberal education were seen as individuals incapable of and unwilling to exercise capable ownership of themselves. Unfortunately for descendants of most European peoples, liberal education and initiation were eliminated right after the conquest of our tribal ancestors and the replacement of education with mystification, as has always been done to conquered peoples.

A Little Witty Witch Bit

We forget that the word, witch, used for the carriers of our ancestral ways of orienting ourselves who were systematically tortured and assassinated, has the root wit, which, in the ancient Germanic, is intelligence. They were seen as practicing an art called wicca, a word related to wicker basket, for example, whereby they could identify the warp and the woof of how the world is held together. My Native American friends call this art “tracking.” In many cultures, the wisdom (literally “the state of the WAYS, PATHS, TRACKS”) keepers are spoken of as “belonging to the way of tracking.” Why? Because that’s the art they practice: they see connections and relationships.

Medicine today is taught and practiced as a “specific, difficult manual task,” very specific and very difficult, but very manual nevertheless, as attested to by the countless manuals medical personnel use and memorize while ignoring the most basic principles of how Living Systems are naturally designed to restore and maintain health.

Dr. Terry Wahls’ story, is one of a true Doctor, a word that comes from the latin docere: “to show, teach, cause to know,” and of a truly educated person, one who led herself OUT of the medical system and illness she was in and began to examine and comprehend her challenges contextually, from first causes. As you will see, sophistication and reliance on sophisticated experts was rapidly taking her down a very painful road. She had to activate her Primitive Intelligence, which is much richer, more complex and attentive to subtle and nuanced realities than our sophistication, in order to save her life, literally.

“I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.”

-Rudyard Kipling

Liberal Education Lets Us Take Our Life Back!

We will revisit her story and her process because it is a perfect example of what liberal education IS and precisely how liberal education FREES and allows people to take back a more complete ownership of themselves.

You can read this article in a way that is instructional but not educational. For education to “do us any good,” it’s actually up to us to do the good that “it” does us. We go from being the passive recipients of “knowledge” to making coherent connections between our Aliveness and that which surrounds us. We are the only ones who can do anything with what is offered here. Nothing we offer you will “do anything for you” unless you do it!

Information is useless until we use it to reveal how we have been in-formed. That requires more than the information. It requires the will to observe the realities that the information points to and getting outside of our own worldview and actually viewing the world. We are the only ones who can educate ourselves by actually leading ourselves out.

The daring will educate themselves by leading themselves OUT of their daily habits and conclusions, and some will even say, “Instead of just having an opinion about this, I’ll investigate it further and, by the way, why don’t we just give it a 100% try for a month and see what our EXPERIENCE is?”  That is up to you. I have no recommendation for anybody else’s life. It’s up to each one of us to start leading ourselves to thriving!.

Free people free ourselves. Slaves and permanent dependents make their lives, their health, their wealth and well-being somebody else’s responsibility. Both are perfectly viable options, each with serious advantages and disadvantages.

Which One’s the Freebie: Freedom or Slavery?

Freedom isn’t “free,” in the way that word got totally distorted since the sixties and mass marketing turned it into its perfect opposite. It comes at tremendous cost of effort, trial and error, learning, unlearning, investing and often tremendous resentment and humiliation in a culture of mediocrity, conformity, dependency and moral cowardice.

Slavery, on the other hand, is a “freebie.” It’s actually our default way to be and a very natural prolongation of our childhood dependency on other people to direct our lives and solve our problems.

“A slave is one who waits for someone else to free him.” –Ezra Pound

Deep Freedom Now is dedicated to those who love ourselves enough to lead ourselves to health, wealth, well-being and mastery. We learn to lead ourselves into a way of living that we love by way of loving and realizing what we ARE, as natural, capable and adult human beings.

Dr. Wahls’ protocol is a huge first step to wellness, if followed 100%. It is not complete but it IS fantastic. Over the next few weeks, we’ll examine some of the elements of Dr. Wahls’ experience with more detail while also adding amazingly simple elements that further amplify our health naturally.

In my primary care clinic, my residents laugh and say, “Dr. Wahls, you use the same diet treatment for everyone, whether they have diabetes, heart disease, mental health problems…” And I say, “We all have mitochondria. We all have cells that have to do the chemistry of life properly.” In my clinic, my dietary approach has been very helpful in treating all of these conditions. If you eat to make sure your mitochondria and cells are functioning most efficiently, you will probably reduce the symptoms of most chronic diseases. – Dr Terry Wahls 

 

For a more detailed version:

 

Please note:

This article is for educational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose or treat any medical diagnosis or to replace such diagnosis or treatment. Please consult your licensed healthcare provider for assistance with any medical diagnosis you might have. Deep Freedom Now does not approve of, recommend, or condone any particular medical practitioner or medical treatment protocol. The reader assumes responsibility for his or her own choices. No free speech expressions contained herein should be misconstrued as medical advice or condoning the theories or practices of others. Pay attention, educate yourself, take responsibility for your actions and inactions, seek competent assistance, when necessary, and continue to take responsibility for your choices. The Quality of YOUR Life is Up to YOU! Free people free ourselves, educate ourselves and lead ourselves to Live the Life we Love and to Love the Life we ARE, often with the assistance of trusted others. Many expect, and may very well require, others to do for them what they cannot or will not do for themselves. Seek the assistance that best supports you. Our work here is strictly educational.