UN Corruption

I’ve just been reading a disappointing article on the response of the UN to the massive atrocity committed by Israel earlier this year.

While the response of the main-stream media to this issue did not surprise me given the clear biases that the media consistently present, I have until today had some hope that the UN could at least promote the kind of impartial benevolent governance that it claims to represent.  Unfortunately it seems that in the current political context, two of the countries who most frequently commit illegal war crimes (under international law) – Israel & the US – are able to pull the UN’s strings to prevent any attempt to hold them accountable for their actions.  And sadly, in these circumstances, who can?

An article in the national business review states…

“Prime Minister John Key has announced the government will throw out the controversial Section 92A of the Copyright Amendment (New Technologies) Act and start again.”

Thanks to Mark Harris for the good news.  

Free music for massage

Here’s a list of great music that I’ve come across over the last year or two which I think is suitable to play during a massage session.  Some of the music will be more suited to particular styles of massage (e.g. sports vs. deep relaxation), and of course some will be more suited to particular clients or therapists.

All of this music has been released under creative commons licenses.  This means that you can download & use it legally (although some items are not able to be remixed legally – check the individual licenses).

60 minute massage mix

This mix starts with some fairly upbeat music, then eases into deep ambience before picking up the tempo again, all over a 60 minute period.  It’s designed to match the psycho-emotional state of your client during a one hour relaxation massage.

Ambient music

• Ambientum – Fractal Philosophy
  Lovely deep beat-driven ambience, at times verging on downbeat.
• Crisopa – Biasgra, Filamentosa, Medicamentosa, etc.
  Wonderful positive ambience.  This is a link to Crisopa’s myspace page.  You can scroll down to find download links for all of his releases.
• Nest – nest
  A widely acclaimed, very well constructed piece of work.
• Ryonkt – The world that was surrounded by a deep forest and warm light
  Meditative and peaceful ambience
• Resting bell netlabel
  Resting bell is a netlabel that releases many albums which are suitable for massage.  They describe their music as meditative, experimental, electric, peaceful, beautiful, exciting, acustic or grounding.

Downbeat

• Gorje Hewek – Surdramatic nature
  Quirky and a little melancholy, but still some nice stuff.
• Pix – Life Living
  Beautiful, electo-downbeat.

Jazz-hop

• Aphilas – Instrumentally Ill
  Really nice jazz-infused stuff.
• Kovacs – Eastern blok
  The first release on the excellent budabeats netlabel.  Kovac’s deep, ambient jazz-hop takes you on a trip into eastern europe.
• Neinvox – Sign
  Great stuff
• Phour Trakk – Slip into something a little more comfortable
  Indian rhythms blend with hip-hop and jazz.

That should get you started.  Clearly this is just some stuff that I like.  There is a real wealth of good music out there on the net if you want to go looking for it.  Searching using “netlabel” combined with the type of music that you want to find will get you started, but I would strongly suggest the use of a feed-reader if you’re really into your music

Please leave some comments to let other people know what you like.

NZ Internet Blackout

Green Day – A summer solstice celebration

I’ve just come back from Green day – a weekend of summer solstice celebration and sustainability workshops.  Wonderful weekend, wonderful people.

On the Saturday night there was a dance party, and I played some music for it.  Here are some links to the recorded music.  All music here is licensed under creative commons licenses.  I’ve needed to edit out some tracks which were not licensed in this way, because I’m not comfortable publishing them for reasons I’ve talked about previously.

Slow Build – Set 1

Ayiana McQuillan – Lala kaku bi
Ocralab – Alea (souldub mix)
Paul Keeley – Ohcen
Florian Kunze – In time
Daniel Gardener – Under the shower tower (Alland Byallo mix)
Breitbandkeiter – More

Mando Mango – Jazzy
was  a real favorite, and is a creative commons licensed track

Techhouse – Set 2

Laptop acid experience – All the right moves (303 mix)
Lukas Lehmann & LudwigCoenen – Parkverbot
Ture Sventon – Morker (Jeff Bennett remix)
Le Jockey – Fun time frankie

I ended with Professor Kliq’s – Sema, another wonderful creative commons licensed track.  The individual track isn’t available for download for some reason, but you can download the entire album here.

Normally I’d provide links to all of the individual tracks, but I need to get into the packing for our holiday.  You should be able to find any of the above with a quick Google search anyway.

Enjoy.

Professor Klick is bringing the big beat back

Just taking a 5 minute break to spread the joy. 

The Catching the Waves blog, has just brought to my attention Professor Klik’s Guns Blazing, and what an energetic, funky & meaty beat-filled album it is.  I haven’t really heard anything like this for years – it’s a bit reminiscent of the Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, or even Daft punk at times.  Lovin it.

Right, back to work……

Collapsed arches – a personal account

I’ve had collapsed arches (pronated feet) for my entire life.  At various stages I’ve been given exercises to help correct the problem which have not really helped.  I’ve also tried working on them myself with varying degrees of success.  The approach that I’ve been taking more recently seems to be really effecting some changes, so I thought that I’d document my process here in the hope that it can help others who suffer from this condition, and those who are interested in working with the flat footed.

I had completely collapsed arches when I was a kid.  Once when I was about 12, the father of one of my best mate’s (who was a physiotherapist) saw me walking with bare feet.  He was so amazed by how flat my feet were that videoed me walking. (I should get that video!)

Around this time I was given orthotic inserts for my shoes and the standard physiotherapy exercises at the time – putting a towel under my feet & pulling it towards me with my toes (strengthening the toe flexors which support the medial arch), and standing on a balance board (to activate and strengthen the muscles which laterally support the ankle).  I was not particularly motivated to do these exercises.  From memory
I think I did them for a week or two fairly regularly, and then tapered off after this.  So I guess it’s not really any surprise that no real progress was made with my feet.

The first real improvement happened spontaneously.  In 1999, while studying massage therapy in Auckland, I got into the habit of going to tai-chi classes weekly and practicing regularly.  One week during one of my tai-chi classes I felt what seemed like warmth flowing into my foot.  I became more aware of my right leg and my foot, and the structure of the foot spontaneously corrected.  Since this time my right arch has been fairly stable.  Although it remains slightly less upright than ideal, it is a long way from
where it started.

According to Chinese medical theory, chi is associated with
both awareness and healthy functioning.  Feelings of warmth
are commonly associated with movement of chi.

My left foot has never really corrected.  I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the years working on with limited results.

Interestingly enough I recently noticed that I have less awareness of the left side of my body than in my right.  If I concentrate on how my body feels, I can more easily feel the sensations associated with my right shoulder (or insert other body part here), and I am also more aware of the positioning of body structures relative to others (e.g. my shoulder-blade with relation to my chest/neck).

I’m also aware that I have what feels to me like an energy block in the area of my left hip.  This area feels thick & sluggish to me, and below this point I have less sensory awareness of my leg.  I feel less connected to my leg than to other parts of my body if that makes any sense.  Interestingly I have noticed that sometimes following particular kinds of bodywork which focus on this area, my kinesthetic sense of my left leg has been markedly improved when I’ve gotten up from the table.

I said before that my left foot has never really corrected.  This is not exactly true.  Over the last two years I have been working with a series of somatic exercises which I’ve developed from my understanding of anatomy, kinesiology, and tai-chi as well as my own kinesthetic sense of my body.  I have noticed particularly in the last couple of months some real changes which I hope will continue.

I will talk more about these in future blog posts.

What makes you think Obama is any different than Bush?

Medialens, have just published another insightful commentary on the role of the media in political propaganda.

Obama’s election has been trumpted through the media as a sign of change.  His political campaign pushed this idea, as illustrated by his campaign website – change.gov.  However he has kept his policies very close to his chest, and what comments he has made seem to be largely in-line with the policies of the current and historic American governments.

As independent candidate Ralph Nader put it in a letter to Obama

“Far more than Senator McCain, you have received enormous, unprecedented contributions from corporate interests, Wall Street interests and, most interestingly, big corporate law firm attorneys… Why, apart from your unconditional vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, are these large corporate interests investing so much in Senator Obama? Could it be that in your state Senate record, your U.S. Senate record and your presidential campaign record (favoring nuclear power, coal plants, offshore oil drilling, corporate subsidies including the 1872 Mining Act and avoiding any comprehensive program to crack down on the corporate crime wave and the bloated, wasteful military budget, for example) you have shown that you are their man?” (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10809)

You’ve been lost – Shamani McQuillan

I’ve been playing around with Audacity & the girls, and we’ve recorded a couple of tracks. 

Here’s Shamani McQuillan’s first release – You’ve been lost.
The underlying music is O-P-Q-A by Crisopa, off his Bisagra album.
Release under the creative commons share alike license.

I had intended to put Ana’s Fairy Dance up here as well, but I need to confirm a copyright issue first.

What about Somatic Reflections?

I originally established this blog because I was interested in documenting my exploration of bodymind phenomena, my self and my own body.  I’ve been interested in body awareness, meditation, and physical health for many years now, and when I set up the blog, I thought that this would be my focus.  Sadly I find that I spend most of my time now working on a computer, and although I’ve been really enjoying both my work and the the exploration of elearning, net-label music, and mixing, it does mean that I spend very little time focussing on myself and what I need, in direct contrast to my life when I started my training as a massage therapist.

In recent times my life has been incredibly mentally focussed (apart from our recent trip to Mt Cook - our belated honeymoon).  I now find that I spend a lot of time in “headspace”.  I had an experience the other day of walking home after work.  My head was still buzzing with the events of the day (which had been quite stressful).  I started meditating, and instantly dropped back into the full kinesthetic experience of the present moment.  I noticed the warm sun on my skin, the slight breeze, the beautiful plants in front of me, and felt my body walking up the stairs.  It’s amazing sometimes how we can walk through the world caught up in our heads, and not notice the wonder that’s all around us.  However it wasn’t too much further along the walk home that I noticed myself back in my head turning over the events of the day again.

…and I’m feeling a bit dissatisfied with this situation.  I enjoy my life much more when it is in balance.

Back in 1999, I was spending up to 3 hours per day meditating.  This might seem like a lot of time, but the benefits definitely outweighed the cost to me.  Much of the time, I had an intensely rich experience of the moment, in which I felt unconditional love for the present moment, myself and the people around me.  This unconditional love radiated from the core of my being to connect me with everyone and everything around me.  I have never experienced so much joy, and fulfillment as I did at that time.  When I remembered this feeling years later, the realisation of what I’d lost brought tears to my eyes.

I’ve recently started meditating semi-regularly, and have started to tap into this again (although only for short periods of time).  I’m loving it, but this puts me in a space of intense polarity.  When I’m meditating (sitting or walking) I often feel this rich connection to myself, to the moment, and the peace and love that’s associated with this experience, but this is in stark contrast to my (more regular) experience.  My working life at the moment is intense I have far too much to get done over the next month, and there are new demands arising with almost every day.  My experience of this (the dominant) aspect of my life is pressure, and stress, and quite frankly I’m over it.

I’ve recently figured out what I think is a solution to the problem.  Over the next 3-4 years I plan to gradually transition my work-life to 50% programme coordination at Otago Poly and 50% private practice.  I haven’t completely decided on what I want to focus on in my practice.  I’m really enjoying working with myofascial release, and psycho-emotional body-work, so I might find a counsellor or psychotherapist to work with.  I’d like to experiment with the Bowen technique, and lymphatic drainage.  I definitely want to run meditation & stress management classes. I also figure that once my practice builds up a bit I should be able to focus on my climbing again.