On Saturday LiFE Academy had the wonderful honour and great pleasure of co-hosting a one day programme with Sister Kate’s Home Kids Aboriginal Corporation. The focus was on the women who stand strong in the family - grandmothers, mothers and daughters, strong in traditional culture and strong together.

We were forty eight women sharing the silence, the laughter and tears. We shared the beauty of the Mother Earth and all the healing that is given to us freely from her. It was a precious moment that will be remembered forever.

My beloved friend Ken Colbung was a Sister Kate’s Home survivor, stolen from his people, contracting polio at the Home and only then handed back to his people. Encircled once again by their love and wisdom, he was healed of polio overnight in the Flower Pit healing Ceremony. He was then stolen for a second time and taken back to the Home.

Ken’s daughter Sandra, who along with Ken and his wife conducted the first Flower Pit Healing ceremony on a non-Aboriginal person (it was our Vasu) was there to receive the women into the flower pit site with a smoking ceremony. We walked through the smoke and were held by her and her gentle words of encouragement, then walked into a circle which included great grandmothers/mothers who had their children stolen from them, as well as those children (most now over forty) and their children and grandchildren.

Later we went to another site of the Waitch (Emu) Dreaming and had a nutritious “food as medicine” lunch with the famed purple cabbage noodle salad and spinach, cottage cheese and cashew roll ups. We then headed off to the Academy where staff and the students of the Massage clinic were waiting to pamper and heal with the fruits of their training, including flower essence treatments. It was a lovely way to finish a perfect day.

Heartfelt thanks to Sandra Colbung and Tjalaminu Mia (SKHKAC) and all the women and their daughters, to our Clinic Supervisor Angela and the staff and Martine Pitt (Communicare)– all power to you sisters!

Following is the recording of the Introduction Night Session from 16th February 2011.

In this session Kadambii Barnao, co-founder of the LiFE Academy introduces prospective students to the over-arching approach of the LiFE Academy.

Topics covered include;

• The Connection Between Well-Being and Health
• Stress and Peak Performance
• Stress and Disease
• Scientific Research - Stress is Directly Responsible for Disease
  • Telomeres - Elizabeth Blackburn - Nobel Prize Research 2010
  • Neuroplasticity
• Structural Integrity
• Happiness-Energy Equation
• What Limits Happiness?
• Mind-Body Medicine - LiFE Tools for Health
• Question and Answers
• How to Generate Happiness

Fantastic and very important new documentary on Aboriginal rights by Sinem Saban and Damien Curtis

A rollercoaster journey into the heart of Australia's Indigenous relations, a hidden shame that is pushing the world's oldest living culture to the edge. Through the stories of the Yolngu of Northeast Arnhem Land, the film looks at the Government's ongoing policies of paternalism and assimilation, examines the real issues underlying Indigenous disadvantage, and opens dialogue on ways forward that respect Aboriginal culture and dignity. A fresh and unflinching look at unresolved issues, with music by John Butler Trio, Yothu Yindi and Gurrumul.

Stay tuned for announcement soon for a collective viewing of this powerful documentary at LiFE Academy headquarters in Joondalup.

A comprehensive study has offered an insight into what makes for a good life and a good old age. The director of the Grant study George Vaillant speaks with Tracy Bowden from Australian television's 7.30 Report about his results.

"Yes, ma’am. Yes, ma’am. But it's all about positive emotions that are genetically created for survival purposes. So I mean we've evolved to be increasingly altruistic and caring about each other. The spiritual side of that is that whether I blame Darwin for it or whether I blame a loving god that created the universe for it doesn't make very much difference. It's - you do a lot better going to a positive church than you do reading Richard Dawkins. And so that I'm a psychiatrist and I think it's terribly important that my profession spend more time with positive emotion and more time regarding people's spiritual involvement as a virtue rather than something that if they just read enough Freud they could give up."

George Valliant, director of the Grant study.

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2010/s2891411.htm

With stunning photos and stories, National Geographic Explorer Wade Davis celebrates the extraordinary diversity of the world's indigenous cultures, which are disappearing from the planet at an alarming rate.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes -- including speakers such as Jill Bolte Taylor, Sir Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling, Al Gore and Arthur Benjamin. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at

http://www.ted.com/

Watch how stress effects our genes! The genetic structures called telomeres protect the ends of our chromosomes from fraying. As we age, our telomeres shorten. Stress by way of stress hormones accelerate the shortening of telomeres.

A telomere is a region of repetitive DNA at the end of a chromosome, which protects the end of the chromosome from deterioration.

A chromosome is an organized structure of DNA and protein that is found in cells. It is a single piece of coiled DNA containing many genes, regulatory elements and other nucleotide sequences.

Video Clip from "Stress: Portrait of a Killer"
Produced by National Geographic

This is a preview of documentary "Killing us softly".

In this new, highly anticipated update of her pioneering Killing Us Softly series, the first in more than a decade, Jean Kilbourne takes a fresh look at how advertising traffics in distorted and destructive ideals of femininity. The film marshals a range of new print and television advertisements to lay bare a stunning pattern of damaging gender stereotypes -- images and messages that too often reinforce unrealistic, and unhealthy, perceptions of beauty, perfection, and sexuality. By bringing Kilbourne's groundbreaking analysis up to date, Killing Us Softly 4 stands to challenge a new generation of students to take advertising seriously, and to think critically about popular culture and its relationship to sexism, eating disorders, and gender violence.

What an individual perceives as reality is really nothing more than bundles of component concepts threaded together. These concepts govern an individual’s enjoyment of life, how they go about maintaining their physical existence and their understanding of reality. One person may think the world is flat another that it is round, this conceptual difference will only matter when it has bearing on their enjoyment or physical survival. One group of people may believe certain behaviour is damaging for the fabric of society while another group has an opposite view. Who is right and who is wrong?

Knowledge is often put into two compartments; that which is considered important for survival and happiness and that which isn’t - the latter having academic value. An individual’s assessment of what has value, what is right or wrong and what is real, is normally based on what they have been told is so, plus what they have experienced - the latter modifying the former.

As societies developed, social structures and a pool of hand-me-down knowledge was passed on from generation to generation. In this process some understandings are discarded, others added to and new ones introduced. Today there is a merging of cultures, some people have an openness to what cultures have to offer, while others, due to distrust, fear or feelings that others will exploit, damage or pollute their so-called superior society, shun concepts and ideas from other cultures.

The paths of knowledge trodden by the human race fall into three basic categories;

• that which has been deduced from subtle perception and internal introspection
• that which has been developed through observation of life through the window of humanity’s five physical senses and their extension, scientific instruments
• that which is a mixture of the two On the basis of this knowledge, human beings hypothesise about what human life is and how it fits into the universal scheme of things.

In general, scientists have concluded that human consciousness is molecular and therefore ends when the physical body dies. Those who have an understanding of the spiritual or metaphysical, see the basis of consciousness as non molecular and therefore an individual’s experience of existence continues after the death of the physical body. Who is right and who is wrong, and does it really matter? A chimpanzee would have a very different perspective as to what constitutes life to that of a human. The concepts of space, galaxies, molecules and quantum mechanics are not consciously recognised by chimps, as far as they are concerned these things do not exist. So even though these aspects of the universe do exist, the non recognition of these concepts does not adversely affect chimpanzee life. On the other hand if they did recognise such things how would this knowledge help their lives?

Concepts/knowledge have a perceived value within the framework of an individual’s life, that which is perceived as having very little importance is normally given very little attention.

Three centuries ago, a concept had taken hold within the human psyche that opened their minds to the existence of molecules. This understanding had very little importance for the then average citizen, as it had very little bearing on their happiness or physical survival.

In the twentieth century the concept of quantum mechanics and relativity (as explained by Albert Einstein) has taken hold within the human psyche. These concepts hold very little importance for the average citizen of today, as they contemplate their happiness and survival strategies. Scientists are now saying time as we know it is an illusion. Try saying that to a train driver and those who need to move their physical bodies from A to B to meet someone or get to work on time.

“It is not reality that has a time flow, but our very approximate knowledge of reality. Time is the effect of our ignorance”. New Scientist January 2008

Excerpt from "Integration of Consciousness and the Quantum World" module. Vasudeva and Kadambii Barnao