Here is a direct link to the new Web log: http://thelightouseonline.com/blog/.

Enjoy!

Another way to save money in the food department is to take a look at what you are drinking and make some healthy adjustments. People in America drink way too many soft drinks, and soft drinks are nothing but flavored, carbonated water, usually sweetened with high fructose corn syrup (very bad for you), often with phosphoric acid, with caffeine thrown in just to add insult to injury. And don’t get me started on aspartame/NutraSweet/whatever they are changing its name to so you won’t know you are ingesting poison.

Instead, save yourself money and try something different. Water is great! If you can’t consume sugar because of diabetes or some similar difficulty, you are better off drinking water than drinking beverages with artificial sweeteners.

Or try tea. Remember when we were all told that tea was bad for us? Nutritionists and scientists have done a 180 on that one. Oh, and it doesn’t matter whether you like black or green tea—they both have great health benefits. Which makes sense, since they are all made from the same plant. Tea has no calories or sugar, but it tastes great and is very good for you.

What about caffeine, you ask? I once read that our bodies process the caffeine in tea differently than the caffeine in coffee. Whether that is true or not, as brewed, ounce for ounce of the two beverages, tea has a lot less caffeine than coffee. Not that I personally think coffee is bad for you, but although I have known coffee addicts, I have never yet met someone who was addicted to tea. And caffeine withdrawal is pretty nasty.

One of the reasons tea is such a frugal choice is that, properly brewed, one teaspoon of tea leaves can make many cups of tea. One of the methods to use is to steep the tea leaves in a cup using a mesh tea ball, then remove the tea ball and re-use it for two or three more cups of tea.

And there are so many different kinds of teas, if you experiment a bit, you may well find one you like even if you don’t think you like tea. One of my favorite places to get tea is at MountainRoseHerbs.com. Try their organic Jasmine Pearls tea—it is one of the best jasmine green teas I have ever had. Although it may look like it is pretty expensive at $36 per pound, that pound of tea would last a long, long, LONG time even in a household of tea drinkers drinking it every day. It will certainly last a whole lot longer than a pound of coffee. Though I recommend you purchase smaller amounts—tea, like coffee, is best brewed when still fresh; basically, in the same year it was dried.

If you find it hard to think of giving up soft drinks, read The Health Hazards of Drinking Coca-Cola and other Soft Drinks. Or Soft Drinks: America’s Other Drinking Problem. Or Four Dangers of Soft Drinks. Or—heck, just Google “health dangers of soft drinks.” These links are just from the first few of the 19,000,000 (yes, nineteen MILLION) results.

Yes, I know how much easier it is to go out and pay someone else to fix your food. But when money is tight, for the price of a fast food meal or a meal at even a moderately priced restaurant, you can buy enough food to fix several meals at home. Even if you can only cook simple meals, simple meals can be quite tasty.

This isn’t a fast fix, though. You may be used to buying overpriced food at the grocery store that has empty calories and therefore is neither nourishing nor, ultimately, tasty. And food manufacturers know a lot about the psychology of food and food packaging, as well as how placement of food in the grocery store affects buying habits and impulse buys, so you will have to take charge. Educate yourself about what foods are good for you. Find out what is really healthy and what is just hype. Find out what you truly like versus what you might have been eating because you always did, or your mom served it to you, or it is easy.

On the way to better eating, take a look at SuperFoods Rx, the SuperFoods Rx Diet, and SuperHealth. Okay, so the authors are making a franchise of it, but what they have to say is well-researched and simple to remember. To summarize their message, there are foods and food families that are filled with so many good things for us that they practically constitute medicine. And you don’t even have to purchase these books; your local library almost certainly has them for you to check out. You don’t have to read every little detail in these books either; just look at the summaries at the start of the chapters, make your own lists based on them, and you are good to go.

In my next two posts, I will be addressing some other food-related ways to save money, and I may include a few of my favorite recipes while I am at it.

The person I was doing the reading for voluntarily said that if this information was of value to others, I had permission to type it up.  (Normally, I erase all readings after the readee gets his/her recording.) So I set the reading aside to transcribe just the non-personal information; however, the disks got filed away without me doing it. I recently started to clean up my office, and found the disks again. I’ve taken the time to listen to and transcribe the 25 minutes of non-personal information, and here it is. It could potentially be of interest to anyone, and is of particular value to people who are healers.

Seth’s “Short Treatise on Energy”

We’ll give you a short treatise on energy and its uses in the physical universe. Now, from your perspective, energy is not something that you see but instead something that you feel. Though there are those of the human race—the human population—who have the ability to see energy as it flows, as it ebbs, as it moves about, and to even associate colors, if you will, such as with people’s auras. There is a root existence of energy that is “energy as energy” and that is basically the source of all life. It is the source of every physical thing—everything. It is the source of rocks, it is the source of trees, it is the source of dirt, water, it is the source of animals and humans in their physical expression That energy is constantly flowing transforming dissolving from one form to another as life seeks its constant creative expression in the universe as you know it.

Now you are asking because you are seeking information about healing energies in particular, and what we would say is that that kind of energy, if you wish to call it that, call it ‘healing energy,’ is an energy that is life enhancing.

In a sense there is also an energy that is destructive that may or may not be viewed as negative from your point of view depending on where you stand. The kind of energy that pulls something apart simply because it needs to be pulled apart so as to make way for something new is destructive but would not be considered negative. The energy that slowly melts the mountain is destructive, but not negative.

There is another kind of energy that does harm, that causes pain, that is the kind of energy that you would say healing energy is a counterbalance to. That energy comes from ultimately from fear. Fear is a pulling away from life. Fear is a lack of trust in All That Is, and fear then often motivates, though not always—there are those who fear and yet who do the right thing, we will hasten to add—but those few who fear and do not do the right thing are motivated by fear to attack, you see. To do harm. To perform destructive acts that are not, from within the physical reality perspective, life-enhancing.

That which pulls down the mountain is ultimately life-enhancing. Those who seek to injure are not enhancing life. And a person may injure themselves as well as others. Often when a person is ill, when a person is experiencing disease, they are judging themselves and attacking themselves with their own energy because they have some fear at the root of it. They have made a decision, you see, that they are not worthy of something.

Healing energy then seeks to move into those areas that are being attacked, seeks out, if you will, the root cause of the disease, and heals it, not by putting something over it, not by scarring over, if you will, but by literally undoing the root cause. It goes to that root cause, examines it with the entity’s willing cooperation, we will add, and as that root cause is examined, a new decision is made that unties the knots of fear and anxiety, and undoes the knot of the physical ailment, if there is one, or the spiritual or emotional ailment as well, so that all flows smoothly, and there is no sign of the previous ailment because it has been undone at the root, you see.

Healing energy knows no time or space. It can move forward, it can move backward, it can move sideways in time. It can move through dimensions. It can move through energy levels. It can move through emotions and spirit. It can move through levels of emotion and spirit, and levels of physicality from the very tiniest physical particle to the very largest—which would be a universe.

The healing energy then is in itself, you could say, though it is not an exact analogy, a kind of very refined tool that has the ability to focus very sharply or have a very broad application as required. Because healing energies are life-enhancing, they have no down side. They will not do harm. When you access healing energies, the first method of accessing is to have the intention to so access them. That is the primary tool and perhaps one would say the most essential. All others are secondary.

When you access that healing energy, and as you know, you can access it for yourself or for others, there must always be a component of permission acceptance to receive it; on your part for you to use however you use it, and on the part of those who receive it. So if you are healing yourself, you must both have the intention to access the healing energy, and also give yourself permission–or give it permission–to act upon your energy field.

Likewise if you are performing healing for others, then you have the intention to access it and they must give their permission to receive it; otherwise, nothing will happen because, by its very nature, healing energy cannot force. We know you know all of this.

Healing energy will then therefore go where it is welcome and where it is needed. And it doesn’t take a huge welcome. A small bit of willingness to receive healing energy can go a long way toward receiving a great deal. It just will trickle through at the rate that the person who is receiving this energy finds acceptable. There are those who can heal quickly because they can accept a great deal of the healing energy; there are those who will heal more slowly because they can only accept a small amount. Remember that the energy is going to the root cause and undoing the knots of the initial difficulty. For some, they are willing to undo the knots quickly. For others, because, perhaps there are so many interconnections among all the knots (again we are using analogy here, but it is very apt), they must undo just a few at a time.

So the energy is, in a way, a form of information. It carries with it the information that is needed by the entity who is receiving it. So, for example, for a human being receiving healing energy for a particular spiritual or physical ailment that perhaps started with an emotional trauma, the information that will come through will be specific for them and it will tell them, bring to them, additional information that they may not be consciously aware of in this lifetime that will allow them to view the trauma, if you will, with someone warm and safe holding their hand so that they can release the trauma and make a different decision about it, which then undoes the trauma; it literally undoes it.

For other species and for other components of the physical universe, the information will differ, and for other circumstances for a human the information will differ.

But at the root, if you will bear with us, and without any wish to sound sappy, we will say that healing energy is love energy at the level that we as entities understand love.

Love is what enhances all life, love is what all life is about, love brings with it only loving intentions and carries away with it only loving responses.

And so you could say if you are willing to even in your own heart, though it may sound very New Agey, you could say that love and healing energy and information—we mean true information—are all part and parcel. They are all just different ways of looking at or dealing with or labeling a kind of energy that underlies every living thing in this universe. So ultimately we would say that there truly is, as we started out saying, one energy that supports and enhances and nourishes all.

When you have healing intentions, what you truly are doing is that you are saying that your intention is to help this entity, this being, this whatever it is that you are wishing to help, to achieve it highest and most loving alignment with its highest purpose, so that it expresses the most loving possibilities of itself.

That is all we will say for now about energy. There is indeed the possibility to write volumes (plural) on the subject, because life is infinitely varied, and therefore there are, in a sense, an infinite variety of energies that you could say rise out of this universal love energy and express themselves in an infinite number of different ways. Each person in a sense is their own expression of energy, unique, never to be duplicated, never to be seen again that walks about on the earth. Even your pets your cats your dogs your fish your houses your trees all are unique and never=to-be-repeated expression, individual takes on, if you will, an expression of this underlying love energy.

Some might call this God, but it would be a misnomer in the sense that it would denigrate the individuality—the cherished individuality–of each person, each individual thing. We are not just expressions of God, if you will, though there is a God, and the God does express itself—the God and Goddess, if you will—through All, but we are in a sense, a very real sense, distinct and separate in the sense of our own identity that we will always keep and will always cherish with us.

What your role as a healer is, is to, you might say, with one hand reach into the universal love energy, and with the other reach into the individual’s energy, and connect them. It is your job as a healer to understand and tune into as much as possible the individual energy of the person you are working with, connect them with the healing love energy in such a way that their individuality is enhanced and nurtured and made more able to express its own uniqueness. You are not seeking to make everyone the same, or to make everyone like the love energy; instead you are seeking to bring that love energy into them so that they can use it however they like. They can customize it, if you will; they can make it their own and have it express their own unique talents, abilities, and selfness, selfhood.

It would not be loving for loving energy to try to wipe out individuality, you see, so instead, loving energy’s essence is to be loving, and therefore its essence is to support and nurture individuality as it is. So you, as a healer, become more attuned to each person’s individually and more able to help them to help themselves to heal and to express themselves more fully in a more whole way.

We see it clearly, but we do know that part of any individual expression is for that expression to find its own way and to make for itself what is true and what is not true. So we give you this information but it won’t do you any good if it is not for you or if you don’t have it also arise for your own knowing from within your heart, you see. And that will either come or not come according to your own desires. But when it does come, it will be your information, even though we have connected you, if you will, to this information. When it becomes yours, it becomes yours. It will well out from your being and will have the textures and flavors of your being, so that you may not even at first recognize that it is the same thing, in a sense, until much later, when you get the “ah ha,” and you say, “That’s right, five years ago, Marina’s source, Seth, told me that this is what it was like, and I realize, that’s what I’ve been doing, but in my own way.” But we do not wish you to think that it is identical in that sense. It is your own. You will make it your own and it will be your own. It is important for us to tell you that.

Let’s say you make impulse purchases of $3 to $5 or $10 five times a week. Averaging that out, it could add up to $30 or more a week spent on items or food you really didn’t want or need.

So here’s the technique to practice. Set yourself a threshold amount of money. Anything that costs more than that, you wait a certain period of time (the cooling-off period) before you allow yourself to buy it.

One purpose of this technique is to prevent impulse purchases. If even some portion of your money is spent on impulse purchases, giving yourself a cooling off period can keep you from making a number of those purchases. By giving yourself a cooling-off period, you give yourself a chance to evaluate whether you really need that item. You might end up amazed at how many things you do not purchase simply because you waited.

Here are the details:

1. Decide on a dollar amount that you consider significant. It can be $1, $10, $100, or any other amount. I suggest you start low, though—try $10, or at most $20. This is your threshold amount.
2. Now decide on a cooling-off period. It could be 24 hours, or overnight, or five days, or a week. I recommend you start with three days. If you are a very impulsive shopper—in other words, if you find yourself buying things on impulse a lot—give yourself a longer cooling-off period—say, a week.
3. Now, every time you find yourself wanting to buy something that is over your threshold amount amount, wait until your cooling-off period is over before you make that purchase.
4. If, after the cooling-off period is over, you find you still want that item, then take another step. Ask yourself what else you could spend that money on, and ask yourself which is more important. Let’s say you wanted to buy a CD. After the cooling-off period, you still want it. But do you want it more than a video game? A DVD? Some food for your pantry? Do you want that item more than you want to save the money toward, say, a nice vacation or something more expensive that you have your eye on?  Weigh your answers, then make your decision.

This other planet had (has? will have?) some interesting different ways of being, including a lack of belief in physical privacy; for example, although they recognized the sanitary reasons for keeping toilets separate from eating and living areas, bathrooms were not private, and anybody might pass through one on their way to somewhere else without anyone caring who might be using it at the time.

The people on this planet were pretty much good-natured, but suspicious of the olive branch I was extending. They were worried that they would be forced into changing or accepting things they didn’t want to change or accept.

There was one group of young people that I was speaking with with equanimity. They were expressing these fears, and I told them that that was why I was there—so they could check me out and use their own intuitions and sense of judgment to decide. I added that nobody would force them to do anything; that we were instead offering them the choice, and that it was up to them to decide what they wanted to do.

And then I said the thing that stuck most in my mind when I awoke, as I think it is true for us today, now, in this time and space.

“When you do something out of fear, you are helping to create the kind of world you don’t want. When you do something that you feel is the right thing to do, perhaps despite your fear, you are helping to create the world you want.”

What can you do instead? In order from least costly to most costly, you can

• Ask for it free from your local Freecycle group
• Use your local library
• Buy used instead of new
• Subscribe to Netflix
• Use the rental cost rule of thumb before buying

Ask for it Free

If you joined your local Freecycle group as described in my previous entry on saving money, you can post a request for the DVD. There is no guarantee that someone will have it, but they might!

Use Your Local Library

Or try your local library, which, in addition to DVDs and video cassettes, should have a large collection of audio books to check out. Some might even have audio books you can download from your library’s Web site.

Buy Used Instead of New

If you do want to buy a DVD, consider purchasing it used; for example, from Amazon.com. If you can wait a while after its release, you may find you can buy a used DVD in “like new” condition for a fraction of its new price.

Netflix

You could also consider subscribing to Netflix instead. If you think you might want to watch it now and then, but probably not that often (after all, there are always new movies coming out to see, too!), then Netflix is a good solution. Plus there are no late fees with Netflix, and you can watch thousands of movies online there as well. If you choose one of their less-costly programs, Netflix can cost less per month than the price of two people going out once to a movie. For that price, you can watch a very large number of movies in a month.

The Rental Cost Rule of Thumb

If you must have it new, ask yourself whether you are going to watch that DVD enough times to make up for the purchase cost. Many people use what a rental cost rule of thumb. If you think you are going to watch it enough times that renting the DVD multiple times would cost more than buying it, consider buying it instead.

Like many people, I use this rule of thumb, but even if the movie passes this test, I give myself a cooling-off period before actually purchasing it. What I loved and thought I had to have often doesn’t stand the test of time, and I find myself content to have just seen it once.

A freecycle group is a group of people who very simply do one of two things: They offer items for free, or they ask for items for free. Because of its nature, although all groups fall under the umbrella of the national Freecycle.org group, each freecycle group has to be local.

I have gotten rid of CD cases, DVD cases, supplements, partially used shampoos, and a host of other things that I might otherwise have had to throw out. Although I rarely am on the asking end, and although I have had much less success getting items I ask for, many people get exactly what they want. I’ve seen people ask for cell phones, computers, and even cars.

No money is to ever change hands, and the freecycle group is not intended to be a source for those who are turning around and selling the items, though there are those who abuse this.

How does it work? After you join your local group,

1.  You have something you want to get rid of and you post an offer of it on the group’s forum.

2.  Someone (or many someones) contact you and arrange to come take it off your hands.

Or, you may want something. In that case,

1.  You post to your local group’s forum asking for that item.

2.  Someone (or several someones) contact you, offering that item to you.

Not only can this save you money, in that you get something for free that you might otherwise have had to pay for, but you are helping keep stuff out of your local landfill, so it is good for the environment as well. Membership is free as well, so give it a whirl!

Recently, I’ve been reading SuperFoods Rx, and like it very well indeed. There’s a lot of information packed into that book, organized in a very nice, clean way; however, although there is a one-page summary of the ideas in the book, it isn’t as complete as I would have liked it to be. So I made my own one-page summary that shows all the foods and their sidekicks, arranged by food type, with recommended servings per day as well as serving sizes. Although the print is quite small (so I could fit it all on one page), it is quite useful to have it on my refrigerator for reference.

In these times, every little bit helps, and so I am going to share some of my tips on how to cut back your costs. I have a lot of them—65 on my list, and I’m not done listing everything. I’m not simply going to give you a list, however, but am instead going to have a separate  post for each item on the list so I can discuss it a little bit, say why it works or how it works, perhaps give instructions if it is something along the lines of reusing something for a new purpose (“repurposing,” as it is known in the corporate world), and even, if you don’t mind, sharing a bit of the philosophy behind the item.

Some of the ideas I will be sharing with you will simply involve changing habits—doing something differently than you have before. Some will involve buying things in different ways. Others will involve not buying something entirely. It is of course completely up to you whether you choose to take one, some, or all of these ideas and make them your own. All I ask is that you read through them with a neutral eye. If you find one you like, consider making it a goal to incorporate that idea into your life.

Ways to Save Money #1: Cancel Your Television Service

Television does not exist to entertain us; it exists to sell to us. (Commercialism by Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen)

In some ways, there isn’t a priority to these ideas, but idea number one is so important in so many other ways than saving money that I am sharing it first. It is also going to be an idea that many people will resist, so I am throwing it out there first so that you have a chance to mull it over, maybe do a little research yourself, perhaps give it a try for a month and see how you do with it.

This first idea is to cancel your television service. There are many good reasons to stop watching television entirely, though you don’t have to. Most television shows are available on the Internet either through the network Web site or such sites as Hulu; if you are patient, many shows are eventually available on DVD (which you can rent or check out of your library instead of buying them). However, you will still be subjected to commercials while watching at sites such as Hulu, so the DVD option is still better.

Here are some good reasons to cancel your television service. You can

• Save money. Most people are paying $50 to $100 a month for cable service. That’s $600 to $1,200 a year. Think of what you could do with that money. You might even be able to afford a nice vacation.
• Save money and refuse to be programmed. Commercials are a waste of your precious time, and yet the number of minutes you spend watching them when watching television just keeps increasing. Commercials are designed to get you to do one thing: spend more money. They use a number of ways to manipulate you into thinking that a particular item or lifestyle must be yours; of course, that item or lifestyle is going to involve spending money. Do you really need brand-name shoes? In addition, even when you are watching television shows, the programming is there just as strongly in the shows themselves. You will see women working as waitresses living in apartments that someone with a much higher salary might not be able to afford. Subconsciously, you think that your lifestyle and circumstances should be at least as good as hers, and so you go buy more stuff. Stuff you can’t afford. Stuff you don’t need.
• Save your young child’s health. Watching television is actively damaging to the health of toddlers. Many people, pushed for time, use the television as a babysitter for their very young children, saying with exasperation that they just don’t have the time to watch a child every second. They unfortunately will have to pay a heavy bill later in terms of their child’s lost health and abilities. However, when you have no television, you will find you do, after all, have time to care for your child. And what better use of your time than to spend it than with your own child? For years before my daughter was born, I had been deliberately without television. When she was born, I had no partner, so I had to single-handedly take care of her until I married (when she was nearly four). Without television, I instead spent time with her (which was a joy and not a chore for me). Even after I married, we still did not purchase a television until she was seven, and then we carefully and closely supervised and limited what she watched. I still didn’t like it. Then, when she was ten, the television was gone again. What should you do instead? Take your children to story hour at the library. Read to them yourself. Take them to the park or a museum (if their age allows). Take them camping or to the beach or a lake.  Chances are, you’ll develop a much better relationship with your children than otherwise, which will pay you back many times over as they grow older.
• Improve your children’s reading abilities. You will be amazed at how much more literate your children will get when they don’t have TV as an option. When I went television free in 1996, my daughter’s reading speed, level, and comprehension shot up in just a few months. She’s now an adult and chooses not to have television herself.
• Spend more quality time with your family. As mentioned earlier, you will have more time to spend doing things with your family. Pick up a shared hobby, or pick up hobbies you can do together companionably. For example, one person might enjoy reading while another is doing needlework.
• Spend more quality time with yourself. If you don’t have a family, you can still benefit just as much from all the time you free up by not having a television. You may find yourself getting so busy you won’t know how you ever had time to watch TV in the first place.
• Get some fresh air and maybe some exercise. If the weather is good, you can go outside for a while and enjoy the fresh air. if your health allows, you can take a walk.
• Save your brain. Television itself, even with nothing on it, suppresses mental activity. (Though that might only apply to the old cathode-ray-tube style of television.)

If you find yourself getting angry at the idea of quitting television cold turkey, or find yourself giving all sorts of reasons why television is good (the Discovery channel is often mentioned to me, but hey, that’s on DVD too), consider this: “Millions of Americans are so hooked on television that they fit the criteria for substance abuse.” (source) Bottom line: don’t let television control your life. Save a substantial amount of money and cancel your television service. If you wish, keep the TV set and watch DVDs instead. You’ll still be miles ahead.